The time has come for solidarity.

 People feel powerless – locked out of decision-making, by-passed by real governance – So they turn to protest. Especially for the disenfranchised and oppressed, protest is often the only way to exert power and affect policies and practices that impact their lives and communities.

TOWARDS WORLD SOCIALISM

Socialism involves such a complete change in the way in which the world is organised that it can only be put into practice when all the factories, mines, transport systems, shops, and so on are owned by mankind and used for the benefit of the entire world population. The whole system of employment, of a class of bosses buying our energies with wages and then setting us to work for themselves, will be replaced by voluntary, co-operative effort by all members of society. This means that, just as there will be no buying and selling between individuals.   One of the first priorities in a socialist world will be to get rid of the boring and repetitive tasks which today make so much work unpleasant and replace them with alternative methods. Socialism must be a world community without frontiers. It can not be set up in one country or even in one part of the world.  In Socialism, so there will be no trade between different countries. Production in socialism will involve a worldwide effort to make what is wanted and since every region will be working towards this end and will participate in the democratic processes used to decide what is needed and in what quantities naturally every group of people will have free access to what is produced. Socialism is not just a good idea but also is urgently needed to solve many of the serious problems which now plague the world.

There can be no politics of socialism without challenging the concept of property rights over the land, capital and intellectual ownership. Rights of use rather than rights of property must be the juridical axis for the transformation of society. The liberation of work from capitalist control will only be possible if the enterprise becomes an institution of a democratic society. Any workplace democracy is incompatible with capitalism’s control of what it considers to be its exclusive property. Yet state control is not the way forward.  So-called public-ownership is unable to practice anything other than a centralized, bureaucratic form of management. The politics of common ownership aims to return the control of the institutions of reciprocity and solidarity to society.

We tend to think of the various components of the natural world around us as being, quite rightly, the common legacy of humankind. In his famous lament of 1854, Chief Seattle’s chastised the white settlers of North America and their system of commercialised greed in these haunting words:

“The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth…All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself”.

The venerable old chief expressed bafflement at the American government's offer to purchase land from the tribe. How can you buy or sell the sky or the warmth of the land, he pondered.

The struggle between those who possess social power and those who do not, between freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed is a war fought with many and varied weapons. It is not an all or nothing case.  It does not say that workers can do nothing to protect themselves short of socialism.  

Our present society is founded upon the exploitation of the propertyless class by the propertied. And it is the goal of the Socialist Party to remove the existing ruling class, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action so to establishment of a free society based upon cooperative organisation of production. The struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation is necessarily a political struggle.

In Marx’s view, a system run by freely associated producers and their communities, socially unified with necessary conditions of production, by definition excludes commodity exchange and money. As a result, “the money-capital” (including the payment of wages) “is eliminated” although during communism’s lower phase, “the producers may…receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time” but “these vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.” 

There is a widespread notion that socialism and communism are two different , successive, societies, that socialism is the transition to communism, and precedes communism. However, for Marx (and Engels) socialism is neither the lower phase of nor the transition to communism. Socialism IS communism. In fact Marx calls capitalism itself the ‘simple transitional point ‘ or ‘transitional phase’ ( to the higher form of society (in Grundrisse,Notebook 5;Notebook 18 of the 1861-63 Notebooks). For Marx socialism and communism are simply equivalent and alternative terms for the same society that he envisages for the post-capitalist epoch which he calls, in different texts, equivalently: communism, socialism, Republic of Labour, society of free and associated producers or simply Association, Cooperative Society, union of free individuals based on the Associated Mode of Production, as opposed to the Capitalist Mode of Production. Hence what Marx says in one of his famous texts – Critique of the Gotha Programme – about the two stages of communism could as well identically apply to socialism undergoing the same two stages.

To drive home our point that socialism and communism in Marx mean the same social formation, and thereby to refute the uncritically accepted idea – a sequel to the Bolshevik tradition shared by all the Party-State régimes and their partisans following the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of political power – of socialism as the first stage and being only the transition to communism, we can mention at least four of Marx’s texts where, referring to the future society after capital, Marx speaks exclusively of ‘socialism’ and does not mention ‘communism.’

"Generally a revolution – overthrow of the existing power and the dissolution of the old relations – is a political act. Without revolution socialism cannot be viable. It needs this political act to the extent that it needs destruction and dissolution. However, where its organizing activity begins, where its aim and soul stand out, socialism throws away its political cover”(in his 1844 polemic with Ruge).

The second and the third texts are almost identical, appearing respectively in one of his 1861-63 notebooks (second notebook of the 23 notebooks) and in the so-called ‘main manuscript’ for Capital III. Here is the 1861-63 text, in Marx’s own English:

Capitalist production…is a greater spendthrift than any other mode of production of man, of living labour, spendthrift not only of flesh and blood and muscles, but of brains and nerves. It is, in fact, at [the cost of] the greatest waste of individual development that the development of general men [general development of human beings]is secured in those epochs of history which prelude to [which presage]a socialist constitution of mankind. 

This text is repeated almost word for word in the ‘main manuscript’ of volume 3 of ‘Capital’. Finally, in the course of correcting and improving the text of a book by a worker (Johann Most), meant for popularizing Capital, Marx inserted: "The capitalist mode of production is really a transitional form which by its own organism must lead to a higher, to a co-operative mode of production, to socialism.