Rejecting Capitalism

The rich and their retainers in the media love to put down and revile poor people who depend on welfare payments, ignoring the fact that their wealth has a lot to do with the poverty of their fellow men and women. The epithets are numerous. Skivers (as opposed to strivers), ‘wedded’ to welfare (single mums), welfare queens (hinting at some kind of secret opulence),  free-riders, spongers, scroungers and loafers.  Underlying these labels is the insinuation that members of the  demonised underclass are mentally weak-minded or criminal but above all they are responsible for their own situation. The wealthy, we are told, deserve to be rich, no questions asked, because they are hard-working, ambitious and smart. Any correlations with  wealth/corruption, wealth/tax-evasion, wealth/inheritance, wealth/criminal acts is conveniently over-looked.  Plunderers who profited from appropriating the Commons wealth malign and punish the poor while they fill their tax-haven bank balances. The “robber barons” will brook no interference with their will.

 These moguls and magnates presume to know best what we should teach children and how it should be done; how to defend the country’s borders against alien invasion, organise international trade and the national debt, how to provide health-care and welfare, ‘create’ jobs , revise the tax laws, control and curtail the unions, and, of course keep the country on the moral religious and racial straight and narrow so they look into a mirror at the reflection of themselves.  Some are philanthropic, others parsimonious; some are pietistic; some paternalist. There billionaires may not be a Tycoon Party in politics but every mainstream party represent their interests. They fund the politicians and the think-tanks and who pays the piper always clls the tune.  Some  may donate to liberal causes while others finance right-wing crusades.  But all of them subscribe to one thing: a belief in capitalism. The business autocrats have grown into an aristocracy. The capitalist class include reformers like Zuckerberg and Gates, as well as reactionaries such as the Koch brothers. What they share with each other and their robber baron ancestors is a god-like desire to create the world in their image to enhance their power.

We live in dangerous times, and this is something that few in politics or the media are willing to admit. Governments continue to be proxies and cheer-leaders of the capitalist class risking yet  another catastrophic economic crisis. Glorified financial scammers dictate the rules of the game and the structure and operation of any given economic environment. Many people are now not only working for lower wages, but often for fewer hours, and hours determined in an arbitrary fashion.

Socialism seeks to solve the problem of human misery by economic and social revolution. The capitalist class has never stopped–and will never stop–its efforts to destroy and weaken the workers’ movement. Revolutionary workers must be guided by the principle, an injury to one is an injury to all. We must advance labour solidarity in all battles against the capitalist class. Revolutionary workers must build toward independent political action by an organised working class. The Socialist Party’s main task is to dispossess the capitalists and establish socialism. But that doesn’t mean we can just sit around and wait for socialism, nor can we make capitalism work like socialism.

The Socialist Party has to win a hearing for our views from our  fellow members of the working class. We don’t care where a person is born, as long as he or she can fight alongside us for socialism.