Soaring fuel, food, and transport costs, coupled with falling real wages mark the current crisis that confronts us. But the present crisis is part of a much deeper one. With spiralling inequality, climate breakdown, war and rising authoritarianism we are confronted with a systemic crisis. Capitalism, which dominates every aspect of our lives, is in terminal decline, it will limp from crisis to crisis, each one more devastating than the last.
The crises that confront us in our daily lives are not just caused by this or that bad government, politician, or policy – they are produced by the system. A system that robs the vast majority, and in the process enriches a tiny few. This system offers us nothing going forward but declining living standards, precarity, climate collapse, and misery.
To build better lives for ourselves, our families, communities, and future generations – we must break with the capitalist system, before it breaks us.
Capitalism cannot exist without the working class. The vast majority of people in the world are working class, and every day they sell their labour to bosses. It is this relationship, of worker and capitalist, that produces wealth in capitalist society. The capitalist class, the small numbers who own factories, platforms, transport networks, and intellectual property rights, use their property power to squeeze the very lifeblood from the working class, and turn it into profits and dividends.
The never-ending drive to capture more profit, to squeeze more from the working class, drives every capitalist. This relentless drive is what lies at the root of the growing inequality, climate destruction, and immiseration that characterises the world today. Without the labour of the working class, the capitalist class would not exist. The capitalist class, like any parasite, requires the working class for it to live, but the working class does not require the parasite.
While the working class is united in its shared experience of capitalist exploitation, there are important differences in how that exploitation is experienced. Oppression on the basis of gender, race, or sexual orientation or gender identity is also endemic in capitalist society. As a result, women, racial and other minorities, and the people of formerly colonised countries experience distinct forms of marginalisation and violence, which compounds the exploitation they experience as members of the working class.
These real differences in experience are often mobilised by ruling classes to divide the working class, and entrench systems of patriarchal, racial, or imperialist inequality. As such it is crucial that we fight to build a united working class, by advancing a class politics that is feminist, anti-racist, inclusive and anti-imperialist to its core.
Under the domination of private property and capitalist profit chasing, the working class can never live rich, fulfilling lives. For each worker, as an individual, to develop and live a rich, fulfilling life, the working class, collectively, needs to break the dictatorship of capital.
Women are oppressed within the capitalist system due to a complex interplay of our sex and our class. These two elements interact and reinforce one another. This results in the double oppression of women.
It is impossible to truly understand what it means to be free as women within this economic system, because so much of our individual and collective mental and physical energy is used working (often in extremely exploitative and dangerous conditions) and performing multiple caring roles. Our work is undervalued or unpaid and sexism exists both interpersonally and structurally, in the home, our communities and the workplace.
In addition, our bodies are commodified, in many of the same ways as they are for men – in the exploitation of our labour, but in different, sex-based ways too. Out of economic necessity women are often forced to sell their bodies for sex, to stay in abusive relationships and are trafficked across borders.
Often women’s genitalia are mutilated to control or to sexually oppress us, and women may alter their own bodies to satisfy unrealistic, but extremely profitable, manufactured beauty standards. In our society, rape repeatedly goes unpunished and is often not even recognised as such.
Despite all of this, our collective power is immense. Women do some of the hardest jobs on earth and our ability to shape the course of events, is severely underestimated, both in terms of our past and our future. What is really needed is a militant working-class woman’s movement to organise, to develop strong bonds between women in different communities and to win real, meaningful power against our oppression.
While the capitalist class lives and prospers by stealing from the working class, this relationship of exploitation and theft is not, generally, out in the open. Instead, it is concealed behind a complex web of illusions and justifications, like freedom of contract. The state, and state power, plays a crucial role in both maintaining this illusion of freedom and consent, and enforcing the interests of capital, when push comes to shove.
The state is not a neutral, independent tool that can be used by one class or the other to advance their interests, instead it is fundamentally implicated in producing and reproducing the inequality and exploitation of capitalism.
The institutions of state (police, courts, councils, parliament) serve, in the final instance, to defend property rights, and justify the existing order of things. Through democratic struggles the working class, and other oppressed groups, have won important concessions from the ruling class and the state. However, the state cannot, and will not, ever concede any reform that fundamentally threatens the capitalist system.
