Matt Dobson
This summer a meeting of the most affluent and powerful 500 people, organised by Spears Wealth Management magazine, gathered in the glittering ballroom of the five-star Savoy Hotel in London.
A member of “Patriotic Millionaires UK” pleaded that unless their obscene wealth was minimally taxed, they would be faced with “burning torches and pitchforks” from the hungry planet’s masses.
Never has there been such wealth polarisation. In one second of time, in 2022, the ten richest men on the planet increased their wealth by $15,000. By the end of every day that increase was $1.3 billion. Today’s youth have only ever known economic stagnation and crisis.
Real wages in Britain are only expected to return to their 2008 level in 2026. We all know it’s becoming impossible to pay for housing, student fees and debt and even food on this pittance.
Is it any wonder why, even according to the right-wing Fraser Institute think tank, one third of us view communism, as opposed to capitalism, as a better economic system. Capitalism is a rotten, rigged system based on private ownership of the means of producing geared towards profit for a tiny few instead of social need.
Marx in his work Capital illuminated all the intertwining contradictions of capitalism. As every worker knows, the bosses extract surplus value from wealth that is created in the workplace during our shifts. We can never buy back the true value of what we have toiled to produce. Is this “free market”, as the capitalists claim, the only way of running society?
The endless wars, from Ukraine to Ethiopia, the global climate crisis, economic stagnation, added with rampant inflation and debt which impoverishes billions, are signs of a system in its death agony.
We have seen uprisings as workers, youth and the poor from Sri Lanka to Sudan and Chile fight to overthrow corrupt governments that perpetuate inequality.
The moving force of history and human development is the class struggle as we see with the recent strike waves in Britain, France and Germany. This is what Marx and Engels explained in their ever-relevant Communist Manifesto, written during the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe.
The question that was posed in the Communist Manifesto of not just interpreting the world but changing it is still posed for revolutionaries.
For Socialist Students and Young Socialists, real communism is a society that would see the predatory stage of human development, where society has been divided into classes, as under capitalism and feudalism, come to an end.
As Lenin explained in State and Revolution, the state, which through armed bodies, the police, army, judiciary etc, protects the ownership of a surplus or profit for the ruling capitalist class would wither away.
Imagine such a economic and social transformation! The class biased, unequal “superstructure”, from the education, legal to the cultural, and its oppressive ideas such as sexism, racism, casteism and LGBTQphobia, would also have no more basis.
Isn’t the overthrow of capitalism something worth dedicating the fight of our lives for? Archaeology and science confirm that for most of human history our species lived cooperatively in a form of “primitive communism”. Where collective activity was vital for survival and there were no labour divisions based even or gender or vast differences in property ownership.
capitalism
Capitalism, based on mass commodity production for profit, was once a revolutionary new system that overthrew feudalism, a system based on the majority working on the land owned by a lord or major landlord. Initially capitalism played a partly progressive role, industrialising and modernising society albeit, as Marx said, dripping with blood as it violently accumulated wealth. From land seizures to slavery to the utmost wage exploitation.
Today it is dragging society backwards and will destroy the planet unless we overcome it. The capitalists claim the anarchy of the market, where at the click of a button millions can lose their jobs or homes as the bosses drive each other out of business, is the “natural order”.
The idea of planning for the needs of the majority is utopian, they say. In fact, the capitalists constantly plan as they group together in bigger and bigger monopolies.
They build up industries and production based on how they can exploit workers to the maximum. Their planning is for profit. A socialist economic plan, in contrast, would utilise all skills and talents and resources for humanity internationally.
To begin to build a communist society we need an international socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism. The force capable of achieving this is the working class, which is exploited collectively and socially through capitalist production.
Wage workers, capitalism’s creation, as Marx explained, are its potential gravediggers. Last year’s general strike in Sri Lanka paralysed production and profit for the capitalists, which shows a small glimpse of worker’s power.
By taking power away from the capitalists, the working class can take over the biggest corporations, banks, industries and infrastructure through socialist nationalisation.
Through democratic planning it would be possible to utilise society’s resources for the common good. A workers’ government would involve democratic committees at local and national level with the participation of directly elected representatives of the workplaces, consumers, trade unions and the wider society. All elected positions would be subject to immediate recall.
In the initial stage of workers taking power in one country, especially in a neocolonial country exploited and indebted to imperialism and international financial institutions, it would need to appeal for support and a continuation of the revolution by workers internationally.
Socialism and communism cannot be built in one country. That’s the lesson of the betrayal of the October 1917 Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party.
Stalinism was a gross caricature of socialism, which the capitalists never cease to use today as scarecrow against socialist and communist ideas.
China today is not real communism but is a state capitalist dictatorship with its roots in a form of Stalinism.
Stalinism, based on a privileged bureaucracy, which parasitically grew out of the isolation and backwardness of the Soviet Union. When other revolutions failed in Europe and internationally in the 1920s the bureaucracy gradually seized control of society. They persecuted real communists and the ideas of Marxism represented by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
Despite colossal social advances, from rising literacy to life expectancy, eventually the Stalinist states collapsed under the weight of the bureaucratic mis-rule in the 1990s. By then the advances of a planned economy became stifled by their hunger for privileges. Today a capitalist nightmare has dragged society backwards in Russia and elsewhere.
Marxists today fight for every gain for the working-class youth and poor. We struggle to build fighting trade unions and mass parties based on the organised working class and the trade unions which can raise the understanding of class consciousness and socialist ideas.
Crucially, the struggle for communism requires socialists to be organised in a revolutionary international of parties with a programme linking the battle against the day-to-day misery of capitalism with the socialist transformation of society.
That is what we are striving to build. Join and discuss with us today.
