An Uprising Means Rising Up From Your Knees

 If the ruling class are fortunate the present discontent remain protests but if working people are lucky then it will become an uprising against a whole system.  Instead of letting the rage create change, corporations and institutions are declaring themselves in solidarity to contain any intensification and escalation of the anger. They promise improvements in social services, more investment in local communities, redistribution of budgets describing it as de-funding the police. CEOs cry crocodile tears in support of the oppressed, offering platitudes and empty words of sympathy, token gestures of grief. Yet none dare to question or challenge the social system which systematically robs working people of their labor, their health and their lives. The people in power are only interested in saving themselves. Socialists say this is now the time to create an entirely different world.

The capitalist system came into being only after a number of revolutions and half-revolutions. The period of its birth lasted for decades, The change from the feudal system to capitalism was not as drastic as will be the change from capitalism to socialism, for the latter implies not the change of one system of exploitation for another, but the elimination of all exploitation and class rule. Socialism is the system of society that will carry on production FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS to supply the needs of babies, their mothers and their fathers – and to hell with profits.

Socialism is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution, upon production for use as against production for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions, class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance that the struggle for necessities to live is completely eliminated, so that humanity, at last freed from economic exploitation, from oppression, from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Much can perhaps be added to this definition, but anything less you can call whatever you wish, but it will not be socialism. 

 Working people must take over society, remold it, reshape it, in the interests of people, on a rational basis; otherwise, society will decay into barbarism. If you do not take over, if the working class does not take over, there will be decay, and this decay will mean your ruin. It will mean your ruin. Today it is a bitter and cruel reality that stares us in the face. There is no socialism and no progress to socialism without the working class, without the working class revolution, without the working class in power, without the working class having been lifted to “political supremacy” (as Marx called it) to their “victory of democracy” (as Marx also calls it). No socialism and no advance to socialism without it! That is what we’re unshakably committed to.

 Socialism for the World Socialist Party, yesterday, today, tomorrow still means the end of class rule; the end of class privilege; the freeing of the people from all chains and all coercion, the fullest realization of democracy, the emancipation of women and of children; the end of wage-slavery, abundance for all, and therefore liberty for all.