What is this system?

The working class is not a small, narrow class. The working class constitutes the majority of the population composed of the industrial and agricultural workers, and non-production workers such as clerical, transportation and service workers. The working class is defined as all those who:

1) Do not own the means of production;
2) Have to sell their labour-power to the capitalist class to make a living;
3) Directly, or indirectly, create surplus value... which is expropriated by the capitalist class. 

This exploitation, or expropriation of surplus value, creates an irreconcilable, antagonistic class contradiction between the employees and the employers. Only the emancipation from capital itself can liberate workers. Their mission, therefore, is to overthrow their masters. 

In order to keep power, the capitalists teach the idea that capital and capitalism have always existed. In this way, they seek to convey the idea that capitalist class society and capitalist exploitation will continue to exist forever. In other words, that it is a system of society that is natural and eternal, and there is no use anyone thinking of making fundamental changes in it or replacing it with any other social system. This idea is completely false. It has been developed only to maintain the capitalist class in economic and political control. To live, capital must accumulate. To accumulate, capital must yield profit.

Socialist society will be a class-free society, in which all the means of producing wealth are owned in common. Instead of being divided into workers and employers, rich and poor, society will be an association of free people, all making their special contributions to the well-being of society, which in return will supply them with what they need in order to live full and happy lives. Such a society can be summed up in the slogan: “From each according to ability, to each according to needs.”

For this to be possible, socialism must be based on abundance. Production will be organised in such a way that there is plenty of everything for everybody: not only food, houses, and so on, to satisfy material needs; but also schools and theatres, playing-fields, books and concerts, so that people can lead full, physical and cultural lives.

Socialism will be worldwide. It is not something which can be fully completed in one country, isolated from the rest of the world. On the contrary it must eventually embrace all the peoples of the world; and in so doing it will put an end to war. Because no wars can take place in a truly international society there will be no need for armies.

Many institutions which we accept today as essential, such as police and prisons, armies and civil servants, will have disappeared. Because it will be a community of plenty, where there is enough for all and therefore no advantage can be obtained by theft or other forms of crime, all need for courts of justice and police will have disappeared. In other words, the State, which is the sum of all these institutions and organisations, will itself disappear. Instead of one section of society ruling and oppressing another, men will have grown accustomed to living together in society without fear and compulsion. Thus, for the first time, mankind, united in a global family.

It is often argued that, however desirable such a communist society may be, it could never be made to work, because, whatever changes are made in the form of society, human nature will always remain fundamentally the same: there must always be rulers and ruled, rich and poor, employers and employed. This argument springs from ignorance of the facts. 

The study of history, and the observation of primitive communities still living in the world, prove that in the earliest kind of society not only were the land and the tools (what are called the means of production) regarded as the common property of the tribe, but everyone shared in the common tasks of production and defence, as well as in the product of their labour. Because of the low level of technique such communities were necessarily extremely primitive and poor, but because there was common ownership, and therefore no classes, they are correctly described as “primitive communism.”