For people who want to change the world

The American presidential election process is an elaborate, staged event which creates the sense that opposition is futile. It is corporate brainwashing many times a day telling us that we are powerless and the Party machines are invincible. We are presented with two oppressors and our choice is the lesser evil of the two.  It is time to stand up and fight for the greater good. Someday, people tell us, we will have socialism, but the world and its people are not ready for it yet. They argue with us that they are being “realistic.” We say they’re not being realistic; they’re being idiotic. That their position isn’t even coherent. Other critics of our position are merely cynics. The cynic thinks everyone is stupid. They accuse their fellow workers of never being ready for socialism because they’re mean spirited as well as stupid. They don’t want other people to have decent lives, they want people to suffer, they want it so much that they will allow that desire to over-ride their own individual self-interest. Most people don’t realise the socialist ideas they oppose are in their own interest. Believing that one day we will get socialism even though people who like the idea but nevertheless are unwilling to vote for the Socialist Party is not simply unrealistic – it’s fantastic. It’s downright delusional. For the proponents of lesser evilism, winning is everything. There is hardly anything more shameful after all, than losing. Even cheating is acceptable if the cheater manages to win. Lesser evil supporters are cowards, people who are incapable of seeing the incoherence in voting for someone who opposes things they profess to want, while persisting in believing that we will one day get these things anyway, without having to vote for the party who seeks them. If people want socialism, then they’re going to have to vote for candidates who advocate it, rather than for candidates who oppose it. It takes more than one person or one party to change the world.

The vision of the world’s future appears completely dystopian and has descended into the dark abyss where the unimaginable has become imaginable. The politics of terror and the culture of fear legitimises the militarization and regimentation of public life and society and fosters the criminalisation of social problems. Brutal modern-day capitalism has released corporate and military power and throughout the globe we witness particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regimes of oppression. The planet itself is now under threat. Capitalism has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit of material wealth. Capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. Money now engulfs everything in this new age of disposability. Moreover, when coupled with a weakening of movements to counter the generated power of capitalists, the result has been a startling increase in the influence of predatory capitalism, along with inequities in wealth, income, power, and opportunity. Such power breeds anti-democratic tendencies. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable. Concentration of wealth and income generate power for the financial elite. Capitalists are no longer willing to compromise and have expanded their use of power to dominate economic, political, and social life. There is the deepening of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the working class to the ranks of the precariat. The emergence of new technologies create a large pool of more or less unemployed people. Moreover, as new technologies is also is being used as a repressive tool. Capitalism is a pathological economy. It creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos buttressed by a discourse that is morally insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a hatred of those whose labor cannot be exploited, do not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are considered other by virtue of their race, class, and ethnicity. Capitalism is slavery, exploitative usury of labor to enrich capital holders via violence and subjugation of people, nations and the globe. ALL capitalism is predatory violence, wasteful production and consumption and human subjugation.

There is no need to attach an adjective to the word "Capitalism", as in "Casino Capitalism" "Crony Capitalism", "Neo-Liberal Capitalism", "Financial Capitalism", "Disaster Capitalism", "Shock Capitalism", "Unregulated Capitalism", "Private-Equity Capitalism," or that old standby, "Greedy Capitalism". It is Capitalism, pure and simple, and there can be no confusion. What we see is what it is. Capitalism has brought depression and fragmentation. The idea of capitalism is force fed to all of us at the same level of religion. It's never associated with war, exploitation, oppression, lack of opportunity, discrimination or poverty. It's sold to us as the producer of peace, prosperity and plenty. Instead of bringing democracy and prosperity to the world, it has wrecked societies where they hung on by a fingernail. No extended criticism is needed because criticism itself - social, political, and economic - has become a criticism of capitalism. It has been this way for a long time. In the 19th century, capitalism was that which ripped small holders from the land, chained children to machinery, and pushed entire populations, on threat of extinction, across the surface of the earth. They told you that capitalism changed? They lied. There are no forms of capitalism that aren't damaging to society. There is no such thing as “Compassionate Capitalism”.

Our socialist goal is what some have called the “community of goods”; everything is to be made common property, everything will be everybody’s. “The association of free men who work with the means of production and who employ, following a concerted plan, their numerous individual forces as a single force of social labor … the work of freely associated men who act consciously and are masters of their own social activity”; “free and equal association of the producers”; such was for Marx and Engels the form of socialism. Association—this is the key word of socialism: individuals, instead of acting, as in capitalism, each for himself, associate with one another for the purposes of common labour. This simple definition of socialism already allows it to be distinguished from certain false socialisms. The variety of “self-management socialism” making the workers the owners of the enterprise has no trace in the Marxist conception of any kind of “communitarian social order.” It has changed nothing: the enterprise is still autonomous, and therefore competes with other enterprises in the same sector; for this reason, it is the market rather than a “concerted plan” that regulates production, and is therefore subject to all the fluctuations of the market; finally, as in capitalism, there will be enterprises that will be “winners” (the workers in the competitive enterprises) and “losers” (the workers in the less profitable enterprises who will be laid off). This is not socialism: there is no real association of producers that supersedes the limits of the enterprise.

The other major type of false socialism is the one that, for its part, also expropriates the owners of the enterprises, but this time in favor of a State outside the control of the workers. This State is in the hands of a State bourgeoisie that, by enjoying a de facto possession of the means of production, decides what must be produced and in what quantity, while also imposing the logic of profit. Such a bourgeoisie undoubtedly plans production, but not in order to satisfy the needs of the workers, but for the purpose of capital accumulation, by means of the systematic exploitation of the workers’ labor power. Such a system, which makes the nationalization of the economy synonymous with “socialism”, was already denounced in his time by Engels as a false socialism, because, as he wrote, “the transformation into State property does not suppress the character of the productive forces as capital”. But it is quite clear that Engels had not yet seen anything like State capitalism. This was to be established on a grand scale during the 20th century in the Soviet Union. If socialism is undoubtedly a planned economic system, this cannot be confused with State management of production that escapes the will of the workers: “. . . united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production....”

If the form assumed by socialism is an “association of producers”, its content is production that is not undertaken for the market. Since the goal of production will not be profit, that is, money and capital, but the satisfaction of human needs, it is clear that the market will no longer have any reason to exist: the market is not, as it seems at first sight, the showcase of use values offered to the customer, but the network of sales that allow the surplus value seized from the workers in production to be realized in its money form by means of the sale of commodities; in other words, the market is the place where capital realizes its profit, since use values are nothing for capital but exchange values. Hence, Marx explains “within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production the producers do not exchange their products; similarly the labor spent on the products no longer appears as the value of these products....” Engels was just as explicit: “The seizure of the means of production by society eliminates commodity production and with it the domination of the product over the producer. The anarchy within social production is replaced by consciously planned organization.” From this point on, if the producers do not exchange their products and do not have to measure their exchange value, it is clear that socialism has suppressed money.