Is there any hope?

The world has clearly has moved into unknown territory — a world we fear what may come next. And it makes us anxious. have no idea what the months and years ahead will bring. The future appears vague, hidden beyond the horizon. All the customary signposts have gone missing. In the absence of any clarity, the call to radical hope that from disaster something good can emerge. In the coming years, workers will undoubtedly be confronted by the most difficult challenges that many of us have ever faced. We can expect an assault on everything.  The capitalist class are seeking to make labour power cheaper, decreasing wages by union-busting, outsourcing an off-shoring. Production in capitalism is carried out with the purpose of creating exchange values (commodities to be sold for profit), not use values (things that human beings really need to survive).  Capitalist “democracy” is facing a crisis of legitimacy: fewer and fewer people believe in the ability of government to produce prosperity or promote equal opportunity.  Racism nationalism and xenophobia sexism, homophobia, and all other things that divide the working class has combined to sap working class confidence and has produced demagogues like Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Viktor Orban. But it also inspires the socialist movement.

A lot of people seem to be talking a lot about socialism these days, but what does it mean?  The myth perpetrated against socialism is that it is a gloomy world devoid of fashion and creativity where citizens wear the same gray clothes, eat the same bland food rations, and are ordered to think the same thoughts. We are told socialism is hostile to the individual in every possible way – to individual thought, expression, choice, freedom, and creativity.  Yet it was Marx and Engels who wrote, “The free and full development of each is the precondition for the free and full development of all.”  Our thinking about a socialist future, what it would be like and how to achieve it, acquires a new urgency.

Social-ism is called what it is because it asks us to recognise the social dimension of our existence so we can see how much we rely on the work others do for us that makes our lives possible. It is recognizing our interdependence. Capitalist culture loves to tell us we are competitive beings and can’t achieve our best without competing against one another. Yet if you were to really pay attention in the world, you would notice that you spend far more time cooperating, collaborating, and depending on others to get things done, to achieve your goals, to meet your needs, to take care of your kids, and so on, than you do compete with others. Socialism must entail the complete socialisation of the economy, not just the redistribution of the product. Workers have to have real, not just notional, control of the means of production and understand that it is in their hands to make or break. It must be seen as the transformation of the entire social formation – to use Marxist terms, both the base (means and relations of production) and the superstructure (social and political system, values etc.). Capitalist culture tends to pit individuals against each other. A socialist society wouldn’t ask us to be who we are not. It would create a social system that accentuated rather than obscured the cooperative or social dimensions of our beings, leaving us to live out our competitive drives in our places of play and sport. Socialism is the modern expression of the age-old quest by humanity for humanity. So long as classes and class exploitation and oppression have existed, a struggle for freedom has been waged.  A revolutionary reorganisation of society to one that is people-centered, democratic, peaceful, and in harmony with nature is necessary if humanity is to survive and flourish. The old ruling class will be overthrown and the working class will hoist the proverbial red flag.

The socialist revolution is not inevitable but a product of a complex and contested process, a transformation orchestrated by real people consciously and creatively shaping their conditions of existence to make their lives more livable, secure, enjoyable, and meaningful.  No one can predict exactly how this process will unfold or what the new society will ultimately look like - there is no blueprint. Majorities make lasting change. People gain a deeper consciousness, including socialist consciousness, in the course of greater participation in the struggle for immediate radical economic, political, and social change. The revolutionary process unleashes the creative energy of millions through a wide variety of forms of mass protest, including mass non-violent action, in the battle for ideas and in the cultural sphere. These forms of action are connected with voting and mobilisation in the election arena, which will be greatly democratised as millions more become engaged. It must result in the election of ordinary working people to office at every level. The world socialist movement must be fully democratic, collaborative and inclusive. It must place the actual needs of people and nature above all else. The climate and ecological crisis is a crisis for humanity. It is also a crisis of capitalism and its inability to address the inevitable havoc of actual climate change and adapt to a fully sustainable model.  Profound and radical changes in our economy and society must begin if the Earth is to avert destruction.  It means transferring all natural resources and the energy production sector to common ownership managed under democratic control. It means a radical reallocation of resources needed to rebuild the planet's infrastructure, retrofitting for conservation and converting to renewables. It means adapting to the inevitable changes wrought by global warming, including extreme weather events, coastal flooding, relocating communities, building massive public works, overcoming drought, and deforestation. The move from production for the creation of commodity values to production for the creation of use values will be central to the socialist effort to create greener ways of doing things, without consumerism but rather with the promise of a life of modest dignity for all. Socialism of the future will have to find ways, technological and other, to produce everything needed by the human race more sustainably, efficiently, and cleanly than under the present capitalist system. That means that scientific socialism will have to be really, really scientific in every sense. Our goal today should be to overthrow capitalism, not to reform or ameliorate anything.

Marx called for an equalitarian society, one where we will live by the principle “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Facts matter and they make a difference in how we see the world and what we do about it. There is always hope because without it there could be no struggle. Let us resolve to wipe out homelessness, poverty, racism and injustice once and for all! Probably no society has been so deeply alienated as ours from our communities and from nature.

We are here as caretakers and stewards of the planet. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. Fostering an understanding that encourages us to recognise our interdependence and our cooperative nature is the key challenge for those working for a socialist society. Our aim to build a sustained movement of the immense majority is a real – not wishful – possibility in the not too distant future. If people power is to grow, it must be in arenas old and new. To act to stop the developing perfect storm of environmental and human disasters it is going to be up to us, the world’s 99 percent. The capitalists are not going to resolve these situations, which arise from the very nature of capitalism itself. Capitalism cannot continue on its present course, and if socialism is not achieved, worse forms of capitalism may replace the present one.