Saturday, May 25, 2019

The Party of the Revolutionary Cause


Reformists are those who say they are fighting for the workers, but whose aim is limited to reforming the system in order to preserve it. The principal promoters of reformism are paid handsomely for carrying out the dirty work of the class they claim to oppose. Many working people in every corner of the world know that they can solve the fundamental problems of their class only by making proletarian revolution and winning the fight for socialism. The capitalist class live in great splendour by exploiting the working class through the daily robbery of the enormous wealth the workers produce. In contrast to this, intense exploitation, oppression, poverty and misery characterise the lives of the working class. 

What are the fundamental criteria for the existence of capitalist production? How do we recognise it? Capitalism is a system of commodity production, production for the market mediated by a system of monetary exchange, and it is a system in which the actual producers do not own the means of production necessary to turn out a usable product. These means of production are owned by a class of capitalists who buy the labour-power of the producers, paying them only a certain portion of the total value they produce. The most developed and typical form in which producers are paid is by a money wage. The capitalist class, is a small class composed of those who own and control the financial institutions and means of production–the land, raw materials, machines, mines, mills, factories, farms. The working class, is made up of those who are deprived of the ownership of the means of production and therefore are forced to sell their labour power as a commodity to the capitalist class. The working class participates directly in production, transportation, communication, service, agriculture, and commerce. It is the class which creates the wealth of society and from which the capitalists extract surplus value. The working class also encompass the reserve army of unemployed, including old and disabled workers and semi-permanently and permanently unemployed workers forced to live on public assistance.

 Because of its organised and concentrated character at the centres of production, workers are the only class able to mobilise and wage the class struggle against the ruling class. It is the only thoroughly revolutionary class, ideologically, politically, and organisationally. The working class is the most progressive and most revolutionary class ever known in history and stands in the centre of our epoch of the world proletarian revolution. It has the power in its hands to forge a new socialist society out of the ruins of the old capitalist one, and it alone is capable of running society in the interests of the great majority. Working people are the “only consistently revolutionary class because, whether or not they realises it, their social problems cannot be solved short of socialism. They also play a key revolutionary role because of the organisational skills acquired as a result of its collective experience in factories and with mass production. The world's working class has “nothing to lose but its chains and a world to win.” Through its own emancipation, it will break the chains of capital which bind the exploited people of the whole world. 

We know that the day is not far away when workers will find their way to the politics that will sweep from the earth the system which has caused them so much suffering. They will find this task not in the “politics” of the boss parties, but in the party of working class revolution – the Socialist Party.

Socialists understand that the ills of the capitalist economic system will not be eliminated short of the destruction of capitalism. Only the removal of the material basis of man’s exploitation by man, can actually permit us to wage a winning struggle.

What the working class lacks more than anything else is a sense of itself as a class, and of the inherent contradiction between its needs and the needs of the capitalist class. It is precisely this class consciousness which socialists must strive, above all else, to instill in the working class, this consciousness of itself as a class is what can lay the actual basis for a firm and relentless struggle against capitalism. It is abundantly clear that the class struggle has been relegated to one of several movements of mass resistance the women’s movement, the anti-racist campaigns, the environmentalist movement. We will continue to engage with these struggles, help them by linking them up with our fight for socialism.


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