Our message to fellow workers

Many people became frightened by the immensity of the task of achieving a socialist society. The thought of creating a whole new stage of history is a daunting one. There will no longer be the need for the state since the state will be replaced with common administration by all of society. Socialism eliminates the anarchy of capitalism and its crises, by collective ownership of the means of production and collective planning of the economy controlled by the working class. Society will be transformed and the community of workers established, a completely classless society. Technology will no longer be weapons in the hands of the capitalists to grind down the working class, and workers will no longer be a mere extension of the machine, as they are under capitalism. Instead technology will become tools in the hands of the working class to benefit all of society. This will unleash the stored-up knowledge of the working class and inspire people to make new breakthroughs.  Unemployment will end, because socialism will be able to make full use of the labour of everyone in society, while at the same time developing and introducing new scientific to expand output. As increased automation replaces workers, people will not be thrown into the streets, but shift to other jobs and the working hours will be reduced. Work itself will become a joy and enrichment of a person’s life, instead of a miserable means to sustain existence, as it is under capitalism. People will have a wide and diverse variety of organisations to remake and administer society. Imagine how it will feel when all mortgages and debts immediately disappear.

Socialism will bring about well-constructed housing for people. Under capitalism, it is more profitable to speculate in land, maintain slum housing and put capital into buildings for big business than to build decent housing for the masses. It is only because the rule of capital has so greatly distorted development, and brought such decay. Slums will be pulled down, and in their place new homes and other community facilities will be built. Homes will built near places of work, doing away with unnecessary commuting and with easy access to medical clinics, nurseries and schools. A socialist society will make available public laundries, cafeterias, nurseries and other facilities near the home and work. This will make it possible to greatly reduce the burden of household work, and free women–and men as well–to play a greater part in productive labor and the political role of the working class in ruling and revolutionising society. Health care will be freed from the nightmare of big business and the drug companies. Under socialism health care and hospitals will no longer be about cost-cutting but a means for the working class to prevent disease and to preserve the health of the people. Capitalist education prepares the great majority of youth only for existence as wage-slaves and perpetuating the capitalist system. Children are taught to compete against each other. Under capitalism education is geared to maintain the division of society into classes, the conditions of capitalist exploitation and the rule of the capitalists over the working class and masses of people. Education in socialist society will promote cooperation in place of competition, stressing the living link between theory and practice, between knowing and doing.

Capitalism promotes cynicism, despair, and the lie that the masses of people are at fault for all the problems of society–since these can hardly be covered up. It tries to demoralize people with the idea that they are the helpless pawn of mysterious and sinister forces. When it deals with the problems ordinary people face every day, it tries to paint them as purely “personal problems” not stemming from the nature of society itself, or at most as the fault of some “bad” people with “bad” ideas, not representing any class. In all its forms it aims at deflecting the anger of the people away from the ruling class back onto themselves–hate people of another nationality, or the other sex, hate yourself, hate people in general, hate anything but the ruling class itself. It glorifies parasites–whether bank president, gangster or pimp. Socialists shine a spotlight on the crimes of the ruling class and illuminates the real reason for the evils and the sufferings of the people in society – capitalist exploitation.

Socialists point the way to a brighter future. There is no such thing as “human nature”. In the slave system, it was considered “natural” for one group of people, the slave-owners, to own other people, the slaves. In capitalist society, this idea is regarded as criminal and absurd, because the bourgeoisie has no need for slaves as private property (at least not in its own country). But it has every need for wage-slaves, proletarians. So it presents as “natural” the kind of society where a small group, the capitalists, own the means of production and on that basis force the great majority of society to work to enrich them. The slave-owners and the capitalists have one fundamental thing in common–they are both exploiters, and they both regard it as the correct and perfect order of things for a small group of parasites to live off the majority of laboring people. They differ only in the form in which they exploit and therefore in their view of how society should be organised to ensure this exploitation. When humanity has advanced to socialism, society as a whole will consciously reject the idea that any one group should privately own the means of production. Then wage-slavery, based on the ownership of capital as private property, will be seen as just as criminal and absurd as ancient slavery, based on the ownership of other people as private property. The working class has no interest in promoting private gain at the expense of others and every interest in promoting cooperation. For only in this way can it emancipate itself and all humanity. Appropriating the means of production from the overthrown employing class is an act which will be accomplished almost immediately once the workers have won political power.