Something Is Wrong with the World

 

Prices have continued to go up higher and higher. There hangs the terrible nightmare of the coming recession. People hoard their money. They do not buy anything new. They watch and wait.  Workers have an uneasy feeling that despite all the claims of great employment, jobs that pay a decent wage are scarce. Capitalist economists vie with one another in predicting the exact date of the coming recession. Wherever there is a conflict the U.S. and the U.K. are embroiled.

The whole social system, economy and politics, have outlived itself. It is rotting from the inside. No one person, no government can remove, or even permanently remedy, unemployment. The problem is an indication of the underlying poverty and insecurity of the whole working-class. That is why everything is wrong and there is no solution in obvious sight. Working people can and will have no peace as long as capitalism exists. The struggle between capital and labour is on a world scale. Capitalism is responsible for poverty. The purpose of this system is to provide the bosses with profit.

Capitalist apologists are never tired of telling us to-day of the blessings and comforts that capitalism has bestowed—but on whom? Capitalists are not concerned with production as such, their concern is primarily with the effective exploitation of the working class for profit. No reform that could be introduced will prevent the present system from proceeding according to the laws of its own development. From the workers’ point of view, capitalism renders all reform futile to solve the main poverty problem. Their conditions worsen faster than palliatives can be introduced and take effect. The very advocacy of reforms presupposes the continuance of the present system whether those reforms are presented as sugar-coated pills or the frothy soundbites. It is the capitalist system itself that enslaves the worker. The remedy is the removal of the cause and no “meantime” patchwork can do that. Only a socialist working-class will ever be able to undertake the removal of capitalism and the establishment of common ownership of the means of life. Such ownership will place the powers and the results of production at the disposal of the whole of society; consequently, leisure and comfort could be available for all if the workers had the knowledge and the desire to bring the change. Until then, through political ignorance, they will continue to keep in existence the present system.

The need is great. It is for a working-class movement, intelligent, organised, and conscious that the means of life may be owned by the people and controlled by them. 

We struggle because we must and in the course of that struggle we learn that the root of all social evil is a system which has no other use for the great majority of men and women than to grind profit out of them. It is that system workers must sweep it away, and reconstruct society on a new foundation.

An individual of any standing cannot with impunity set out criticism of a subject such as physics, biology, or chemistry, without the necessary qualifications for the task. Among the defenders of capitalism, this same disqualification does not appear to matter, providing the subject to be criticised is socialism. Wages are the price of labour-power, whether that labour-power is employed by the capitalist state or by a private employer. The working class are compelled to sell that labour-power, their only possession, to a non-producing class that owns society’s means of life, and who consequently can retain much of the product of the workers’ labour. Socialism means the abolition of classes, wage payers, wage receivers, nations, states and tyrannies. It means, in short, a system of society in which the commonly-owned and commonly-controlled means of social living would make such things absurd and unnecessary. 

Socialism means a system of society in which goods are produced for the use of the members of society, not for the profit of a privileged class. There will, inside socialism, be no buying and selling, and therefore no need for any currency system. That is socialism and that is what we work for. 

 The Socialist Party is called Marxist – and we are proud to bear that name. Socialism is a worldwide movement which unites working people of all nationalities, of all colours, in a common world organisation. Full economic, political and social equality can be attained only through mass action. Let the capitalist apologists proclaim the death of socialism. When the workers in any number become acquainted with socialist principles efforts to rebut socialist teachings will be impotent.