Time to reboot the world

 Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What awaits us? Many feel confused in a state of anxiety and fear. World history shows that we live in a situation where devastating wars, exploitation and oppression of peoples have become a permanent fact of life. In many countries, hunger, poverty, illiteracy, and all kinds of degradations make the lives of hundreds of millions of men, women, and children scarcely tolerable. In our world, injustice and the denial of the most elementary rights have become common practice. More and more peoples are under the iron heel of military regimes and police states. Billions of dollars are spent to perfect methods of surveillance, repression and torture. Humanity’s resources are wasted in senseless adventures while people’s basic needs remain unsatisfied, land is spoiled, misery increases, and poverty spreads. The gap between rich countries and poor ones, far from diminishing, is increasing. In this capitalist world the normal condition is war with abnormal interludes of peace.

 Why is it that we have to put up with these conditions? Who is responsible? What economic, political, and social system creates and perpetuates this situation? How can things be changed? Reality shows that who profits from this misery are those whose power depends on maintaining the present conditions. You cannot have capitalist profit without capitalist exploitation. Capitalist profit and the benefit of the entire community are irreconcilable. Capitalism is not an eternal system which has existed from the beginning and will prevail to the end. Like all preceding social systems, however, capitalism too must die. The direction of capitalism’s own development is towards the socialist solution.

If socialism is not the alternative to capitalism, then why a socialist movement at all? It is a question of learning hope. The new is never completely new. The economic basis for socialism was being created under capitalism. The world was ripening under capitalism itself for socialism. When the “inevitability” of socialism is talked about, it means that given correct human action it could come into being. It does not mean that socialism is bound to come, mechanically of itself, independent of human action. On the contrary, the destruction of capitalism could lead to socialism – or barbarism, that the latter could come out of capitalism’s disintegration as an alternative. If you destroy capitalism in a certain way, that is, by a certain form of social action, the road to socialism would be open. If socialism is to be the outcome of capitalism’s downfall, it is necessary that mankind take conscious action in that direction. The two classes of capitalist society are the capitalist class and the working class. Between them there is already a struggle going on; the struggle by the capitalist class to maintain its system of exploitation, and the struggle by the working class to overthrow it.  In order to emancipate itself, the working class would have to expropriate the capitalists and socialise their property. The process of the working class emancipating itself from capitalism is therefore also the process of emancipating all mankind from exploitation.

 One question that is always raised at socialist meetings is how society would be organised after a revolution. Socialists have to convince our fellow workers that socialism represents a better system if only a  sketch of the future state of human society. for people, that the eventual withering away of the state is not a pipe-dream but a realistic aim. How people have always dreamed of this, dreamed of the better life that might be possible. Let our dreams grow fuller, clearer and more familiar. Thinking means venturing beyond. We do not believe in drawing up detailed plans for the socialist future now as such a project would be futile – millions of people engaged in the struggle to establish socialism will be much more creative than a few individuals in a small party as ours in drawing up blueprints. But we can get some idea of what is possible

Even in bourgeois economics there is scarcely a serious scientist or investigator who would deny that the abolition of hunger and of misery is possible with the productive forces that already exist technically. The abolition of poverty and misery is possible as is the abolition of alienation.  Today we are less preoccupied with the abolition of the wages system than ever. The old cry for a fair day’s pay echoes itself time and again.

Marxism teaches that socialism will not fall from the skies. Neither will it be gained by any appeals to the good will and compassion of the capitalist exploiters, as the utopians, who preceded Marx, used to think, and as some people still seem to think. Socialism can be realised only as the outcome of the class struggle of the workers. Only socialism can save humanity from the abyss. This is the truth. We cannot be afraid of "indicting" capitalism and wage-slavery, or afraid of arousing the socialist consciousness and class struggle. We cannot be  afraid of teaching the working class its socialist aim that can only be accomplished by way of a democratic revolution. We cannot be afraid of teaching the working class the evils of capitalism’s "halfway-houses" to “socialism”. The fight for socialism is not as a Utopian scheme but as the realisation of a historic necessity.