The emancipation of the working class is an act of self-emancipation.

“If you fight you won't always win. If you don't fight you will always lose.” – Bob Crow

It seems bad for socialists. It looks as if we live in is an age of inhumanity. All around, there are world crises with men and women appearing to be unable to do much about it. Resources that should be used to house the homeless and feed the hungry are squandered on ever more costly wars. Our present society is founded upon the exploitation of the propertyless class by the propertied. This exploitation is such that the propertied (capitalists) take for themselves, i.e., steal the amount of new values (products) which exceeds the price of the wage-labourer. The owning class sucks the body and soul from the propertyless, for the price of the mere cost of existence (wages).

While the workers are not class-conscious – that is, knowing and understanding their class subjection and its cause, and therefore knowing and understanding their class interest in overthrowing the institutions which keep them so – this is not so with the capitalist. They are thoroughly class-conscious. And as Warren Buffet has pointed out, it is they who are winning the class-war. But all is not yet lost. Although the idea of socialism is presently confined to a small minority in the working-class movement, at times of great crises and upheavals, when people are thrown into confrontations with their ruling class and strive to seek a way out of a world of despair and desperation they will look towards the revolutionary alternative of socialism. But socialism is not something which comes ‘from above’. It will not be achieved, on workers’ behalf, by an enlightened elite in a vanguard party engaging in minority action. Working people will play a purely passive role, looking on while others transform society for them. Only workers can liberate themselves. No one can do it for them. In Marx’s words, socialism is ‘the self-emancipation of the working class’.

Socialism involves the transfer from present day private ownership to common ownership of all those agencies of wealth production necessary for supply of life’s necessaries for the whole people. The root basis of this is found in the fact that private ownership of the means of wealth production fails most lamentably to provide all the people with the commodities of life. Let that fact never be forgotten, private enterprise utterly fails men and women in obtaining for themselves a sufficiency of the necessaries of life. Capitalists own and control industrial establishments in every manufacturing country, and the means of obtaining trade is by competing in the world’s market against all other capitalists in the same trade also seeking a share of the market; to compete effectively, they must place the commodity on the market as cheaply as, or cheaper than, other competitors. In order to do this they must ever have regard to cheapening the cost of production.

The mission of socialism is so to organise production that wealth can be so abundantly produced as to free mankind from want and the fear of want, from the brute necessity of a life of arduous toil in the production of necessaries of life. We want the people to directly and collectively own the industries, utilities, transport systems, natural resources etc., and democratically decide how these vital means of living should be used. With genuine socialism, workers aren’t exploited, because production is purely for use—not profits, which force employees to work much longer and harder than necessary, often in unwanted jobs. With production for use, there is free access to food, goods, electricity, trains, health care etc. as the means for providing these then belong to the people. You don’t buy what you already own! With genuine socialism, there’d be no inequality, no unemployment, no homeless, no poverty, no debts, no lack of much-needed health care, and no deceitful politicians! Food can be of the highest quality. The competition for profits drags standards down since firms must cut workers and corners, which, inevitably, means the cheapest ingredients and most vile practices end up being used.

Some say socialist ideas as Utopian, a good idea but people are too greedy, too selfish for it to work in practice. They forget that each and every day we work together co-operatively on a massive scale. They forget all the solidarity that is expressed in our daily lives. Socialists are concerned with enlarging and developing the individuality and the potentiality of every human being. The capture of political power should not be regarded as an end in itself, but rather as a means of freeing and emancipating human beings from the poverty, suffering, and the oppression. In order to acquire the basic democratic socialist values of liberty, equality, and fraternity into terms of practical politics, we will require to break away from the practice of clinging to outmoded concepts and outdated dogmas. We have to reconstruct socialism as a vision of freedom. Our politics cannot be confined to revolutionary rhetoric.