Capitalism and imperialism
bourgeois rule. These are inevitable developments, the natural conclusion of the free market and of the division of labour between an oppressed proletariat, the oppressed working class which most people belong to, and a dictatorial bourgeois, a class of bosses and idle financial elites who hold unchallenged authority. Understanding how our society is economically and politically structured, we can form a progno sis. Capitalism is struggling more and more to produce ‘booms’ and ‘golden ages’. Some would argue that capitalism, now, is in the early stages of a death agony and, as these problems reach a head, we can predict that the crises of capitalism and of our current age will only get worse. The only way to crush imperialism and the ills it causes is by doing away with capitalism, by bringing about socialism, and by turning the economy we have, planned by highly coordinated industrial oligopolies, into an economy planned by workers to serve not the profit motive, but the motive of common good. Such a worker’s state could, at last, serve the people, to protect the climate, to lift people from oppression, having done away with the tyranny of profit over human welfare. We should not let slip the opportunity to seize control of the economy and, in so doing, provide all necessary resources for everyone. In this era of overproduction, where things are thrown away because to sell them would lower the price, worker contro l of corporations, of the economy, under a worker’s state, has never made more sense.
What is to be done by us, personally
What do we need to do, right now, then, to bring that to a reality? We need to work to inform ourselves and others. We must clearly and irrefutably explain these crises to all and build movements that work together to spread awareness and to impede imperialism, to stand up for the interests of the people. Now and then, the power of the united masses becomes clear, as in the role of anti-war movements in pressuring the USA to end the Vietnam occupation, or as in the size of the outcry of the Reclaim These Streets and BLM movements. Again and again, however, such widespread movements fail to secure meaningful and lasting change. Although they have energy and passion, they often fail to properly understand the wider role of capitalism in the ills of society, to offer alternatives to capitalism, or to form the centrali z ed organisations necessary to overthrow and replace bourgeois power structures. We need to make clear that it is not just Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Ukraine, but that there is an economic system under which these incidents keep happening, and that to oppose these isolated incidents must mean to oppose the wider system that brings them about. And, with a large, united movement, conscious of its place in history and its relation to this system, we can overthrow capitalism. It is longer, harder work than reformism and, for that reason, is often dismissed. It is work that requires conviction, unity, organization, determination. But the difference is that such methods might actually do something about imperialism, and that’s a cause worth fighting for.
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