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Saturday, June 20, 2015

The Socialist Movement

Poverty, exploitation, oppression, war and environmental destruction are products of the capitalist system, a system in which a minority ruling class profits from the work of the majority. The alternative is socialism, a society based on people commonly owning and collectively controlling the wealth their labour creates. Although workers create society's wealth, they have no say over its production and distribution. The 1% — the rich capitalist ruling class - are the ones who have the power to make decisions that affect everyone else — the 99%.  This system is geared toward the constant accumulation of profits, no matter what social or environmental costs may be incurred.

Ideas about reforming this system don’t take the history of capitalism into account. The social ills we see today are not a perversion of the system, but the consequences of the logic of the capitalist system, which concentrates wealth and political power in ever-fewer hands. The problems are huge and only society-wide action will resolve them. The answer to this cannot simply be a matter of replacing people at the top. For real, lasting change to take place, political power cannot be wielded in the autocratic way the 1% has used it for so long. A different type of politics is needed, one where the interests of the 99% are at the fore. Political reforms cannot put capitalism to rights. It must be completely replaced.

Only workers themselves can put an end to the capitalist system of exploitation. Socialism is working-class self-emancipation. Given the huge scale of the problems that need addressing — centuries of environmental damage; an economic system that creates  chronic social problems linked to inequality and alienation — a democratically planned approach, using all resources available, will be vital. Some people might call this socialism. Currently the word, ‘socialism’, is mostly taken to mean state involvement in or control over the economy. Many people have quite narrow views about what socialism can and cannot be. But that is not accurate even if a number of text-books offer it as a definitive description. Socialism places satisfying human needs and the needs of the natural world as the primary purpose of society rather than producing profits for the few. Socialism is the idea that each individual should have the means to live a life of dignity, without exception. Socialists think each person should have the means to develop to their full potential. It means a society focused on restoring ecosystems and promoting sustainable human development. It means a society based on ongoing, participatory democracy. It means people-power.

In the 19th C. William Morris said:
 “Socialism – a condition where there is neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brainworkers nor heart-sick handworkers – in which all men would be living in equality of conditions, would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all.”

We can go further back into history to the 17th C. when Gerard Winstanley wrote:
“Every tradesman shall fetch materials… from the public store-houses to work upon without buying and selling; and when particular works are made… the tradesmen shall bring these particular works to particular shops, as it is now the practice, without buying and selling. And every family as they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops and fetch without money.”

Or we can travel even earlier into our history to the 14th C. to the time John Ball could say:
“When Adam delved and Eve span; Who was then a Gentleman? Ah ye good people, the matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall do till everything be common, and that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we are all united together, and that the lords be no greater masters than we. What have we deserved, or why should we be thus kept in servage? We be all come from one father and mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or show that they be greater lords than we, saving by that they cause us to win and labour for that they dispend?”

To-day society is fundamentally anti-social. The whole so-called social fabric rests on privilege and power, and is strained in every direction by the inequalities that necessarily result. The welfare of each, instead of contributing to that of all, as it should, detracts from that of all. Wealth is made by the legal privilege to filch from labour’s pockets. Every man who gets rich thereby makes his neighbour poor. The better off one is, the worse off the rest are. Socialism wants to change all this. Socialism says that what’s one man’s meat must no longer be another’s poison. Socialists are the only people entitled to cite the eighth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal’ That commandment is a socialist principle, only not as a commandment from God, but as a condition of nature. Socialists do not order; we prophesise and predict. We does not say unto you ‘Thou shalt not steal’ We say when all men and women have free access to the world’s treasury they shalt not steal. Capitalism is doomed to make the lot of the working class more unstable, insecure and miserable. Indeed, the promises made by the supporters of capitalism have not been fulfilled for billions of people around the world. If anything, the opposite is true.


If the working class continue to accept capitalism, then the system will persist until it produces the "common ruin" of all. The socialist revolution is not a given, or something that will be reached inevitably simply through the course of history. Marx and Engels argued, "history does nothing...it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not...a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims." 


 Our conscious aim must be the overthrow of the contradictory crisis-ridden class-system of capitalism and the purposeful establishment of socialism.



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