What socialism will be like

 

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. A handful of parasites live off the backs of the workers. Under capitalism, the fundamental contradiction in society is between the social character of production and the private ownership of the means of production. More and more workers come to work together in modern industry, which is capable of providing for the needs of all the people. But the means of production are in the hands of an ever-smaller number of billionaires whose only goal is to maximise profits.

 In Marxist class terms, this contradiction translates into the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There can never be class peace between exploiter and exploited, between boss and worker. The working class cannot end exploitation and poverty unless it overthrows the capitalist system. It must sweep away the nightmare of capitalism. Only socialism can respond to the just aspirations of the working class.

It is from the labour of working people that the capitalists have grown rich. The workers own no means of production and are forced to sell their labour power to the capitalists in order to live. The workers receive a wage that corresponds roughly to the value of labour power. Their surplus labour increases or helps increase capital. The working class has no role of direction in the division of labour and is subject to the rigid discipline of capitalist production. The workers produce the riches of society. It is their labour that turns the wheels of modern industry.

Capitalism cannot be fixed. It must be replaced by an economic system that replaces a worldwide system of production for need and wants and not profits. A world shared by all. Reorganizing our economic system into one that produces the things people need and want instead of production for profit will free the world.

Workers would contribute our labour to society and society would distribute the wealth that our labour produces equally among all people according to need and want. We could produce things that are designed to last ending “built-in obsolescence”—i.e., products designed to break down forcing us to continually replace them and creating enormous amounts of waste. We could take all the necessary measures to make sure that all production is safe for human beings and the environment because the cost of safe production would no longer be an issue. We would be able to automate industry to the fullest degree freeing up workers’ time for personal development and leisure. All borders would be torn down, and all the wealth produced by labour would belong to all, equally everywhere.

 Our first concern would become the well-being of all life on Earth and the health of our planet. We have the modern-day wherewithal to carry this out. We have the ability with the world-wide-web to calculate all the things that are needed by people and design our products to fulfil those needs free of the profit motive. Instead of a tiny minority of capitalists stealing the wealth we workers produce, all that wealth could be put back into schools, housing, hospitals, clean water supplies, and cleaning up the oceans, air and land. We could restore our environment.

Socialism will put an end to the exploitation of man by man. It will bring freedom to all those oppressed by capital and open up a new period of history for working people. Gone will be the anarchy of capitalist production. The vast riches of our planet, its lands, forests, mineral resources, lakes and rivers as well as the means of production, for the common benefit of all. There will be an end to all exploitation. The wealth will be the property of the people and not of individual capitalists. Socialism will guarantee the well-being of all the people who will run society and the economy from top to bottom. The resources of society will be distributed according to the needs of the people, not to satisfy a few capitalists’ hungers for profits as is the case today. The quality of everyday life will improve. The enormous waste of capitalism will be abolished. There will be no more needless destruction of our environment. 

This is not a Utopian fantasy.  The real fantasy is believing that the capitalist class will become more benevolent and that their wealth will trickle down to us.  That’s the pipe dream!

Dave Rovics - The Commons (music)

 

Humanity is sleepwalking towards catastrophe

 

Hunger, poverty, racism, sexism and many forms of repression, are still the lot of the majority of the people of the world.  The gap between the rich and the poor, between the powerful and the dispossessed, is widening. Capitalists have only one reason for existing – to accumulate more and more capital. The two classes in our society, the working class and the employing class are locked in a bitter struggle. A handful of capitalists control our country and make fabulous profits off the labour of working people. All the major means of production - the factories, the mines, communications and transportation – are concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists who employ millions of workers. For working people, the future is becoming less and less certain. The exploitation and oppression grow worse every year. All this misery is created so a small clique of the very wealthy can continue to enrich themselves. 

Every bit of capitalists’ vast wealth was stolen from the people. It’s the capitalists who appropriate the fruits of our labour. At the end of a work week, the worker collects his or her pay. The capitalists claim this is a fair exchange. But it is highway robbery. In reality, a worker gets paid for only a small part of the value he or she produced. The rest, the surplus value, goes to the boss.  The more they keep wages down and reduce the number of employees with productivity, the more they can steal from us and the greater their profits.  It is a myth that everyone can get rich under this system, a lie invented by the rich themselves. Under capitalism, the only way to get rich is to trample on someone else. This is why workers have only one choice: either submit to wage slavery or abolish it

Capitalism has created the very conditions for its own destruction. Capitalism, undermined by its own contradictions, will inevitably be overthrown, just as all previous systems of class exploitation, including slavery and feudalism, have been. The working class has as its historic mission to abolish class society. A socialist revolution is the only way that the working people can ensure the abolition of all exploitation.

