De-fanging the capitalist beast

From cradle to grave, commercial interests infiltrate every aspect of our lives. Education has turned into vocational indoctrination, with predatory student loans and standardised testing, this schooling trains youth to become obedient wage-slaves who would never challenge the prescribed answers to ‘happiness’ as defined by corporate values. Health care systems have become insidious profit-making machines, where our bodies become a new frontier for exploitation for medical insurance and pharmaceutical profits. While low-income people (disproportionately those of colour) are sent to privatised prisons for minor offenses to engage in slave-labour camps. Those who manage to escape police repression are induced to volunteer to combat on the front lines of expansionist wars. The rule of conquest and blind eye to war-crimes have become entrenched within our very culture. This heartless system creates imaginary enemies and raises artificial threat levels to justify invasions of foreign countries. It crucifies innocents in “collateral” damage. Aggressors brutalise anyone who stands in the way of their conquest.

Capitalism is intent upon spreading its tentacles to conquer the globe. Some individuals may express regret for the crimes against peoples and nature but as a system, capitalism is devoid of empathy and remorse. Behind the supposed human rights and rule of law is the drive for profits, forever looking for the loop-hole to exploit to further accumulate capital. Corporations see everything in terms of quarterly business reports and profit margins. They legitimatize exploitation, making it rational to cheat and extract resources through sophisticated schemes of financialisation and privatisation which in another era would rightly be described as plundering and pillaging. De-fanging the capitalist beast calls for establishing socialism. We have to commit ourselves against capitalism and rediscover our own humanity.

Employees we are constantly struggling to keep up. And going on strike is the most publicised evidence of this. Militants emphasise that when everything else fails we must use the strike weapon.

We don't want more jobs. In fact, we don't want the jobs most of us have now. Bank tellers, bookkeepers and cashiers - all those who handle money. We don't want cops, lawyers and judges either. Nor soldiers and prison guards. But don't get us wrong. We do want to be useful and productive members of society. But first, we must be free. And that means a revolution to socialism. Socialism means production to satisfy social needs. So the next revolution must abolish capitalism and the government. It means the end to poverty, war, famine and tyranny: And the beginning of the true brotherhood of man.

It's difficult to understand exactly why Leninists reject so utterly the idea of a peaceful revolution. One explanation may be their romantic attachment to the model of urban insurrection played out in Petersburg in 1917. Another may be that the Socialist Party model of a political party leaves no role for the vanguard party and its leadership elite -- no place for Lenins, Trotskys, Stalins, Maos of such a revolution. Perhaps they feel that sacrifice at the barricades and blood-on-the-streets insurrection will pave the way for the CHEKA that will police their dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Socialist Party conception of the process to achieve socialism is a peaceful revolution through the ballot preceded by a period of economic and political education by a democratic mass party. An educated working class would result in an overwhelming victory at the polls. The socialist majority in parliament would abolish capitalism and disband the state apparatus. The power that will enforce the victory at the polls will be the class-conscious working class organised in their trade unions whose members do the work and are in a position to control production, communication, transportation and all other activity a counter-revolution would require.

Because we want a world without money: Free access to the necessaries of life, the only real issue in any election is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution. In one word, that issue is capitalism.