Monday, September 14, 2020

It Has Got To Change

Socialism means no privileged elite, only the right of people themselves to manage their own affairs. It means creating an worldwide brotherhood and sisterhood. We must resurrect socialism from its present graveyard of opportunism, we must study socialism. We hold to the socialism of Marx, and Engels, the economic doctrine, the character of the state and the class struggle.

Working people are not for socialism as yet, that we acknowledgeThe absence of a viable socialist movement today is an indisputable and depressing fact. This is hardly a profound observation. It has been noted by many others who offer differing explanations to account for our marginalisation. 

The Socialist Party remains politically isolated and ineffective. Some on the left blame our alleged sectarianism but there is no easy cure for our woes. The struggle for socialism in this country and worldwide is a formidable task, to say the least. There exists an ideological indoctrination of the population that pervades society which includes the educational system, the media, the church, cultural and labour organisations, etc. Fear, suspicion and hysteria are spread throughout by sensationalist news and social media. The result of all this is that the worst of capitalism–consumerism, rampant individualism, jingoism, xenophobia, racism and sexism increasingly prevails. It is entrenched and permeates all facets of cultural life.

Socialism is an imperative if humankind is to avoid the path of barbarism or self-annihilation. War can solve no working class problem. It cuts across the fundamental identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of this class at enmity with each other in the interests of sections of the capitalist class.

War elevates force into the position of arbiter in place of the common human desire for mutual peace and happiness. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate upon the best methods of producing misery and of annihilating each other. War elevates lying, cheating, disabling and murdering opponents into virtues, confers distinctions upon those who practice these means most successfully.

Young men and women, in their most impressionable years, have the vile methods of warfare impressed upon them so thoroughly that they lose a balanced outlook on life and are impregnated with the idea that force, with all its baseness, and not reason is the final solution in all problems.

To suggest to the national ruling classes of the world that they must abandon “the use of force” when their commercial interests are at stake, is asking them to stand aside while their rivals take the lot. Nothing could be more foreign to the nature of capitalism than this.

Socialism is completely opposed to war and to what war represents. At the same time it is the only solution to the conditions that breed war. It is a new form of society in which the people of the world will work harmoniously together for their mutual benefit, for there will be neither privilege nor property to cause enmity.

No coercion will be needed in socialism because each will gain from co-operating harmoniously with his fellows. But it is a new social system that demands understanding of its implications from those who seek to establish it. With the establishment of socialism war will disappear and humanity will have taken the first step out of the jungle.


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