Don't trust in promises

 

Politicians throughout the world are resorting to all kinds of tactics and attention-getting gimmicks intended to demonstrate to the electorate that they are thoroughly honest and free of improper influence. Although some lay stress on their "integrity" and "independence,"  they disguise they may have "sold out" to special interests.

 

Every politician who has run for office has promised to do something to alleviate or eliminate the evils of poverty, crime, unemployment, pollution, and many more. Ask yourself this— Has the general quality of your living improved? Or has it worsened? Are the streets safer? Is there less crime? Is the air we breathe less polluted? Are our jobs more secure? Has poverty diminished? Has racism been eliminated?

On the contrary, hasn't every one of these evils grown worse?  Few will deny that, whatever their race or ethnic origin, we are being subjected to more discomfort, more crowding, more inconvenience, more exploitation, greater insecurity and physical danger than ever before. The politicians blame each other.

 

But the truth is that these evils have been present and worsening for decade after decade. Reform after reform has been enacted in efforts to alleviate them. But conditions have gone right on getting worse and worse. All of which demonstrates that even with the best of intentions no politician or set of politicians could prevent conditions for workers from worsening. WHY?

The explanation is easy. Politicians persist in dealing with effects and ignoring the cause.  The basic reason for our problems is the capitalist system under which we live. Capitalism today is an outmoded decadent social system. It has been so for a long time, and history fully justifies this conclusion. Consequently, the solution to our problems is not to be found in politicians, but in a whole new concept of society—a society for which the material basis exists right now.

Technological development clearly dictates the course that must be taken. Modern industry is thoroughly socialised in its organisation and operation. It has outgrown private ownership of industry and production for sale and the profit of the owning few. We are now at a point where we can produce an abundance for everyone. By establishing a new society we can prevent worsening crises and the ultimate catastrophe toward which our present society is taking us. What we are saying is that we can and must establish a socialist society. Let us explain briefly what socialism is and the kind of life we can have under it. 

In a socialist society, there will be no private ownership of the land and the industries. When we say this, we are not talking about your personal belongings. We are talking about the factories, the mills, the mines, transport—in short, the socially operated instruments used in the production and distribution of the necessities of life. We say that these must belong to society as a whole.

In a socialist society, there will be no wage system in which the workers receive in wages only a fraction of the value of the goods they produce. Instead, in socialism, we shall receive the full social value of our labour. We shall produce for use rather than for sale with a view to profit for private capitalists. We shall produce the things we want and need rather than the things for which a market exists in which the goods produced are sold for the profit of private owners.

In a socialist society, there can be no poverty or involuntary unemployment. The more producers, the better for all. Technological improvements will be a further blessing. The greater the number of workers, the better the tools, the more modern the methods, the greater and more varied will be the wealth we can produce, and the shorter the hours each of us will have to work.

Organised into one all-embracing industrial interconnected network we, the useful producers, shall manage and direct all social production, exercise all authority and make all other decisions necessary for the most efficient operation of production. When private and state ownership have been eliminated, there will be no way for social parasites, capitalistic or bureaucratic, to exist. In the nature of things, it will be impossible for any individual or group to acquire economic power and use it to exploit or suppress another human being. There will be no material basis on which a bureaucracy could establish and perpetuate itself. No one will be able to hand out offices or appoint lackeys. All in whatever capacity will be elected to be subject at all times to grassroots control. In short, we, the people, shall be in complete control of the source of all power, the economic resources of the land.

We have all the material requirements for producing an abundance. It is common knowledge that we have developed the most productive machine in the world. Once this machine is socially owned, controlled and administered, there will not be, there cannot be, conflicting material interests. We shall all be useful producers, each contributing his or her fair share to the total product. In return, each of us will receive directly and indirectly all that we produce. We say “indirectly” because we shall get part of our product back through social services—public health, education, recreation, etc. So great is our capacity to produce abundance that we can easily ensure that our youth will be educated, the aged provided for, and the sick given the finest care possible. All this will be done without depriving anyone of a fair and more than adequate share. It will not be charity but the rightful share of every human being in the affluent socialist society.

In socialism of abundance and cooperation, we shall achieve the highest standards of mental health and physical well-being. We shall enjoy great material well-being individually and collectively, but it will not be at anyone else’s expense. We shall be secure, healthy, happy human beings living in peace, harmony and freedom, in marked contrast to the capitalist jungle of strife, misery and insecurity in which we live today.

