This is Socialism. Are You a Socialist?

 If men and women understood what socialism really is and means they would flock to the socialist movement. They would strive just as hard for the advancement of the socialist idea as any capitalist ever schemed for profits because socialism is the only hope in the world for working people.

It is necessary to repeat a truism that few people can deny, but many forget. There are two classes in society.

The capitalist class owns the factories, farms, transport, communications and all the machinery for producing wealth

The working class who are forced to sell their energies to the private property owners, because they, the workers, do not own the means and instruments of wealth production, and are propertyless.

There is a clash of interests within capitalism. On the one hand, workers organise in the industrial field in trade unions to struggle for better working conditions, and higher wages while capitalists strive to force wages down. Conditions are favourable for workers in their struggle if there is little unemployment and unfavourable when there is widespread high unemployment.

Under capitalism and against capitalism you can demand nothing more essential, more definite, and more encompassing than the abolition of classes, i.e., the abolition of all exploitation. What to some appears as the antagonism between rich and poor, is in reality the class antagonism between the exploiting owners of the production apparatus and the non-possessing exploited workers. We, the workers, are the exploited class. And we demand and fight for, mastery over the production apparatus, where under common ownership in a class-free society true equality will be established. Socialism is the international movement of the working class to abolish the wage system. It is a revolutionary movement OF THE WORKERS, BY the workers and FOR the workers. 

A person who works for wages is a slave, worse than a slave, for a slave can always look to a master to be fed, clothed and housed. The wage-worker is forced to get a job – to sell one’s working strength to a boss or beg, starve or steal.

Men and women can never be free or independent as long as they have to beg the idlers for a chance to work. The man who owns your job owns you. Generally, he will pay you barely enough to live on, while he keeps for himself all the things you make.

And we workers make everything in the world. There is nothing fine, valuable, beautiful, or useful that is used by men and women, no matter who they are, that is not made by the hands and the brains of workingmen or women.

But we are not permitted to enjoy these things. The bosses claim them all. They only give us (in wages) enough to eke out a poor existence.

The whole secret of our slavery lies in the fact that a few people OWN THE FACTORIES, the MINES, the MILLS, the LAND the TRANSPORTATION and the COMMUNICATIONS.

Socialism proposes that the workers who operate the industries shall OWN them in common – that men and women shall work for themselves and shall own the things they make without DIVIDING UP with any property owners. This is socialism in a nutshell. If you are an unhappy miserable worker living from hand to mouth and in constant fear of losing your job, it ought to sound good to you.

 

There is no way out for workers within the framework of capitalism. Struggle as they may improve their lot, and they do sometimes get a few crumbs.  Here lies the root of the trouble. When the majority of workers become class-conscious nothing will prevent them from overthrowing and replacing capitalism by the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of wealth production, which presupposes a money-free, class-free society, in which people will have access to all the good things that society can produce.

Is this too much to ask of those who produce but do not possess? Only you can judge. Would that we could circulate our literature wide and far. Would that our words carry to each one of you weary wage-slaves the message of socialism. Socialism is the movement of your class, the WORKING CLASS. Join it and help yourself and every other workingman and woman to free themselves from wage-slavery.

WORKERS AWAKE FROM YOUR SLUMBERS—YOU HAVE A WORLD TO GAIN.

Alistair Hulett -Which side are you on? (music video)

 

We Are Marxists

 

Over the last few decades have witnessed an increasing number of anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movements seeking a voice through protest and opposition to the damaging practices of transnational corporations and the institutions of the World Bank, IMF and WTO.

The probability is that the vast majority of these individuals have never studied economics or politics and don’t understand much of the workings of current economic policies, but they certainly do see and feel the results and negative effects of these policies and they have a feel for what is unjust. They share a common desire for a better world, a fairer world. They may not have identified clearly or explicitly what it is they want in this other, better world, but they have undoubtedly recognised much of what they don’t want. Their protests and their slogans are demands to be heard; these are ways of expressing anger, frustration and disagreement with the status quo.

Around the world such groups are voicing many different grievances from many different angles, protesting against the methods and results of worldwide capitalist Big Business. So many different reasons from so many different perspectives; different levels of anger, deprivation, and disenfranchisement.

It would be unrealistic to make broad generalisations about the myriad of individual goals but it’s certainly possible to bring the separate bits and pieces together and view them as perspectives with converging aims. All these fingers may not be poised over exactly the right button but at least they are pointing in the right direction.

It’s about choices. People’s first choice should be socialism. It seems such a small step but a huge paradigm shift. For people focused on life’s necessities – enough food for the family every day, somewhere secure to sleep, healthcare for those who are sick and childcare for increasing numbers of mothers obliged to take a job to pay the bills. It’s hard to focus on the light at the end when the tunnel is long and dark.

So, as socialists, how do we address this last little push, this yawning gap? Let’s not criticise those who haven’t figured it out yet. Let’s harness their strengths and energies. We need first to get people to see the light at the end of the tunnel, recognize it for what it is and then keep focused on heading for it through the darkness of capitalism, in growing numbers, with growing strength in the knowledge that there is a better world, a socialist world.

