This world isn’t working for us and we deserve better! Ordinary people in Britain have everything to gain by getting involved in the political process. We need to fight against deteriorating working and living conditions, and we need to work for a completely different type of society.
So many problems face our world: environmental catastrophe, poverty, illiteracy, disease, racism and war. These issues will never be solved while capitalism remains, but they could be resolved if society was set up for the benefit of the majority rather than the private gain of a minority of billionaires.
Under capitalism, our society is organised to enable the extraction of profit to the detriment of the people. Under socialism, it’s just the opposite: everything is planned to provide for the needs of the people. Just thinking about it logically, it makes sense that we organise ourselves and manage our resources for the benefit of all, not to create private fortunes for a tiny handful of parasites.
‘Communal’ and ‘social’ just mean sharing amongst the members of a group or society: sharing society’s wealth is the basic principle of socialism and communism. Wealth is produced by work; by productive labour. It is the working class (at home and abroad) that creates most of the wealth that exists, not the rich.
‘Capital’ is wealth (money, land, premises, machinery, factories) which enables an individual or group to employ workers, whose labour adds wealth to that original amount – this is the basis of capitalism.
Living in a capitalist society, which is controlled and dominated by the capitalist class, we are saturated with anti-socialist propaganda, bombarded all our lives by pro-capitalist news and online media, educational institutions, TV, radio and film. In every area of life we are harangued into thinking that socialism is something evil, that it is equivalent to fascism.
The purpose of all this is to convince us we live in a ‘democratic’ and ‘fair’ society; and that what we have now is as good as it gets.
But here are just a few highlights of ‘good’ in today’s Britain:
- In July 2023, it was estimated that one in 20 renters and one in 30 mortgage holders defaulted on a payment.
- Cases of malnutrition have more than doubled in a decade and have quadrupled since the introduction of draconian austerity measures to pay for bailing out the banks in 2007/8.
- Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) data shows that around one in five people in the UK are now in relative poverty – that’s 20 percent!
- 7.1 million people are described as having ‘very poor’ literacy skills – this locks them out of the job market and also leaves them unable to support their children’s learning.
- By the end of this year, 300,000 households across Britain will be experiencing core homelessness.
- Even forgetting the major issues, we all know from looking around us that our infrastructure is crumbling: rubbish builds up, roads have potholes, pavements and trees are overgrown, public recreational facilities are neglected, libraries and community centres have disappeared, etc, etc, etc – the list goes on and on!
The root of the trouble
Workers certainly need short-term fixes to keep them from falling into dire poverty now, but we also need to look deeper to address the root causes of the crisis. What is the point of forcing concessions from our rulers if we don’t do something to address the social and economic forces that brought us to this point? Do we want to doom ourselves and our children to fighting the same battles repeatedly?
Globally, in the last two years, the richest 1% acquired almost as much new wealth as the rest of the world’s population put together. 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits last year, making $306bn in windfall profits and paying $257bn to rich shareholders. The fact is, that whilst a minority of grossly rich elites are bathing in obscene wealth, many in Britain have joined a select group of 1.7 billion workers worldwide who are battling to survive against conditions where inflation is rapidly outpacing wages.
The market has proven itself to be totally unable to meet the needs of the people. The capitalists have shown themselves to be entirely unable to run their own system for the benefit of society.
Ultimately, only socialist science enables us to understand the causes of this crisis and to create a real working-class party. This is needed so that workers’ power can be used to create a society that not only solves the problems that press on us so heavily and urgently today but also offers us the prospect of a bright and fulfilling future.
Here are just a few illustrations of socialist gains and socialist priorities:
- In Cuba, 72 percent of the annual budget is dedicated to health, education and social security – ie, to the wellbeing of the people.
- In Venezuela, education and healthcare are free, and poverty has dropped from 48 percent to 24 percent.
- In 1914, 72 percent of Russians could neither read nor write. By 1950, 100 percent of the 170 million Soviet population were literate.
- In north Korea (DPRK) today, housing, education and healthcare are all totally free.
- For the third straight year, Nicaragua ranked fifth in the world for gender equality – putting it far ahead of Britain in its treatment of working-class women.
Everyone except the tiny minority of super-rich exploiters who live in a tax-free bubble of privilege and ignorance knows what is meant by the ‘cost of living crisis’, which is imposing itself on ever widening circles because of rising energy bills, inflation, low wages, job and housing insecurity, food bank queues, hospital waiting lists, inaccessible ambulances and GPs, failing schools, and trashed social services.
People are right to be angry and many are joining the fight-back against the attempt to make workers pay for the crisis.
We invite you to challenge your ideas, challenge the propaganda and seek the truth.
Our party is different because we consistently apply Marxist science to all areas of our work, and we’re not scared to tell it how it is. We refuse to be intimidated by the barrage of lying propaganda that fills British mainstream media.
It is the capitalists’ job to try to stop us from building a socialist society; it is our job to do it anyway!
