The problem is capitalism. The solution is socialism

To change society and end oppression, we need a plan to get from where we are now to a socialist world. The capitalists have accumulated untold wealth based on the exploitation of the multinational working class and the systematic discrimination and robbery that is visited upon the oppressed. This class has shown time and time again that it will stop at nothing to maintain its power and privilege. We need to turn things around. This means radical revolution that advances the cause of the exploited. The growing radicalisation of the workers has its foundations in the structure of capitalism itself.The capitalists are a powerful enemy and it will require protracted efforts to overthrow them. But there is a potentially much more powerful force opposing them. The working class constitutes the majority. It is composed of women and men of all lands who labour to create goods and services, be it in factories, offices or the fields. It encompasses the employed and the unemployed, those who do manual labour or mental labour, people working in the service sector or manufacturing and transportation. It includes the organised and the unorganised. The working class makes its living by selling its ability to work. The capitalists own the places and things that are used to create goods and services. They appropriate for themselves all that is produced by the collective labour of the working class. This gives rise to an irrepressible conflict, a clash of basic interests that can be solved by the working class taking all power into its own hands. Socialism will only be gained by waging the working-class struggle. Socialism is not inevitable. What has been termed its ‘inevitability’ consists in this, that only through socialism can human progress continue. But there is not and cannot be any absolute deterministic inevitability in human affairs, since mankind makes its own history and chooses what to do. What is determined is not its choice, but the conditions under which it is made, and the consequences when it is made. The meaning of socialism is not that it tells us that socialism will come regardless, but that it explains to us where we stand, what course lies open to us, what is the road to life.

What is socialism? It is no accident that socialists failed to sketch out in any detail the new socialist society. Instead of blueprinting the new society, we have analysed the society in which we now live — capitalist society — the society out of which the new is destined to come. Socialists do not put forward their goal as a utopia, as a mere vision of what would ideally satisfy people’s needs and make them all happy, but as a goal the practical attainment of which is made necessary by the actual conditions of modern society. We can play no part in the building of the new society – that privilege must be left to those who come after us. Not only will the revolution itself be profoundly democratic, but thanks to the tremendous productive capacity we have created, we will be quickly able to satisfy all the basic needs of everyone. There will be no real shortages that would require some kind of bureaucrat to ration out who gets what. We would see our wealth as part of mankind’s common heritage. Socialism is more than the name merely for a new system of economic relationships. Socialism means the ending of exploitation of man by man, a society without class antagonisms, in which the people themselves control their means of life and use them for their own happiness.

Socialism will change our way of life. That is what makes the struggle worthwhile. Socialism will be possible only when the workers, those who meet the needs of society, decide that they are determined to lay the living conditions of mankind on a new foundation. The whole future of humanity rests on the emergence of the working class as the creative force in society. Socialism meets the desire for freedom innate in every human being. Solidarity in the working class as a whole is an urgent necessity if we are to further the cause of socialism. We trust in our fellow-workers will see that the solution of mankind’s economic and social problems lies not within the capitalist system at all but beyond it, in a socialist order.