Why change is necessary

We live in a strange society which honours the dead more than it cares for the living. It builds monuments to mark the famous dead, but not houses for all the living. There are great social achievements but, as is usual under capitalism, humanity is denied the full benefits of them. Having created the means of extending and improving life, capitalism negates such an advance because it destroys life at an intense rate. It is a tragic paradox that the system which has enabled medical science to extend its horizons is one which creates more “artificial” deaths than it saves in avoided natural deaths.  Lack of decent food (or any food) kills millions of people each year. Millions die each year because they do not have access to clean water or hygienic sanitation. In vast areas of the world health services hardly exist with one doctor has to attend to thousands of patients. The mortality rate in such areas is phenomenally high. Even in Britain, where there is supposed to be a free health service, NHS treatment is second-rate and “on the cheap”, and recent government cuts have seriously affected services. Patients have died in ambulances which have been forced to drive around searching for an open casualty department. In times of “peace”, there are always local wars going on somewhere. In Afghanistan, Syria Iraq and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands have lost their lives fighting for their masters’ interests.  The environment is made unclean and unsafe by industrially produced chemical pollutants which are cheaper to release into the atmosphere than to avoid or destroy. City-dwellers inhale regular doses of polluted filthy air which cause sickness and contribute to many early deaths. Many of the accidents which injure and kill people in the course of employment are predictable and avoidable, but employers calculate that it is cheaper to make occasional compensation payments than to make working conditions safe. The strain of the competitive rat-race frequently leads to chronic illnesses. People under stress are less resistant to minor ailments which can become potential killers. In periods of economic recession, the suicide rate rises rapidly. Every winter people die of the cold because they cannot afford to put on a heater. Hypothermia especially affects pensioners and the families of the unemployed.

These artificial killers account for many millions of deaths each year. Even if workers think that they are immune from all of them at the moment, the insecurity of working-class life makes them prime targets in the future. For those who survive capitalism's ways of killing people, old age can be a depressing and impoverished period of life. In a society which is primarily interested in workers as exploitable commodities, once a worker has passed retirement age they are often seen as a social inconvenience old workers are “problems”. Under this wasteful, destructive profit system working class lives are frustrated. From birth to the grave wage slaves have to put up with conditions which scientific advances have made unnecessary. We could live and die in peace, but the majority of the working class consents to a system which dehumanises social relationships. There is a better way to live. In a socialist society, human beings will be free to live healthy lives in a healthy social environment. We will all have free access to what we need so no one will die for lack of basic requirements to sustain life. Old people in a socialist world community will give according to their abilities and take according to their needs, as will all people, including the physically and mentally disabled. In a creative, satisfying society men and women will have no need to fear old age.  Socialism offers a happier way of living.

For wage workers, the world is drab and insecure, but more than that, laden with resentment and suspicion, part indeed of a whole world of resentment and suspicion that is capitalism. Even his next door neighbour he is reluctant to really trust, and as for his workmate—a prospective competitor—that’s often worse.  Given a world of common ownership, work would be everyone’s ambition—a way of self expression that the present system just cannot provide. Freed from the strains of competition and the cash nexus, we could meet people from far and wide on truly equal and friendly terms, because the cause of suspicion and fear would no longer exist. 

Socialists see leaders as a useless anachronism. From a purely practical point of view, the Socialist sees many arguments against leadership. It is undemocratic in principle; it is unhelpful in the task of arousing class consciousness and a sense of the dignity and strength of the working class; it, therefore, tends to demoralise the “rank and file” and leads to a spirit of competition rather than co-operation; it can also be a direct cause of factionalism, intrigues and splits caused by personal ambition and group rivalry developing into hostility. Another way in which the leadership cult can be detrimental to a political party is due to the leader’s “charismatic” personality being identified with his or her party’s policy. Even if the leader leads a blameless life, has courage and intelligence, is unbribable and unbreakable, it only requires a jail sentence or an early grave, for the party to suffer a crippling blow. What we do want is the support of intelligent men and women the world over, committed to destroying the rotten fabric of capitalist society, not patching the old threadbare curtain of fraud and exploitation any more but tearing it from the window to let the clear light of a new day shine through, exposing in stark reality the squalor and misery, famines and wars, bigotry and xenophobia. We can and must decide our political destiny for ourselves, taking full responsibility on our own shoulders and not leaving the burden of decision to selected individuals. For the "leader" is no better than his flock and may well be a good deal worse. Leadership, hero-worship, and élitism are contrary to the democracy of the socialist movement, incompatible with the egalitarian nature of a socialist society and are utterly inimical to the mass movement of class-conscious workers to abolish the old privilege-ridden society.