“At the parliament of
animals, the rabbits demanded equal rights, and the lions replied, ‘But where
are your claws?’”
If you thought you were in charge - think again.
“Living in poverty” is one of those phrases that rolls
easily off the tongue. We all tend to glaze over the full meaning of the
phrase, the grinding day-to-day misery of hunger, insecurity, worry,
discomfort, exhaustion, and despair. The grim reality is that people are
working hard and yet remain impoverished. Too many of our neighbours are being
destroyed by poverty. We must demand better than that. Whatever fear, grief,
anger, disbelief, or horror you are feeling in a personal crisis, imagine those
feelings expanded to planetary scale. Socialists today give voice to the future
generations. Even the most educated have not the slightest inkling of the false
history they have learned. The intellectuals have been thoroughly co-opted by
the ruling class with university tenure and prestige trinkets. Many activists have
addressed different areas. But few link them up.
The lesser of two
evils is not the quick way to die, but instead a slow deliberate bleeding to
death. Sure Republicans or the Tories are worse. But that most assuredly
doesn’t mean that Democrats or the Labour Party are the solution. Real change
will not come from them. Your elected leaders are working for themselves and
their puppet-masters. They couldn’t care less about you. Certainly Left and Right
use different language and reasoning but they both come to same conclusions. There
will be no change until the American people wake up and realize that no
politician will deliver it to their door. For the self-actualized worker not
looking for a hero/leader there is just a vision of a world that could be. Revolutions
need commitment. As The Who once sang – “we won’t be fooled again”. But sadly
this is exactly what happens every election. We get the governments and the
presidents we deserve. Take a look at the mess we are in around the world.
Capitalism is a wrecking machine, scorching and scouring the Earth of its
resources, increasing its profits plundering the people. The viciousness of
capitalism engulfs us ever more.
To all those on the Left – the Socialist Party say “Please come home!” Re-think your
positions. Maybe it is the bitter truth that that none of us will see a society
in which we'd actually want to live in. Perhaps the youngest of us will be the
ones to create the new society. But what we can do now is to lay the groundwork
for that by exposing the hoax that reformism will lead to basic changes. People
require to understand that the purpose of reformers is to patch up the problems
of the profit system but more importantly defuse and diffuse discontent with
promises of a better future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing.
Capitalism is willing to change only in ways that shore it up. It diverts
potentially revolutionary energy into superficial dead ends so before anything
truly different can be built, we have to bring it down. What we can do now as socialists
is weaken capitalism and build organisations that will pass our knowledge and
experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our children or
grandchildren can make a revolution. If we don't do it, our descendants will
remain wage-slaves. Our most important aim is educating and organizing people
towards a revolutionary goal, undermining the beliefs that prop up the institutions
of capitalism, breaking the identification with “God, King and Country”,
ridiculing their patriotic rituals. We should talk about capitalism, not
neoliberalism or any other euphemism for the capitalist system. The precise
form that capitalism takes in a particular era might reflect 'evolution' of a
sort but, in whatever guise, capitalism is fundamentally exploitative. Capitalism
like the board game Monopoly is designed to bankrupt and eliminate other
'players' from the 'game' leaving just one 'player' (the global elite) to own
everything. There seems little point in shifting the focus to one or another
manifestation of it. Capitalism kills people. Our task is to explain this. It
is our duty to ourselves and to the future to profit by the experiences of our
predecessors and by our own.
And yet, despite everything that capitalism does to destroy
the bonds of human solidarity in our world, many people still act selflessly as
the people of Occupy Sandy did after Hurricane Sandy and as many are doing to
help in the plight of the migrants in Europe. Technology has abolished time and
distance as factors separating nations from nations. On our shrunken globe
today, there is room for one group only - the family of humankind. We have waited
too long for real change and lost some precious time. We can’t avoid the
battles of ideas. We can’t avoid the discussions about what our values. Our argument
is that our case for socialism is the best chance to build a better society. We
will seize the opportunity to decentralized economic power as much as we can.
We must come together as a community and drop the “my issue is bigger than your
issue,” pissing contest. It’s about connecting the dots and laying out an
expansive vision to work towards as an aspiration for all
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