From Pandemic Emergency to the Emergence of Socialism

We should not return to the type of society that enabled this pandemic to emerge and spread. We must instead create a new socially just and sustainable world. We, working people, can shut the system down and we have the numbers to break the power of capitalist class and their State. We should send a clear signal that things cannot and must not return to normal. We must transform our broken and inequitable society, and build a new society run by and for us – the working class majority. We seek a world safe not for profit-making, but for people.

Capitalists maximise profits. Capitalism has proved extremely inefficient in its response to the virus. Why return to such a normal? Why fix capitalism yet again, given its cyclical crashes and  costly requirement to keep fixing it? Absurd, isn’ it? The problem is the structure of capitalism and not the particular management team running the capitalist enterprise. Capitalists either cannot or will not hire because to do so is not profitable for them. Why reproduce capitalism that so undemocratically organizes its businesses. Why replace one group of employer dictators with another, when a better alternative exists? Why revert back to a profit system that generates social divisions and inequality, which is regularly unstable?

We must use this opportunity to create a global economy that meets our basic needs while at the same time securing sustainable communities for humanity and a healthy environment for both people and planet. We must end the power of profit-maximising corporations and self-organise production, providing for everyone and assuring everyone to the necessities of life. We can achieve and we deserve a better society than the one we presently have. We can’t know for sure what a successful socialist revolution will look like, but we can say that it will definitely be “ the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”

The Socialist Party rejects capitalism in all its disguises and there is no equivocation on its part — no acceptance of government ownership nor even cooperatives. Ours is the only message worth listening to, and the only one that holds a real promise of the final end of privilege, insecurity, poverty and oppression in all its forms. Let us work  for the great day when the capitalist social parasites who have paralysed society will be banished into the limbo of the past.