Socialism Now More Than Ever

The two basic classes in our society, the working class and the bourgeoisie, are locked in a bitter struggle. The bourgeoisie represents the old system of exploitation and oppression. The working class represents the fundamental progressive force, the most consistent social force in the struggle to eliminate capitalism. It’s the capitalists that get rich by appropriating the fruits of our labour. At the end of a work week the worker collects his pay. The capitalists claim this is a fair exchange. But it is highway robbery. In reality, a worker gets paid for only a small part of the value he produced. The rest, the surplus value, goes straight into the boss’s pocket. he bosses get rich, not because they have “taken risks” or “worked harder,” as they would have us believe. The more they keep wages down and reduce the number of employees with speed-ups, the more they can steal from us and the greater their profits. And if the boss thinks he can make more profit somewhere else, he just closes his factory and throws the workers out on the street.

The idea that everyone can get rich under this system is a lie invented by the rich themselves. Under capitalism, the only way to get rich is to trample on someone else. This is why workers have only one choice: either submit to this wage slavery or fight it! Only socialism can respond to the just aspirations of the working class and the people. Working people will overthrow the capitalists and build socialism. 

Around the globe, the working class is in motion. The working class has always fought against the capitalists. There is a growing determination to overthrow this system of capitalist wage slavery and build world socialism. But although revolution is the main trend, we know that history proceeds through zigs and zags and that the struggle for revolution may suffer setbacks.

Our planet is rich in natural resources. It is capable of satisfying the needs of all its people. A handful of capitalists control our world and make fabulous profits off the labour of working people. All the major means of production - the factories, the mines, telecommunications and transportation – are concentrated in the hands of a few thousand capitalists who employ millions of workers. for the workers, the future is less and less certain. The exploitation and oppression gets worse every year. Our misery is created so a small clique of very wealthy individuals can continue to line their pockets. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. A handful of parasites live off the backs of the workers and could not care less about their situation. The capitalists' spokespersons endlessly vaunt the merits of this system where “everyone has an equal opportunity,” and “democracy rules.” But the truth is that it is a hoax: a paradise for the rich and powerful, a trap and an illusion for the exploited and the poor.

The state is an economic tool by the wealthy. When the capitalists need to develop certain sectors of the economy that require large initial investments, when they need to protect certain industries that are essential to the entire ruling class (like transport), when they face bankruptcy or in sectors that produce little profit (health care hospital services), the state underwrites them them. Nnationalisation in no way mean the people control or benefit from these companies. It just means the workers of these nationalised companies are subjected to the same conditions as workers in private industry.

Prices rising faster than wages, redundancies and lay-offs where those out of work are piling up debts as our communities education, health care and transportation fall apart. And our cities are becoming more and more unlivable. To the great majority of its people the world is going to hell and politicians lying through their teeth. The capitalist rulers cannot continue to maintain capitalism without plunging into one war after another, in their quenchless thirst for more profit. They double-deal and double-cross others like them from other countries as the divide their ill-gotten gains and spoils. They keep saying they have solutions, but they all come down to one thing – we have to tighten our belts as they tighten the noose around our necks. They demand that the people sacrifice – and sacrifice some more. They tell us we will just have to get used to the fact that things are bad and will keep getting worse.

Things do not have to be like this, and people will never be satisfied living this way. All over the world people are rising up to fight back against those whose wealth and power have been built upon the backs of the world’s working people. More and more people are talking of revolution. At the very heart of this struggle is the basic conflict between the working class – the millions who have no means to live except through their labour, and whose labour is the driving force in society – and the capitalist class – the handful who do no productive work but live and accumulate billions from the labour of the workers, and continually grind the workers down in accumulating more. The working class possesses tremendous potential power to change the world, a fact that is shown every day in the process and product of its labour and in its many struggles against capitalism. It is the task of the working class to wield its mighty power to remake society to serve the interests of the great majority of the people.

The great store of society’s wealth is created by the millions of workers who with their labour mine, grow, and transport raw materials, construct machinery, and use the machines to transform raw materials into finished products. The machines, raw materials and other means of production created by the workers are an important part of the productive forces of society, but the most important part is the working class itself without whose labour the means of production would rust and rot. But in the hands of the capitalists the means of production become tools for the continued enslavement and impoverishment of the working class. Production is on a massive scale, but with the present economic relations, the basic producers, the workers, are increasingly unable to buy masses of goods they have produced. Goods pile up and stare the workers in the face, for lack of one thing – money. Under the capitalist system, production only takes place if those who control production, the capitalists, can make profit from it. And they can make profit only by wringing it out of the workers, and constantly pushing their wages down to the lowest level, allowing the workers only enough to keep working and to bring up new generations of workers to further enrich capital.

