Rely on ourselves, not the politicians

Every day working people suffer the hardcore reality of few jobs, bad working conditions, ineffectual health care, dilapidated housing and poor education for our children. We can see our lives going down the drain. But there’s a growing consciousness that we don’t have to take things as they are. It scares the hell out of the rich to see workers uniting to fight for what we need, resisting their laws, their system of rule. The rich are trying to prevent more workers from joining this movement, trying to keep us under control. They really have no answer, no solutions as to how to better the lives of working people.

Only with socialism will working people have the means to collectively and democratically decide the direction their society will take and how they will participate in it. The capitalists hate and fear any sign of a fight-back. There is no kind of reformism which is going to provide a real long-term solution to the exploitation of the working class. In order for the working people to fulfil their historic role of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism, it is necessary that they be organised as a class. We need cures to kill the infection but all the capitalists offer are more band aids. They offer no cure because they have no cure. Poverty and inequality are a natural part of their system and making a law to get rid of them is like trying to end cancer by making it illegal. For the capitalist there is only one law–the law of profits. The closing of companies, low wages, speed-up, and lay-offs are part of everyday life under a system where capitalists compete with each other by squeezing out as much wealth as they can from our labour. Only as long as the capitalists can make a profit from our sweat do they give us the “right” to slave for them. They dread the prospect of people that they will see that all our problems are a result, not just of a handful of greedy bosses, but that these problems are a permanent part of life under the ruling capitalist class and their whole rotten system.

Workers don’t need a crystal ball to see their future. The capitalists in their never-ending grasp for higher profits, are intent upon making the world a den of misery for a majority of working people. In contrast, the working class, if it were united, could not only stop the assault in its tracks, it could turn this country and this planet into a storehouse of plenty for all. The problem is that people accept capitalism and its logic and therefore see no alternative to the current mis-leaders who defend that system at all costs. A working class that does not see its own power today certainly doesn’t see that it can generate a real alternative to capitalism. Tomorrow, will be the time when all things including socialism will seem both possible and necessary. The revolution will not come through condescending saviours but through the actions and the consciousness of the working class itself. The Socialist Party's method is simply to tell the truth to our fellow-workers. Trying to reform capitalism is no solution for the working class. The reformists display little sense of the realities of capitalism; many believe that the growth of the welfare state will turn into a mixed or socialistic state as time goes on. The “welfare state” never meant raising people out of poverty and providing a better life for them and their families. It is one thing to defend all the crumbs, like state benefits, that have been won. It is quite another thing to pose more or better welfare as a real solution. The answer to unemployment and poverty is not welfare but a new society which will have real solutions for all, a new society based on human needs, not profits, using all the resources of society for the benefit of all. Faith that capitalism can be reformed is prevalent those intellectuals whose careers are based on the existence and expansion of the welfare state who compromise between the crudely greedy rulers on the one hand and the impoverished masses on the other. When push comes to shove they settle for the illusions in what capitalism can offer while accommodating to capitalist misery—on behalf of the poor. Thus reformism today means acceptance of austerity, cloaked in the illusions of a return to prosperity. They do not specifically name capitalism as the problem or call for revolution as the answer.

Today most workers know they are not doing well and that low wages, stringent working practices, multi-tier contracts, non-union shops, etc. are key to the attack on them. Employers' attacks will inevitably increase if we allow the system to continue who perpetrate a system that divides and weakens the struggle and saps the working class of its consciousness as to who the real enemy is. They purposely propose strategies which teach the working class not to identify with their class as a whole but with only one sector.