We Must Change

For those working for a fundamental change in our social system, clarity is important. we need to be clear about what we’re trying to leave behind (capitalism) to have greater clarity about what it is that we’re moving towards socialism. We can understand those who seek a just and sustainable world and hope such a goal can be achieved by reforming capitalism. We, however, disagree that it is possible. Transferring control or ownership of the economy to the State or to co-operatives does not serve the needs of all the people. It is not the door to a better future beyond capitalism.

One characteristic alone does not make an economy capitalist. For example, markets pre-date capitalism by thousands of years. The same goes for commodity production—production for sale, rather than use.

Capitalism’s mode of production lies in its division between the class ownership by the capitalists of the means of production (land, buildings, technology, transportation, etc.) and the non-owning workers who sell their labour power to the capitalists to produce goods and services. Capitalists maximise profits in many ways by squeezing the workers. Capitalism’s drive to “accumulate.” The failures of capitalism—from blind growth to the increasing concentration of wealth and power around the world to the destruction of the environment—are becoming more and more evident. The climate crisis is perhaps the greatest challenge humanity is facing. it threatens civilisation’s existence. The present pandemic has left the market and many governments badly shaken. COVID-19 has shown us the fairy tales of mainstream economics, exposit it as serving the interests of the 1%. The outbreak of Covid-19 brought havoc for all sectors of economy and ushered unprecedented and unpredicted disasters.

We need a bold transformation of our politics and economics and that requires a far greater imagination. The “lesser evil” argument is a pervasive poison which inevitably leads to a vicious and continuous election cycle. We must once and for all reject the false notion of a lesser evil. The United States is essentially a one-party state, the business party, with two factions, Democrats and Republicans. Likewise in the United Kingdom political power is shared by the Tories and the Labour Party. The media is complicit in denying the depth of their unity.

Capitalism to-day must answer to the charge of acting as a brake upon the wheels of progress. The class which benefits from its continuance must prove that it is any longer of social service or produces what it receives. The Socialist Party is able to show that it does not do this and that it is this fact that is sapping the social organisation,

Socialist revolution is the most radical break with oppression and exploitation in history. Socialist society is the first society that no longer proceeds in chaos, but based upon the planned fulfilment of genuine human needs. The system of wage labour will be abolished and the guiding principle will be “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” The ownership of the means of production will be held in common and private property will be eliminated. Private property offers a choice illustration. At one period there was a justification for the individual ownership of property. When each worker took the raw material and made his or her tools, and then with these tools manufactured cloth or shoes or tilled the ground, each thing that was produced was to a great extent the product of individual work. To-day this method no longer exists. All things are produced collectively, and still there survives the idea of the sacredness of private property. It is to-day the corner stone upon which rests the whole superstructure of capitalist society and class rule. Private property for the worker is but a farce, since the class that preaches most of the virtues of private property is the one that takes from the producing class all that it produces except a scanty subsistence.  

As pointed out by Marx and Engels the whole history of civilisation has been the history of the rise and fall of classes. The interests of each dominating class while it existed made for social progress. Each class fulfilled its function, became useless and disappeared from power. Further, a most significant fact, different ideals of right and wrong have at all times prevailed for the ruling and subservient classes. With the abolition of classes and class distinctions, all social and political inequality arising from them will disappear. The conflicts of interest between workers and farmers, town and country, manual and mental labour will disappear. As classes will not exist, the state will not be necessary as an instrument of class rule and will wither away.  The subservient class has been lulled into acquiescence in its enslavement through the persistent inculcation of the “virtues” of self-sacrifice, humility, reverence, docility, frugality and patriotism. The abolition under socialism of these warring class interests would necessarily carry with it the abolition of these contradictory codes of values. In a socialist society all are equally able to exercise their self-interest. The reconciliation of the individual and society, ever discussed and never answered, because of their blindness to the fact of class antagonisms, will at last be solved by the abolition of these antagonisms in the co-operative commonwealth.