Break Their Haughty Power

Some think it is foolish to contemplate ideas that still haven’t seen any success after 100 years  But to socialists visualising the actual goal is what motivates and energises us. We can only work with our hearts and minds. It’s not legislation from on high that will change the lives of those who live in poverty and misery. We have to take responsibility for allowing the 1% to control us. Slavery, serfdom, wage labour, have been means to an end for centuries. The name changes but the game is always the same - to provide a privileged few with comfort.

We live in a world dominated by capitalism, a system which allows a small minority of capitalists to oppress and exploit the great majority of humankind.  It is capitalism that brings about great inequalities in living standards with more poor people now in the world than ever before, starts wars to steal the resources and causes the growing devastation of our natural environment. The only viable way forward is a classless and stateless society on a world scale where people do not oppress and exploit each other and where we live in harmony with our natural environment. The working class must establish socialism, a system of real, popular democracy that sets about the reconstruction of society.

The wages system is a form of servitude. The freedom so loudly proclaimed is, for the workers, merely a freedom to change from a bad master to a worse one, or at the worst to starve. Realisation of profits is the sole consideration for continuing production. When profits ceases, industry ceases, or the scale of wages goes down until there is a sufficient margin of surplus value to induce the proprietor to again open the factory doors.

Buying and selling commodities is the basic principle of the capitalist system of exchange of private property, and it is but natural that the labour-power of the working class should also be regarded as a commodity. It is inevitable that, under a system of production for profit, labour-power should take on such a character and that it should be bought and sold in the open market according to the law of supply and demand of commodities.

Ranchers branded their cattle with their personal logo to mark their ownership. Today, corporations impose their ownership brand upon us in a similar fashion, not upon our hides but imprinted upon our minds by their company logos and slogans, their familiar trade-marks. Businesses spend hundreds of millions  in order to fix their “brand” in people’s minds and differentiate it – supposedly – from all similar products and create customer loyalty. It’s not about producing a better, more reliable, longer lasting and healthier product, but by getting people to believe their “brand” is better than any other, despite any evidence to support such claims. Athletes, entertainers and other celebrities show the way like the Judas goat leading the others into the slaughter-house.

Socialism comes only at the desire and with the consent of the majority of workers, for it is evidently the only class able to safeguard humanity by means of a new society; and the revolution can properly occur only after the working class demonstrate its ability to successfully continue production and handle distribution—so that all may be fed. No class ever yet successfully dominated society unless it demonstrated its ability to direct industry. To merely destroy modern society without substituting something better would be the most monstrous of crimes. To achieve emancipation only to plunge the world into economic chaos would be the bitterest of travesties.

We say “Enough” to the present society and to its reformists. Reformism regards socialism as a remote goal and nothing more. Reformism is a programme of relying on gradual change and making things a little bit better, slowly. Reforms are regarded as a partial realisation of socialism. It develops out of faith in the fair mindedness of the liberal capitalist and trust in the good intentions of the politicians. Only when the working-class has seized political power can it develop co-operative labour on an all-national scale, i.e., really liberate the working classes. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves. The transition from capitalism to socialism does not take place by itself. For this, the working-class must break the dominance of the capitalist class.