May
1ST: International Workers’
Day
Socialism
or Death!
For
workers to survive, capitalism must die!
Capitalism as a social system is breaking down.
It has long passed its use-by date. Capitalism is well into its terminal
crisis. Every month and year brings with it more death and destruction.
The two imperialist blocs led by the US and
China are engaged in a life and death struggle for survival. They now pit
workers against one another from Bosnia to Venezuela and threaten a new
world war. The threat of such a war is most evident in the build up of US
military encirclement of China in the Pacific. Never before has the
alternative “Socialism or Death” carried the same urgency.
Capitalism was a huge advance over the previous
societies because it allowed humanity to create sufficient wealth from nature
to establish the conditions for a socialist
society to emerge. For the first time in history humanity could look forward to
living in a state of plenty, abundance and freedom, rather than a state of
scarcity, poverty and misery.
Capitalism could do this because the profit
motive drove individual capitalists to compete to revolutionise industry. To do
this they had to increase the rate of exploitation of wage labor which increased
the productivity of labor to undreamed of heights.
But the inevitable consequence of this was that massive
wealth was accumulated in the pockets of the capitalist class, while the
producing class, the great mass of society, became relatively impoverished. All
those who say that this obscene disparity of income can be corrected by means
of reforms sow illusions in a peaceful outcome of capitalism’s
decline and fall.
In reality capitalists are incapable of backing
off the drive for profits which brings with it the destruction of those same
forces of production that create the basis for socialism. Fracking and deep-sea
drilling for oil and gas is proof of this. Not only must capitalism destroy
itself it will destroy humanity and nature in its blind struggle
to survive.
For humanity to prevent this
destruction it must destroy capitalism first. The working class, the great
majority of humanity, must overthrow capitalism to allow a new socialist society
to emerge capable of stopping the earth’s climate catastrophe and the extinction of the human, and most other, species.
We can see that this realisation is what
underlies the many manifestations of worker and peasant uprisings and revolutions
taking place around the world. While the capitalist system tries to make
workers and peasants pay for its crisis by destroying jobs, living standards
and the lives of workers, workers are rising up in resistance.
Everywhere we look we can see workers rising up.
The global crisis means that the imperialist powers can no longer rely on the
bosses’ ‘democracy’ to impose austerity in every country. This has produced uprisings
against dictatorships such as the Arab revolutions that were sparked by the suicide
of Mahomed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December 2010, including the Syrian revolution that broke out in March
2011, against the regime of Bashar al Assad.
In other places workers have gone on strike
against the austerity attacks of bosses such as the miners of Marikana, South Africa, in August 2012, who
were then shot down in cold blood by the ANC regime; the Greek popular
resistance to extreme austerity that led to many general strikes; the youthful
indignados of Spain and Italy who are still occupying squares; and the local
wars such as in Syria and South Sudan that are driven by the rival imperialist
blocs’ grab for cheap resources and cheap labor.
In every case, workers resistance is met by
capitalist force. Capitalism has no alternative but to physically destroy the
class that can dig its grave, the proletariat. To make this destruction more
efficient, capitalism uses the false leaders of the workers movements to divide
and rule the proletariat along national, race, ethnic and religious lines.
This typically means capitalist regimes use the labor
bureaucracy that controls the unions on behalf of the ruling class to trap
workers in popular fronts with one or another imperialist power like the US Democratic Party, and popular front parties
such as ZANU-PF allied to China in Zimbabwe and the Bolivarian PSUV allied to
China in Venezuela.
These reactionary fronts and divisions destroy
the class independence, unity and organisation of the proletariat, so that
workers begin to fight one another instead of the class enemy. We can see such
divisions exploding in Thailand, the Ukraine as well as Egypt, Sudan and Syria.
To prevent these destructive divisions, the
proletariat needs a revolutionary socialist party and program to unite and
guide workers internationally to a victorious socialist revolution. The current
leadership of workers movements internationally are incapable of such a task as
they share the ideology of the ruling classes to some degree. They promote
national, race, ethnic and religious divisions in the name of the ‘democracy’
or the ‘lesser evil’ of one or another ruling class.
A revolutionary party and program is necessary
to fight for the independence of the working class from all such ruling class
influences. In every struggle across the world, the international unity of the
proletariat is the immediate aim. Its organisation into one world socialist
movement led by a revolutionary party and program is the means, and the end is the
socialist revolution and the building of a world socialist society.
This requires that all healthy revolutionary
currents that are fighting towards this objective urgently join forces in such
a party and program. For us this has to be a party and program based on the
Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. For today the Transitional Program of the Fourth International founded
in 1938 embodies the method and tasks of the revolutionary party we need.
Trotsky referred to Marxism as synonymous with
dialectics, the method of analysing the dynamics of social change, and the
method of applying this was a democratic centralist party. Not only is this the
basis for true workers’ democracy where collective decisions are arrived at
after all positions have been debated, the
centralising of the collective actions of the party is the only means of
testing theory in practice and enabling the workers to come to power in the socialist
revolution.
While the Transitional Program was never
intended as a blueprint for all time its guiding transitional method is to combine the immediate demands for what
workers need to survive and live, such as a living wage and basic democratic
rights and freedoms, and while fighting the bosses’ resistance to these
demands, workers are led to escalate the fight to challenge the bosses’ power
by building their own organisations of armed workers’ power ultimately capable
of overthrowing the capitalist state and creating a workers state.
In this way the working class destroys
capitalism, saving its advanced development of the forces of production as the
basis for a new society where production is for need, and each and everyone is
rewarded according to the formula: from each according to their ability, to
each according to their need!
Such
is the future communist society envisaged by Karl Marx in which humanity and
nature can live in harmony. “In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class
antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each
is the condition for the free development of all.” –Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto
Liaison
Committee of Communists
May
1, 2014.
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