International Socialists

A world of exploitation, inequality and crisis...
Take a look at the world around you. Since the mid-1970s growth rates have declined in all of the major advanced capitalist countries and unemployment has increased substantially.

 

Real incomes for the majority of workers have either remained largely stagnant or have declined.  Income and wealth has become much more unequally distributed within the advanced capitalist societies, with the rich become much richer at the expense of the poor.

 

Government spending on health, housing, education and welfare has been subject to "fiscal restraint" throughout the Western world.

 

We spend a large part of our lives at work and our activity there is typically governed by undemocratic authoritarian administrative and managerial structures. The experience of alienation from work, society and politics is all-pervasive.

 

Poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, drug abuse, crime and violence are widespread in the midst of societies in which more wealth is produced than at any previous time in human history.

 

The material reality of women's oppression remains. Women are over-represented in a narrow range of relatively poorly paid occupations, and within particular occupations tend to be stuck at the bottom of managerial structures.

 

Women's incomes are substantially lower than men, women possess less wealth, and are more likely to have insecure employment. Female participation in paid employment continues to be adversely affected by inadequate, or non-existent, employer and government provision of childcare.

 

Within the family-household an unequal gender division of labour prevails. Surveys show that even where both partners are also working in paid employment, women perform most of the domestic labour and childcare.  Far from being a "haven in a heartless world,"  the family-household is the primary site of male violence and sexual abuse. Sexuality remains constrained within narrow heterosexual limits. Other sexualities are repressed.

 

Violence against women is related to wider patterns of violence within and between capitalist societies. The incidence of violent crime has increased in most of the advanced capitalist societies since the mid-1970s. Globally, there have been more large scale military conflicts since 1945 than during the entire previous course of human history. The current stockpile of nuclear weapons can destroy the entire planet several times over.

 

But while capitalist governments always have money for war and weapons, they are not prepared to spend the equivalent of a small fraction of their military budgets to eliminate mass starvation in the so-called "third world." In fact, Western aid to Africa is considerably less than the total amount paid each year by African governments to Western financial institutions in interest payments on debt.  At the same time that hundreds of millions suffer from malnutrition, food stockpiling and dumping is common in Europe and North America (because the food there is produced for profit, not need).

 

War and starvation are taking place on a dying planet. Over the long term, capitalism is ecologically unsustainable. Not only does it rely on an accelerating depletion of non-renewable resources and massive deforestation, capitalist industries are polluting the atmosphere (through ozone depletion and the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere), waterways with effluents, soil with pesticides, and oceans with outfalls.

 

Far from disappearing, racism is getting worse in most of the advanced capitalist countries. Income inequalities between blacks and whites are growing, blacks are over-represented amongst the poor, homeless and prison populations, and they continue to have inadequate access to health care and education. Ethnic violence is on the rise, and neo-Nazi groups have re-emerged in many countries.

 

 

Why is the world like this?

None of these problems are accidental. They are all ultimately products of a capitalist system that is based on the exploitation of the working majority by a tiny money grubbing minority. And it is this exploitation that generates massive inequalities between rich and poor, men and women, whites and blacks, rich countries and poor countries.

 

It is a system that tends towards ever-worsening crises over the long term. These economic crises are marked by stagnation and high unemployment and caused by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. As profits fall, investment declines, the economy slows down, and workers are thrown on the scrap-heap of unemployment.

 

And it is a system that produces violence. Violence and war are the ultimate products of a dog-eat-dog society driven by competition - between capitalist firms and governments acting in their interests.

 

 

There must be an alternative

If this is the best of all possible worlds, then we really have reached a most depressing "end of history" - as one apologist for capitalism put it.

 

Fortunately, there is an alternative. In the short term, the alternative is to fight back against the bosses' attacks on our pay and conditions, against racism and sexism, against homophobia, and against cuts to housing, health, education and welfare.

 

In the long term, the alternative is to overthrow the capitalist system which is the root cause of the problems we see in the world around us, and to build a society that is both democratic and socialist. A society without significant inequality, which workers run through democratically elected workers' councils.

 

This might sound utopian, but it is not. Workers have taken power before - the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Soviets in 1917 - and even if these revolutions ultimately were defeated, they do show that workers' revolution is possible.

 

In order to fight the evils of this world in the here and now, and in order to fight for a better world in the longer term, you need to be part of a socialist organisation.

 

Alone all you can do is sit and watch the TV and get angry. Together with other socialists you can help to fight back and to fight for a better world. You can also have some fun!  If you want to know what's wrong with the world, why it is this way, and how we can fight to change it then you should join the International Socialists.