Now is the time to build a socialist party

 

Socialism is in principle a working class movement which organises and moulds the workers for the class struggle and the construction of a future new society. It is impossible even to imagine socialism as realisable within capitalist society where the robber class has always stolen power from the people. Only a working class party working for the propagation of socialismand for the success of the future social revolution can be recognised or supported. All other action must be resolutely condemned and combatted. A socialist society must be built by the expropriation of all land and capitalist property, and by the workers taking production and distribution into their own hands. From a Marxian point of view, the working class movement should take the direction of revolution, should prepare itself seriously for the event, and not seek to avoid it by other action.

Crises today are not caused by natural scarcity. In the past, when people starved, it was a result of harvest failure – there wasn’t enough to go round. Now such scarcity is artificially created. Now we have overproduction. Not too little, but too much is produced – ‘too much’ not compared to people’s needs, but to the profits of those who control the world economy. Capitalism, then, is an economic system based on production for profit. So long as society is bound to commodity production, it is only through the market that its needs can be satisfied. Capitalist society necessarily presupposes exchange. Present-day society does not even concern itself with determining the consumption capacity or needs of society, in order to make a corresponding adjustment of production.  The only social concern is the market on which the purchasing power depends.

Modern capitalist production is social in operation. The problem is that while the global labour of the workers is collective, what they produce is privately owned by a small number of millionaires and billionaires, who literally dominate billions of people. Powerful dynasties, multinationals, monopolistic corporations are the levers which direct capitalist production, so as to garner the highest profits based upon the most intensive, brutal exploitation of the worker around the world in an international division of labour. It is no exaggeration to say that the bulk of the earth's wealth is firmly in their hands.

In our present society humanity is but a cog in a machine. Early proponents of the cooperative tried to avoid the cruelties and barbarities of the capitalist system and establish an egalitarian society. The hope of the early Utopians, like Fourier, Robert Owen and others, was to set up cooperatives to free workers from their exploiters. The cooperatives could show that the capitalists are really not necessary, that they are an ulcer on society. They proposed that if the worker received the full product of his or her labour, minus the cost of administration and organisation, it would be easy to do away with the cruelty and extortion of the private capitalist establishments, who appropriated the unpaid labor of the workers. The unpaid labour of the workers, according to the Utopians, would then go into the common fund, for health care, housing and all human needs.

Cooperatives also sprung out of the necessity of survival where mutual aid was an imperative. Often it is the religious communities which depend on helping one another. The Amish and the Mennonites or the Jewish Kibbutzim are examples. After the American Civil War in the face of racial violence and oppression there was a period when ex-slaves survived by forming cooperative ventures together, caring for one another, an idea revived later in the years of the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, capitalism is a world system by that time with a world market. In order to undo the capitalist system, the cooperatives has to compete with all-powerful capitalist enterprises. Not only is the capital investment of these businesses formidable and overwhelming, but they had enormous capacity to undersell, even taking big losses, in order to drive the cooperatives out of existence or alternatively force the cooperatives to adopt the commercial practices of the conventional companies. The cooperative movement was relegated mostly to fringe areas of the economy. For the most part, it survived in those areas of the economy where the capitalists felt they couldn't obtain an adequate rate of profit, and driving co-ops out was not worth the effort. Many  cooperatives are short-lived and have disappeared. Any successful large cooperatives existing today are in reality capitalist enterprises with no affect on the devastating operations of the capitalist system. They are in essence an integrated element in capitalist production.

We know that the root of the social evils in the world today is the oppression of the working people suffering all the atrocities of capitalism. It is world  enslaved by a few capitalist bandits, who own all the wealth of the earth as their private property. The capitalist ownership of the means of production – this is the reason of reasons which explains the barbarity of the present order of things. To deprive the rich of their power by depriving them of their wealth is the paramount duty of the working class party of socialists.