How can we get such a society? The answer is easy. Winning the struggle for socialist freedom requires building a political party of socialism to contest the power of the capitalist class on the political field, and to educate the majority of workers about the need for socialism. The working class must organise its might to back up its demand for the end of capitalism and the establishment of socialism.

There is no time to delay.

 

As COP26 approaches, more and more the urgency of resolving the global environment emergency becomes apparent.

The capitalist system carries in its wake environmental degradation and destruction. The most far-reaching example of this is global warming. The world has to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Such change will require restructuring the world’s energy, manufacturing and transportation systems. Such changes require massive investment and represent a threat to existing capitalist industries, their growth and profits. Capitalism requires profit and economic growth to survive. Capitalists want their profits now. The future has little meaning in a profit-driven society.

Workers today continue to live under the shadow of climate catastrophes, but in a socialist society, workers could enjoy a material abundance without in any way compromising their health of the planet. The many social problems of capitalism increasingly threaten the lives and well-being of workers, it becomes more and more imperative that they recognise the need to organize politically and economically to take control of the economy, abolish class-divided capitalism and administer production through their own democratic bodies. 

Socialists can bring many important insights to the questions and concerns raised by technology and the environment. The socialist understanding is that in a profit-motivated capitalist economy, technology will inevitably be developed and applied in an unsafe and environmentally destructive manner. No solution to the current danger can be found by taking the problem out of the social context in which it exists. The primary problem with any technology under capitalism is that it is controlled by a ruling-class minority that manipulates technology to serve its narrow economic interests. The task of the Socialist Party is to consistently emphasise the need to free all technology from the fetters of capitalist productive relations.

 Socialists clearly favour technological progress and the general expansion of society's productive forces. Accordingly, socialists do not see the answer in a technological retrogression of capitalist society. For one thing, it is utopian to suggest that society can or will return to a lower level of material development. Moreover, workers' interests directionally lie in furthering, rather than limiting, economic progress. Socialists thus seek to transform society into one based on new social relationships that will allow the worker-majority to become the master of technology, rather than vice versa.

On the other hand, this does not mean that socialists blindly support technology. All technological innovation is not progress, and a socialist society may well decide that the hazards of particular technology renders of no use. Nor should Socialists foster the illusion that the debates on the environment will miraculously disappear with the advent of socialism. Socialist revolution will clearly sound the death knell of the profit-motive and the militarism which have generated the threat to ecology. But socialism is no panacea.

Clearly, the socialist perspective has thus far failed to impress itself on the environmental movement which continues to be dominated by anti-technology currents, apolitical supporters of techno-fixes and capitalist politicians and other liberal reformers. Environmental reforms are not the answer. Capitalism has eroded even those feeble efforts of the past.

To capitalism falls the task of justifying its technological horrors on the basis of picking the lesser evil. To socialism falls the task of turning technology from the horror it currently is to the benefactor of an emancipated working class.

In a socialist society, people would democratically make the decisions on how the resources available to a society are to be used, what energy sources are to be developed, what goods are to be produced, etc. and collectively hold full decision-making power over the use of all technology. With the abolition of the profit motive and the transformation of the means of production from private into social property, such decisions would be made not by a minority to serve its own vested interests, but by the working-class majority, which could rationally assess the overall impact of any decision would have on the general welfare.

If the future is not to be plagued with the floods, droughts and other catastrophes predicted related to global warming, the political and economic system of capitalism must end. The Socialist  Party urges fellow workers to abolish capitalism and introduce socialist production for use. Workers must understand their latent economic and potential political power as operators of the industries and services and begin integrating the protest campaigns and resistance movements into one movement with the goal of building a new society with completely different motives for production—human needs and wants instead of profit—and organise their own political party to challenge the political power of the capitalists, express their mandate for change at the ballot box and dismantle the state altogether.


The new society they must aim for must be one in which society itself, not a wealthy few, would own the industries and services, and the workers themselves would control them democratically through their own organisations based in the workplaces. In such a society, the workers themselves would make decisions governing the economy, electing representatives to industrial councils and to a workers’ congress representing all the industries that would administer the economy.


