Rakhmetov
12th September 2010, 21:01
In order to eliminate the symptoms it is first necessary to make a correct diagnosis of the disease. The symptoms we see are well known to students of history. They recur regularly in periods when a socio-economic system has outlived its usefulness and become an obstacle to human progress. We see very similar symptoms in the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and also in the period of the decay of feudalism.
To many people living in such periods the calamities that appear on all sides herald the End of the World. It is no accident that early Christianity, the rise of which coincided with the terminal decline of Roman slave society, was based on the idea that the end of the world was nigh. But what the Book of Revelations anticipated was not the end of the world but only the end of slave society, which finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The barbarians merely gave it a final shove and the whole rotten and decaying edifice collapsed.
The terminal crisis of capitalism will produce even greater horrors than those experienced by Roman society in the last three centuries of its existence. The bankruptcy of capitalism is expressed literally, not metaphorically, in the colossal and insoluble public debts of the USA and every other nation. In its period of senility, capitalism has become entirely parasitic. The bloated and unproductive financial system is sucking the life blood out of the productive economy, draining it of its vital force and even that does not satisfy the bloodsuckers.
In order to pay the debts of the banks, society as a whole is called on to make sacrifices. Those who create the wealth of society are informed that they must sacrifice all the gains that they have won over the last fifty years. That is to say, they must sacrifice those elements of a semi-civilised existence they possess. But the sacrifice is unequal. Nobody asks the bankers to sacrifice. And while the shortage of cash compels them to make some reduction in arms spending, it remains as a further colossal drain on the wealth of nations.
At a time when the working class is being told there is no more money for schools, hospitals and pensions, we are also told that immense sums are still needed for bombs, tanks, satellites and warplanes. But it is clear that one thing excludes the other. The working class must oppose wasteful arms expenditure, counterpoising a program of useful public works: not more guns and tanks but more hospitals, houses, schools and nursery schools are what are needed.
The vast productive potential that exists on a world scale is being held back by the narrow limitations of private ownership of the means of production and the nation state. A socialist planned economy would eliminate this appalling waste and lay the basis for a rapid development of the productive forces and an unparalleled increase in living standards. Instead of discussing how to cut pensions and wages, we would be in a position to introduce a programme of social reforms that would put all the gains of the past in the shade.
The fight for world socialism and a socialist world federation is the fight for a world without wars. We stand for a world without frontiers and tariff barriers, a world without passports and visas. We are fighting for a world in which the barbarities of war and terrorism will be only a bad dream of the past, a world in which the colossal productive potential of the planet will be realized through a harmonious socialist plan of production on an international scale.
Does this seem so difficult? But is it not far more difficult to accept the present situation of unemployment, cuts, wars, mass starvation and all the other horrors that capitalism has prepared for the peoples of the world? The fight for world socialism is not a utopia but the only realistic way out of the blind alley into which senile capitalism has plunged the human race. Humanity needs a new perspective. The perspective of a socialist new world order is the only perspective worth fighting for in the first decade of the 21st century.
http://www.marxist.com/nine-years-after-9-11.htm
To many people living in such periods the calamities that appear on all sides herald the End of the World. It is no accident that early Christianity, the rise of which coincided with the terminal decline of Roman slave society, was based on the idea that the end of the world was nigh. But what the Book of Revelations anticipated was not the end of the world but only the end of slave society, which finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The barbarians merely gave it a final shove and the whole rotten and decaying edifice collapsed.
The terminal crisis of capitalism will produce even greater horrors than those experienced by Roman society in the last three centuries of its existence. The bankruptcy of capitalism is expressed literally, not metaphorically, in the colossal and insoluble public debts of the USA and every other nation. In its period of senility, capitalism has become entirely parasitic. The bloated and unproductive financial system is sucking the life blood out of the productive economy, draining it of its vital force and even that does not satisfy the bloodsuckers.
In order to pay the debts of the banks, society as a whole is called on to make sacrifices. Those who create the wealth of society are informed that they must sacrifice all the gains that they have won over the last fifty years. That is to say, they must sacrifice those elements of a semi-civilised existence they possess. But the sacrifice is unequal. Nobody asks the bankers to sacrifice. And while the shortage of cash compels them to make some reduction in arms spending, it remains as a further colossal drain on the wealth of nations.
At a time when the working class is being told there is no more money for schools, hospitals and pensions, we are also told that immense sums are still needed for bombs, tanks, satellites and warplanes. But it is clear that one thing excludes the other. The working class must oppose wasteful arms expenditure, counterpoising a program of useful public works: not more guns and tanks but more hospitals, houses, schools and nursery schools are what are needed.
The vast productive potential that exists on a world scale is being held back by the narrow limitations of private ownership of the means of production and the nation state. A socialist planned economy would eliminate this appalling waste and lay the basis for a rapid development of the productive forces and an unparalleled increase in living standards. Instead of discussing how to cut pensions and wages, we would be in a position to introduce a programme of social reforms that would put all the gains of the past in the shade.
The fight for world socialism and a socialist world federation is the fight for a world without wars. We stand for a world without frontiers and tariff barriers, a world without passports and visas. We are fighting for a world in which the barbarities of war and terrorism will be only a bad dream of the past, a world in which the colossal productive potential of the planet will be realized through a harmonious socialist plan of production on an international scale.
Does this seem so difficult? But is it not far more difficult to accept the present situation of unemployment, cuts, wars, mass starvation and all the other horrors that capitalism has prepared for the peoples of the world? The fight for world socialism is not a utopia but the only realistic way out of the blind alley into which senile capitalism has plunged the human race. Humanity needs a new perspective. The perspective of a socialist new world order is the only perspective worth fighting for in the first decade of the 21st century.
http://www.marxist.com/nine-years-after-9-11.htm