The Revolution - Our Way Forward

For much of modern history, there was not a word more magic than “revolution.” The idea of revolution was viewed with fear and hatred by the propertied classes and was revered by all who dreamed of liberty and longed for a new life. The slogan “Long Live the Revolution” reverberated around the world and signified ideals of freedom, of human dignity and social justice. Revolution to socialists does not mean destruction and bloody battles but implied a movement both humanitarian and liberating, the emancipation of the downtrodden. 

Revolution is not the conspiratorial insurrection by a handful of rebels, but the open movement of the broad majority of the people, not from fear or bitterness, but in celebratory joy of the beginning of a fresh future, the start of a new journey. Love for one's neighbour rather than hatred for one's enemy, was the essence of revolution which became part of the great desire for world peace, for the friendship of all peoples. Revolution was the promise of well-being for all.

Socialism cannot be made by force. It is only possible when it is understood and wanted by a large popular majority that embraces it. If it has to come to a violent revolution, it will not be a matter of accomplishing socialism, but of setting back socialism. The establishment of a society of free people can only result from a free revolution.

Revolution is the desire for a new world without oppressors and oppressed. This is what revolution means.

Our policy is not to demand reforms — for capitalism will grant those — but preach social revolution, and that only. The Socialist Party's goal is socialism, industrial democracy, and the cooperative commonwealth. From the beginnings of capitalism, the drive for profits and accumulation have set the capitalists not only against the working class but at each other and this rivalry has resulted in war. The drive is for maximum profits. These profits depend on power, in dividing up the world and carving out spheres of influence between different groups and the different countries. The basis for sharing out the booty changes.

Every human born may well be an extra mouth to feed but also another pair of helping hands and an additional thoughtful brain.

We need no more misanthropic pronouncements about too many people or that humanity has exceeded carrying capacity or that humanity is an alien species to the Planet Earth’s ecology.

The fertility rate is dropping, the rate of population rise is falling and family sizes are reducing.

We can bandy figures back and forth but rarely, if ever, does it achieve any change of opinion.

Even though it might sound counterintuitive, for stabilising and lowering the population forget all about population policies and instead simply help each and every woman bear a child in good health, whenever she herself chooses to have a baby.

Ending population growth starts by saving the children of the poorest women. Giving women control of both their lives and their bodies is what will control population growth. The best family planning and contraceptive is the empowerment of women.

We are told that hunger and malnutrition exist in the world today because there is not enough food to go around; that there are, in short, more people than can adequately be fed. The Socialist Party emphatically repudiates this assertion. 

All the evidence points to contrary and that mankind has developed the means of production to a level where it is now technically possible to abolish hunger and poverty. Technically possible, but not socially possible. Capitalism, our present relations of production is a system of commodity production, of buying and selling, where the profit motive dominates the productive activity of men and women. Market considerations take precedence over human need. The production of wealth takes place only where the owners of the means of life — the capitalist class — hope to sell their products at a profit on the world markets. The market economy bears no relation to the needs of human beings. Human priorities are sacrificed to the priorities of the profit motive.