Such a society is what is needed to solve the environmental crisis. By placing the economic decision-making power of the nation in the hands of the workers, by eliminating capitalist control and the profit motive in favour of a system in which workers produce to meet their own needs and wants, the necessary resources and labour could be devoted to halting global warming, employing the renewable resources we now have available and develop new ones, and clean up the damage already done.

This is what is meant by socialism

  

Because of the imminent arrival of COP26 attendees in Glasgow, many more of us understand that the most serious problem facing society today is the climate crisis and its environmentally destructive consequences. The list of bad news on the environment is seemingly unending. Each of the ecological problems represents a serious danger in its own right. The longer the ongoing and worsening process of environmental degradation continues, the more difficult it will be to halt and reverse. Resolute and decisive action is long overdue. The laws that have been enacted and regulatory agencies that have been established have often been undermined by the very corporations and firms responsible for global warming. The regulations themselves have been watered down; undeveloped countries aren't funded adequately to act on them and are frequently corrupted by corporate interests; enforcement of even inadequate regulations has been poor, raising the question of whether the laws and regulations were frequently intended to be anything more than window dressing.

To understand why regulation hasn't worked and what kind of action will work to end this worsening environmental nightmare, it must be understood that the environmental crisis is fundamentally an economic and class issue. Its cause lies in the nature of the capitalist economic system.

 Environmental destruction is not an inevitable by-product of modern industry. Methods exist or can readily be developed to safely neutralise, recycle or contain it. Less polluting, less wasteful forms of technology can be built. Adequate supplies of food can be grown without deadly pesticides. The problem is that, under capitalism, the majority of people have no power to make these kinds of decisions about production. Under the capitalist system, production decisions are made by the small, wealthy minority that owns and controls the industries and services—the capitalist class. And the capitalists who make up that class make their decisions to serve, first and foremost, one goal—that of maximising profit for themselves. That is where the environmental crisis begins. From the capitalist point of view, it is generally less costly to dump pollutants into the environment than to invest in pollution-control equipment or pollution-free processes. It is more profitable to continue fossil fuel production as it is rather than invest more heavily in solar, wind or other alternative energy sources. Likewise with every other aspect of the environmental crisis: Socially harmful decisions are made because, in one way or another, they serve the profit interests of the capitalist class.

Capitalist-class rule over the economy also explains why government regulation is so ineffective: under capitalism, the government itself is essentially a tool of the capitalist class. Politicians may be elected “democratically,” but because they are financed, supported and decisively influenced by the economic power of the capitalist class, democratic forms are reduced to a farce. The capitalist class and its government will never be able to solve the environmental crisis. They and their system are the problems. It is up to the majority of people to end this crisis.

The goal is building a new society with completely different motives for production—human needs and wants instead of profit—and to organise our own political party to challenge the political power of the capitalists at the ballot box and dismantle the state altogether.

The new society must be one in which society itself, not a wealthy few, would own the industries and services, and the workers themselves would control them democratically through their own organizations based in the workplaces. In such a society, the people themselves would make decisions administrating the economy.

Such a society is what is needed to solve the environmental crisis. By placing the economic decision-making power of the nation in the hands of the workers, by eliminating capitalist control and the profit motive in favour of a system in which workers produce to meet their own needs and wants, the necessary resources and labour could be devoted to stop pollution at its source and clean up the damage already done.

Many people believe that socialism means government or state ownership and control. Who can blame them when that is what the schools teach and what the media, politicians and others who oppose socialism say? Worse, some people and organisations that call themselves socialist say it, too—but not the Socialist Party. Socialism is something entirely different. 

If the government or state ownership is not socialism, what is? Socialism means economic democracy. Workers would be making decisions every day where they work and in the field in which they are most qualified. Here is where their vote counts because it vitally affects their own personal lives.  When we use the word “worker,” we mean everyone who sells his or her labour-power, or ability to work, at so much per hour, or so much per week, to a capitalist employer. Coal miners are workers, but so are musicians, scientists, nurses, teachers, architects, engineers and mathematicians. In a socialist society, there would be no wage system. Workers would receive the social value of their labour. And since the people would collectively own the industries, anyone would be free to select any occupation in which he or she has an interest and aptitude. No longer would workers live under the fear of being laid off, or be compelled to spend their lives at some job they hate or are unsuited for. Also, since the people would collectively own the colleges and universities, no longer would workers be denied education or training because they lack the money to buy it.

