For a Better Future: Become a Socialist
For billions of years, the Earth has sustained a wonderfully rich and interconnected web of life.
Now one social system - capitalism - is putting it all at risk.
The world’s climate is changing…the air and water is no longer clean and pure…species are dying out at a terrifying rate…people everywhere suffer from pollution and environmental damage caused by this malevolent profit motivated system.
It doesn’t need to be like this. For more than a century the Socialist Party of Great Britain has demonstrated that social reforms, like the ones proposed by environmental groups from Green Peace to Extinction Rebellion, cannot solve the problems facing the world’s working class and the planet.
What is required is a social revolution to replace a polluting and exploiting social system with a one in which production takes place solely and directly to meet human needs.
Only socialism can balance producing for human need with environmental concerns. Only the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society can ensure a balance between the social and natural environments.
However, socialism cannot be established in one country or by minorities. It cannot be established by politicians, and capitalism cannot be reformed into socialism.
What is required is a socialist revolution, conscious political action by a socialist majority. A world socialist movement. A socialist majority understanding and agreeing with the urgent necessity to abolish capitalism throughout the world through political means and replace it with socialism where the world’s resources are commonly owned, their distribution produced solely and directly for need not profit. – no money and no wages system.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not want leaders. It does not want people who want to be led. The SPGB wants active socialists capable or acting and thinking for themselves.
Capitalism must be replaced by socialism. A world socialist majority must democratically and politically abolish capitalism.
This is the only way to a future free from pollution and environmental degradation caused by the anti-social interests of a small capitalist minority supported by their political agents. A small minority capitalist class whose drive to make a profit has left a world vulnerable, its inhabitants exploited and living in unnecessary poverty, and the future bleak and inhospitable.
Object and Declaration of Principles
Object
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.
Declaration of Principles
THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN HOLDS:
1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (ie land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.
3.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.
7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.