Monday, May 20, 2019

Revolutionary change is inevitable

Study because we will need all your intelligence,
Agitate because we will need all your enthusiasm,
Organise because we will need all your strength.” Antonio Gramsci,1919

The world is in the midst of change. The capitalists are defending their profits and domination by being ever more ruthless in their policies towards the workers and the dispossessed. The system can no longer feed and house us or provide us with jobs. We, suffering under the misery of stagnant wages and deteriorating condition, those of us un- and under-employed, surviving on State benefits and welfare, in a word, the dispossessed – must fight back if we are to survive. This system offers hunger, homelessness, and the harm of drug and alcohol abuse. We must destroy this system of private property. We have no choice but to create a world free of exploitation and want. In order to do so, we need parties and organisations that can educate. Technology is powerful enough to end hunger, homelessness and all want – but only if it is taken from the exploiters and organised in the interests of those this system has ignored and discarded. Millions upon millions of people in this world are being forced to become economic refugees. We face two choices – either accept this degradation or overturn this system. Yet working people are still apathetic, unawakened and collectively weak. Our desire to make revolution is thwarted by a lack of a socialist understanding.

Capitalism is complex and does not lend itself to simple analysis. Marx had to write a number of volumes to describe its nature. No revolutionary change in society is possible without the active participation and support of the masses. Out of their own interests the exploiting classes blurred the historical role of the people whom they looked upon as dunces and dupes. Historians have recorded only the feats of great individuals, heroes, kings and well-known generals, overlooking the role of the ordinary person acting en-masse. It was Marxism which recognised the common people as the makers of history. The capitalist revolutions only aimed at replacing an exploiting class by another with the regime of exploitation of man by man that relied upon private ownership of means of production remained unchanged. Socialism must wipe out the exploiting regime and that of private ownership of means of production established since thousands of years, and set up the regime of social ownership of means of production in so short a period, we see more clearly the need for the strength and extraordinary creativeness of working people once they realise that they must rise up to make their own history. Only socialism can save us and only a class, the working class, can bring that about.

We are a world of perpetual and all pervasive corruption because of capitalism. Workers alone can draw on our own experience which is not to be got from a book. It comes down to the primitive question – them or us. We the working class: they the class enemy. There are only two kinds of politics – ours or the bosses! They have yet to realise that theirs is a loser.

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