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Saturday, September 02, 2017

It is time for socialism


The future of human survival depends upon our ability to create a society based on socialist principles. We overthrow capitalism. Resistance to capitalism is fragmented into mostly separate movements and these must become a unified coordinated struggle against the system that represses all of them.  Only a movement that musters all these diverse struggles under one banner will lead us toward an economic democracy. The Social Revolution seeks to transform the existing system and create a different society.  It requires a strong class politics to win over workers.  Shared experiences and common interests can defeat ingrained cultural differences and prejudices.  For the majority of people, living standards are on the decline, job-security is diminishing, wages and social welfare systems are being brutally cut. This may cause a certain amount of despair but it also brings anger against the system but which can be badly focussed.  People must be willing to work together and not scape-goat other victims.  Nevertheless, the system's ruthlessness and callousness offer an opportunity and a challenge for the Socialist Party to promote and advocate the socialist alternative. Only a mass socialist movements can create the transformation we need. The left offers just rhetoric but socialists must present real solutions if we can have genuine hope to win over the majority. Rather than calling for reform, the Socialist Party possesses a compelling vision of a radical change to the current political and economic systems.  A new socialist vision for a socialist society cannot be built on the discredited history of the left-wing parties. And our class politics moves beyond the token protests.  Our campaigns must help people to start re-imagining the future and what can be achieved when the resources of the planet become the common property of all. To be effective, we must communicate in a language that speaks to people's needs, enabling them to both identify and recognize themselves with the conditions that produce the suffering they experience.   The socialist project is about identifying the root causes of our exploitation and oppression. We have a system based on capitalism, by definition, it means there are very few winners and very many losers.  The 95 percent that are on the losing end. The few are using the profits extracted from the many to stay in control and suppress democracy. The problems workers face are too deeply ingrained within the capitalist system to resolve without ending it. The Socialist Party supports workers in their struggles over wages and working conditions and we wish our fellow-proletarians every success, but we do not see it as our task to give detailed advice on how to conduct these struggles. That is something for those involved to decide themselves. We would merely urge workers to recognise that they have a fundamental conflict of interest with their employers (whether private or state); to subordinate sectional demands to the interests of the working class as a whole; and to decide democratically on what action to take, whatever it might be. Trade union action, whether official or unofficial, has its limits. It defends wages and working conditions, but it leaves the places of work in the hands of their owners. As long as this class ownership lasts, workers will have to —and should—take such defensive action but they should also realise its limitations and the need to organise on the political field too in order to capture the machinery of government and make the means of production the common property of society as a whole.


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