Sweep Away Capitalism

 Occasionally in the course of human events, a new worldview emerges that transforms society. The Socialist Party is a political party dedicated to building class-consciousness from the bottom-up through education and discussion to achieve workers’ empowerment. It holds the promise of fulfilling the great aspirations of the past and heralds the advent of the next phase of our social evolution. For this to be successful it will require a movement of movements, an alliance of separate movements, including a coalition of the global social and environmental justice movements, environmentalists and so on. We will need to work together to find more sustainable ways of living on this planet. All of this begins by asking the right questions and making the attempt to understand. There is, of course, no guarantee of success.

For many people the idea of anti-capitalism seems ridiculous. After all, capitalist businesses and entrepreneurs have brought us fantastic technological innovations in recent years: from smartphones to driverless cars.  The array of consumer goods available and affordable for the average person, and even for the poor, has increased dramatically almost everywhere. There has been an improvement in basic standards of living in poorer regions of the world as well where the material standards of millions have risen. So, if you care about improving the lives of people, how can you be anti-capitalist? That is the story we are taught. Yet there is another story: the hallmark of capitalism is poverty in the midst of plenty. Alongside the economic growth, technological invention, increasing productivity, and a diffusion of consumer goods, comes, at the same time, destitution for those whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the advance of capitalism, precariousness for those at the bottom of the labour market, and alienating and monotonous work for the rest of us. Capitalism has generated massive increases in productivity and extravagant wealth for some, yet many people still struggle to make ends meet. Capitalism is an inequality-enhancing machine as well as a growth machine. Not to mention that it is becoming clearer that capitalism, driven by the relentless search for profits, is destroying the environment. In a time when the old promises about technology are failing; when economies are collapsing and collective trust in public institutions is plummeting. Yet it is not an illusion that capitalism has transformed the material conditions of life in the world and enormously increased human productivity; many people have benefited from this. But equally, it is not an illusion that capitalism generates great harms and perpetuates unnecessary forms of human suffering.

 Many are now awakening to realise that change needs to take place on multiple levels- social, economic, environmental, and political. It is becoming increasingly apparent to many that our political and economic system is run and controlled by a network of economic elites and private interests. The fundamental essence of capitalism is that the needs to make a profit takes precedence over the well-being and needs of the people. The Socialist Party mission is to raise awareness of social, economic and political issues through dialogue with our fellow workers, creating the foundation for wide-scale change. Knowledge is a torch of freedom and the fundamental step towards liberation begins with individual understanding. We aim to build a people-powered revolution. Our objective is to create a society that benefits the many and not the few. It will take a collective effort of shared resources and ideas to restructure our world. But false solutions abound; almost all of the solutions put forth to solve the problems of capitalism continue it in another form.

All efforts to make life tolerable under capitalism will eventually fail. From time to time small reforms that improve the lives of people may be possible when popular forces are strong, but such improvements will always be fragile, vulnerable to attack and reversible. The idea that capitalism can be rendered a benign social order in which ordinary people can live flourishing, meaningful lives is ultimately an illusion because, at its core, capitalism cannot be reformed. The only hope is to sweep it away, and then build an alternative. As the workers’ anthem tune “Solidarity Forever” proclaim, “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.”