The most depressing aspect of identity politics is the claims of “who is the most oppressed”. Oppression cannot be quantified. The result is increasing fragmentation and confusion, at a time of major attacks on working class living standards and individual liberties. Class struggle is a unifying force. It is the one thing that all workers have in common, whatever their country, their industry, their gender, colour or sectional interests. Identity politics and single issue campaigning, on the other hand, divides by its very nature. Particular privileges will continue to be defended and even enforced by capitalist ruling classes for as long as they have power. That is, until they are overthrown by a working-class revolution. Divided and at each others’ throats by many forms of discrimination we will not take up the fight against our masters. We strive for the complete social, economic and political equality for minority people. The Socialist Party’s role is to strengthen the class movement against capitalist exploitation. We will struggle for the revolutionary unity of all working people. The division of society into the exploiting and exploited are rooted in the same social development – the private ownership of the means of social production. In primitive communist society hierarchal oppression did not existed.
Only the socialist revolution can lay the basis for the complete emancipation. In socialism, men and women will not be oppressed. It is only a socialist, planned economy that can provide full employment for all who are willing to work. This lays the economic basis for equality among men and women. It is the capitalist system that is the main cause of oppression today. The principal contradiction in capitalist society is between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie tries in every way that it can to sabotage the struggle for socialism. It tries to divide the workers through a system of national privileges and by spreading the poison of nationalism and racism. The capitalists try to justify, in the minds of white or native workers, the oppression of nations and peoples by saying that other nationalities are “inferior.”
Only the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of socialism will guarantee the liberation of all oppressed. Working people are the ones who built this world, its industries, farms and cities. Our planet is rich in natural resources. It is capable of satisfying the needs of all its people. But today cut-backs in health and other services. The two basic classes in our society, the working class and the bourgeoisie, are locked in a bitter struggle. The bourgeoisie represents the old system of exploitation and oppression. The working class represents the fundamental progressive force, the most consistent social force in the struggle to eliminate capitalism. A handful of capitalists control our country and make fabulous profits off the labour of working people. All the major means of production - the factories, the mines, telecommunications and transportation – are concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists. They control whole sectors of the economy. All the misery we suffer is created so a small clique of very wealthy individuals can continue to line their pockets.
For workers, their lives and their future is less and less certain. An alarming number of working families are in debt. Every bit of capitalists’ vast possessions was stolen from the people. It’s the capitalists that get rich by appropriating the fruits of our labour. At the end of a work week the worker collects his pay. The capitalists claim this is a fair exchange. But it is highway robbery. In reality, a worker gets paid for only a small part of the value he produced. The rest, the surplus value, goes straight into the boss’s bank balance. The employers get rich, not because they have “taken risks” or “worked harder,” as they would have us believe. The more they keep wages down and reduce the number of employees with speed-ups, the more they can steal from us and the greater their profits. And if the boss thinks he can make more profit somewhere else, he just closes his factory and moves elsewhere or another industry. The idea that everyone can get rich under this system is a lie invented by the rich themselves.
Under capitalism, the only way to get rich is to trample on someone else. This is why workers have only one choice: either submit to this wage slavery or fight it. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. A handful of parasites live off the backs of the workers and could not care less about their situation.
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