What do you owe capitalism? Your chains.

We are a species in deep trouble. No matter how much our politicians dismiss the reality of global warming, minimise its impact or offer false solutions to climate change, the intensifying weather events and their unpredictability are happening here and now.  The fate of humanity hangs in the balance.  The future looks grim.

Things are not produced today to meet people’s needs. They are produced to make a profit. And that’s the cause of the problems we face. Under the profit system profits always come first, before providing basic services like health care and transport, before improving conditions at work, and before protecting the environment. At the same time, it encourages a get-rich-quick climate where competition to make money takes over from cooperation and community values. Everything is reduced to its cash value and people are judged, not for what they are but by how much money they have.

Look at the results. The health service is crumbling. The transport system is in chaos. Schools have become testing centres. Pollution is rife and the environment under attack. The poor have got poorer. Begging and homelessness have spread. Crime is rising. Racism is reviving. Business culture reigns supreme, with "market forces", "competition" and "profit" as the buzzwords. Life is becoming more and more commercialized and empty. People are becoming isolated from each other, with drug abuse and mental illness on the increase. The standard of living may be going up, but the standard of life is going down.

The health and welfare of the workforce and the effects on the environment take second place. That’s what minimising costs means. This is why at work we suffer speed-up, pain, stress, boredom, overwork and accidents. This is why we have to work long hours, part-time work, shiftwork and zero-hour contract work. This is why the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe are all polluted. This is why the Earth’s non-renewable mineral and energy resources are plundered. This is why natural balances are upset and the environment destroyed. This profit system can’t help doing this. It’s the only way it can work. Which is why it must go.

Under capitalis,m there are no "good times" for the working class, but just so long as the working class does not see through the capitalist "work hard now and wait for reward" fairy story, there will always be Tories and Labourites,. Only the Socialist Party keeps to the sound working class position that the only remedy for the evils of capitalism is socialism, and that the time for it is now.  Our present system cannot be made to function efficiently no matter which government holds office, crude attempts to shuffle off the blame for the current state of affairs onto disaffected workers using the media of broadcasting and the press to do so reveals a blatant and cynical determination on the part of the capitalist class to hide this truth from the only other section of capitalist society which has the power to put things right: the 90 per cent of us who constitute the world's working class.

The Socialist Party has always said that under this capitalist system the most decisive factor in production is the profit motive, and that production itself is geared to a marketing system that does not take any account of the real social needs of the community. We have said that capitalism channels all men's efforts down the narrow inhibited path of commerce and reduces his vast potentialities in the field of production to within the bounds of profit making. What is needed is a system of society wherein the means of production shall be held in common ownership by all of humanity instead of a privileged few. Wherein production can be consciously regulated to meet human needs and requirements. Wherein commodities are not produced for sale to the highest bidder, but are produced for the benefit of all mankind. Only in socialism can there be found the answer to the problems of the working classes of this world. 

What then is to be done? If the working class realise that political action need not consist of a repetitive switching from one futile government to another, what else is open to them? First, they must grasp that politicians have only a limited relevance. They are prevented by something outside their plans and claims and deceptions from organising society as they say they would have it. That “something” is the capitalist social system, which from its basis outwards can only be run in the interests of the parasitic minority who own the means of wealth production and distribution. Just a couple of weeks ago we saw two representative members of this minority dress up and parade through the streets to get married. Everything about that event—the opulence, the cynicism, the ballyhoo in the media emphasised the class division of capitalism into those who own but do not need to labour and those who must labour but do not own. The workers, who made all that went into the wedding, owned none of it. Their part in the cruel farce was to stare and wonder and to cheer, to testify to their own degradation.
And in that fact there is the reason for the impotence of capitalism's politicians. Workers are ready to blame MPs for their problems, overlooking the fact that they themselves vote for these leaders and all that they stand for. It is the working class who choose their own repression, who respect and admire their exploiters and who are therefore responsible for their own plight.

We are arguing here, as always, for another approach. The Socialist Party insists that workers need to examine the basis of capitalism as the cause of the world’s problems and to act to change society from that basis. We are arguing here, as always, for a social revolution to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism—a social system based on common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. Socialism will be a classless society, without privilege and poverty, a society in which all human beings will stand equal in their freedom.

In face of that, the posturing, impotent leaders of capitalism fade into their true proportions. It is not they who will change human society into one of abundance but the mass consciousness of the working class. Socialism is something for the workers of the world to get excited about and then act to achieve.

Revolution can’t be outsourced to some sort of heroic leader who will come to the rescue. As the Internationale says:

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear

The only real saviors are the people themselves. We are going to win this war—the CLASS War. Join up and do your bit.