You have the Power - Be the Change

Socialism will protect the planet from the profiteering planet-plundering capitalist class. The World Socialist Movement (WSM) is very clear about which side we are on - the people’s side.  We put forward  our socialst vision of the future to draw working people to us to organise and fight for that vision. For sure, our movement has not greatly grown, but nor has it disappeared. We need to build political power to create a socialst sharing economy. No matter who is elected,we  need to continue to build that people power. Now we need to move from protest to political action.

Dealing with climate crisis requires major transformation of our economic system. We need to challenge the illusion that governments and corporations can solve global warming. To save the planet we must overcome the ruling class. Many communities are riven with divisions – personal, social, religious, cultural, class, gender, age, sexual-orientation and of course race. Building unity across these many divides is hard, the WSM tries to break down these barriers.

One could look around today and see no opportunity for change. The reality is that these many crises offer opportunities for people  to build a better world for ourselves and future generations. The starkness of the current polarisation is an opportunity to change the debate from one of reforms to revolutionary transformation of society. Of course, there is no guarantee regarding our success but there is potential we can realise. The Socialist Party is building toward being a movement that can make transformational changes to the system. We now have the possibilities to organise in our communities, to connect with others throughout the country and around the globe.
 The World Socialist Movement is a movement of movements linking issues that seem unrelated. We are building solidarity across borders. Together we can build the power to create a new world. Socialism requires action. A worker is someone who has survived and who can create the future. 

Despite capitalism having reached perhaps one of the lowest point in its history of degradation, of suffering and misery imposed upon the peoples of the whole world political parties are openly committed to the support of capitalism and the rule of the capitalists. In the midst of a period when capitalism has most clearly proved its utter bankruptcy in solving and its utter inability to solve a single important problem facing society as climate change, politicians remain supporters of capitalist ideas. When the working class throughout the world are once more beginning to rise against this rotten, outlived social system, the reformists persist in trying to patch it up with policies couched in the language of the capitalist class itself. The Left are openly committed to the appeasement policy of the “lesser evil.” The working class are now being taught that progress no longer lies along the road of class independence and class action. Working families are being told to make  sacrifices in order to prop up the tottering structure of capitalism. Here are the facts in this country and all over the world. The working class enjoys no rights; it enjoys no power. It is gagged, bound and fettered by a ruling class, which has a complete monopoly of power, rights and privileges which looks down on you only as tools. Its only interest in you is to use you to maintain it in power. If you give up the class struggle and support capitalism now then, later, when YOU are ready to resume the class-struggle for socialism, you will find that you will have enormously strengthened the capitalist enemy, and terribly weakened, disoriented and demoralized the working class. The class struggle cannot be abolished or postponed under capitalism. The capitalists always defend their class interests. If workers do not fight as a class, capitalists will surely triumph. Do you want to be guilty of helping the enemy win?
 

The Socialist Party is still revolutionary, world socialists, irreconcilable enemies of capitalism. We have not abandoned the cause of socialism. We have never flinched from the struggle against capitalism and never forsaken the principles, of socialism. It is the time to re-dedicate yourselves to the revolutionary socialist principles and to the struggle for socialist freedom. Return to the ideas and ideals taught us by such teachers as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Turn your back on the base falsehoods and cynical treachery of the leftists who try to treat you like robots and not like revolutionary socialists. Unite in the class war against capitalism. There is a comradely place for you in the Socialist Party to help battle capitalism, with its oppression, exploitation, wars, misery and slavery.

The "Freedom" Socialist Party

All class societies are based upon and filled with social contradictions and conflicts. Capitalists are interested in production for profit, socialists in production for use. Capital is based upon a constantly increasing exploitation of labour, in order to maintain its profit; workers constantly resists this exploitation. There is and can be no such thing as a “legitimate profit,” inasmuch as all profit is derived from paying workers less than the value they add to the product. There is and can be no such thing as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” inasmuch as wages are the payment for only one part of the day’s work, the other part of which the worker is compelled to contribute to the employer in the form of surplus-value, or profit. The capitalist class always seeks to intensify the exploitation of labor by reducing wages, increasing the work-day, or speeding-up production, or by all three at once; and labor always seeks to raise its wage and working standards. Capitalist always seeks to increase their profits, which can be done only by exploiting workers and workers always seek to resist exploitation, which can be done only at the expense of profits. These are fundamental economic facts. Under capitalism, nothing that all the capitalists, or the government can succeed in wiping out these facts.

