Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Let's save the planet – Let's have socialism

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.” Marx, Capital

Humanity’s and civilisation's survival can only be guaranteed by the vision of world socialism. If the goal is turning out more billionaires with an ever-growing GDP, giving control of the planet to profit-maximising corporations. If your goal is the well-being of people and the community then abandon capitalism. It's a straightforward choice if you are concerned about the interests of the people. We the people will need to make our demands for a sustainable thriving future and organise the path to its achievement. Let us not be distracted from that cause by political debates to divert our attention from proposals that replaces the capitalist system with a series of palliative reforms, to do so, too risks mankind's possible existence. Let’s make people's potential central to our vision of the future—a future that offers hope instead of a doomsday scenarios. There’s no guarantee that we can still solve the climate problem. One can understand for pessimism, but not for apathy, especially at these most desperate moments. Through creative visionary forms of action and political struggle, we can halt the climate-driven collapse, and point the way toward a different world. It is more necessary than ever to sustain a hope that humanity can unite to reject false solutions to the climate crisis.

Capitalism demands we pretend all is well and carry on business as usual while climate chaos breaks out all around us. Industrialised agriculture ‘works’ by externalising environmental costs. Manufacturing ‘works’ by externalising pollution and waste. Commercial fishing ‘works’ by externalising the costs of over-netting and depletion. Transportation 'work' by the externalising of greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental devastation is fundamental for capitalism to make ‘work’ at all. Markets and prices mystifies the social costs. Loot and pillage is far more profitable than sustainable methods of production.

Many still believe that the crisis isn’t actually that critical and we can still avert an environmental catastrophe by some lifestyle changes, a few pieces of regulatory legislation and a bit of geoengineering technology. Many turn a blind eye to the climate emergency as they also do to the rising wealth disparity between the rich and the poverty-stricken, worsening racism and xenophobia and the intensifying migrant and refugee crisis. Wherever you look in the world today you will see suffering. Millions live in misery because they lack sufficient money to buy the necessities for a decent comfortable life. Poverty and insecurity face the great majority. We face a grim future of a capitalist race to the bottom, with increasingly extreme deprivation on a global scale. But there is a better path to take. Humanity's solidarity is required to realise a liberated and truly interdependent global cooperative commonwealth of socialist communities.

If capitalism is permitted to continue, say goodbye to a livable world. Many people imagine some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmarish dystopia where the horrors of our own past  return, the collapse of infrastructure and industry, disruption to food supplies and healthcare, leading to famine and plague. Our popular culture of movies, TV shows and computer games are full of such scenarios. It is a terrifying depiction of the future. The Socialist Party offers an alternative vision. There exists another possible sustainable society. We advocate something better and argue it is something that works.

Socialism means producing wealth solely and directly for free use by all. All the resources and machinery for producing wealth will be taken into the hands of the community as a whole, and work will be organised through voluntary co-operation, not the economic force of the wages system. Society's principle will be: "from each according to ability, to each according to need". It is only by free and open discussion that the workers can grasp the essentials of their present condition of servitude and the way to abolish it. Until they have this knowledge it matters little which of the capitalist parties they support. The only sensible way to organise society is for the satisfaction of human needs—that is, on the basis of ownership by everybody of the means of life and access for everybody to everything there is.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with humans as a species which makes us incompatible with our surroundings. It is not innate within us to destroy and devastate the environment that sustains us. We can shape the world to fit our desires that does not jeopardise our survival. We are caught up in a cancerous capitalist system, driven by the demands of growth and profit that it must devour, exploit and expand at the expense of the environment. Undoing this is beyond the scope of any series of laws or single country. It requires the transformation of our global economic system to bring it into balance with the planet. We need socialism the only means to achieve a sustainable steady-steady economy required for survival of our civilisation if not our species. Our challenge now is to address global problems like climate change and, at the same time, create an economy that it meets the needs of people and the planet. We need to take on those Green catastrophists and promote technology and real democracy to face down the spectre of austerity green capitalism in order to kill this pernicious and dastardly capitalist system once and for all.it is not the ongoing climate catastrophe that is destroying the Earth. It is capitalism. The climate catastrophe is being generated by the behaviour of capitalists. But 24-hour news channels can’t tell us about the true story because they are bought and paid for, owned and controlled by the elite. It is impossible to offer alternatives for a better tomorrow without understanding present times. We live in a world where Vox Populi (the voice of the people) is replaced by the commands of capitalists where the market and money dominate the social, economic, political, cultural spheres. We live in a society where people are imprisoned by economic laws. Capital is free and labour in chains.

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