Once
more, socialists have witnessed the meaningless slaughter of our
fellow-workers, this time in Sri Lanka. The Socialist Party is saddened
and outraged by the terror attacks and have no sympathy for those who
carried out those atrocities. Make no mistake about it, as members of
the working class we are repelled by the slaughter. Those lying dead
beneath the rubble are our fellow-workers. Socialists will empathise
with the feeling of popular revulsion that follows such barbaric acts
of mass murder. For someone not totally doped up on the belief of the
inseparability of god and cause, the idea of taking the lives of
other people is too utterly sick for contemplation. But as socialists
we need to take a more considered measured view of the phenomena of
terrorism.
Rarely
has a day gone by where there are no terror related stories in the
news. And it is a little bit sickening to see political leaders stand up after every terrorist act to announce that they
stand together to protect democracy, or freedom, or human values
and anything else that they can co-opt and misappropriate in order to
serve the purposes of capitalism and the capitalist class.
It
is not your neighbour but the
capitalist system which is the enemy. It is only by establishing a
class-free, state-free, propertyless global society that real freedom
will be won. Let the supporters of capitalism reflect on the tragedy
in Sri Lanka: their system caused it. As long as we have capitalism
we will never be free of violence and terrorism. The solution remains
the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of
each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that
unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or
religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living
in, but before that happens we need the conscious cooperation of
ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause—to
create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits
of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes
or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the
artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of
humanity—socialism.
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