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We don’t have to accept the self-fulfilling prophecy that “capitalism
is the only game in town”.
Imagine that all the people in the world made a set of informed,
collective and democratic decisions about what kind of system would
best meet their needs and solve global problems. Would they choose a
money and property system that forced nearly half their total number to
try to survive on a dollar a day? Or would they prefer to organise
production and distribution of goods and services on the basis of what
they need, without the profit system?
Would they, if and when given the chance to vote, do so overwhelmingly
for candidates who—whatever labels they attached to themselves or their
parties—stood for the continuation of some form of capitalism? Or would
they elect delegates, from among their own number, to initiate the
process of setting up and running a fundamentally new form of world
society, a system based on the common ownership and democratic control
of the means of wealth production and distribution?
Would they embrace nationalism, involving armed forces paid to kill and
injure other groups (“the enemy”) with whom they have no quarrel? Or
would they regard themselves and behave as citizens of the world,
regardless of any geographical, cultural or philosophical attachments
they may feel?
Would they divide themselves into classes, rich and poor, leaders and
led, privileged and unprivileged, dominant and submissive,
superordinate and subordinate, master and servant, powerful and
powerless? Or would they, despite individual differences in abilities,
personalities, interests, tastes, likes and dislikes, think and behave
as members of the one human race, not perfect, sometimes fallible or
irrational, but never deliberately cruel or anti-social?
Whatever words they use to explain or sloganise their ideologies, all
parties except the Socialist Party stand for the continuation of some
form of capitalism. From their point of view, a vote for their own
candidate is best; a vote for one of their competitors is second best.
Not voting could be a worrying sign of alienation from the system.
Worst of all, a vote for the Socialist Party candidate – or, where none
stands, writing “Socialism” across the ballot paper – would indicate
the beginning of a resolution to replace capitalism with socialism.
Don’t forget:
Before the first Labour government came into power, and when some
members and supporters used to profess socialism as their eventual
goal, there was some justification for the argument that: “The Labour
hell is one degree cooler than the Tory hell.” So “Choose the lesser of
two evils.”
Today, after successive administrations of the same system, the
difference in temperature is too small to get excited about. The same
applies to others lining up to be our government—the Lib Dems, etc. We
don’t want them and we don’t need them.
Support for socialism isn’t a matter of campaigning to make the poor
rich in today’s terms of material consumption. That wouldn’t be
environmentally sustainable. The socialist aim isn’t even equality in
the sense of sameness, like amounts of work contributed or goods and
services consumed. Socialism is essentially about social equality,
encouraging and enabling every human being to realise their full
potential as giver and taker, not buyer and seller, in the context of
society itself moving towards reaching its full potential.
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The Socialist Party is like no other political party in Britain.
It is made up of people who have joined together because we want to get
rid of the profit system and establish real socialism.
Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for
themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring
about the kind of society that we are advocating in this
journal.
We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists
for socialism.
We are not a reformist party with a programme of
policies to patch up capitalism.
We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. We publish
pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and various other informative
material.
We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies, meetings
and demos; run educational conferences;
host internet discussion forums, make films presenting our ideas, and
contest elections when practical. Socialist literature is available in
Arabic, Bengali, Dutch,
Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and
Turkish as well as
English.
The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able
to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to draw
on and greater will be the new ideas for building
the movement which you will be able to bring us.
The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader
and there are no followers.
So, if you are going to join we want you to be sure that you agree
fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied that you
understand the case for
socialism.
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