Socialism is a good idea...but

Socialism is a good idea, but “it doesn't work in practice…” and “people are too greedy for it to succeed…” and “the rich and powerful will never allow it to happen.” We’ve have all these refutations to which is added “it's the only system that works…” and “don't waste your life trying to change things…”

Imagine if you wanted to start a society and proposed that those who do all the work will be paid as little as possible while those who claimed to own most things didn't do anything but would have more of everything. Capitalism is a bad idea for the well-being of society. Socialism is more rational. Growing numbers are concluding that capitalism doesn't work.

The ruling class have abandoned the rest of us to survival status, without jobs, without security, without hope. We get the crumbs off their table. Reformism both expresses an abandonment of revolutionary aims and the adoption of bourgeois party politics. The reformist tactic is the acceptance of gradualism. Reformism offers no hope of creating a labour movement that can in fact bring socialism about. The oligarchs and plutocrats amass fortunes, unaware of the millions starving to death, living without clean water and dying from preventable illnesses, all in their wake. The media offer stories about the good works of billionaires to make us think they are somehow special people. Bill Gates, they tell us, is a grand fellow, as is Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos with their “charitable give-aways.”  If they were sincere about wanting to make a better world, they would do the one thing that would bring immense change and form a mass-media network, waking up the citizens of the planet to the need for social revolution.

The achievement of socialism awaits the building of a mass base of socialists, in factories and offices. Capitalism must be replaced by socialism, by the common ownership of the means of production and distribution in the interests of the people as a whole. A socialist democracy implies mankind's control of the immediate environment as well, and in any strategy for building socialism, community democracy is as vital as the struggle for electoral success. To that end, socialists must strive for democracy at those levels that most directly affect us all — in our neighbourhoods and our places of work, promoting decentralisation, and restoring human and social priorities. By bringing men and women together primarily as buyers and sellers of each other, by enshrining profitability and material gain in place of humanity, capitalism has always been inherently alienating. A socialist transformation of society will return mankind to its sense of humanity, to replace its sense of being a commodity. The process of socialist education is the raising of consciousness, the building the numbers of socialists, and a strategy to make visible the limits of capitalism. Victory lies in joining the struggle. Socialists should get together to discuss the path ahead.