Socialism we would produce for use and to satisfy the needs of all the people. Under capitalism, the industries operate for one purpose—to earn a profit for their owners. Under this system, food is not grown primarily to be eaten. It is grown to be sold. Cars are not manufactured primarily to be driven. They are made to be sold. If there are enough buyers here and abroad, then the capitalists will have their factories turn out cars, appliances, pianos and everything else for which buyers can be found. But if people lack money, if the domestic and foreign markets cannot absorb them, then these factories shut down and the country stagnates, no matter how much people need these commodities.

 With socialism, the factories and industries would be used to benefit all of us, not restricted to the creation of profits for the enrichment of a small group of capitalist owners. Under socialism our farmlands would yield an abundance without great toil; the factories, mines and mills would be the safest, the most modern, the most efficient possible and productive beyond our wildest dreams—and without laborious work. Our natural resources would be intelligently conserved. Our schools would have the finest facilities and they would be devoted to developing complete human beings, not wages slaves who are trained to hire themselves out for someone else’s profit. Our hospitals and social services would create and maintain the finest health and recreational facilities.

Under capitalism industrial technology is used to replace workers and increase profits. Instead of creating a society of abundance, capitalism uses machinery to create unemployment and poverty. Our inner cities have been converted largely into festering slums in which impoverished people, not understanding the cause of their miseries, are imprisoned and damned to a life of misery.

It is not technology that threatens us. By themselves, improved methods of production and distribution are not social evils. They could be a blessing, but under capitalism, technology is used for antisocial purposes. This follows from the fact that technology and industry are the exclusive property of a small minority —the capitalist class. Capitalism uses the industries for the private profit of their owners and not for the benefit of the vast majority of the people—the workers who invented and built them.

In a socialist society, on the other hand, since we would collectively own the factories and means of production, we would have full and free access to the means of wealth production and distribution. Since we would receive the full social value of our labour there would be no unwanted surplus. We would collectively produce the things we want and need for full and happy lives. It would be to the benefit of all to find new inventions, new means of production, improved means of distribution.

 Society as a whole would have a vital interest in providing the opportunity to each individual to find the work for which he or she is best suited and in which he or she will be happiest. There would be the fullest freedom and opportunity.

And, we repeat, there would be a complete and full democracy. Democracy that will truly be based on the broadest lines. Democracy in which the final and only power will be the great mass of our people, the useful producers, which in a socialist society would mean everybody. Society no longer would be split into two contending classes. Instead, we would all be useful producers, collectively owning the means of production and distribution, collectively concerned with producing the most with the least expenditure of human labour, and collectively jealous of the rights of the individual to a full, free life of happiness.

How can we get such a society? The answer is easy. It is within the power of the working class to establish such a society as soon as they recognise the need for it and organise to establish it.

While Capitalism Prevails Atrocities Will Always Be.

At the time of writing 48 churches have been burned down or vandalized in the last 2 months, since the news of the genocide committed against indigenous children was revealed. Most of them were Catholic since they ran the residential schools where the children were murdered. 

Though Prime Minister Trudeau and Indigenous leaders have appealed for it to stop, nevertheless it continues, including churches that are not Catholic. However bitter one may understandably feel about atrocities, bitterness alone is not enough. Bitterness fused with the understanding that as long as capitalism prevails atrocities will always be. To sum up the state of things in Canada, July 31, it's pretty bad, or should I say ugly bad.

Fires are out of control in B.C.; there are fires in other provinces and smoke from them engulfing other areas, which with the intense heat and humidity are health hazards. This is exacerbated by the drought in most of western and central Canada, in fact, some rivers are in danger of drying up. The pandemic was on the decline is on the rise and causing the cost of living to go sky-high. Crime in general and gun violence, in particular, is on the rise in major cities. 

So, things ain't exactly wonderful in Canada and since capitalism is a worldwide system, Canada stumbles lockstep with too many people and places suffering the same plight.

S.P.C. Members.

