In order to maintain their rule, the capitalist class must exploit national, ethnic and racial divisions. The ruling class continues to impoverish the world’s masses, engage in constant war and re-division of the world markets in order to prop up profits. A victory for the socialist movement on a world scale would place unimagined material abundance at the service of human needs, lay the basis for the elimination of classes and the eradication of social inequality based on sex and the very abolition of the social significance of race, nation, and ethnicity. For the first time, mankind will grasp the reins of history and control its own creation, society, resulting in an undreamed-of emancipation of human potential, and a monumental forward surge of civilisation. Only then will it be possible to realise the free development of each individual as the condition for the free development of all. The success or failure of the working class to achieve victory depends upon the education and awareness of working people. Through its acquisition of political consciousness, the working class ceases to be merely a class in itself and becomes a class for itself, conscious of its historic task to capture the state machine and reorganise society.
The two basic classes in our society, the workers, and the capitalists are locked in a bitter conflict. The working class has always fought against the capitalists. A handful of capitalists control our planet and make fabulous profits off the sweat and toil of working people. All the major means of production - the factories, the mines,communications and transportation – are concentrated in the hands of a few thousand capitalists who employ millions of workers. For the workers, the exploitation and oppression gets worse every year. All this misery is created so a small clique of very wealthy individuals can continue to fill their pockets. Every bit of capitalists’ vast possessions was stolen from the people. It’s the capitalists that get rich by appropriating the fruits of our labour. At the end of a work-week, the worker collects his pay. The capitalists claim this is a fair exchange. But it is highway robbery. In reality, a worker gets paid for only a small part of the value he produced. The rest, the surplus value, goes straight into the boss’s pocket. The bosses get rich, not because they have “taken risks” or “worked harder,” as they would have us believe. The more they keep wages down and reduce the number of employees with speed-ups, the more they can steal from us and the greater their profits. And if the boss thinks he can make more profit somewhere else, he just closes his factory and throws the workers out on the street. Under capitalism, the only way to get rich is to trample on someone else. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. A handful of parasites live off the backs of the workers. This is why workers have only one choice: either submit to this wage slavery or fight to end it!
The World is rich in natural resources. It is capable of satisfying the needs of all its people. How is it possible to have scarcity so abundant in resources, manpower and technology? Yet poverty and hunger are an integral part of capitalism. They are rooted in the capitalist class’s insatiable thirst for profits. There can never be class peace between exploiter and exploited, between boss and worker. The working class cannot eliminate exploitation and poverty unless it overthrows the capitalist system. It must wipe away the nightmare of capitalism. After we have overthrown the capitalists we will establish socialism. Socialism will mean the rule of the working class. It will put an end to the exploitation of man by man. It will bring freedom to all those oppressed by capital and open up a new period of history for working people. With socialism, the workers will administer the vast riches of our planet, its lands, forests, mineral resources, lakes and rivers as well as the means of production, for the common benefit of all. There will be an end to all exploitation. The wealth will be the property of the people and not of individual capitalists or even the state. Planning will guarantee the well-being of all the people and guide the process of socialist economic construction. Through planning, we shall build up and modernize the factories and other productive facilities and eliminate backward and backbreaking labor. We will construct new houses and medical, cultural and sports facilities for the working people. The quality of everyday life will improve vastly. Gone will be the anarchy of capitalist production. Gone, too, its resultant economic crises which today bring so much misery to workers. The workers will distribute the resources of society according to the needs of the people, not to satisfy a few capitalists’ hunger for profits as is the case today. The enormous waste of capitalism will be abolished. We will eliminate the terrible waste of human resources as is the case today with millions of unemployed. It will be impossible for idle parasites to live off the backs of the workers as the capitalists do today. Working people will participate in all aspects of society.
Socialism is the future of humanity, a radically new society where classes and the state will have been completely eliminated. Humanity has not always been divided into classes. In the primitive communal societies, all the members cooperated together to assure their survival. The state is simply an instrument by which one class dominates another. It became a necessity when society split into classes. Just as the ancient slave state served the slave owners to suppress the countless slave rebellions, so too the modern capitalist state is a tool of the bourgeoisie to maintain its dictatorship over the working class. Throughout history, there have been many revolutions where the oppressed classes have broken the fetters that bound them and overthrown the reactionary decadent ruling classes. However, in previous revolutions, the new ruling class which rode to power on the backs of the masses eventually substituted itself for the old exploiters, and in turn had to be overthrown. In this way the bourgeoisie who fought along with the workers and peasants to overthrow feudalism set up its own exploitative system – capitalism. But now the development of society has created a class more revolutionary than any yet known in history – the modern working class. It has provided us with the opportunity for a revolution that will not just replace one exploiting class with another but will open the way to the final abolition of all classes and an end to all oppression and exploitation.
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