The only way humanity can survive is by ending capitalism. humanity cannot thrive by pursuing profit.
The world today is in the hands of billionaires-owners of the biggest corporations. They use their power to make themselves richer and richer—at our expense. They hire workers to make a profit out of their labour; their capitalist production is for profit, not for use and to get more profit they keep wages low and worsen conditions. Poverty and insecurity are making great inroads into the homes of working people. Capitalism has become an obsolete oppressive system that ought to be gotten rid of. Socialism will mean the end of production for profit and instead work will carry on production for use. The needs of all will be met, and new needs and pleasures now denied to the working class will be created and satisfied by a socialist organisation and extension of production. Advancing slogans like “Make the Rich Pay” implies no intention to abolish capitalism.
Capitalism exists on the basis of unpaid labour. You as a worker produce commodities to be exchanged on the market. You produce not only enough to pay your own wage, but also an added value, a surplus value, over and above the cost of your maintenance. Surplus labour is your unpaid wage. In polite circles, it is called “profit. ” And that’s what capitalism is all about. The ruling class wants to preserve its privileges, its interests, its power, its wealth, and its dominion. And so it engages in divide and conquer.
Paradoxically, capitalist society has internationalised humanity’s life. It has forged material bonds between all peoples which establish an inevitable solidarity between them. Internationalism is not ideal, it is a historical reality. Capitalism causes the peoples’ interests, ideas, customs, and regimes to coalesce and co-mingle. Working people are not making good progress toward the solution of their problems because they see only isolated injustices and do not see the underlying cause. Too many people still believe that their government stands for peace and freedom.
Workers are all the people who don’t own their own means of production. Are you a producer of goods, or are you an appropriator of profits? Are you a worker employed by somebody else, or are you the owner who reaps surplus value from the labour of your workers?
In order to replace capitalism with an egalitarian society we need a revolution. Capitalism, no matter how it plans and promises and prays, can never actually lift the worker from the bedrock of subsistence – although there is potentially plenty to provide an abundance for all. Our world revolution aims not only at the abolition of privilege, and class, but ending national boundaries and the fusion of all peoples into one society.
Socialism is the sole solution to the question of poverty and the question of exploited labour. The Socialist Party holds that the exploitation of labour, with all of its consequences, will not disappear until the day the means of production – land, machinery, communications and transport will be transformed from private property into collective property.
Socialism is not production for profit. It is production for use. It is not production for private ownership and the private ownership of resources. It is common ownership of wealth. It is not inequality and misery and persecution and discrimination. It is not deprivation and destitution. It is equality and fairness. It is freedom from poverty and want. It is freedom from hunger and war. It is freedom from oppression and squalor. Socialism is a celebration of life, not a cult of death.
How is a socialist movement to be built? This blog does not pretend to have a formula but does believe that certain steps can and should be taken. Defeatism must be replaced by confidence in victory. Raising the political consciousness of the largest possible number of fellow workers we could reach remains our main task today. To transform the SPGB from a propaganda group into a party of mass action and where workers shall learn to accept Marxism as their guide to action.
The Socialist Party looks to the working class to fashion and fights for its own solution—workers’ control, self-management and democratic planning. We stand with the workers as they organise. We must not entertain illusions for it is only the working class, who can forge an authentic socialist revolution. We are the people. We are the majority. We are the working class. If we organise we will change this world. The Socialist Party is the harbinger of a world movement for the future. The working class today stands at a crossroads of history. The workers cannot afford to be lulled into a false sense of security. The empty gesture of capitalism to save itself must be repudiated. The happiness of humanity is not in the past but rests in the future.
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