 

Capitalism comes in all forms

 

Getting something for nothing is the great anathema of the right-wing. They abhor the very thought of a single mom or a jobless dad on the dole, living off the government’s “welfare state.” Capitalism condemns millions to lives of poverty and despair just to enhance the worthless lives of a few. It is not the welfare queens or the “idle” unemployed who bleed society. It is the capitalist vampire that is sucking the working class dry. Speaking on behalf of the capitalist class, the intellectual lackeys answer that workers have been asking for, and getting, too much, from the government. Workers have demanded too much improvement in air and water quality, too much job security and safety, too much retirement pensions, too much health care, too much protection from racism, too many holidays, too much pay, etc. Gone are the days of expanding State spending on social services. Economic austerity is the order of the day.

Getting something for nothing is what capitalism is all about and it is what capitalists do best. Indeed, that is all they do. Capitalists do not earn, or create, or build anything. They live by profiting from the work done by others. They live off the labour of the working class. The names these two classes bear tell the story. Workers work and capitalists capitalise on the work that workers do. Capitalism exists and can only exist as a system of exploitation. Capitalists are the exploiters and workers are the exploited.

Working people are being victimised by an array of absurd contradictions. Basic needs like housing and health remain unmet while billions of dollars are being spent on the military and the armament industry.  While millions of working people suffer poverty goods that could serve their needs sit in warehouses, inaccessible to the working people who need but can’t buy them. Education, transport and other social services are being curtailed or eliminated for “lack of funds.” Less spending citizens generally means higher budgets to protect capitalist investments. Profit-motivated production and private ownership of the economy are the hidden causes of our misery and current divisive policies are fostered to increase competition among workers for the limited number of jobs and restricted access to social services that capitalism has to offer. In this way, the ability of workers to mount a unified defence against enforced austerity is crippled.

The needs of workers are never met. This is so because the capitalist economy does not operate to meet workers’ needs. It operates for capitalist profit. That profit is generated through the exploitation of working people—that is, by paying workers wages that amount to only a fraction of the wealth they collectively produce. Profits are made not primarily by cheating in the market or arbitrarily adding a “profit margin” to the price of a commodity. Instead, they come from appropriating at the point of production the greater portion of the values labour creates.

A socialist economy is based on the common ownership of industry. Production would be for social use instead of for private profit. Through representatives elected by workers where they work, they would democratically administer the industries and make all economic decisions. Resources would be allocated and production would be carried out on the basis of social needs and wants. A socialist economy would thereby free society of the limitations now imposed by capitalism. Such a society will not, of course, come into existence by itself. If the working-class majority is to become master of the economic forces, rather than its victims, workers must organise to gain control from the capitalist class to lay the foundation for a socialist society. Working people must break with the political parties of the capitalist class and independently organise politically around their common class interests for the transformation of the present economy into a socialist economy run by, and in the interests of, working people.

In regards to the environment, despite their lip-service, industrialists and politicians utter not a word about the waste and destruction of raw materials and natural resources by the anarchy of capitalist production—its unplanned, irrational duplication of effort in a mad, competitive drive by each capitalist to “capture” the market—or the bulk of it—for his corporation. Not a word is mentioned about the manner in which every corporation is trying to exploit the existing circumstances to destroy its competition and entrench itself more solidly as one of the few that control the overwhelming proportion of the nation’s resources and wealth. Nor a word said about the incredible waste and destruction, not only of finite resources but of human life itself, through capitalist wars and continuous preparations for ever more destructive wars.

The issue confronting the peoples of the world is not the climate crisis that threatens to grow worse. Those are merely the effects of the issue. The real issue is, shall we continue to tinker with those effects or shall we get rid of their cause—the capitalist system and replace it with socialism—a system of social ownership, democratic management and planned production for use. The issue, literally, is survival. The harm and damage already done to all of us and to our environment by capitalism are beyond exact calculation. If it is not abolished and replaced with a viable Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth it will destroy itself. And there is the distinct possibility that it may destroy humanity and the world in the process.

That can happen, but it need not happen. And it won’t happen if all who realise the need for a socialist reconstruction of society join with us to appeal to our proletarian brothers and sisters of every race, of every colour, of every creed, to organise their latent political and industrial might as a class to accomplish the revolutionary change to socialism and thus guarantee the future safety and well-being of the human race.

Social Justice is Socialism

 Working people run society from top to bottom. The potential political and economic power that rests in their hands is enormous. The workers are in the best strategic position to take possession in an orderly yet resolute manner via elections. With socialism, all power to make social decisions will be vested in the people. Socialist society will be administered democratically from bottom to top by representatives elected directly by the citizens in each neighbourhood and industry and subject to their control. Production will be carried out to satisfy the people’s wants. The useful producers will receive in goods and services the social equivalent of their work. Those unable to work will share in that abundance. There is nothing which in any way resembles the workings of class-divided capitalism and its political state.

