The Socialist Challenge

We rebel against capitalism not in the name of an abstract principle of justice, but to displace the capitalist class, privileged minority. To put it another way, we stand for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.

The social revolution we conceive of can only be made by and for the people, without any false representatives offering themselves up as leaders. We believe that socialist society will be organised from the bottom up and not from top down, by a central authority served by an army of functionaries. The workers have no need of chiefs and are quite capable of delegating  one of our own with a particular task. This being understood, the revolution obviously cannot be the work of a vanguard  it demands the participation of  the entire working class. Without that, it would be little more than a doomed coup d’etat or putsch, not a social revolution. We witnessed how the Lenin and the Bolshevik Party kill the revolution for its own domination.

We possess, even today, sufficient means of production to satisfy all reasonable needs, i.e., to provide a well-being to all. There will no longer be, as is the case today, men condemned to long days of toil and drudgery. Men and women will pass from one job to another, from manual labor to study and artistic recreation. But in working, in studying, in cultivating the fine arts, etc, their goal will always be to make themselves useful to their community.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the task of the socialist movement. We will have in the beginning  to work not only to produce what we consume today, but a hundred times more to remove the suffering and deprivation endured by others across the globe. We have not only to establish local organisations , but also regional and international ones to organise and administer our society. We need only think of situation of cities, whose provisioning depends on countless supply chains with surrounding area and further afield, while the countryside is dependent upon the cities for machinery. We need only think of the current distribution of industries, of the organization of exchange, of the great networks of communication, etc. Without a doubt all this must be changed, but this can’t be done overnight. There will be trial and error, possibly even conflicts before agreement can be reached. Just to determine what must be produced, which needs deserve preference, and what limitations individuals should impose on their desires a certain amount of time will be needed for decision making. We will not immediately fall upon a perfect system. There will be no heavenly inspiration, but experience and experimentation will determine what society has need of at a given moment.

We must prove to the world that socialism isn’t an abstract concept, a scientific dream, or a distant vision, but an immediate possibility and wanting the social revolution,  we will choose the means that seem most apt to bring it closer.

We are all made of a common substance and inhabit a common planet, facing a common threat, and that, as human beings, our individual interests and flourishing are deeply interdependent. In short, no one can be fully human alone. When we hurt another, we hurt ourselves. We are at root social and collective beings.

There are millions of people out there who in some way or another are looking out for something  beyond the present system, even if the words ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ do not cross their lips. The challenge, the need, then, is to find a way to catch their attention, and to hold it long enough to build something together out of our mutual recognition.

1)  Capitalism itself is a system based on increasingly socialized labor, one that brings people together in new ways and that unleashes productive (and destructive) forces of unprecedented power (and danger);
2) that this system remains fundamentally incapable of satisfying the needs and wants of the vast majority of humanity because of fatal flaws;
3) that human beings are capable of thinking, desiring, wanting, and wishing in ways that point beyond this system’s limits;
4) that among our needs is the need to satisfy the other’s need; that it is within our capacity, even perhaps integral to our nature, that we see in the other a being ultimately very much like ourselves, that we see ourselves reflected in the other.

These points, taken together, imply nothing less than the potential and necessity for a communist, cooperative organization of the world. Socialism can be understood not as with the achievement of some utopian end-state or with the toppling of the capitalist order, the seizing of factories, etc), but a conscious desire to bring about mutual aid.