The urgency grows to lift people out of hunger, poverty, sickness and ignorance and to save our planet before its eco-system degenerates beyond the point of no return. Even under wasteful and destructive capitalism, the productive forces exist which could—if planned and utilised to meet human need instead of maximising capitalist profit—ensure sufficient food, nutrition, health care and education for all.

Indeed, never before in history have the rapid advances in science and technology provided such opportunities for the all-round development of every human being.

But while it has proved possible—from time to time—to curb capitalism's tendencies to crisis, deprivation and war, those tendencies have always reasserted themselves because they arise from from the nature of the system itself.

In most developed countries, the welfare state with its benefits and pensions and benefits (and in Britain the National Health Service) has helped masses of people to escape destitution and avoidable ill health, but it is constantly vulnerable to cuts and privatisation. Progressive taxation has made possible the provision of public services and a redistribution of wealth, although the latter too has been severely restricted by wealthy vested interests.

In many countries across the world, public ownership of basic resources, industries and utilities together with massive public investment has enabled them to lay the basis for extensive economic and social development—but this has invariably been turned, sooner or later, to the advantage of private capital at the expense of workers and consumers.

Neither the welfare state, progressive taxation, public ownership nor economic planning amount to socialism, although they do represent real advances and can provide a glimpse of socialism's potential. But they also indicate the limits to collectivism and planning in what remains a capitalist society.

Even so, the experience of social-democratic policies and the attempts so far to build socialism—albeit in very different conditions to those in Britain—provide some valuable lessons.

They indicate, for instance, that public ownership, economic planning, collective provision and the redistribution of wealth can provide enormous economic, social and cultural benefits to the mass of the population, even when they are restricted, distorted, exploited and subverted by capitalist interests in a capitalist society. They also indicate that unless they are also mobilised as the basis to make deeper inroads into capitalist economic and state power, they will prove to be partial and temporary, used to discredit any socialist alternative to private capitalist ownership, the 'free' market and social inequality.