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Saturday, December 26, 2015

The Dawn and the Day is coming


Socialism is the doctrine for sharing and caring but for many people socialism is the philosophy of the ‘crazies’. The ruling class claim for themselves the mantle of progress, logic, truth, beauty, and knowledge. They represent socialists as deluded, irrational, psychotic, and hateful. But just look at these critics of socialism: the distorted finance capitalists who would see a world plunged into barbarism before they relinquish a penny of their fabulous profits; the power-mad industrialists who grind the working class to dust beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of new technology. Are these people sane? Wise? Right? Benevolent? Reasonable? Only we socialists really take reason seriously. We are infinitely more rational than our class enemies. Socialists do not rape the Earth and do not worship Mammon at the expense of people and nature. This has made socialism the anathema of the ruling class, hence, they misunderstand and distort the ideas which reflects the class struggle. The only alternative is socialist revolution. Nothing is more impossible than the goal of self-survival on a ruined planet. There is a better way for suffering humanity–to go forward together to reestablish the democratic collective ownership of the means of producing life’s necessities.

It is practically impossible to make capitalism work rationally with a plan. The purpose of production always remains the same – how much is there in it for the owners of industry! The profit system recognizes no plans except one: private gain and the accumulation of even more gain. Our bosses has to exploit us in order to keep their own businesses making profit. In capitalist economics, the workers are reduced to a “resource” and a “cost item” to be kept to the absolute minimum through speedups, wage-cuts and layoffs. The bosses spend millions figuring out how to squeeze every possible ounce of labour out of us, for it is only out of our labor that they make their profits. Under capitalism, workers have no control over what is produced and how. All that is decided by how much profit some capitalist will gain. But socialism enables the working class to decide how to organise itself and the resources of society to meet the needs of the people. Socialism means workers are not at the mercy of the crises of capitalism. As long as profit for the few is the basis of the economic system, that system–capitalism–will continue to go from crisis to deeper crisis, with more misery for the majority of people.

Capital is simply money and commodities assigned to create a profit and be reinvested. Profit is made by the "magical" addition of surplus value to the value inherent in the product. The "added value," the profit, is produced by workers. The value of a commodity comes from the labour invested in it, including the labor that manufactured the machinery and extracted the raw materials used to create the item. And the boss' profits do not come from his smarts or his capital investment or his mark-up, but from the value created by labour - specifically, surplus-value. Surplus value derives from unpaid wages. The worker is never paid for the value of the product, only for the value of her or his labour time, which is considerably less, and which meanders widely depending upon the historical, cultural and social conditions of a country. Labour-power is miraculous, like the Virgin Birth. You get more out of it than you put in. Workers produce a commodity which has more value than what they get in wages to keep them functioning. This differential is surplus value, which is the source of capital. The secret of value, the labour theory of value, that was unearthed by the classical economists and by Marx is what the ruling classes fear and hate. It is the secret that will set the world free. People will learn how to control the supposedly sacred, eternal, and inscrutable method of production and distribution that now controls us.

Socialists will produce for use according to a reasonable plan and without a thought for the odious notion of profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain, socialist society will produce abundance for all. The global human family will arrange its standard of living as easily as affluent families do today.

Capitalism isn't directed by some sinister cabal, but by millions of individual owners. The whole system is coordinated through trade and the money prices that trade generates. Much engineering and manipulation and control through pacts does go on, but Marx pointed out the truly anarchistic nature of modern industrial capitalism - an irrational, disorganized hodge-podge operation that enormously rewards price fixers, crooks, gangsters, exploiters, con artists, gamblers, stock manipulators, and all manner of corruption. It's a crazy and ruthless economy that survives by inflicting anguish on untold billions. The underlying profit system is perpetuated by mostly unknown industrialists and financiers.

Today, millions challenge and protest. We have had enough of those patronising “radicals” who tells us that “You socialists are too impatient — Rome wasn’t built in a day.” After decades the working class is eventually becoming sophisticated enough to dare to revolt. Millions of people are learning to shed regressive prejudices and reactionary ideas. The socialist future is clearly within view for our epoch and our lives. What better use to make of one's life than in preparing that new civilization, the participation in the emancipation of humanity. We are no longer occupied with explaining defeats such as the 1917 Russian Revolution and rising above betrayals of all the reformist social-democrats. Not because we will have forgotten those, but simply because we are now focused upon fulfilling our role in creating a new world, rich with freedom, able to produce abundance while maintaining humane relations between people. Men and women intend to create a new society where everybody can stop being sheep start being human. You must play a part in bringing this about. Together, we must either change the world or be doomed by it. Together, we can win. Our mutual aid and shared support grows naturally out of our common experiences and joint actions. We are a movement with a goal. This world is ours, and you fight for what’s yours. The comradeship of fellow communists engaged in a common crusade is to be cherished. Our revolution is everybody’s revolution, and our revolution can and will be made, as the song puts it, with a little help from our friends.

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