The cause of socialism is the advancement of the material and spiritual wealth of humanity and the freedom and fulfillment of each individual human within society.
Socialism, by giving power and priority to the working class population as producers of social wealth and social resources, is the only system that can attain social equality, rational economic decision-making and world peace.
Socialism represents the revolutionary transformation of human economic and cultural practice. A socialist society is one which enables full economic and social investment in education, the building of infrastructure and the application and refinement of scientific knowledge.
Socialism ensures direct democracy and citizens governance through which is consolidated the fundamental human right to real representation in economic and political decision-making and a guaranteed high standard of living. The universal right to peace, inclusive international cooperation and resolution of global conflicts is only possible under socialism.
The end result of this new practice is the optimal development of every individual’s potential and that of human civilization.
To achieve this end socialism requires the abolition of capitalism, a system of exploitation, inequality and violence. The world today consists of deep social inequality, with the top 1% of the world’s population controlling 90% of the planet’s social wealth. War and poverty are the daily experience of billions of people. Millions of working class people even in the richest countries live paycheck to paycheck and have seen their standard of living decline from decade to decade for half a century. Access to high quality healthcare, housing, and the necessities of life is precarious in every corner of the globe. The growing threat of a major war between the largest nations poses the question of the survival of humanity. Global warming, a product chiefly of uncontrolled and unregulated capitalist industrial activity, has as its solution only the abolition of capitalism and a rational system of economy. The effects of global warming that have already been triggered and will set in within the next half-century can only be dealt with by massive investment in infrastructure, economic planning and the advancement of science in every field of life. Capitalism is incapable of resolving any of the crises it has set into motion.
To lay the foundations for a socialist society workers will take over the means of production. They must seize the commanding economic and political heights of society and institute direct democracy.
Socialism as a political perspective was not invented out of the blue. It is not the product of a prophet’s vision. Socialism is the necessary logical response to the failure of capitalism. The economic and scientific development of human society has given humanity the resources to supersede class and profit based society. Humanity can rid itself of elitist forms of governance and replace these with a rational democratic system. This presents a revolutionary challenge. The capitalist minority who benefits from the current arrangements of power is bound to come into direct conflict with the mass of the population in order to preserve their privileged position. Even amid the crises and breakdown of capitalism the ruling class will not stand to one side and allow the introduction of socialist measures. They do not want their wealth and power redistributed to the working class.
The working class will subordinate economic production to the democratic will of the working class and their real needs. The working class will institute a guaranteed living wage. This includes the guaranteed right to quality healthcare, housing, utilities, food and other basic necessities. The working class will ensure the right to full and fair employment for all, with the right to free time and resources for families. Human needs will replace the previous need for profit. Economic production and services will be based on consumer needs and expectations, not on squeezing consumers or separating them into haves and have nots. The military and war industry apparatuses will be dismantled and the social wealth sunk into those unproductive sectors of the economy will be used instead to enrich the lives and living standards of the population. Democratic, grassroots council democracy will be established, where citizens have direct control over social and economic decision making. Today there are divisions between countries, where some countries exploit others and all try to take advantage of each other, leading to the squandering of opportunities in international development. The working class will establish a borderless, open, democratically centralized planet where each individuals’ life is important no matter where they were born.
Socialism’s detractors use socialism as a swear word. Socialism is said to represent something like pure evil. This is nothing but a defense of class privilege. These figures themselves are not paragons of virtue and truth. Among the foremost champions of continued capitalism are the corporate media, privileged academics, and hypocritical politicians who make a career out of making working people suffer. All of these forces have aided and abetted dictatorship and conditions of injustice and inequality around the globe without blinking an eye. The continuation of capitalism, ruinous to the planet and the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants, is for them instead a ticket to a comfortable, complacent existence. It doesn’t matter that this is short-sighted for their class as well. Every lie and distortion of historical experience is brought out to pile mythological horror stories at the feet of socialism. At the center of all of these lies is the aristocratic denial of the potential of ordinary working people to achieve social equality and direct control over their own destinies.
Socialism is a science oriented worldview, a combination of thoroughgoing humanism, enlightenment values, a rational approach to social organization and dedication to social equality. Socialism supersedes any of the social ideals of an earlier period which were limited by their reliance on empty moral appeals and their basic adherence to social inequality. Socialism rests on the objective necessity of adopting a rational, planned economy and a society which advances humanity forward as the tasks before humanity grow qualitatively in complexity. Empty moral appeals and attempts to simply reform the broken system of capitalism are bankrupt in the present context of the profound decline and crisis of capitalism.
Those who oppose socialism rely upon two dishonest arguments; that there exists a scarcity of human productivity to ensure equality, and that so-called human nature will prevent humans from achieving social equality. To illustrate the second point the opponents of socialism will point to various countries in the past and present which called themselves “socialist.” They use these countries as supposed proof that human nature makes it inevitable that without the capitalist market – to which all kinds of magical properties are attributed – humans automatically resort to barbaric governments and repressive societies. This is a mythology that doesn’t often touch on the real historical significance of the twentieth century. It assumes that every government should be taken for their word. Yet with this one exception nothing of the sort is done by opponents of socialism. While they deny repressive governments of Eastern Europe and Asia were democratic or free – as those governments claimed to be – they have found it convenient to agree with those regimes that they had achieved socialism. They dismiss as lies and propaganda all but the claim to having achieved socialism. In this they reveal hypocrisy and opportunism. The regimes that have called themselves socialists did so to appropriate a progressive terminology while continuing to either maintain a capitalist economy and state or some other nationalist, anti-working class arrangement. Just as those countries used the propaganda that they were socialist against their own working class, the capitalists in the Western world readily used these same lies to demoralize Western workers. A whole industry of anti-communism arose in the west to prevent the working class questioning the sordid history, pitfalls and increasingly dire consequences of capitalism in the West.
As socialism is neither a manufactured set of ideas like religion or an attempt to reform capitalism its major task is not to propagate a certain doctrine or set of beliefs but to achieve the independent organization of the working class. This means an independent self determined movement outside the capitalist political system. This includes the two parties, the trade unions, the middle-class protest movements and the present electoral system. Workers will form rank and file committees at work places and unite for common action aimed at raising the level of working-class awareness and opposition to capitalism.
Workers will found their own party, independent of the capitalist political parties and movements. This party will be opposed to capitalist governance, would-be leaders in the middle classes and the pro-big business trade unions. This party will formulate a perspective that reflects the world situation and the class struggle. It will then link up the masses of workers with this perspective in the active effort to achieve workers power. The workers, organized and united in an international workers party, will form their own decision-making bodies, workers councils and work committees. Workers will implement real democratic change by displacing the authority of the current governments, corporations, political parties and trade unions. All of these appendages of capitalism are unreformable and operate wholly in the interests of squeezing the international working class for profit.
The cause of socialism is the cause of humanity. The era of capitalism is drawing to a close, one way or another. There is almost unlimited potential to what humanity can accomplish as a unified, harmonious body dedicated to solving complex social and planetary problems in a planned, rational and democratic way. What is required is the abolition of capitalism, the most dangerous obstacle to human progress.
What Way Forward? 