Through hundreds of years of exploitation and struggle, the working class has formed its own organisations and institutions. Chief among them are trade unions. At their best, trade unions have provided a site and basis for workers to harness and exercise their collective power. Through strikes, protests, and boycotts trade unions have won important gains for workers.
However, trade unions have also internalised the logic of the capitalist system, they accept, without question, the right of capitalists to extract profit from workers, and fight only over the respective shares between worker and boss. In this way, trade unions which began as independent sites of working class power, now often play the role of stabilising the existing system, by limiting workers’ demands to modest reforms within the confines of the status quo.
If trade unions are to play a leading role in rebuilding working class power, and in confronting the structural crises we face, then they will need to move beyond mere “bread and butter issues” and be reconstituted as offensive institutions of class war.
The capitalist system brutalises the working class, devastates the planet and hurtles us from one crisis to the next, in a ceaseless, downward spiral. The only meaningful alternative to this is socialism.
Socialism, fundamentally, is about the emancipation of the working class – not just from this or that bad boss, or this or that passing crisis, but from the system that necessarily exploits and brutalises us.
This emancipation cannot be delivered to the working class from without, but instead it is something that the working class must do itself. In the struggle to overcome the existing order, individuals learn, grow and change, and in the process of fighting to change the world around them, they change themselves.
Understood in this way, socialism is not a set of policies or slogans, but a long-term process of transformation and construction of independent, working class power. Socialist politics, then, is not about contesting or winning elections, but about building a social force capable of challenging capitalism on every front.
In order to transform society, we need a political instrument or organisation that brings together and harnesses the various strands of working class struggle – in communities, the work place, trade unions, and electorally – into a focused torrent.
Reliance on mere spontaneity is romantic but hopeless – to challenge and overcome capitalism, we have to consciously organise and build to do it.
Understanding that socialism is not merely about elections, but primarily about building a social base, we need then to build an organisation which is organically rooted in working class communities, workplaces and trade unions. An organisation which supports and connects the struggles of the working class at the cutting edge.
This organisation needs to combine clear analysis of the existing balance of forces, systematic political education, rank and file organising, and the empowering of the working class to demand and seize their own emancipation.
The focus, then, needs to be on building in workplaces and communities, developing the political education and analysis of fighters, and connecting the leading layers of the struggle together. This lays the foundations for a social base that understands itself, and organises itself, in opposition to the capitalist state, capitalist class, and the logic of the capitalist system.
In due course, this social basis will likely seek formal, political representation for the politics it advances – in this case, any electoral strategy must remain rooted in and responsive to the social base. Elections, and winning electoral office, must be understood not as the goal, but as an element of a broader, deeper socialist politics.
The scale of the crisis confronting us now is profound, and deepening. The so called “cost of living crisis” will continue to decimate entire communities, while accelerating climate collapse poses existential threats to life on earth. There is no solution within capitalism, only a possible future beyond it.
None of the existing political organisations and institutions are adequate to the scale of the crisis we face, and so the working class must become organised as a political force. The immensity of the challenge we face is real, and we need to enter it with no illusions. But if we do not act, we condemn ourselves and future generations to accelerating barbarism.
Only the working class can force the changes necessary to avert this brutality, and so confronted with the choice between socialism or extinction, we must choose to fight. To build a social and political force tempered in the fire of struggle and deprivation – a political instrument capable of demanding the future and building a better world for all.
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It is clear to everyone that our society does not work for us all. Working class people, who produce the wealth, and without whom nothing works, have seen their wages, living standards and quality of life collapse. At the same time, the wealth of a tiny minority in society grows without restraint.
The Origins and Importance of May Day. On this May Day we send fraternal greetings and solidarity to the struggling working classes around the world and re-commit ourselves to the pursuit of working class liberation, socialism and world peace.
Palestine will continue until the structures of apartheid and colonialism are dismantled. There will be peace, but only when Palestine is free, from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Rise will work tirelessly to hasten the day.
