There Is Only One Solution – Socialism!

FOR WORLD SOCIALISM

We live in an epoch in which there exists class oppression, poverty, hunger war, racism and sexism. There’s a name for this kind of society and it’s called capitalism. It relishes and thrives on inequality. By capitalism, we mean the system that exists on the basis of your unpaid labour. You as a worker produce commodities to be exchanged on the market. You produce not only enough to pay your own wage, but also an added value, a surplus value, over and above the cost of your maintenance. Surplus labour is your unpaid wage. In polite circles it is called “profit.” And that’s what capitalism is all about. Capitalism is at the core of all of our struggles and all of our problems. The ruling class wants to preserve its privileges, its interests, its power, its wealth, its dominion. And so it engages in what is called divide and conquer. It’s a weapon designed to make us all hate and resent and compete with each other. And so many of us fall into its trap. We can’t let ourselves do that! We have to make change. We have to make revolutionary social and  economic change. And we can do it through unity. We are the people. We are the majority. If we organise, we can change this world, and we must for humanity to survive.

Some people try to escape the system. They try to ignore things happening around them, pretend it doesn’t affect them. It’s always a temptation to want to avoid trouble. But although you may try to escape the system, the system won’t escape you. You may try to ignore it, but it won’t ignore you. Sooner or later life and the system are going to put you in a struggle stance. Sooner or later you’re going to find yourselves in a battle. And suddenly you’ll find you need solidarity. When people realise the system has turned against them, they become politicised. And a very, very quickly acquire class consciousness. When it hits you, when it hurts you, you can begin to generalise, to see that everybody is suffering its effects. So we’ve got to have solidarity. We’ve got to stick together if we’re going to create change. What is class? Socialists call it your relation to the means of production. What end of the commodity production process are you on? Are you a producer of goods, or are you an appropriator of profits? Are you a worker employed by somebody else, or are you the owner who reaps surplus value from the labour of your workers? Workers are all the people who don’t own their own means of production. By this we mean the factories, the offices; the production operation.

So who are workers today? Who isn’t? Movie stars, artists, musicians, government workers, professionals of all kinds, teachers, professors—almost everybody is a worker today. Workers aren’t just blue collared in overalls; there are very few of those as automation takes over and everything becomes computerised. We do different kinds of work these days. We work with our minds more and we sit on our behind monitors more. But we’re still workers. We are the working class. We are the overwhelming majority. And taken together, workers in jobs and out of work, workers of various colours, young and old, male and female, gays and lesbians, and the fit and disabled are the majority class. That’s what too many of us lose sight of. We really have some power if only we would use it. And that’s why we should stop sniping at each other and start organising.

There’s a big class struggle going on. And the question is, what side are you on? There can be no liberation without socialism. And conversely, there can be no socialism without liberation for everybody. What is socialism? Socialism is not production for profit. It is production for use. It is not private ownership of resources. It is common ownership of the wealth. It is not inequality and misery and persecution and discrimination; it is equality and fairness. It is not poverty and want; it is freedom from want. It is freedom from war. It is freedom from ugliness and squalor. To achieve socialism you have to recognise class—who’s the boss, who’s the worker, who’s right and who’s wrong.