 

Our freedoms and liberties are not mere privileges we enjoy by the grace of the ruling class. They were wrested from tyrants by our forebears at the cost of their blood. Capitalism is increasingly incompatible with freedom and democracy. To save capitalism, its ruling class must destroy freedom and democracy. To save freedom and democracy, the capitalist system, the system of economic despotism, must be destroyed. Socialist democracy alone can fully guarantee lasting freedom and democracy. While many liberals, reformers and other supporters of the capitalist system are sincerely opposed to white supremacy and police violence, they are blind to the fundamental causes of both crime and injustice within capitalist society. They will not alter the social conditions that produce capitalism’s need to maintain a form of “law and order” that is designed to protect the system and the ruling class from the consequences of the larger crimes it commits against the working class as a whole. They attribute it to prejudice without asking themselves what it is about the society in which we live that creates these prejudices. The Socialist  Party opposes the political state for the vicious and hypocritical thing it is. At the same time, however, socialists do not permit themselves to fall victim to any illusions about capitalism’s capacity to dispense any other form of justice than ruling class justice. The Socialist Party maintain that the solution to class-based prejudices and viciousness of capitalist “justice” is the abolition of the crime breeder—of capitalism itself. The oligarchy’s need for a new level of repression and restriction of democratic rights can no longer be doubted. Working people are losing their democratic rights and civil liberties at an alarming and accelerating pace.

Fundamental freedoms are being eroded and taken away. The government itself has become the number one violator of democratic rights. Its intelligence agencies routinely ignore every constitutional protection, compile files on tens of thousands of citizens, spy, hack into computers and mobile phones to monitor dissidents daily taking on more of the trappings of a secret police force. To enforce “order” as it sees it, the ruling class hires mercenaries drawn from the working class. These are the police, one of the armed branches of the political state. Any movement aspiring to bring about social change must be prepared to deal with a State willing and capable of turning its military—ostensibly produced to fend off foreign enemies—against its own citizens. That means a movement that understands the need for education first, then political and industrial organisation to enforce the will of the majority in face of the anti-social tendencies of the capitalist system and its political tools.

Free elections, supposedly the most basic process of democracy, no longer exist. They are largely restricted to two capitalist parties and packaged by media which censor nearly all another political opinions. What was once a free ballot is today a restrictive bureaucratic maze of polling rules that effectively keeps the political process controlled and contained at the very time society's problems call for new revolutionary ideas. Access to the means of communication, a fundamental condition of meaningful free speech, is blocked by monopoly control of the news media and social media for corporate profit. The right to strike is under persistent attack by both the courts and legislatures. More and more unions are forced to face injunctions and fines.

 

Dissent and discontent are always a threat to a small tyrannical class and the capitalist class is no exception. Its system has created problem upon problem which it cannot solve but can only repress. Its only response to crime is repression. Its only response to opposition to its imperialist foreign policy is repression. Its only response to growing resistance to poverty, unemployment, racism and the anarchy of its system is repression and more repression. To put it simply, the capitalist class is passing repressive laws to protect itself from its own people. The ruling class seeks to keep the working majority from using democratic rights to organise itself.

The right to engage in free and open political activity, to use free speech and a free press to expose official lies and deceptions, the right to fundamentally alter society, all pose a threat to continued capitalist rule. Repression is fast becoming the only means left to block change and hold the system together. In short, capitalism is becoming totally incompatible with democratic freedoms. The longer it continues, the more thoroughly it will try to sweep away the hard-won democratic gains of the past.

Unlike the ruling class, workers and the socialist movement have a definite interest in seeing democracy preserved and extended. Democratic rights are vital to the working class, which must defend them at every point. Likewise, democracy is inseparable from socialism, which is based on democratic majority control of every social institution, including the economy.

Society has reached a point where capitalism and democracy are irreconcilable enemies, one declining in proportion to the advance of the other. To reverse the current trend toward repression, to defend the rights now under attack, and to make democracy a reality in every sphere of life, a socialist reorganisation of society has become absolutely essential.