Part of the workers’ labour covers the cost of maintaining themselves and their families–their wages–and the rest is unpaid labour that produces surplus value for the capitalists, the source of their profit. This exploitation of the workers to create private profit for the capitalists is the basis of the whole capitalist system and all its evils. Capital chases after the highest rate of profit, as surely as iron is drawn to a magnet–this is a law beyond anyone’s will, even the capitalists’, and it will continue in force so long as society is ruled by capital. Owning and appropriating a part of the total capital of society privately, each capitalist must try to enlarge his share at the expense of the other capitalists. Capitalists therefore repeatedly introduce new machines and technology to try to produce goods faster and more cheaply, in order to grab more of the market from their competitors. But this machinery and technology costs the capitalists additional money without bringing additional profit–which can only be gotten from the labour of the workers. So there is the constant tendency for the capitalists’ rate of profit to fall, which constantly leads to desperate attempts on their part to push the rate of profit up, to the highest level possible. Capitalists battle each other for profit, and those who lose out go under, even huge corporations can collapse. While each capitalist tries to plan production, the private ownership, the blind drive for profit and the cut-throat competition continually upset their best-laid plans, and anarchy reigns in the economy as a whole.

Capitalists constantly pull their capital out of one area of investment and into another, along with bringing in new machines to speed up production. Some capitalists temporarily surge ahead and expand while others fall behind or are forced out of business altogether. With each of these developments, thousands of workers are thrown into the streets and forced once again to search for a new master to exploit them. All this is why, from its beginning, capitalism has gone from crisis to crisis. And the way the capitalists get out of these crises only lays the basis for worse ones – they destroy goods and even the means to produce goods, scramble to grab up more markets, and a bigger chunk of the existing ones, and increase their exploitation of the workers. The strongest capitalists survive, and in surviving concentrate more of the means of production in their hands and hurl more of the smaller producers into the ranks of the working class. As capitalism develops, society more and more divides into two antagonistic camps–at one pole tremendous wealth and greater concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands; at the other pole tremendous misery for the millions who can live only by working for the owners and can work only so long as they produce profit for them.

Through all this, and especially in times of the sharpest crisis, the basic contradiction of capitalism stands out all the more starkly: production itself is highly socialised–it requires large concentrations of workers, each performing part of the total process and all essential to its completion, and it is capable of massive output on this basis; but the ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of the wealth produced is “private”–in the hands of a few, competing owners of capital. But so long as capitalism is not overthrown, it finds some way out of the crisis – temporarily.

Through a series of such crises large corporations have come to dominate and monopolise the major industries. Banks have increasingly merged their capital into industry, creating finance capital and monopolising credit as well, interlocking it with industry. Monopoly or duopolies has become the rule where competition once was, but competition still exists, and in fact grows more intense – between different monopoly capitalists within these countries and internationally, and between the monopolies and smaller capital that seeks to expand and challenge the existing monopolies. Anarchy and the chase of competing capitalists after higher profit remain in effect. The laws of capitalism remain in force, especially the commandment: “expand or die.” The market of the “home” country is too limited for the continued expansion of capital. So, backed by the military might of their governments, the monopolies penetrate into every possible part of the globe, not only or mainly to sell goods, but to exploit labour, grab up supplies of raw materials–for their own production process and to keep them out of the hands of the competitors-and to set up production in other countries to “secure” their markets.

The undeveloped or developing nations they have made into indirect colonies and distort their economies to fit their own profit drives, allying with the local landlords capitalists and government officials in these nations, and turning them into their junior partners in the plunder, keeping these countries in an enforced state of backwardness, in order to rob their resources and make profits . To back up this international robbery they ring the globe with their armed forces. These monopoly capitalists are modern-day imperialists, having empires far greater than the ancient Roman, Greek, Persian and Ottoman rulers.

It is impossible to “reform” capitalism. The only solution is to go forward, to socialise the ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of the products of production. This requires a political revolution, the overthrow of the rule of capital by the working class, which, in its socialised productive labour, represents the embryonic organisation of the future, socialist society. The working class as a whole never ceases battling for its day to day needs. This resistance to capital erupts in a great upsurge of rank and file struggle. Despite the divide and conquer schemes of the rulers, the unity of the working class is being built through these struggles. Increasingly united the working class is intensifying its mighty war against capital. For the workers, capitalist “freedom” means in essence the freedom to choose between toiling for some capitalist or starving - and in times of economic recession even the first choice can disappear.

Now is the time to overthrow the capitalist system and build a completely new kind of society. It has become possible for the people to finally take their place as masters of society and break all social chains enslaving the producers and shackling production itself.