The Necessity of Revolution

We are not progressives, not liberals but revolutionists. We declare our aims, our perspective, and our attitude. We take this opportunity to restate our aims.

The capitalist class owns and controls the means of production, distribution and communication. The working class owns none of these, and therefore workers must sell their labour power to the capitalist for wages in order to live. The worker creates a product of value, part of which is returned to him as wage, and the rest of which is taken from him by the capitalists as profit. Thus is created the basic antagonistic contradiction between worker and capitalist, since the interest of one is, and has to be, directly opposed to the interest of the other. This most fundamental of contradictions will not end until capitalism with its private or state ownership is itself ended, and replaced with socialism, where all means of production will be common property. There will be no classes and no class struggle. The consequences of class divided society – racism, national chauvinism, male supremacy, the monogamous family based on property, etc. – will all have disappeared. There will be no wars, no armies, and no need for weapons of war, which will become historical curiosities. There will be no distinction between mental and manual work. Socialism will be a life of material and cultural abundance. Contradictions between people will remain, but these will not be antagonistic and will be resolved by mutual cooperation.

The capitalists have attacked you with every weapon at their command. They have battered down your wages to starvation levels. They have cast you on the scrap-heap of unemployment. They have gagged your every protest, bludgeoned you when you assembled to demonstrate your misery, and laid by the heels in prison all those bold enough for voice your claims and your indignation. To hell with their capitalist politics! We want an end of class tyranny and oppression. Vote down every capitalist candidate. Their labels mean nothing to us. Conservative or Labour or Nationalist, they are all the same. They all stand upon the backs of the workers, and differ on only over their share of the plunder. We must stand together against them.

The only struggle for us is the struggle of the workers against their exploiters. Wherever one looks, we see  more of the rubble that wars have piled up. Thousands of people can’t get a job to live and are hungry. Misery, undernourishment and a huge increase in sickness and the number of the people’s children dying every day. The social misery and poverty continuously grow begging, prostitution and the number of criminals whom the prisons cannot hold any more. A clique of financiers is gambling on the backs of the people. A class of bankers, industrialists, big merchants, big landlords and arms dealers, after accumulating easy riches and taking advantage of every commercial or political abnormalities in order to profiteer on the needs of the population, now holds in its hands huge concentrated economic forces (stock-market capital, land, factories, transport, construction etc), that is, it holds in its hands almost completely the lives of the people. The sharks of bank capital, the big industrialists and big merchants, speculators and the upstart newly rich of the wars; on the other hand, out in the rural areas, the big landlords and money lenders hold the lives of the people in their hands, and with more or less “legal” methods they usurp, they steal, the labour of the vast majority of the people, comprising of workers, poor peasants or landless ones, clerks, small-holders and dispossessed refugees.

The plutocratic oligarchy exploited the labour of the people. Underneath a thousand lies and prejudices and customs this great evil was hidden. Only then the poor popular masses began to realise that these drones constituted a class on their own, with its own separate interests, and that the poor workers of cities and villages are another class with its own separate interests, opposing those of the exploiters class’. And then they began to understand well, that they must wage a social struggle, to fight that exploiting class with their own forces and not wait passively for its charity. That they had to organise themselves.

Political exploitation and tyranny. They tell us that “the people is sovereign” and decide on their own on their fortunes with elections. They send their own representatives to the parliament and they take decisions with their interests in mind. Especially now, with Democracy, the sovereignty of the people, they say, will become even greater, since only they will be able to elect the Head of State, the President of the Democracy. But we know well that the great majority of the poor people, whether they want it or not, remain still illiterate and cannot know about the various issues concerning the country. They don’t have the chance to educate, because they are condemned to work only.