A real social revolution

The Earth’s greatest single resource is its people. The world could be a paradise for its inhabitants but it definitely is not a paradise for the majority of people. Who and what is responsible? It is the capitalists and their profit-seeking system. Our planet is ruled for and by capitalists for their own interests. What is wrong with the world is the way society is organised, the “system of society” which prevails. Two main features of this society are it is divided into rich and poor—a tiny handful of rich (1 per cent of the population own more than half the wealth) who need not do any work, and the overwhelming majority who toil their whole lives through and that wars, involving incalculable suffering to the people, are a regular occurrence. Resources are squandered in production of weapons of mass destruction, armies, navies and air forces by the global capitalist players.

It is a system of exploitation. By exploitation we mean living off the labour of other people. There have been previous forms of exploitation. In slave society, the slave-owners lived off the labour of the slaves who were their property. In feudal society, the feudal lords lived off the forced labour of the serfs. In capitalist society the worker is neither a slave nor yet a serf, i.e. forced to do free, unpaid labour for a master. But he or she is exploited just the same, even though the form of this exploitation is not as open and clear as was the case with the slaves and the serfs. The essence of exploitation under capitalism consists in this — that the workers, when set to work with raw materials and machinery, produce far more in values than what is paid out by the capitalists in wages. In short, they produce a surplus which is taken by the capitalists and for which they are not paid. Thus they are robbed of the values they produce. This is the source of capitalist profit. Capitalism holds no future for the humanity other than the destruction of the environment, poverty, disease and war. Capitalism’s not natural and it need not be permanent. But that’s up to you. Human nature does not exist beyond eating sleeping and procreating and socialising. Human behaviour is social. Competition breeds competition, cooperation breeds cooperation. If human nature ruled out cooperation for the greater good, even capitalism could not exist. The human nature argument is a slavish,religious/ ideological reinforcing, nonsense one.

For workers, the problem is capitalism. We produce all the wealth—in fact we run the useful parts of society from top to bottom—but we don't get all the benefits of our production of goods and our running of services and we don't have direct control of the society we run. Our economic function under capitalism is to produce wealth for an exploiting and parasitical class, the capitalist class. Since the 19th Century, these basic facts haven't changed. We had capitalism then and we've got capitalism now. Workers were exploited them we're exploited now. The rich had luxury then and they've got it now. Workers had the problems of housing, making ends meet, and economic insecurity then and we've got the same problems now. This is in spite of the fact that we produce every bit of useful wealth that becomes available and run all the useful services that people need.

Capitalism produced for profit then and it produces for profit now. When there was no prospect of profit then, workers became unemployed. It is exactly the same now. At the turn of the century the privileges of the rich were based on their ownership of the means of production and all natural resources and on their control over workers through the state machine. It is exactly the same now.

We live in a world where solidarity and mutual support has been reduced to charity and volunteering and with a victim’s mentality, blaming one another and deferentially pleading with governments and our employers rather than reacting our exploitation and oppressions with strikes and revolutionary demands. We have lost any sense of our real class power.

We must establish a world where people collectively plan and produce, share and care for one another. It isn't enough just to have a clear understanding of what causes the problems of the working class; we must also have a very clear understanding of how they could be solved. That solution is socialism. This will be a practical and straightforward system of useful work producing useful goods free from the economic constraints of production for profit, without any exchange of any kind and without therefore the use of money.

Production will be humanised in the sense that human beings won't have a price put on either their ability to work or the product of their work. Jobs won't have a price on them, nor will goods, nor will needs. Instead of working for wages people will cooperate, and this will bring work under the control of those who carry it out. It will be the self-determined activity of individuals responding to the needs of the community of which they form a part and who have the responsibility and the real power of decision-making and action. That is the sane system we must establish and it is the only sensible definition of socialism.

When will you all wake up to an obsolete system which has food, clothing, and shelter, indeed everything useful, as commodities for sale on the market with a view to realising a profit for the few while the wealth creators (working class) receive a rationing of access via the waged slavery system?

What we must do, is make common cause with workers worldwide to remove the capitalist class private, corporate and state, ownership of all the means and instruments for producing wealth, which leads to rationed access (wages and salaries) for the useful working class and privileged access and further accumulation of the spoils for the parasite class (capitalists). This cannot be reformed in any human-centred way. A real social revolution will establish a post-capitalist society of common ownership and democratic control globally, with production for use and not for sale on a market, free access according to needs and the world for the workers.