The World Needs Socialism! Socialism Requires Revolution!

The class struggle -- the conflict between the capitalists and the workers -- is at the very heart of the capitalist system. It explains how it works and where it is going. The workers create the wealth and the bosses take the lion’s share. Today capitalism is on a global offensive that is wiping out past gains. As profit margins have fallen in the system as a whole, competition between capitalist firms and nations has become ever more vicious. The “race to the bottom” in which capitalists try to outdo each other in finding the cheapest labour possible is prevalent. The needs of the ruling class to boost profit rates also dictates escalated racist and anti-immigrant attacks across the board -- to keep the working class down through divide-and-conquer methods. In their insatiable quest to maximize profits, the capitalists and their state crush everything that stands in their way; they no longer have the luxury of preserving the democratic veneer they once applied to their system.

Socialism still offers the best hope for humanity.  We aren't idealists who think people can be made perfect.  We simply think a society run by workers themselves, freed from both bosses and bureaucrats, would be far more democratic and liberatory than capitalism ever has been.  We think that a society premised upon the enhancement of life rather than the perpetuation of profit would stand the best chance of putting a halt to the environmental devastation now ravishing the globe. But we can't get there on our own.  A society that strives for basic equality and democratic participation will only come about through the coordinated activity of many people. The emancipation of humanity from capitalism will only come about when workers act in the offices, factories and streets on their own behalf.  It cannot be achieved through any shortcut, though many have been tried.

Socialists are widely condemned as utopian dreamers. But socialist society is not some dreamland. We argue that socialism is the only solution. Only the working class, through socialist revolution, can stop this nightmare. In order to fight most effectively, workers also have to understand that there can be no lasting concessions from the capitalist system. To win security and abundance for all, the working class will have to take matters into our own hands. We must dare to struggle and dare to win!

There can be no bureaucrats in socialism. It will be a social organization of the people by the people. Government over the people is replaced by the administration of things.

Marx and Engels had clarified the concept of socialism in the Communist Manifesto, where they wrote: "In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class conflicts there will be an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." In Capital, a society opposed to the "world of the commodity" is described as "an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social force." From The Civil War in France,  "if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, this taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production-what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, "possible" Communism?”  One more example comes from an essay Marx wrote in 1871 entitled ‘On the Nationalisation of Land’: "The national concentration of the means of production is the natural base of a society in which a co-operative union of free and equal producers consciously acts in accordance to a rational plan."

It is natural that from the outset in this sort of society there is no room for the existence of commodities or currency which are categories peculiar to a society founded on private property.

Socialism is thus a society in which private property is abolished so that the means of production become the common property of society. Individual labour power is consciously expended by an "association of free men" as one part of society's labour power; that is a "combination" of "large cooperative production unions" consciously coordinates production and distribution based on a rational single common plan – the cooperative commonwealth. Of course, to realise this society the highest development of production, technology and industry are the necessary preconditions.