Transforming Our World

Fellow workers, sisters and brothers, people are under attack. Our communities are under siege. In the cities and in the rural areas, conditions are all the same. Jobs are minimum wage and factories continue to close. Unemployment benefits are a joke and welfare benefits can’t feed our children or pay our rent. Many of us are forced to live in the streets like animals. Our communities are flooded with drugs and alcohol. Our children have no future. The police harass us. The politicians and their political parties don’t represent us. They are tied to the banks, the rich, the powerful and the rest of the capitalist class. A system that cannot feed, clothe and house its people does not deserve to continue to exist. We can and must organise to replace it. 

Workers have won great victories. Workers have suffered painful defeats. Workers have suffered foulest betrayals. What the working class learned from its experiences is of decisive importance. One scarcely need add we are not “mechanical” Marxists – the workers didn’t learn automatically. Only where revolutionary forces drew correct conclusions and explained them to fellow-workers can conscious progress be made in the working class movement. A clear understanding of the nature and scope of the problem and of the prominent position strikes as a manifestation of the class struggle will play are necessary prerequisites to our success. Our goal is the equal sharing of the responsibility is running society and accruing it benefits of society, the establishment of the application of equality.

A contradiction under capitalism is that between the social/collective nature of society’s basic production process and the private nature of appropriation of the product of that process. This is in the form of profit, which represents wealth taken from those who produce through the system of wage labour. The resolution of this contradiction is and must be a revolution to establish socialism, a system characterised by the struggle to end all exploitative relations and establish collective ownership and control of society’s resources and production. This will result from the class struggle on a world-wide level, between the many who take part in social production and social life, and the small few whose power and wealth rests on their control of the means of production, and power to appropriate the fruits of the labour of the many. 

One of our tools for understanding is historical materialism, formulated by Marx and Engels. What we do in the world, is the main thing, it will never develop beyond early mistakes unless we constantly succeed in learning from it – to work hard at drawing necessary and appropriate conclusions from it, to guide future practice. The State is an elaborate political institution, and its main function is to protect and serve the power of the ruling class. In spite of apparent concessions, it will always protect the process of private appropriations of social production. Because of this, socialist revolution requires that the State of the capitalist ruling class must be abolished.