The case for socialism is one which has to be understood and implemented by the world's working class seizing control of their own destiny. It is not something which can be given or gifted by a political party dropping it onto people’s laps like the proverbial 'Manna from Heaven'.
It requires the development of a political consciousness which understands that capitalism is already obsolete as a useful social system. Which draws these conclusions from its never-ending crises, wars, two world wars last century, war science on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still doing war dances in the North Sea, the Arctic Circle, the Middle East and the South China seas over raw materials, trade routes and spheres of geo-political interests.
On June 20th the United Nations Refugee Agency released their annual global trends report which contained the startling news that 65.3 million people have been forcibly removed from their homes. This is an all time high record and it means one in every 113 people is a refugee. The causes are due to on-going persecution, human rights violations and war. In 2015 more than 1 million reached Europe, fleeing conflict and persecution in Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan. If this 65.3 million were a nation it would be the 21st largest in the world.
The dominant ideas of any time are those of the ruling class (Ideology). How can it presently be any other way? The electorate is persuaded through the education system, the media, slavish fellow workers espousing 'common sense', that capitalism is the only system around.
To this end all capitalist political parties do attempt to appeal to electorates that all of the above madness is quite normal, inevitable, due to human nature, but with their husbandry, as the 'lesser of the other's evil', war-mongering, poor-bashing, immigrant and refugee scapegoating, better outcomes or reforms can be achieved. A demonstrably monstrous lie. Capitalism cannot be reformed. All the above are not fixable, nor reformable aberrations of capitalism, but entrenched parts of it.
The onus is not on us to put it to the electorate, but for you to engage your intellect, to put it to yourself and ask yourself the question, why so many wonderful things are happening lately. In Britain the Brexit vote caused stock markets to plunge trillions of dollars. Five cops were shot dead in Dallas. Suicide bombers killed 36 at Istanbul airport. In the U.S. they seem ready to elect a racist moron as president. In Venezuela, starving people were shot dead as they stormed grocery stores to get food which their fellow working class people produced. In Africa and Asia women are being violated by the armies of war-lords. Global warming continues unabated.
Doesn't it occur to you that something is fundamentally wrong in society and that being such, something should be done about it? Poverty absolute or relative, war, (business by other means) either total or by proxy, are inevitable concomitants of capitalism. The world’s workers produce all of the world’s wealth yet can only access a fraction of it rationed by wages or salaries. The world’s workers run capitalism from top to bottom although this is not in their ultimate interest.
Tim Di Muzio, senior lecturer in international relations and political economy at Wollongong University in Australia, in ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership’. He further states that “The market and price system were imposed on humanity not as a matrix of choice but as a mechanism of domination.” Di Muzio reveals that the 12 million high net worth individuals (HNWIs) on a global scale represent 0.2% of the population. the top ten percent own 85 percent of the world’s wealth, the bottom 50 percent scarcely one percent. The 1%-ers have almost 40 times more than the bottom 50 percent. The goal of capitalists is differential accumulation – to primarily increase the wealth gap between themselves and others: i.e., they seek greater wealth inequality. At the corporate level, the goal is the same: to gain a larger share of the wealth pie than competitors. For this reason, the capitalist system cannot rid wealth inequality or significantly reduce the inequality. Di Muzio writes: “this addiction for wealth and power is destroying the planet for future generations.”
All of the above problems can be swept away easily as anything by the establishment of a commonly owned production for use society, without markets, without buying and selling, without money, where we would all be better off and in delegated democratic control of our commonly owned world as a fellow human family.
The task of creating the socialist post-capitalist, production for use, free access, commonly owned, world is that of the working class itself. There is no short cut to this. It is you, and I and our fellow workers worldwide who have to aspire to this task. There are some anarchists with whom we can share a degree of affinity, Bookchin, anarcho-communists or such, others are as crazy as fervid leaderist bolsheviks and would get workers heads blown off, instead of trying to capture the state initially, to prevent this outcome backed up by the populace already organised to implement common ownership and production for use. For us, it is peacefully, if we can violently if we must. The end determines the means, which is why it has to be a democratic majority-led movement and not seized or gazumped by a political clique.
We still had to have two world wars, innumerable small ones and wars by proxy, over trade routes, raw materials, spheres of geopolitical interest, war science on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fire-bombing of Dresden, by the 'good guys', bombing of Britain by the 'bad guys'. 'Homes fit for heroes after WW1, the introduction of reforms ,'from the cradle to the grave’ after WW2, the failure of state capitalism in Russia all to show that, war and poverty absolute or relative are intrinsical concomitants of capitalism and that capitalism cannot be reformed.
Capitalism is based on the ownership and control of the means of production by a 'privileged few' and production for the market with a view to profit, the source of their high incomes and privileged lifestyle. Capitalism runs on profits. Any government, whatever its intentions, has to respect this and give priority to profits and conditions for profit-making, unless they want to provoke an economic crisis and slump. This means putting profit-making before meeting the needs of 'ordinary working-class families'. All governments have done – have had to do – this, some Tory governments with relish, some Labour governments reluctantly, but they've all done it. Capitalism cannot be 'socially responsible', i.e. responsible to society as a whole. It is a profit-driven system that can only work in the interest of the privileged few who are the profit-takers.
The reason given by the majority of Labour MPs for wanting to depose Corbyn is their perception that, with him as leader, the Labour Party is unelectable and so cannot, as some of them have been tearfully proclaiming, get into a position where it can govern in the interest of – of course – the working class.
Are they any more sincere – or insincere – than May and her Conservatives? Not that it matters. It is not a question of sincerity but of what is practicably possible, and it is not possible to govern capitalism in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. Both the Labour Party and the Tory Party stand for capitalism, and no government, not even one under Corbyn, can make capitalism work for the working class.
It is time we all got a life, ended the tyranny of capitalism, its anarchy of the market place and production only for the profit of the few and ushered in the, commonly owned, democratically controlled by us all, free access, production for use, post-capitalist future.
We have a world to win for all the world’s people. Socialism would be a global system, as capitalism is at present. There wouldn't be any foreign powers organised in nation states. Workers worldwide would be organised by themselves, locally regionally and globally, to administer resources in the cooperative world commonwealth There would be no government over people, (this is only needed in a minority class dominated competitive society), government ceases to be, other than the collective administration and sharing of resources, (an administration of things rather than people) that in capitalism war is waged over.
It is workers who presently run capitalism from top to bottom in the interests of the capitalist parasite class, they will be more than capable to run the post-capitalist world with a production for use, free access distribution, with no top-bottom dichotomy, or elites in privileged conditions.
We don’t really care less what it is called, socialism, communism, anarchy or macaroniHow long, how long? We advocate what socialism was, originally prior to the reform parties of capitalism utilising its popular appeal to their own, doomed to failure, gradualist and reformist ends and Lenin's gross distortions into two phases, to justify Bolshevik control of their aspiration to state capitalism revolution. They called us "Impossibilists", but reforming capitalism is what proved impossible.
Educate! Agitate! Organise!
"From each according to their ability to each according to their needs".
Wee Matt
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