Humanity or Capitalism?

Capitalism has deteriorated to the point where it threatens the existence of civilisation and perhaps even mankind. The system faces problems it cannot possibly solve. Most serious of these are the intensification of the effects of climate change and the growing unemployment as a result of automation and the ever present threat of nuclear war. Other problems that defy capitalist solution are: wide displacement and impoverishment of refugees and migrants, mounting racism, and rising levels of mental illnesses. All these are symptomatic of a social system that is taking us toward social catastrophe.

Capitalism is an economic system in which goods are produced to be sold at a profit. The goods are produced by the working class in industries owned by a small class of capitalist parasites. The capitalist owners of industry become the owners of the products. The workers get for their creative efforts a wage , an amount just barely sufficient to maintain themselves and their families. It is the relation of this amount to the value of the workers' output that is at the bottom of capitalism's recessions and conflicts. Don't be misled by delusions. While the capitalists probably do fear the danger that their class rule and privilege might result in a climate cataclysm, there is still no guarantee that their class interests will not drive them to gamble with the planet. As for the nonsense that government intervention and the Green New Deal is able to restore stability and prosperity remember that all of the original New Deal's "pump priming" failed. It took a world war to end the economic slump.

The Socialist Party says this: Global warming, recessions and wars are inevitable effects of capitalism, therefore they can never be eliminated as long as the system survives. Only when our economic life has been entirely rebuilt on a new foundation can lasting sustainability, peace and economic well-being for all be achieved. Production for private profit must be replaced by production for the common good. Instead of letting a tiny useless class appropriate the largest share of our collective product, the workers who create it must retain its full social value. Likewise, the existing despotic capitalist control of the economy must yield to a democratic management of the industries by the workers who run them. And, of course, to permit the foregoing fundamental changes, the industries and natural resources of the Earth must become the social property of all of its peoples. We must establish a new society -- a Socialist society. We mean genuine Marxian socialism and emphatically not those monstrous counterfeits which workers in the past have been deceived by in the past.

Working people have the potential political power to dispossess the capitalist class in order to place the economy under common ownership. It is of crucial importance that the workers vote for socialism. There can be no peace or economic security without socialism! Nor can we solve our other tragic problems until we get rid of their capitalist cause. Put your full weight behind the only movement that can transform our world into a model of peace, abundance, freedom and social sanity.

Are we going to keep the system of private ownership? Shall we attempt to preserve a social system that has proved its incapacity to solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty? Do you favour prolonging the life of a society in which a few own all the means of wealth-production, in which labour-saving machinery, instead of lightening labour's toil, throws workers out of their jobs onto the industrial scrapheap? Must mankind pass through still another vicious cycle of recessions and continue to suffer war and climate crises? Or shall we do the common-sense thing, make the means of production our collective property, abolish exploitation of the many by the few, and use our productive genius to create leisure and abundance for all?

If you agree with us that society must be reconstructed, then there are certain things we must understand. The first is that we can expect no help whatsoever from the beneficiaries of capitalism. Here and there a capitalist may see the handwriting on the wall and join with the workers, but as a class the capitalists, like the slave-owning and feudal classes before them, will strive to prolong their poverty-ridden, war-breeding system. The workers of hand and brain must build this new world and emancipate themselves through their own class conscious efforts. The second thing we must understand is this: Though the workers are in the overwhelming majority, and have tremendous potential power, they can apply their collective strength to the task at hand only through political and economic organisation. This means that by organising as a political party the working class and avails itself of the ballot. This is the peaceful method. It permits the forces of progress to proclaim their purpose openly, and mobilise themselves for political victory and the conquest of the capitalist political State. 

The people run the industries today, under capitalism, and will run them tomorrow, in socialism. The difference will be (1) that tomorrow, with socialism, production will be carried on to satisfy human needs-instead of for sale and profit - and (2) the despotic management of capitalism will be replaced by the workers' own democratically elected and democratically controlled administrators and delegates, the most complete democracy ever achieved since the breakdown of the tribal councils of primitive communist societies. There can be no bureaucrats or technocrats. This will be a living, vibrant democracy in which all power is in the only safe, place for power to be- with the people integrally organised in every community and workplace across the land.

Will you take an active role in the revolutionary process that is already unfolding? Will you put in the energy and effort?