Understanding our world

 As long as capitalism has lasted, not a single day has gone by without discontent and dissent somewhere in the world. But the enormous potential for revolutionary change has, for the past century, been channelled into fruitless reformism. The reformers have no alternative; they never did have a remedy for the ills of the profit system, and they never will, because capitalism is an inherently anti-social system that continuously throws up more problems and contradictions than the reformists can solve. Workers won the vote but instead of using it to end the profit system, they have used it to give capitalism a longer lease.

Understanding this society is not a difficult or an exclusive business. The knowledge is easily available and accessible for the Marxian analysis of capitalism, exposing its foundations, its development and its workings is as vital and relevant now as it was when it was first set down over a century ago.

There is every reason for workers to understand that capitalism cannot satisfy its people's needs and that it must exploit and debase the majority who do all its useful work. They can easily grasp the fact, because the evidence is all around them, that none of the political parties who appeal for their support to continue capitalism can effectively deal with the problems of the system.

From that understanding, it is a simple, logical step to the conclusion that only a democratic revolution to establish a society with a different basis, and different social relationships, will be effective. And this revolution cannot come about through leaders; it must be the act of a conscious, participating majority of the world’s working class. For most workers, this is suspiciously simple. They prefer submission, keeping their place in society. Capitalist mouthpieces have convince millions of people that unpalatable things are actually good for them. Things like class society with the profit motive rampant. Things like unemployment forcing workers out of their customary poverty and into deep hardship. Things like sexual and personal repression and Victorian moral values. Things like patriotism which is used to inspire ordinary, peaceable people to make war upon other ordinary, peaceable people they don’t know and have no quarrel with.

 

Shelter regularly announces that there is a “shortage" of homes, which is another way of saying that millions of people are without a decent place to live.

Now, this is not really a shortage. For a long time bricks and other building materials have been stockpiled and among the three million on the dole are many skilled building workers. This situation exists because, for one reason or another, it is not profitable to use the materials or to employ the workers. However desperate people’s needs may be, capitalism does not produce unless there is the prospect of profit.

Then there are those people whose housing problem consists of difficult decisions about which one of their homes they should live in at any one time. These are the people in whose interests production is carried out, the people who accumulate the profits without which there is no production, the people who live parasitically on the workers who suffer in the housing problem.

The Socialist Party stands on a unique and different basis, of working-class unity and democratic revolution. The solution to the chaos of the market system is like the problem it solves, worldwide.  We ask people not to vote for us unless they are fully conversant and in agreement with what we stand for. After all, socialism could only be established if a majority are prepared to take the necessary action democratically, and with responsibility. True democracy cannot be enforced or introduced by methods of secret infiltration. We are gradually building a separate political force that will be able to use the vote in a revolutionary way.  Unlike the politicians who have been elected to run the system of class division, we will not vanish from the scene. In the days to come, the Socialist Party will be working with all the force at our command to show the workers that there is an alternative to the corpse of left-wing reformism and the viciousness of naked capitalism. Each worker declaring a practical commitment to a class-free, world society of democratic control and common ownership represents another nail in the coffin of capitalism.