Every worker must be troubled by the reality we face today.
Our trade unions appear practically helpless before the offensive of the
employers. The potential power of those organisations created to protect our
interests appear practically impotent today. Capitalist governments have passed
crippling legislation to handicap the labour movement. The simple truth is
this: the trade union movement has been disarmed by the profit-greedy billionaires,
beguiled by the fiction that the government was the impartial umpire between
the classes.
When indeed will the time be ripe for the establishment of
socialism? This question the slippery-tongued left-wing intellectual always dodge.
We need not wait any longer for their evasions and ambiguities, for their
procrastination and delays. We have seen how they postponed, blocked and
sabotaged the campaigns for a socialist society, telling our fellow-workers
that they are still not ready for such a revolutionary change. But our enemy,
the capitalist class, have not waited. They
have politically paralyzed, politically dismembered, politically emasculated
organized labour, bound and gagged by ruling class courts. From the
capitalists’ point of view, ANY expression of socialist ideas represents a
great DANGER. Those who will have courage and wisdom enough to resist them
means the continuing life of socialism itself. All of the poverty and greed,
bloodshed and suffering on this planet is a part of the capitalist system. And
we intend to change it.
The physical and mental labour of our fathers and
grandfathers has produced the factories, railroads and other riches that lie
around us. But generations upon generations of our remoter ancestors produced
the things that made our fathers’ labor more productive too. The tools and technology
we have today, the accumulated capital of the past and the rightful heritage of
all humanity, these are the things that make our labour so productive. Our
brains, too – finer and more subtle instruments than our ancestors had, enable
us to work more efficiently, to produce better things. But still, we as
laborers have only ourselves to sell – only our labor power. All that we
produce – all that we labor to make – belongs to the buyers of our labor power.
Our ancestors built up such a tremendous storehouse of tools and knowledge,
such a magnificent productive system, that it is impossible for each worker to
own the tools that make labour so productive.
Our heritage is turned against us. The capitalist, who owns the means of
production – the instruments of our labor, finds us disinherited in the market
place, with nothing to sell but our labour power. While our labor creates our
work places and his pleasure palaces – our labor-power is rewarded with slave’s
bread, masquerading under the name of a “living wage.”
The Socialist Party has to be able to come up with the ideas
and language that resonates enough to create solidarity across our whole class.
We need to expose the political manipulation that are preoccupied with just
profit where working people tend to be considered as an afterthought, if at
all. We must reveal the indifference of elite to the pain of the poor and
working people. They feel as if they can get away with anything with impunity,
immunity and no accountability. We are living under right-wing authoritarian populism; of a
chauvinistic, xenophobic and nationalistic. We need to instill much more vision
among our fellow workers.
The Socialist Party seldom win popularity contests in the
current political climate even though it believes that poverty is unacceptable
and unnecessary. Anyone with an inkling of understanding of socialist ideas,
and anyone who has ever been a have-not under a capitalist regime, knows that
“caring” capitalism is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism in order to maintain
itself has to put profit and economic growth ahead of people’s needs. If in a
time of “economic boom” profit and people’s needs coincide, then we are told to
believe that this will always be the case, that capitalism brings the greatest
good for the greatest number of people. Socialists see this as a feeble
brainwashing technique. It insults our intelligence.
The Socialist Party has explained the subject position of
the working class under capitalist society, and has showed that this subjugated
condition can only be abolished by converting the means of living from the
private property of the capitalist class into the common property of society as
a whole. This conversion could be carried out only after the capture of the
political machinery by the workers, organised in a sound socialist movement. The
Socialist Party says that reforms failed either to remove the cause of poverty
or to change the general direction of capitalist development. Hence the
necessity for revolutionary political action. Our object is the common
ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and
distributing wealth by, and in the interests of, the whole people.
The time for waiting is over. The time for action is now. It
is time to rip the blinkers off the eyes of the entire working population and
instill within them the confidence that they possess a formidable political
power and economic strength.
No comments:
Post a Comment