Monday, May 08, 2017

They Are Rich Because We Are Poor

Protest is not enough. We need a vision.  Is now the time to retreat on our big ideas? Is it time to soften our demands? Now is a moment that calls for a radical imagination of what’s possible. Let’s turn protest power into political power and people power. The days of accepting the lesser-of-two-evil politics are over. We have to build a class-conscious movement if we want to win. And they know if we do that, they will lose – and that is exactly why those in charge work so hard to divide us. It is time to move the struggle from defence to offence. In the shadow of every current catastrophe, forces of global renewal and creating a non-violent planetary society are taking shape. We have a realistic chance to make this happen in the near future.  Human beings are able to manifest whatever they believe in, whatever they can envision. This applies to every area of life. Why not apply this power to establishing world socialism? 

Around the world today, there is a suffering that compels us to make a profound change in our own ways of thinking. 250 million children are currently living in war zones. 50 million children are refugees, searching for a new home. Humanity is faced with an apocalyptic situation. We stand on the brink of global catastrophe, or, on the other hand, the beginning of a new civilisation. The lives of billions of human beings will depend on your choice. We can offer our children, and our children’s children, a future worth living, if we take an active part in the transformation of the economic structure of the planet. Can we imagine new communities that might arise where people a grow up where there is no fear and no hostility among human beings, a world where people practice solidarity and care for one another?  Can we imagine a world, in which the concept of class enmity has been made obsolete? We already possess the knowledge to put it into practice.

A global network is arising with the goal of bringing these thoughts into reality – the World Socialist Movement. We feel that such a world could exist and that we could manifest it if we agree together to do so. We’re talking about planetary system-change - in every community and in every individual. Every rural commune and every urban neighbourhood, will transform themselves into a network of interconnected and interdependent but basically autonomous communities. A bottom-up democratic based society waiting to happen.  All that's missing is the will and determination to usher in a whole new way to live in peace without all of the demonic trappings of capitalism. The time's now.

 The remedy is so simple, and the method more simple still. The cause of poverty is the ownership of the means and instruments of wealth production by the capitalist class. The remedy, therefore, is to dispossess that class of its ownership. It maintains its ownership by virtue of its political control. Its economic domination would cease the moment that the working class captured the political machinery that sends the police and the soldiers against them. Curiously enough, the working class never seem to discover that it is they who gratuitously give the capitalists the power to enslave them every time they go to the ballot-box! It is obvious, then, that the method of recapturing political control is going back to the ballot-box and voting for socialists. 

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