What we want
What we want. A moneyless, stateless, classless society of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources. Production solely for human need, not profit. No wages, no money, no markets, no governments as we know them.
How we get there. Not through vanguards, coups, or insurrection. Through a majority of the working class consciously choosing socialism. Where parliamentary democracy exists, we’ll use it but Parliament isn’t the goal, it’s the mechanism. The working class takes control of the state machinery, converts it from ‘instrument of oppression’ to ‘agent of emancipation’, to abolish it.
What we reject.
- Reformism: no palliatives, no ‘making capitalism nicer’. Every reform leaves the system intact.
- Leninism: no vanguard party, no dictatorship of the proletariat, no ‘transitional period’.
- Nationalisation: state ownership isn’t socialism—it’s just state capitalism.
- All other parties: Labour, Greens, Communists, Trotskyists—all aim to administer capitalism in one form or another.
Our core insight. Capitalism cannot be reformed into socialism. You can’t regulate greed into generosity. The system’s basic drive—accumulation of capital—makes ecological destruction, inequality, and war inevitable. Only abolishing the system itself works.
Our method – education and publicity. No stunts, no violence, no shortcuts. We believe workers must understand and want socialism before it can work. A socialist society run by people who don’t understand socialism would collapse or be captured by authoritarians.
Our slogan – world socialism or nothing. The SPGB founded in 1904 is Marxism with none of the 20th-century add-ons: no Lenin, no Trotsky, no Stalin, no reformist gradualism. Just the original recipe: common ownership, majority consciousness, democratic revolution, then freedom.