Our lives are not easy but some live in opulence based on the sweat and toil of working people. This is due to the profit motive. As Karl Marx points out, profit is a form of theft and wage slavery of the worker. The exploited aspire to a better life where the living conditions of all would be in keeping with society’s ability to use the wealth of nature. They yearn for a society where all injustice would be banished forever, a society where the weak would no longer be oppressed by the strong, and a society in which one class would no longer be exploited by another. We need socialism for satisfying our needs. While the most that these reformist parties want to do is soften the workers’ conditions of exploitation a bit, the Socialist Party wants to eliminate this exploitation completely. 

Ours is a revolutionary party. It isn’t just trying to improve capitalism, it intends to build socialism. It aims to organise and empower working people so that they can collectively transform society.  Our Party will be a working-class party based on the theory of Marxism. Our Party will uphold internationalism and solidarity with workers around the world. The fundamental interests of workers in one country are the same throughout the world. A socialist revolution is inseparable from a world revolution. 

The dreams of the past have become real possibilities for the future because the material conditions necessary for achieving them have been accomplished. Only socialism can put an end to the capitalist relations of exploitation that are now the fundamental obstacle to further progress for mankind. This is the meaning of the struggle for a society of abundance. The working class cannot free itself without freeing all of humanity at the same time, because the ultimate goal of its struggle is not to replace the power of one class with that of another but rather to abolish all classes. This is the only way to put an end to all the social divisions and inequalities that have characterised class societies thus far.

Socialist society is based on the free association of all individuals who work together to produce the goods necessary for their collective well-being. All will work according to their capacities and their needs will be fully satisfied. Individuals will no longer be governed by the division of labour and all opposition between city and countryside and between manual and intellectual work will be eliminated. The expropriation of the capitalists and the socialization of the means of production will lead directly to the abolition of a society divided into classes. The abolition of classes will in turn lead to the withering away of the State, and to its extinction, for the State is not, and can never be, anything other than the instrument of the dictatorship of one class over others. 

Join with us in the great cause of the socialist revolution

Marx on Communism (video)

 Scene from Howard Zinn's “Marx in Soho”

Humanity is suffering

 At a time when nations, led by madmen, charlatans and hypocrites, are suffering the blows of greedy profiteers, the Socialist Party is once again making a sincere appeal to all reasonable and practical individuals to try to avoid total destructionof civilisation and to to turn their efforts toward a rational and humane form of social organisation.

By social revolution we mean the abolition of money. By social revolution we also mean the the free availability of the means of production for all. By social revolution we mean power in the hands of everyone through worldwide cooperative associations, ensuring an equitable distribution in the interest of all. In order to best accomplish this task, we are looking for more people to join us in the Socialist Party.

We are at a crossroads of overlapping crises. Humanity is at risk because of the senseless profit-seeking mentality capitalism imposes on us. Capitalism is no longer capable of organising the production and distribution of goods that people need. Its logic of profit and capital accumulation prevents a more just and egalitarian society. The capitalist system is being increasingly shown to be  environmentally unsustainable. Responsible for much of the environmental crisis are large transnational corporations, which do not respect borders, states, governments, or the rights of peoples. Governments  provide protection for the corporations.  The  media serve their corporate masters’  interests.

We live in a world where happiness is fleeting and everything and everybody is disposable. People say the economic and social system is broken, but it isn’t. The system is rigged. It generates increasing wealth for the already rich and powerful at the expense of the majority of the people on this Earth. Billionaires and corporations measure success by their bank balance, or by share prices. Where we see climate breakdown, poverty and injustice — they see nothing but profit. It is the relentless pursuit of profit for the few which is causing the misery of the many, and pushing the planet to the point of no return. Exploitation is the central feature of capitalism.  The only path of escape is for the workers of the world to unite in opposing capitalism and recognise their fundamental unity as a class and wage war on, not with, their exploiters.

