Share the Wealth

You are trapped in a conditioned ideological stupour. Free yourself and let us build the post-capitalist society where world wars for markets and vital resources are impossible. We have a world to win. we workers collectively produce all of the wealth, run capitalism from top to bottom and the capitalist class do not take any part in the production process other than risking previously appropriated capital (dead labour)arising from the previous exploitation of wage slaves, we can dispense with their parasitism and indeed have free access to all of the world’s wealth. The capitalist class is the property owning class who will be dispossessed of their ownership. Capitalism is the social system which now exists in all countries of the world where  the means for producing and distributing goods (the land, factories, technology, transport system etc) are owned by a small minority of people. Owning one's home (more likely along with a massive mortgage debt) hardly takes us out of the working class.

There is absolutely no automatic right to housing within the capitalist system. All must pay. To pay, all must work. It is no matter that you work long and hard and that your children work long and hard and don't go to school. All that matters is that you have enough to buy or rent or build. Maybe you did have enough before the housing market bubble burst and the “worth” of your house went down while the interest rates went up. Well, tough! Look around you. See the empty houses and FOR SALE and foreclosure signs. These people must be living somewhere now. There is always housing stock available – if you can pay the going rate.

This is one very obvious benefit of not having money. The recent economic crisis has focused many home-owners' minds. Why should anyone be secure one month and the next find themselves in Queer Street? Can anybody justify one individual's multiple home ownership while others live in slums, in cars, in cardboard boxes on the streets? Please! When the majority of us have eventually decided that this scenario is unacceptably obscene we can at last begin to move to a humanitarian way of ordering our societies. Housing for all. Decent housing for all. Materials that are free and belong to all of us. Our architects, builders, plumbers, plasterers, electricians, etc. etc. will all work for free – they also need homes to live in. New housing can be built to the best specifications using appropriate materials, incorporating adequate insulation and services with regard to environmental protection and best use of alternative energy.

We are ordinary people who realise that human society has reached a point in its development in history where the majority of people, in all countries, must understand the structure of the society we live in so as to consciously take steps, as a whole, to peacefully and democratically establish a completely new form of worldwide society in line with the modern technological age. A society which will work to the benefit and well-being of everyone everywhere.

The popular conception of socialism (or communism) is of sharing-out poverty by retaining the present social organization but dividing up the existing wealth equally among everybody. This idea is a moralistic fantasy that would probably end up in more vicious divisions than before. The poverty that exists today can only be ended by a real revolutionary transformation - the establishment of a world-wide community of free men and women in total control of the productive forces of society. This is what socialism means, and it can only be established by your active participation in the World Socialist Movement that accepts no compromise with poverty. A post-capitalist society can register accurate demand in this day of bar-codes and stock control systems to ensure that needs are met, instead of needing a rigged artificial market

Class is a relationship to the means of production and distribution. There are now only two classes. All men and women who because of their lack of property are forced to seek work for a wage or a salary are members of the working class. Whether you work in a factory or an office whether you push a barrow or a pen if you have to seek a wage or a salary in order to live, you are a member of the working class. “Better off” workers still have to worry about making ends meet, face the indignity of redundancy or pay-cuts and in one degree or another, suffer the problems created by capitalist society. "Middle class" is not an appropriate term for people who are only a few pay-checks or a medical bill away from financial disaster or people who have jobs but with debts wildly disproportionate to their income and no assets to speak of. It should be admitted that they really are working class. This is what places them firmly in the ranks of the workers whether or not they like it or not or even know it. It is not a question of social origins. An individual born in the working class may well enter the capitalist class (and vice versa). Nevertheless a class tends to perpetuate itself along the lines of its social origins. What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. To “escape from your class” do not believe or trust in becoming a capitalist. Work instead for a society in which class divisions no longer exist. No matter how seductive the notion, "that we are all middle class now" may be, because we are buying or own our house and send little Dumkins to private school, we are still wage slaves and that fact is growing more and more apparent to more and more people. The middle class were originally the emerging capitalist class, which became the dominant owning class and absorbed the land owning aristocratic one, leaving the rest as one great working class which is still to achieve its emancipation.

"A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.” – Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter XXV