The Age of Plenty is Within our Grasp

 Going into 2021 we are living in extremely frightening times. Life is becoming more difficult for most of us. Without a vision of a better world and the staying power organisation that goes with it, even mass protests of working people in response to injustice will likely not succeed. Witness the failures of the Arab spring and movements like Occupy. Yet the urgency for a socialist transformation has never been greater if we consider the existential crisis of civilisation posed by global warming. Without fundamental social change, our younger generations are facing a bleak future indeed. We are running out of time. There must be a mass world socialist movement, or there will be no future at all. Members of the Socialist Party have never wavered; never compromised; never doubted the principles and ideals of socialism, or the ultimate triumph of the world socialist movement.

Why has wealth piled up on one side and poverty on the other? Because the very root of capitalism is wrong. Because the basic idea is unsound. Because the foundation is illogical. Because the capitalist system is founded on a contradictions. It is the system in which the person who owns the means of production does not work them; and the one who works them does not own them. This is, the basic contradiction of capitalism. Capitalism pits worker against worker in a mad race for a crust of bread, for survival, for security. In an age when plenty is possible for all. Capitalism is more destructive than all the earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions ever visited upon our planet. Capitalism kills and cripples millions in its wars and in hunger and malnutrition, in preventable illnesses and occupational diseases, in malnutrition and child labor, in poverty and crime. It destroys the wealth of society in pollution and waste. In an age of plenty capitalism condemns the majority of the people to anxiety and insecurity. 

The question whether socialism was inevitable was sometimes approached from the stand-point that capitalism’s contradictions makes its indefinite continuation impossible, to be dissolved by a complete transformation.  The efforts of labour in its building of a practice  of class struggle, were viewed by the ruling class as a disturbance of the social peace—something that eventually could be regulated or ironed out by conciliation of contending interests. The contradictions of capitalism—the great basic ones that are involved in the working class struggle for power over the means of life—cannot be smoothed out even by an iron heel. 

 One of the capitalist attempted solutions to civil strive - fascism - is not just political dictatorship, not just right-wing reaction, not just the curtailment of civil liberties, not just the way of trampling the rights of labour, and not just a process of race-baiting either. We have had all these things before the ideology of fascism arose. None of them needed the corporate state; none of them tried to regiment the whole of daily life and regulate it to a plan; none of them sought to invent a new type of society. To run the world economy under an iron heel, where every petty bureaucrat of a supreme oligarchy is looking for his graft for doing his dirty work, where everyone is in a state of discord and discontent, where the military command is incessantly needed to maintain order and thus made mindful of its own opportunity to become supreme, is to enter a period of chaos and waste than we suffer from now. Fascism is not a forward looking plan nor a far-sighted realism. It is a blind retreat. It rallies its support with an irrational appeal, to be fought by no other means than power. The road to fascism is paved with liberal good intentions. Its means of operation is the regulation of capitalism in an alleged public interest. Every regulation over workers, whether by union officials or by public bodies on which such union .sit, is another brick for its world-wide prison. Capital establishes fascism, albeit reluctantly, for the same reason that it establishes and supports any form of government, all the while for more business in government and less government in business. It is done to police working people. 

Our world economy could readily enough be coordinated on the basis of a community of interests to effect the highest possible standard of living for all—if run by producers for producers. We are upon the threshold of new social system that offers abundance to all, that privilege of a class society for none. The great historic role of the working class more readily visualised today than ever before is a planned economy of plenty that can be effected by the one big union of working people.