Will you hear us?

Socialists are often accused of seeking to overthrow the government by violence. When they accuse us of this, what they are really trying to do is to imply that we want to abolish capitalism and impose the will of the minority on the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we can win a majority of the people to support a change in the system. Many possess a stereotyped picture of what is meant bya revolution. They confuse revolution with insurrection.

There are people going hungry all over the world because of the profit system. The US alone would have the potential to feed the whole world. The potential is there. Take the question of housing.  We could wipe out every slum in the next few years. The potential exists, not only in the factories and materials for building but in the potential to build new machinery and factories. Yet, they are not going to solve the housing question because it’s not profitable. We have the unemployed who are not hired because it’s not profitable to hire them. Then you have the people in the army, not to mention the police, and others who consume a great deal but don’t produce anything. Then you have things like the people in the advertising industry. They don’t do anything really useful or necessary.  We create waste by having built-in obsolescence. For instance, if you designed a car for the that would run for 50 years, they wouldn’t use it. Because that would destroy the purpose of making cars, which is to produce profits.  Capitalism doesn’t just have general long-range problems. It has other contradictions — big crises, like recessions and wars. 

It’s very important that everyone should get to know and recognise the ruling class. People are making the choice to ignore capitalism's culpability, and that is a choice to do nothing. The business-as-usual mentality of society as a whole is rife.  Inequality, poverty, abuse of the planet's resources and more have become a natural phenomenon and normalised. The poverty of billions of people is seen as unavoidable and something that is basically deserved. The resources are there to end hunger, cure or prevent many illnesses, set up solar and other renewable energies to replace most contaminating energy forms, build housing, and more. Political apathy facilitates those with the economic and political power to get away with atrocities. The more apathetic and passive society is, the lower the bar for what is tolerable is set. At the moment, we tolerate our supposed representatives lying to us, we tolerate a press controlled by commercial interests, we tolerate resources being wasted. We're tolerating extreme maltreatment of refugees and bombing in the Middle East.

Many people tell themselves that they ignore what is going on in the world in order to protect themselves from it. We can't avoid the homelessness, racism, sexism, or economic hardship. Many people say that following the news is too much effort. We make ourselves powerless when we pretend we don’t know. Ignoring the world means not being part of humanity and the global community. The pervasiveness of indifference means that we have to live in an uncaring, hostile world where we aren't confident we'll be looked after. When people ignore injustice they make an active choice to turn off empathy. We know that it isn't beneficial to an individual's mental health for them to ignore a problem in the long term, and the same applies to society's mental health. Individually, we are not very strong – we lack determination, solidarity, empathy, and we're submissive. We need hope to keep us moving and active. A culture that ignores the suffering of others fosters a feeling that change is impossible, and we go through life embodying that sense of hopelessness.

A starting point is to stop insisting that politics be kept out of everything. Injustices and politics weaves its way into our every thread of being – it's in sport, it's in shopping (who made the clothing and under what conditions, who allocated the land to be used for consumerism rather than health or education). The politics are there, and ignoring it or telling those who don't to shut up doesn't make it go away, it just turns you into a wilful accomplice. Speaking out lets others know that they can speak out too – it triggers action. Talking to others about social problems, discussing socialism, counters the apathy. 

What do people want? Progress to advance the economic, political and social circumstances of the majority of working families. That requires major change, and that will definitely make powerful enemies among wealthy elites. The point of socialism is to create a better society for everyone. To realise socialism is to do away with capitalism.  Socialism provides a way forward for the rest of us who still care about creating a better society

Adapted from here

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/06/20/vivid-dangers-our-indifference-hellish-world