Freed from class chains

 The possibility of a catastrophic civilisation collapse exists if capitalism continues and we ignore a more radical and democratic vision of organizing production to integrate ecological knowledge and principles. Socialism will be the society of true freedom. We emphatically maintain that socialism should be identified with abolition of wage-labour and creation of economic equality between people. This clearly distinguishes us from all those currents who identify socialism with planned state economy or with redistribution of wealth, etc. We maintain that socialism requires the abolition of wage-slavery and the transformation of the means of production, into the common property of society. 

That the Soviet Union was not socialist was always clear to a  those who called themselves socialist. This was even admitted by various capitalist thinkers and Soviet analysts. Th identification of the Soviet Union with Marxism and socialism was and is a propaganda weapon against Marxism and genuine socialism. They say socialism has been defeated so that they may defeat it; that socialism has ended, so that they may end it. The Soviet Union and its satellite states did not by any criterion – economic, political, administrative or ideological – represent socialism. Instead of common ownership of means of production, state ownership of means of production was adopted. Waged employment, money, exchange value, and the separation of the producing class from control of means of production, all remained. As Marxists stress, a workers’ revolution is doomed to defeat unless it carries out a social revolution in society’s economic basis. Without this economic revolution, every political victory eventually ends in failure. Socialist revolution is not divisible; it must win in its totality. It must really be a revolution and not reforms in the existing system. The basis of this revolution is the abolition of the system of wage labour and the turning of means of production and distribution into common ownership, a society worthy of free human beings. This was never done in the Soviet Union.

Everyone knows that today’s society all comes down to profits and labour productivity. At the back of their mind, everybody knows what the state stands for, what the police and the army have been built for. All know that there is an incessant conflict going on within society between worker and capitalist, the employee and the employer; that any trace of freedom and humanity has come to be linked to the degree of power of worker and working-class organisation, against capitalist business and their parties and states. People naturally expect labour organisations to be against exploitation and discrimination, to stand for social welfare, and so on. Workers identify with freedom and welfare. Therefore, nationalists, reformists, and a whole host of tendencies had turned socialism into a medium through which to express their grievances. When socialism was in fashion, they became socialists. The term Marxist-Leninist, just like much other Marxist terminology became a word to express non-socialist ideas and interests. Marx was a free-thinking and egalitarian revolutionary. Marxism is represented neither in the ideas and actions of the ruling parties in the Soviet Union, China and Albania. All were built on a complete falsification of Marx and his ideas. Marx was an enthusiastic representative of equality, freedom and humanity. You can’t, with any justification whatsoever, lay dictatorship, bureaucracy, national persecution, and food queues at door of Karl Marx. For anyone who regards socialism not as an ornamental ideal but as an urgent and practical cause, who is concerned about the actual realisation of socialism and workers’ revolution, Marx will always be, as a political thinker and a rich source of learning and inspiration. Marxists intend to build a system which is based on this economic justice. Marxists regard economic growth, technological development of the productive capacities, and the raising of the level of consumption, welfare and leisure of human society as absolutely vital. Re-division of scarcity and sharing of austerity is not our solution. Socialism is an economy for development of people’s abilities, an economy of the fulfilment of everyone’s material and intellectual needs.

 

This  much more efficient economic system for humanity has been possible all throughout the last century. If humanity is not now living under socialist relations this is because the capitalist system has been defending itself tooth and nail, by killing and torture, by intimidation and deception. The claim that capitalism is the best economic system is the biggest lie in human history. This system is drenched in blood. While hundreds of millions of people have no home, no health care, no education, no happiness, and even no food, the means to produce and satisfy these needs are available and lie idle. Tens of millions of people able to employ these means of production and end the shortages have been kept out of work. We don’t need to take examples from the undeveloped world. In the United States  millions of people exist below the poverty line, not covered by medical insurance, with homelessness rife from New York to Los Angeles. All over the world prostitution is a way of earning a living. Drugs production and trafficking is a respectable way of amassing wealth. In Britain they have been so good as to keep the subways open at night so that the homeless would not perish from cold. Economically, this society cannot stand on its two feet without dehumanising the majority of the people of the earth and without ignoring their basic needs.

 

The basis of this society is that a majority, must in order to live in a world it has been born into sell its physical and intellectual powers to a minority. It is a society where the production of people’s necessities has been tied to the profitability of capital. And this is the root of all these inequalities and deprivations. Wage labour, division of society into worker and capitalist, into wage-earner and wage-giver, degradation of work from being a productive and creative activity to a ‘job’, to a way of earning a living, are in themselves verdicts of the bankruptcy of this system.

 

Whoever calls the existing economic system the best and most feasible is admitting to its savagery. The Socialist Party proclaims possibility of a superior economic and social system and has even sketched its outlines: a society based on people’s complete equality and freedom, a society based on collective creative work to satisfy human needs, a society in which means of production belong to people collectively. A world community without classes, without discrimination, without countries and without states has long been feasible. The slogan `from each according to ability, to each according to need’ is entirely based on the recognition and guaranteeing of the right of every person to determine his or her position in society.

 Socialism is a society in which human beings gain control over our lives, are freed from the chains of blind economic laws. This liberation of entire society from the blind economic laws is the condition of emancipation of the individual and the restoration of humanity and human specificity of every individual. The basis of socialism is the human being – both collectively and as an individually. Socialism is the movement to restore mankind’s conscious will, a movement for freeing human beings from economic necessity and enslavement in pre-determined production moulds. It is a movement for abolishing classes and people’s classification. This is the essential condition for the growth of the individual.