To those of us interested in social progress, the greatest of evils that have confronted and still confront humanity, is poverty, a cancerous growth that has shattered the lives of workers. Housed in soulless council estates, an exhibition of ugliness, who can but wonder that workers have their senses dulled, and their creative aspirations crushed out of them. Debased through overwork and periodic unemployment, living in conditions of squalor-breeding disease, and having little time to review the world around them, it is understandable why the working class have not yet found a solution to their poverty.

And what of the respectable poverty of those workers who dwell in sweet suburbia? Those workers who surreptitiously scrimp and save in order to keep up appearances. A demoralising existence, but one of respectability which must be maintained at all costs, even if it means apeing in manners, speech and dress the parasitic ruling class. Behind this facade of false jovialness is the growing fear of insecurity. Capitalism is casting a dark shadow of doubt in the minds of workers wherever they live.

 The workers receive only sufficient on average to maintain them in efficient working condition. In contrast to this, the capitalists have, in abundance, those things that are denied to the workers. Yet the working class produce everything that is placed on the world market. Workers, it is no use relying on the capitalist class to solve your problems. If they could abolish poverty, they would lose their privileged position, power and prestige. 

Our fellow workers do not delve into the roots. It is the socialist who has the solution, and it is the working class who has the power to build a world in which life can be a beautiful adventure. A world where slums and starvation no longer exist.

The Socialist Party since its establishment in 1904 has become the repository of genuine Marxist thought in this country and bases its political practice on the basic tenets of Marxism. We affirm that Marx’s vision of socialism – or communism, for he used the terms interchangeably – was a wage-free, class-free, money-free and state-free, a world wherein the machinery of production and the resources of nature would be owned in common by humanity and wherein the state as an apparatus of government over people would give way to a simple administration of things.

As Marx made clear, the very nature of his conception of socialism precluded any form of minority violence; socialism would necessarily have to be established by the conscious, democratic action of the working class – the producers of all real wealth – and be maintained by the most wide-ranging forms of participative democracy. Marx devoted much time and energy to repudiating the views of those who urged terrorism on the working class as a means of resolving any facet of its exploitation.

Human Nature (video)

Karla Rab - Member of the World Socialist Party of the United States

Capitalism is a Cancer, Socialism is the Cure

 Capitalism has advanced the scientific and technological capabilities of humanity to a stage where we can now feasibly establish a world of abundance, a world without waste or want or war. But the facts speak for themselves. There are now more hungry and homeless people on the planet than at any time in human history.

The Socialist Party is a companion party of the World Socialist Movement. It aims to bring about a non-violent revolution in the ownership of the means of production from private or state to common. In such a society, money will no longer be necessary, as the things and services we require to live fully (food, clothes, medical services, homes, transportation, and other modern human needs) will be freely available to all. This is because the means of production will be owned in common by the entire community, and will be democratically controlled by that community as well, a society in which leaders are replaced by truly democratic decision-making of all citizens.

In a society of common ownership, all war in such a nationless world will be immediately abolished, while the end of starvation and dire poverty will quickly follow suit. Without the barriers of economic cost holding back human progress, more ecologically sustainable ways to provide energy and production for ourselves will be immediately planned and created on a global basis. We will become for the first time in history a truly human family looking after itself.

The only real remedy is to seek at elections a mandate to abolish capitalism. If capitalism were abolished and socialism introduced there would immediately be two big developments through which the poverty, problem of the working class could be solved by increasing the number of men and women actually engaged in production.

One is that the members of the capitalist class, no longer able to live in leisure and luxury at the expense of the workers, would become useful members of the community helping to produce the articles needed by the community.

The second is that all kinds of activities necessary to capitalism but unnecessary under socialism would cease, and this would free millions of workers for production who are now engaged in banks, insurance companies, and advertising, or in the taxation and rating departments of the central and local government; as well as those now required by the capitalists to serve in the armed forces for the competitive struggle with foreign capitalist groups. As we explain the output of wealth could be at least doubled by these means.

This is the only way in which the poverty problem can be solved and governments, trying to run the capitalist system, cannot solve it. What they are doing is acting as caretakers for the capitalist class, calling on the workers to increase output but using seductive arguments about “service to the community" which would only be justified if in fact the means of production had been transformed or were going to be transformed into the property of the whole community. While maintaining (with merely superficial changes), the system under which the capitalists exploit the working class. Governments are pretending that exploitation has ended.

It is clever propaganda, but the realities of the class struggle between those who own, but do not produce and those who produce but do not own, will not for long be smoothed over by even the most plausible reformist orator. The working class faced with the same old ruthlessness of capitalist employers will find that they have no defence except the limited defence provided by their own trade unions. In strikes and lockouts, the web of half-truths spun by the labour leaders will be rent asunder, and the workers will have made an advance towards the necessary understanding of the fact that socialism has nothing in common with Labourites.

