The Insanity of Capitalism

There are many signs of a drift into an uncertain society of dysfunction, full of decay of social, economic and political institutions. socialism is incalculably more necessary in today’s world because the only alternative under capitalism is barbarism for the entire population of our planet. While capitalism has provided the skilled workers and the technology, i.e., the machines, factories and techniques which are necessary for a socialist reorganisation of society, it long ago ceased to provide for the simple wants and needs of the plain people. Working people want peace, instead of bloodshed and destruction. We want security and jobs, instead of insecurity and joblessness. We want decent homes for our families and good schools for our children. We want comfort and prosperity, instead of slums, child labour, low wages, unemployment and starvation. We want democracy and freedom instead of totalitarianism, bureaucracy and racial and religious conflict. But in our world, with its elaborate industries, complex machines and abundant natural resources, capitalism is unable to provide us with these elementary wants. It is unable to avoid periodic world wars. It is unable to give working people freedom but dooms them to serfdom and poverty. Under this system of capitalism a handful of plutocrats and oligarchs control the wealth and power of the world. They own industry, banking, mining, transportation. They own our jobs. They own governments because they finance the political parties which put their servants into office. They send men and women to war to protect their vested interests. They have the power of life and death over all of us. We cannot begin to estimate the waste of humanity living in latter-day barbarism.  They starve or they pillage. They are wracked by disease. hat is why we say socialism was a necessity. That is why we say socialism is a necessity.

The insanity of this system of capitalism is that it creates inequality, poverty and unemployment and all the crises of society because it produces too much! Not, to be sure, in relation to human needs, but in relation to the market. While the monopoly capitalists are united against the workers and their political and economic organisations, they are in competition against each other and against their capitalist counterparts abroad. They all try to outproduce and outsell each other on the market because the mainspring of capitalist production is profit, not human needs. This fact alone indicts capitalism as the great obstacle to human progress. The more advanced become the technology of our society, the more wealth becomes polarised at one end, and poverty at the other. We see the phenomenon of poverty in the midst of plenty. On a world scale capitalism has reduced the standard of living and decreased the freedom of mankind. It has produced privation across most of the world. It will continue to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. It will continue to divert more and more production into armaments production, to protect the wealth by the few. Capitalism produces more and more environmental destruction. Socialism only becomes more vitally and urgently necessary as we observe how capitalism may destroy the whole of civilisation through it s complicity with the climate crises.

Workers desperately need a political movement of our own. A movement which puts our interests first because it is a movement by, for and of us. Since the system we live under, capitalism, is based on our exploitation, such a movement needs to be explicitly anti-capitalist. It needs to aim for the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a new truly socialist society, based on organising production to meet the human needs of all rather than private profit for a super-rich few. One part of building such a movement is running in elections, to challenge the parties which defend and manage exploitation and oppression and to get our ideas out to the widest possible audience. We need international workers’ solidarity. That’s the only way we’ll be able to stand up to international capitalism.

We are entering into a new era in which irrational profit-oriented production will have to be replaced, and in which the development of human productive power desperately needs to be liberated from alienated labor in order to satisfy a variety of human needs. Unless there are basic changes in existing social institutions, we will be confronted with dangerous, ominous consequences for the human prospect. Such a demand for a revolutionary change in the nature and purpose of human work and human communities requires a profound transformation of social institutions. It requires the democratisation and humanisation of all aspects of social life. The most important commitments of the Socialist Party is the overcoming of capitalism, of social transformation of economy, of worker’s participatory democracy. The Socialist Party is recommending a world society as an alternative. It is proposing the socialist solution to capitalist insecurity and barbarism.