Time to wake up.

The working class are the engine of social change. Basically if one has to work for a wage or salary in order to live, they are a part of the working class. (90-95%) If one owns or inherits, sufficient resources, investment, capital, means of producing wealth by exploiting others, they are members of the parasite capitalist class (5-10%). (We are not speaking of pensioners here.)

All wealth is created by the working class being exploited, by virtue of their necessity to work, in order to live, for a wage or salary (ration) to produce a surplus value over what they earn, which is then sold on the market to realise a profit for the parasite class. This is true whether they work by hand or by brain, in industry or in services supporting industry. Once the working class begin to see themselves as the engine for social change they will be able to usher in a new post-capitalist society of common ownership and democratic control, over the means of producing and distributing wealth, with production for use and free access for all.

The Labour Party is the liberal party. It was formed from them with some trade union support. It never was a socialist party, it stood and still stands for wage-slavery. The Labour Party is irrelevant, except as a capitalist party of business offering some piece-meal reforms. Who produces all the wealth, manages and runs capitalism from top to bottom? The working class that is who. The Labour Party doesn't have to become a party of the liberal left, it is and always has been so, under the misapprehension that capitalism can be reformed in some meaningful way. It was never a socialist party but a reformist one.

“The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it – a bit like Christians in the Church of England.” Tony Benn.

Corbyn/Sanders “Democratic Socialism” has never existed. You are describing reform capitalism with mixtures of state capitalism and regulated free capitalism. Those still retained waged slavery, production for sale etc. still essentially class societies with exploitation an essential component of it. Venezuela has damn all to do with socialism. It is a capitalism, with state capitalistic control of some industries and attempts to reform some of the hideous consequences of capitalism. No more socialist than Bismarck's Germany was.

Socialism/communism is a post-capitalist society which will not have any government over people but will be a commonly owned, democratic resource-based economy with decisions made locally, regionally and globally by the people themselves using recallable delegation where necessary in world bodies such as WHO. It has nothing to do with the Left wing state capitalist, Leninist nonsense of the former soviet blocs or the British state capitalist post-war nationalising reforms of capitalism, which serves as a useful straw man for capitalist politicians, to prevent workers engaging with the real case for socialism, a post -capitalist settlement of human affairs.

If you need a leader, strong or otherwise, you are a part of the problem.

" Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many—they are few!" (Shelley)

We then can dissolve all governments over people and elect ourselves to administer resources in a resource based free access economy without social classes or parasitic elites. We have the World to win, a post-capitalist society to make. We can dispense with nation states and all government over people, when we have a commonly owned, production for use, free access, post-capitalist society organised upon the tenet of, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Governments would wither away into an "administration of things", with recallable delegation where required.

Wee Matt