The capitalist class, of course, indoctrinate the workers from childhood that they are entitled to an “honest profit” as it is so decreed by divinity and “human nature.” They fill the heads of the workers with the idea that capitalism always existed and always will. Maybe it should be improved a little, patched up here and there, but not ended. They work hard at instilling these ideas into the heads of the people. If these ideas did not prevail, they could not retain their power. The defence of the interests of capitalism is, however, incompatible with the defence of the interests of the working class. The revolutionary idea is that the workers should organise as a separate, distinct class, independent of the capitalist class. To meet the capitalists on the economic field, the workers organised trade unions. To deal with the capitalist class on the political field, it is necessary to organise a socialist party. The class struggle is a political struggle. It cannot be fought successfully by the workers unless they have a political weapon.

When speaking of socialism and socialist revolution we seek “no condescending saviours” as our great workers’ anthem, the International, says. We do not believe that well-wishing reforms – and there are well-wishing reformers – will solve the problems of society, let alone bring socialism. We believe that task belongs to the workers, only the workers itself. Regretfully, in the so-called socialist parties, that idea does not dominate. The Socialist Party start by teaching fellow-workers to rely upon themselves. There is no socialism and no progress to socialism without the working class, without the working class revolution, without the working class in power, without the working class having been lifted to “political supremacy” to their “victory of democracy”. No socialism and no advance to socialism without it! That is our principle. That is what we build the fight for the socialist future on. That is what we’re committed to. The Left have lost their hope for the working class because for so long a period of time it has, and it does, lie dormant and seems absolutely passive. In other words, the Left have doomed the working class which, however, has shown itself so capable of so many resurgences in the past years of its struggle. They doomed it to eternal servitude. The Left cannot accept the idea that the workers can free themselves. The Socialist Party has nothing in common with such people and want nothing in common with such people in all their 57 varieties of Trotskyism.

Socialism is a system of society in which the land, the means of production, and distribution are held in common. Production is for use, as and when required, not for profit, exchange or sale. Socialism is a class-free society in which all shall have leisure and culture, and all shall be secured from want.

To the Workers of the World

The media has an excellent method of confusing the workers and keeping them under mental imprisonment. This method consists in putting up slogans and sound-bites that are lacking substance and absolutely empty of content. The greatest lie of our times, the most despicable, used to confuse the working-class is that they are not telling people that so long as the rich remain in power, so long as the destinies of every country are decided by the interests of the capitalists. The wars will continue to be fought for years and years, without any prospect of peace for the people. The world will be soaked in blood; corpses will be mountain high and war will continue because nowhere are the ruling classes able to bring, it to an end. Nowhere do the ruling classes offer the people a way out of the nightmare of suffering. There is one way out and it is not by putting or keeping people in slavery but by freeing all those who are enchained. That is what the workers must do and can do. The Socialist Party is a political party that stands irreconcilably opposed to capitalism.

It’s no good voting for a new set of leaders to manage the present planetary chaos in a slightly friendlier fashion. Even if they really wanted to, politicians can do nothing to solve the problems.

Do you really want to go on working almost every day of your life, just to generate profits for a tiny group of capitalists? Do you know that eight individuals now possess as much wealth as half of the world’s population? Do you realize how fundamentally insane that is? Do you want to live in a society more and more characterised by poverty, addiction and despair? In which children are constantly dying of hunger or being killed in wars - all completely unnecessarily? Do you want to see the natural environment trashed in the pursuit of profit?

A socialist society would not be one organised “for the many, not the few”. It would be a society that has entirely abolished such class division. Communism or socialism (the same thing, whatever the Leninists say) requires getting rid of the buying and selling system and creating a society of free access to goods and services. With the productive capabilities that exist today, there is enough for everybody to enjoy a life of abundance without undertaking any wage labour. 

Once a progressive force (for all its horrors), capitalism today is a system that generates totally unnecessary suffering for the majority of people and it is long overdue for abolition. It continues in large part because we, the working class, continue to give it legitimacy and because, whatever we might say to the contrary, we don’t really believe that there is an alternative to the market system.

What is needed is for workers to come together to bring an end to the madness of the profit system.