World Worth While (1958)

From the July 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Reproduction of a leaflet issue by the Socialist Party of Canada.) 

The average person will endure hardships, even dangers, in a cause that he believes to be worthy. But he does not resign himself to a lifetime of such conditions. He wants to experience the more pleasant things of life. He wants to live in a spacious well- furnished home; strongly constructed and free from the clutches of banks and mortgage companies. He wants his family to be properly fed and clothed and provided with the tilings they need. He wants freedom and opportunity to expand his mental and physical capabilities in the directions of his choice. He wants peace, security and the happiness that the potentialities of the modern world can make possible.

How modest these desires are, yet how far from the grasp of the average person! Those who guide the affairs of the world are overwhelming in their assurances that no aim is closer to their hearts, that no goal receives more careful thought. But—ah, that fatal but!—there are so many obstacles that stand in the way, so many things that have to be done first There are depressions to be offset or overcome, trade agreements to be signed, international problems to be solved. There are billions of dollars worth of satellites to be sent spinning into space, billions of dollars worth of atom bombs and guided missiles to be perfected and stockpiled, freedoms to be preserved, mighty creations of man to be destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again. There are so many things that have to be done—first

No crisis or emergency is so great as to prevent the flow of luxuries into the possession of the idle class, the capitalist class. Only the wealth producers have to wait for the ending of the current depression, war, or other disaster before there is enough for them. Always there are obstacles, never-ending obstacles. Neva can the statesmen say. "You have produced abundance. It shall be yours.” The best that even the greatest of them can say is that none shall starve, and even this is said with reservations. Modern man lives under the capitalist order of society, and capitalism cannot be made to operate in such a way as to benefit alL

The workers today live steadily in the shadow of want and terror. They don’t have to. There is no law of the universe condemning them to live in this way perpetually. The evils of the modern world arise from the class ownership of the productive agencies. They can be ended, at any time the workers choose, by changing these agencies from the possession of a class to the possession of society. Not the government ownership of "public utilities” or “ basic industries,” which is of no practical value to society, but the common ownership of all the means for producing and distributing the needs of life.

A change of this kind does not convert stockholders into bondholders. It puts an end to stockholders and bondholders and transforms the beneficiaries of both these forms of parasitism into wealth producers. It ends the production of goods to be sold on the world’s markets at a profit and institutes the production of goods to be made freely available to all. It means the ending of profit in all its forms, the ending of the local, national and international antagonisms engendered by the quest for profit and so the ending of war, the struggles for military supremacy, the building of hydrogen bombs, guided missiles and all the other terrible things man has devised to destroy man. It means the passing of the foul propagandist activities of the huge publicity agencies, the educators and moralists, whose function it is to guide the workers in ways designed to preserve their enslavement. It means the liberation of human thought and the sources of knowledge. It means the ending of crime, since crime is rooted in a class divided society that will come to an end in a sane world.

Common ownership means the release from their present occupations of the judges, the jailers, the clerks of the court, the lawyers, the politicians, the bankers, the profit counters, the butlers, the valets and boot-polishers, and their transformation, along with the armed forces, the producers of munitions and all others engaged in socially unnecessary activities, into producers of things that will add to the comfort and pleasure of all.

It means the ending of the struggle between Capital and Labour over the division of the wealth produced by Labour, and it means the ending of Capital and Labour as class entities and the merging of these classes into a family of humans intent on making life worth living.

It means the ending of the system of society in which the mass of people are deprived of the fruits of their labour and the establishment of a system in which poverty will give place to plenty, privilege to equality, slavery to freedom. It means a world worth while. It means Socialism.