Happy Birthday Charlie

Today is a special day: it’s Karl Marx’s 200th birthday. On the 5th of May, 1818, Marx was born. He chose to be an advocate for the working class and dedicated his life to their cause. What kind of force would arise if their individual powers were consolidated into a unified political movement?

Things appear more unstable and unpredictable than ever before. The truth is that we are all victims of capitalism and our destiny is to confront and change the socio-economic forces that cause our modern epidemics of social ills. The profit-driven economic system -  capitalism - is not working for us and we should create another economic system that puts the people first.

Day after day, year after year, even generation after generation workers, forced to work under alienating conditions for the money they increasingly need just to survive, workers surely fit Marx’s idea of a proletarian “class in-itself,” having experienced the wage-slavery of capitalism but many socialists and scholars have expressed frustration about workers’ continued failure to become a “class for-themselves.”  How on earth can the scenes Marx portrayed in Capital still remain unchanged after more than a century? They strike only for narrow economic grievances related to their specific workplace and rarely assert a broader class-based perspective. In this sense, it may seem that the prospect of a Marx-inspired movement is nowhere to be found. But regardless the ideas of Marx are still alive, providing many workers with a sense of purpose and direction. Despite years of neglect and distortion, socialist ideas still arise and are discovered by workers when false narratives do not explain realities of everyday life. Theories that do not fit people’s lived experiences are unlikely to hold for long.

Capitalism exploits all the resources. They treat humans as resources, they treat the flora and fauna as resources. Everything is just a resource to be exploited by capitalism for the capitalists. The big corporations and their owners are ]killing this living planet. The ruling class doesn’t have sleepless nights worrying about its workers or the world around them. The same people who own everything on the stock exchange own the media that tells the people what to believe and what to think. And the message is “Don't worry.” We’ve got to take on capitalism and its lies. We are socialists, disbelievers in private property, promoters of common ownership for the common good 

We must work together every day to build our collective cooperative future. The Socialist Party is committed to creating a different kind of world, a world where radical participatory democracy is how we make decisions and it is one where exploitation of our environment and the destruction of our climate is not the function of our economy. Throughout history, change has often seemed impossible. But once it comes, it seems like change was always inevitable.  The Socialist Party has always been the radical voice of the working class.