Capitalism - Each Against All

 

A few can rise out of their class and become traitors and renegades to their own working people; the mass is going to remain where they are. They can rise when the whole class rises together, to real social power. That’s why Eugene Debs said: “I want to rise with my class, not out of it.”

We are a class-stratified society and are getting more so. And no amount of media talk can disguise this fact. The most fundamental social fact is that the people are divided into classes, and the walls between the classes, instead of growing less, are getting higher. Class barriers are increasing. The picture is becoming clearer and clearer: on the one side, Big Business, property and its CEOs; and, on the other side, labour.

When they talk to you about “unlimited opportunity” for “social mobility” but working people live out their lives on the level at which they happen to be born and that is the bone and gristle of the capitalist class system. It is hard to find the media that tells the truth about capitalism, its exploitation and oppression of the people.

The voice of socialism is clear and distinctive and beyond the reach of effective argument because it speaks always and everywhere for this powerful idea: Without the fight for economic democracy, and without the fight for socialism, there can be no social progress. The question of our times grows clearer: the struggle for socialism or world destruction.

Economic power is political power. Don’t let anybody fool you otherwise. Economic power is direct political power. And the bigger industry gets, the more integrated its technology, and the more interdependent its parts, the more dependent the whole society and its government becomes upon those who own and control that technology. What this means is that, with the growth of big industries and monopolies, corporate share in total power has grown enormously.

Socialism will eliminate exploitation. It will rid the world of inequality, competition, social robbery and the nationalism and imperialism that gives rise to global war. In the absence of world socialism, a planet of human harmony, science and technology is now capable of destroying all mankind. Socialism has now moved from the realm of the possible or probable into the realm of necessity in order to save life itself.

 What better plan has anyone offered anywhere for the ending of capitalist anarchy than the socialist reconstruction of society? Is there any plan that goes to the root of the evil as does that to make the means of production the property of the working people, controlled by them, for the production of the things the world needs, ending the limits set by money and markets?