Our need is revolution

We call our society “civilised,” and compare it with those previous primitive systems that we said were at a “savage” or “barbarian” stage. We point at our great works of art, the wonders of our science, our technological marvels in  appliances and machinery of all kinds. Yet we fail to secure for each and all enough to live a life of comfort. That the present social system has failed must be apparent to all who have studied it. It has rendered the many subservient to the few; it has checked the best human endeavours, and facilitated every method of exploitation; it disinherits the many, and foreordains their lifelong misery before they are even born; it makes one dependent upon another’s caprice. It is an incentive to plunder and to idleness.  Plutocracy rules the world.

 Capitalists always seek to convey the idea that the profit system, class society and exploitation will continue to exist forever. In other words, that is natural and eternal, and there is no use anyone thinking of making fundamental changes in it or replacing it with any other social system.

Our good, kind, benevolent employers, to whom the expropriated and exploited  goes hat in hand, cringing for the privilege of being permitted to work extort  huge slices out of the worker, by buying his or her services as much beneath their true value as he can possibly procure them, and selling them as much above their worth as the circumstances will permit him to extort. The bigger his business, the greater his power over his employees. Under capitalism, workers have no control over what is produced and how. All that is decided by how much profit some capitalist will gain. But socialism enables the community to decide how to organise itself and the resources of society to meet the needs of the people. As John Adams said, when drawing up the Constitution of the United States of America, “What matter whether you give the food and clothes to the slave direct, or whether you just give him enough in wages to purchase the same?”

It is an unfortunate fact that the workers have not yet learned that socialism offers the only solution to their plight They express their discontent with a series of reforms they seek but  almost every demand that is arising today from the angry and bitter working class, and which aims at the very simple goal of a decent living for everyone is “utopian”, in the sense that they are unworkable within the present system, for such are demands for security and well-being only socialism can provide.

These aren’t the best of times. More and more families are forced to go on welfare benefits, as jobs are wiped out and are harder and harder to get. Welfare is not something that takes from the hard working people as the government tries to re-portion the blame. It is often the last resort, when employers won’t let people work, or when they cannot keep up with the cost of living.

 Rebellion grows against the handful of big bankers and corporate CEOs who run this system of capitalism and benefit from it, while millions of people are standing in line for a charity hand-out or going without food. We especially have to keep in mind that by far the great majority of people who are poor are not on welfare, but are the working poor,  employed in miserable underpaid jobs. And workers who are organised into unions and get better wages are always just one step away from the poor house, even in the best of times.

The few “concessions” to the people we were able to extract from the ruling class in the past social security, unemployment payments, were just enough to give most working people a small sense of security and the hope that their children would have a better life  but also, to keep the workers and their children alive, because the employers need the workers, generation after generation, to make their products, and their profits. They were willing to pay welfare to women with children, even though the women themselves didn’t work directly for the bosses, because the children could be raised as future workers. But they have no more small crumbs to toss to us. They are snatching back the few crumbs they have already thrown. They cannot afford to think of future workers. They have to squeeze as much out of the workers today as they can.

In socialism, we will use all our industry and farmlands together. We will build new factories, machines, transportation systems, parks, theatres, schools, hospitals, and the other things we need to provide for ourselves and future working people who will inherit together what we produce together. Automation will be used to give us more leisure in common, not to lay us off and increase the competition among us for the jobs that are left. And there will be plenty enough for everyone to live comfortably. This is not a dream, but a reality.  We can make it happen here–by uniting in struggle and smashing every link in the capitalists’ chain of slavery. We’ll sweep away their system and we’ll build our own, our new, brighter future. A future where we workers will run the factories, produce for our needs and not for the profits of the capitalist bosses. Only by completely getting rid of this system of wage slavery and its law of profits and the system in which the capitalists own and control everything, including us and our labor, can we advance to socialism. We can’t move forward step by step, winning some concessions here and there.  Didn’t we fight for the eight hour day, for the right to strike, for worker laws and isn’t it true that we’re fighting for these things all over again? There’s no way step by step we can win, it’s only by getting rid of the whole source of these problems, the system of capitalism, that we can build a new society run by and for the people.