Globalization and Nationalism (video)

 

Speaker is Stephen Shenfield of the World Socialist Party of the United States

Capitalism is Hell

 

The class antagonism between exploiter and exploited, arising, as it does, out of the fundamental contradiction in the capitalist system of production, namely, the appropriation of the social product by the individual capitalist, naturally permeates the entire social organisation under capitalism.

Holding, as we of the Socialist Party do, that the social evils produced by capitalism have reached a stage where peddling reforms enacted by a capitalist parliament can only have the effect of retarding working-class emancipation, it is our bounden duty to be up in arms against all those who, posing as champions of working-class interests, help to bolster up the capitalist system by assisting the capitalists in throwing a bone to the under-dog—the proletariat—to prevent him from attacking the tormentor—the capitalist-class.\

One of the chief causes of the disagreement between the Socialist Party and others claiming to be socialists is we would just as soon expect that burglars and pickpockets would organise themselves to devise and carry out means for the protection of the public against burglary and pocket-picking as we would expect the capitalist-class to carry measures for dealing with the social problems. We tell the workers that there can be no solution except by the establishment of world socialism; that the capitalist politicians, whether labelled Labour or Conservative, desire to maintain the capitalist State, in which a reserve army of unemployed is a necessity, and under no circumstances will we beg and pray them, or appeal to them—our class enemies—to do something which we know they will not do. The workers must accomplish their own emancipation, organised as a socialist party, independent of and hostile to all other parties. That emancipation will never be obtained otherwise.

We of the Socialist Party have, as respecting all other social evils endured by the toiling class, no illusions whatever. Fully recognising the rottenness of the entire capitalist system, we regard it as a betrayal of the true interests of the working class to encourage, let alone assist, any “patching up,” which, after all, only means prolonging the agony. The capitalist class will, as we know, only concede what it is impossible to withhold from the workers. Hence the assistance by so-called socialists in the granting of these concessions tends to throw the working class completely off the path of class antagonism. We necessarily recognise that all measures promoted to improve present conditions only tend to further delay the advent of the economic freedom of the toiler and to prolong the suffering of his offspring. Surely it is not the business of the socialist to assist in applying the brake to the wheel of human emancipation. But those would-be socialists who join hands with the capitalist politicians in procuring a paltry meal for the little standings of the working class now conveniently ignore the fact that they flatly contradict the deductions they drew in the past from the economic causes and effects presented by the capitalist system.

If the capitalists make a concession with one hand they recoup themselves with the other. They may provide a little benefit, but as they will on no account suffer a reduction in the amount of their surplus value—seeing that they completely own and control the economic and political power of the State—the wages of the workers will go down. Besides, the class-unconscious workers are sure to take this concession on the part of the capitalist class as a pure act of grace and not—as in reality it is—an economic necessity, especially when they see that an organisation posing as a socialist body has been amiably working with the capitalist to attain that end.

It may be argued that even if the capitalists recoup themselves and the workers and their children consequently do not gain materially, and even become less class-antagonistic, the thin edge of the wedge has been inserted and the small concession will lead to a full-fledged social revolution. One may as well argue, as the “reformers” contend, that the workhouse system if fully taken advantage of by the workers, would eventually abolish poverty, misery, and degradation. In fact, some today argue that providing you put a sufficient number of patches on a pair of old boots you will produce a new pair.

We get reminded that the Communist Manifesto held that it was the duty of the proletariat while working for the revolution, to endeavour to obtain every amelioration possible for their class. Our reply is that this pronouncement was made over one hundred and fifty years ago and that since then capitalism has developed to such an extent that, if Marx and Engels were alive today, they would fully agree that at the present time there is only one way of obtaining amelioration for the proletariat and that is to usher in the socialist society as quickly as possible.

Further, if amelioration were possible, surely it could not be obtained by joining the capitalists in promoting measures prompted by economic necessity and the desire to stave off the collapse of Capitalism. How amelioration could at all be achieved unless enforced by the antagonism of the class struggle is for a Socialist impossible to comprehend.

 

It was such people as Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg who brought the enlightenment and knowledge that led to the elevation of socialism to the powerful science and the political creed of the International proletariat. But apart from the great services these men rendered to mankind, we must not forget the devotion and faithfulness they at all times bore to the suffering proletariat, never flinching, never yielding, although at times bowed down by their own personal suffering, by their own individual misery.

Seeing in their teachings our guide, our refuge, and our hope for human emancipation, endeavouring to emulate their moral strength, and their uncompromising revolutionary attitude, we invite all men and women of a similar mind to ours to rally and thus help us to keep aloft our banner: “No Reform, no Compromise—but unconditional surrender of the existing capitalists in favour of the free World Socialism”

As is usual in politics, the liberal media are endeavouring to show how much superior would be the government by the Labour Party faction to that of the Conservatives. Yes, an opportunity to make this world a little less like Hell than it is for millions of our people as the leftists assert. Only that and nothing more. Capitalism is Hell for the workers.

There is only one way by which they can get out of it, and that is by organising for the revolution, by joining the party of the revolution, the Socialist Party.