We go after the system!

 

Times are changing. Old political parties are transforming. Working people are looking beyond capitalism. Confronted with the catastrophic destruction of the environment by the logic of the profit motive, many seek an alternative.  Capitalism creates a situation where large masses of the people are dissatisfied, embittered, emboldened by intolerable hardships. Capitalism itself prepares the conditions for its cataclysm. Capitalism has reduced mankind to chronic misery, poverty, insecurity, fear, carnage, insane luxury for the few, hunger and degradation for the many — a state that simply cannot continue if mankind is to progress. To save humanity, this putrid wound on its body must be removed. Defending their lives and their future they must inevitably come into conflict with the bosses. Defending their very lives they are driven to stand up against bosses. Fighting against the bosses they are defending not only their own class interests but the interests of mankind. Socialism has grown out of the disappointment of the workers with politics and parliament.

But their conception of socialism remains unclear.

Whenever the government nationalises an industry, whenever the state imposed its control over industry, many workers naively accept this as an abandonment of capitalism, as a symptom of the growing importance of socialism and the transformation of capitalism into socialism. Not so. What was being ended is not capitalism, per se, but so-called free-enterprise laissez faire capitalism. It is socialism nor an “installment” of socialism, but state capitalism.  Socialism is not state ownership or management of industry, but the opposite: Socialism abolishes the state and its parliamentary regime. Industry is not transformed into state organs, but function socially through new administrative norms of the organized producers. The development towards state-capitalism -- often propagated under the name socialism does not mean the liberation of the working class but greater servitude. Socialists rejects policy of state ownership, rejects the idea that state capitalism is a phase of socialism, and insists upon self- management through industrial democracy. It is the task of socialists to abolish private property in the means of production and to establish socialist production and distribution. In a class-free society there is nobody to suppress or repress. Men and women do not need the big stick of the State. They manage their affairs without the State. Mankind is free, forever. 

What the working people  strive for in its struggle, liberty and security, to be master of its own life, is only possible through control of the means of production. State capitalism is not control of the means of production by the workers, but control by the organs of the state.  Workers control of production means that the employees direct the enterprises and construct the higher and central organisations from below. Organised autonomy of the productive masses stands in sharp contrast to the organisation from above in state capitalism.  The slogan of "workers' control," does not mean to work in co-operation with employers and government ministers; it means class struggle, it means revolutionary action against state power. 

The diametrically opposed interests of capital and labour can never be reconciled. Socialism works in two directions: first, by undermining the existing institutions; secondly, by developing and educating the workers and cultivating their spirit of solidarity, to prepare them for a full, free life, when capitalism shall have been abolished. A free society can exist only through voluntary association and that will depend upon the development of the workers who will supplant the wage system with a new social arrangement, based on solidarity and economic well-being for all.