It’s Up to Us, Claiming What is Ours

 There is no point in talking to you about the misery of today’s society. Any person with a heart  will agree that our life is not happy.  The Socialist Party wants to draw to your attention that the basic cause of all the ills of present-day society, which is normally attributed to the flaws of human nature, is in fact the lack of organisation of human society. 

This system answers our cries of need with blows of terror. It offers unemployment, hunger, homelessness, welfare cuts, and epidemics. We live in a world where hunger, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, racial and sexual discrimination, and many forms of repression, including the most barbaric are the lot of the majority of the earth’s inhabitants. Rivalries, war and the threat of war characterise the relations between countries, peoples, and nations.  Men and women are living under the yoke of capitalism. Essentially, capitalism is the result of the exploitation of the labour power of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, sole owner of the means of production. This exploitation is particularly brutal  in order to guarantee profits. The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves. They will achieve it through socialist revolution, which will suppress the private ownership of the means of production in order to establish socialist and collective property, and replace capitalist commodity production by the socialist organisation of production. 

 Mothers want and try to give their children the right kind of food - food that will build strong, active, healthy young bodies. What prevents women of the working class from taking proper care of their children is lack of money – time – energy. 

The government is turning from neglect to attack – police brutality and incarceration, immigration raids and deportations  and other forms of terror. At present there are over seven billion human inhabitants on the surface of this planet. For the majority of them – of us – poverty, hunger, disease, are the “normal” human condition. Our response is socialist reorganisation of the world economy. 

On a global scale the most important political development over the last decade has been the transformation of climate change from a scientific prognosis to a palpable political movement. Those who rule our planet, both the owners of the giant corporations and the governments of the major powers, are well aware of the environmental threat to civilisation. They have access to all the data, they have been repeatedly warned by experts, that they acknowledged the reality of climate change. Yet they have effectively done little about it. What needs to be done is simple and well understood: the world economy, not you, not your local community, not one country but the world economy, has to switch from fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) to renewable and sustainable sources of energy (wind power, solar power and tidal power). This has to happen on a huge scale and it has to happen quickly. Nothing else and nothing less will do, but this is precisely what is NOT happening sufficiently nor urgently enough

 Massive layoffs and millions out of work, debts piling up and rent arrears coming due, education and health care falling apart - to a great number of its people this world has become a living hell. The capitalist rulers, continue to rule and maintain capitalism, plunging country after country into one war after another. The corporations despite honeyed words to placate climate change protests persist with their policies of environmental harm to the planet in their quenchless thirst for more profit. Politicians and economists keep saying they have solutions, but they all come down to one thing-tightening the noose around necks of working people. The capitalists demand that the people sacrifice t permit them to plunder more people.

All over the world people are rising up to resist. Unrest and discontent are sweeping the world. Some people are now talking of revolution. At the very heart of the struggle is the basic conflict between the working class–the millions who have no means to live except through their labour, and whose labour is the driving force in society – and the capitalist class – the handful who do no productive work but live and accumulate billions from the labour of the workers, and continually grind the workers down in accumulating more. Working people possesses tremendous potential power to change the world and to remake society to serve the interests of the great majority.

This planet is rich in many resources, and and its peoples have achieved a high level of science and technology. Production is on a massive scale, but with the present  capitalist relations, the basic producers, the workers, are deprived of its benefits. Under the capitalist system, production only takes place if those who control production, the capitalists, can make profit from it. And they can make profit only by wringing it out of the workers, and constantly pushing their wages down to the lowest level, allowing the workers only enough to keep working-and to bring up new generations of workers to further enrich capital. Part of the workers’ labour covers the cost of maintaining themselves and their families–their wages–and the rest is unpaid labour that produces surplus value for the capitalists, the source of their profit. This exploitation of the workers to create private profit for the capitalists is the basis of the whole capitalist system and all its evils.

The capitalist class arose within the feudal system, finally overthrew the feudal system and established the capitalist system. And now it is the turn of the workers to overthrow the capitalist system and build a completely new society, removing our masters and breaking all social chains that enslave us and shackle production itself.