Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

JOIN THE WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

The capitalist system is incapable of maintaining improvements in the standards of living of the world’s workers. All around the world, capitalism threatens to plunge humanity once more into the catastrophic cycle of economic depression, environmental degradation fascism, and war. Only the world working class can lead humanity out of the historical impasse of capitalism, by making the world socialist revolution. To realise this necessity, the working class must be armed with a revolutionary class consciousness. Throughout history, the bosses have always tried to keep workers divided, unorganized and weak, in order to intensify their exploitation and thereby grab bigger profits. Despite relative gains for some workers, the rate of exploitation continues to increase. Each year, a larger share of production goes for profits, a smaller share for wages and other workers’ income. The capitalist class has never stopped–and will never stop–its efforts to destroy and weaken the workers' movement. Economic insecurity has become a way of life for millions of workers. Despite a long history of the struggle to improve conditions, reforms have not resulted in a decent, stable life for working people. Every gain has been continuously threatened, if only by a factory closure or relocation to another city or outsourcing to an entirely different country. As long as the ownership of land and industry is under control of the capitalist class, the economy is run solely for the maximum profit interest of the bosses, and their state power is used to protect their capitalist system. The political and class consciousness of workers can be increased only by exposing the capitalist control of the two-party system, and by developing the understanding through specific political exposures that the government, regardless of which party is in temporary control, is actually the political general staff of the ruling class.

When militant workers participate conceal or set aside their Socialist aims and principles, they commit a serious opportunist error. Either out of fear that their socialist views will isolate them, or that their revolutionary position will give a “kiss of death” to the immediate struggle, or out of a misconception that “socialism is not on the order of the day,” they reduce their activities to those of other reformists and thereby forget the very purpose of being revolutionaries. Seeing the immediate struggle as everything, they fail to raise the political, class and socialist understanding of workers. Instead, they tail after the bureaucrats so as to avoid being “too left.” They fail to expose the nature of the capitalist state and the reformist nature of simple trade unionism. They fear to fight for the truth, and, as a result, they eventually abandon all fundamental Marxist principles, Thus, out of fear of isolation, they abandon struggle entirely – and thereby become isolated. Socialist workers must be guided by the slogan, 'An injury to one is an injury to all.' We must advance labour solidarity in all battles against the capitalist class enemy, vigorously combat all manner of discrimination, practices that cause disunity. Unity of workers on a class struggle program must begin “down below,” that is, with the grassroots unity of workers in a department, a shop, a plant, or an industry.

Workers’ understanding must be developed so that they fight the bosses politically as well as economically; so that they learn that the strike is not only a powerful economic weapon but also a potent political weapon. Workers must also build toward independent political action. For as long as capitalism exists, there will be capitalist oppression. A socialist party as Marx and Engels pointed out disdains to conceal its aims, and openly advocates the necessity for a socialist revolution. It is necessary for socialists to use every opportunity to develop workers’ understanding that real economic security, freedom, and peace can be achieved only by a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society into socialism. Success in this work of developing socialist consciousness among the masses can make unions more powerful instruments to win immediate gains, and the struggles of the workers in their unions will provide experience and schooling for the inevitable and ever-nearer fight to abolish capitalism and establish socialism. Capitalism must be defeated ideologically, politically and economically. Capitalism operates the only way it can operate, for the capitalists to run things for their own profit.

Capitalist politicians make pretty speeches about “war on poverty,” then spend more on more machines to take away more jobs. For the workers, new technology and automation mean insecurity. Traditional skilled and semi-skilled trades become useless in many cases. Workers are removed farther and farther from the commodities they produce; they have less and less reason to take pride in their work. In those factories made obsolete by new robots, employers intensify speed-up in an effort to compete. If they can, they cut wages and lengthen hours. Eventually, such factories modernise or have to be closed down. To-day's automated factory, operated by a small force of technical workers, is presented as a model of production. But such a factory brings in its huge profits only because somewhere else there are workers who are sweated and speeded and driven and have to be held down. Efforts to cope with new technology have benefited a few workers, but only a few, and have sometimes delayed mass firings for a time, but only for a time. Nothing can be accomplished by tricky deals with employers. The principal way to deal effectively and correctly with the problem is to fight to shorten working hours with no cut in daily or weekly pay. Unions have done it before and must do it again.  The necessity is a movement of millions of workers, in industrial action, uniting employed and unemployed, black and white, old and young, men and women, skilled and unskilled. Such a movement must seek the support of working people abroad, who need our help as we need theirs. We are fighting the same enemy; we must work together; we must help each other. It will not be easy. The capitalists and their governments will do everything they can do to preserve their profits and their privileges.

Labour-saving machines are not objectionable in themselves, for in the long run, they produce more goods for people to enjoy. What is objectionable is the way in which capitalism introduces new machines, their use to increase profits at the workers’ expense, to bring on unemployment and depression and hunger. In socialism, society will use new machines not to produce unemployment but to produce more goods in less working time. The labour power set free by mechanisation and automation will be used for more science, research, education, health measures and other social services, and to promote wider participation in cultural life and recreation. Thus, with socialism, the workers will get all the benefits of new technology. So our main job is to kick out the capitalists and establish socialism.

But that doesn’t mean we can just sit around and wait for socialism to arrive. We have to fight back now against what the capitalists try to do to us. A working class and a people that do not fight for its material needs, and for its dignity, will never achieve socialism and is in danger of being reduced to serfdom. We can fight back, successfully. We can’t make capitalism work like socialism, but we can limit some of the capitalist thievery. And in fighting back, we are organising for the most important fight of all: we are preparing to dump capitalism and establish socialism. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” can be achieved in today’s world only by a socialist revolution. 

Fight for socialism! Fight to win!