Nationalism is used to inspire populations to sacrifice in the interests of their local capitalist rulers. The history of competing interests between various governments, the huge manipulations of events and policies and the disregard for the well-being of ordinary citizens is lost in propaganda and patriotic posturing. Capitalism kills, and war is the most extreme example. Capitalists send working class men and women into battle against one another. Capitalists are willing to spill our blood whether in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, or in many other conflicts. 

 Capitalism is driving war, climate disaster, disease, poverty and hunger, racism and sexism. Why can’t abundance be shared among all workers equitably? Capitalism, run by the dominant class for their own profit, simply can’t allow it because such a system undermines profits. Why should workers tolerate such chaos? We need to put an end to capitalism, and together we can. Demonstrating in protest marches is not enough. We must create a worker-run society. We must build a whole new model of society, one we run in our interests - a society that maximises the well-being and talents of the people of the world, free of profit, racism, nationalism and sexism.

Capitalism (video)

 

Restoring Hope

 The Socialist Party always attempts to present our ideas in the clearest way possible.

Under capitalism where production is geared for private profit, society’s resources are squandered in many ways. In a profit system, one class lives by exploiting another. The Socialist Party represents the interests of the working class. It doesn’t seek merely an improvement of the conditions of the workers under capitalism, but the abolition of this system of scarcity and insecurity and its replacement by a society of security and plenty for all, an end the exploitation of man by man for all time; to eliminate wars and hunger.

Why does Big Business resist wage increases on the pretext that these will spur inflation. The explanation is simple. The corporations are aiming to defend their blood-stained profits and add billions more they expect to grab from future production. All the talk about the “danger” of inflation is designed to conceal this central fact and thereby deceive the workers and deny their wage demands. It should be understood, first of all, that an increase in wages does not necessarily bring about increased prices. It does mean, however, a direct and immediate reduction in the capitalists’ rate of profit. That is why employers stubbornly resist the wage rises for their workers. That is also why the capitalistsfalsely argue that wage increases bring about inflation.

This exploitative system of  capitalism in direct conflict with the interests of the vast majority of the people throughout the world. The wealth of this society was and is created by working people, yet our human labour is expropriated by individual profiteers and by corporate elites who enrich themselves at the expense of those who make the products and deliver services. Working people are exploited when a portion of their human labour is stolen from them by the capitalists for the sake of profits. The relationship of the capitalist class to the working class is inevitably exploitative. This is the essence of class society. We have no common ground, no basis for alliance, no social peace with the ruling class as long as it exists.

We must bring about the end of the present economic and political system that is imposed upon our lives – the system of  capitalism. This system is inherently based on misery and exploitation. It profits a wealthy few at the expense  of working people.  It is a system  controlled by a small number of extremely rich – a ruling class – who use all  major institutions, including the government, to protect their interests and wealth. In a class society, the dominant economic class makes and enforces the rules. Socialism is not just an ideal. It is a workable system where political and economic power is held and used to benefit not just a handful of people, but all people. 

Working people exist under a system of wage slavery. In order to survive workers have no choice but to sell their labour power at a price determined by the capitalists. As long as capitalists exist on the profits from the sale of this labour power by vast numbers of working people, these working people will have no freedom. The appropriation, by a small minority to be used for personal gain and profit, of the wealth produced by labour power must be stopped and replaced by new relations to production where the workers own and control the means of production, and their labor is for the good of the vast majority. The capitalist system can only survive by enslaving and exploiting the vast majority of people. We must change the material basis upon which the exploitation and enslavement of people exists

In order to safeguard the wealth they have robbed from us and insure more profits, it is in the interests of the capitalist class to have a divided working class. A working class that is divided is one that is not capable of defending itself or fighting in its own interests. The capitalists have a vast array of tools of oppression to keep the working class divided. They continually promote discord among us to keep us weak, fighting among ourselves, fighting against our fellow workers around the world. The Socialist Party is an organisation that fights for class unity. We see that only with a united working class can an effectively wage class war  against the capitalists. We are not talking about idle declarations of unity meant only to fill the pages of self-satisfied journals. We are talking about unity of action because we recognise that the working class must learn the lessons of the class struggle through experience.

“Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Karl Marx 

Pirates and Emperors (video)