Capitalism is a system of economy where exists the anarchy of the market, capital, money, credit, etc., where social and political inequality is guaranteed by the capitalist state. This system is the fundamental basis of the maintenance of rule by the capitalist class, and the oppression of the working class. Capitalism is inseparable from the exploitation. It is a vicious system geared to buttressing the strong against the weak, to serving the handful of capitalists against the millions of workers, and to keeping many millions in poverty so that a few may prosper. Capitalism worships property and degrades life. It is at the root of the racialism and nationalism that poisons society and divides worker from worker. It is a system of massive waste and social disorder. It forces the working class to fight every inch of the way to better or even maintain its wages and conditions. The criteria of all capitalist enterprise is—does it make a profit? When it ceases to make a profit it goes bankrupt—it is finished and the workers are cast on to the scrapheap.
Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,645 in 2014. 85 billionaires now control half the planet’s wealth. And by 2100 we’ll have 11 trillionaires. But for the rest of the world - A billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Thomas Piketty warns inequality between the rich and the rest will get wider, more dangerous. Even the Pope warns “Inequality is the root of social ills,” fueling killings, wars, revolutions.
In an American poll, more than three quarters of self-described conservatives believe “poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything.” In reality, most of America’s poor work hard, often in two or more jobs. The real non-workers are the idle rich who inherit their fortunes. And their ranks are growing. Wealth is going to the privileged, who did nothing except be born into the right family. Six of today’s ten wealthiest Americans are heirs to prominent fortunes. This is the dynastic form of wealth French economist Thomas Piketty warns about. So-called “dynasty trusts” now allow super-rich families to pass on to their heirs money and property largely free from taxes, and to do so for generations.n
The super rich have invested in businesses, real estate, art, and other assets. The income from these is now faster than income from work. The top elite is raking even more from their investments.
Today almost everything and anything can be bought and sold. Markets and market values have come to govern our lives as never before. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life. Everything has a price. For-profit schools, hospitals, prisons. Out-sourcing war to private contractors or sub-contracting the police to private security guards. Buying and selling the right to pollute the environment. Buying and selling of elections. Everything is up for sale. If someone is willing to pay for a kidney, the only question asked is “how much?” Capitalism never asks “what’s the right thing to do?”
Wage slavery treats human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold on the labour market and the moralisers fret about people trafficking in the the sex trade. Children are bought and sold to work in sweatshops or as domestic servants. In today’s capitalist world, everything has a price.
Millionaire bankers, CEOs, hedge fund managers will never voluntarily surrender their control of wealth machine. We need socialists to dispossess them and bring back some sanity to this crazy world we now live in. Otherwise the capitalist class will continue to keep blindly driving us down their self-destructive path to global extinction.
Reformist parties have been successful in passing themselves off as more radical than they have ever been in practice. Their deception shows itself in a thousand different ways, but chiefly in the conception that the working class and the ruling class have a common interest. Unless socialists are able to effectively pose an alternative to these parties, they will be able to go on peddling their illusions. Reformism or gradualism means in practice giving up the fight for socialism. The socialist goal is the liberation of the working class and the humanisation of work.
To turn a capitalist economy into a socialist one is not to nationalise this company or that. State ownership and social ownership of the means of production are two completely different concepts which should never be confused. The means of production may be owned by the state, but this does not mean that they are thereby the social property of the working class.
Socialism is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, upon production for use as against production for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions, class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance that the struggle for material needs is completely eliminated, so that humanity, at last freed from economic exploitation, from oppression, from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Much can perhaps be added to this definition, but anything less you can call whatever you wish, but it will not be socialism. Socialism for us, yesterday, today, tomorrow still means the end of class rule; the end of class privilege; the freeing of the people from all chains and all coercion, the fullest realisation of democracy, the emancipation of women and of children; abundance for all, and therefore liberty for all.
Social revolution has become the only form of radicalism possible. Never before has the working class been so in need of socialism and socialism alone. Never before have the conditions been so ripe for turning socialist ideas into reality. Socialism is nothing more nor less than the social and political system which breaks the fetters of capitalism and opens the way to a new society. Socialism is not something you can export and import. Socialism cannot be imposed on the points of bayonets. Socialism requires the free choice of conscious people as the main condition for its realisation. When socialism comes, it will not be sneaked in through the back door. Socialism which is constructed without the masses and against the masses is a hollow “socialism” indeed. It will come only when a socialist party, having won the confidence of the working class and convinced the majority that the social ownership and operation of the means of production, has become necessary. Socialist society is not created by gradual reform stepping stones steps toward socialism. Day-to-day struggle alone however does not create socialists. Socialism is a result of conscious building and planning, conducted by the organised majority of the population. There are no short cuts by which we can reach socialism. If the working class does not take into its own hands the power to achieve the new social order, it will pay the penalty of its own destruction. Capitalism is dragging us to global extinction. Our perspective must be working class action to bring down the capitalist system to put a working class socialist alternative in its place – rather than waiting for crumbs from the tables of the bankers and bosses. When society owns the means of production it will own the products. When it owns the products it can distribute them to its members according to their individual and collective needs. This is the only solution.
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