In the face of global catastrophe and the horrors of capitalism, we need a socialist world run in the interests of people and planet, argues Jacob Starling
We are living through a period of intense turmoil, crisis and catastrophe. Israel’s genocide has left Gaza in ruins and killed at least 61,700. Regardless of whether the current ceasefire holds, Israel continues to subject Palestinians to a brutal apartheid regime.
The Ukraine War, which has now lasted almost three years, has seen trench warfare return to the fields of Europe, alongside the threat of nuclear war.
Far-right bully Donald Trump sits in the White House, launching attacks on trans people, women and anti-racism programs, promising the deportations of millions of immigrants, dismantling entire arms of government and threatening to take over Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and now Gaza.
Trump’s re-election is only one example of the rise of the far right globally. In Germany the AfD, a party dominated by Nazis, is now the second most popular party. Elections in France last year saw the fascist National Rally narrowly miss taking government.
Peter Dutton is trying to mimic their racist, anti-migrant politics in the hope of winning the federal election here.
Trump posed as an “outsider” to appeal to the discontent at the political system. Both Democrats and Republicans have imposed neoliberal policies designed to boost corporate profits. Since 2000, about two million well-paid, stable and often unionised jobs in the US have been replaced with insecure and low-paid service sector jobs.
Inequality has increased massively as a result over the past few decades. The top 10 per cent of American households now own more than 70 per cent of its wealth.
Alongside all this, the threat of global climate catastrophe looms ever nearer—and world leaders still refuse to act. The devastating fires which have hit the US and last year’s widespread floods in Europe show how dangerously the world is already heating.
Capitalism
Social crisis and the climate catastrophe are a product of the capitalist system that puts profit before people and produces global chaos and war.
Capitalism produces immense inequality. Millions of workers around the world are exploited in the interests of a tiny minority of billionaires. Oxfam reported last month that billionaire wealth surged by $US2 trillion last year while the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990.
The search for bigger and bigger profits determines what is produced by society, not the actual needs of the people. The constant instability of the market creates incredible waste.
Meanwhile, the environment is ransacked by corporations competing for short-term profits, creating climate catastrophe and threatening the foundations of human life.
Capitalism has created bloodshed and war on a scale never before seen. As Karl Marx wrote, the system came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.
The barbarities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that saw millions of Africans worked to death and the brutal colonisation of much of the world by European empires marked the system’s birth.
The last century produced the industrial slaughter of the First and Second World Wars, followed by further bloody wars in Korea and Vietnam, which slaughtered a million and up to three and a half million respectively. Millions more died in Iraq because of US and Australian wars in 1991 and 2003 and decades of sanctions.
These wars are the inevitable consequence of capitalist competition on an international scale.
Huge companies, and the states which support their interests, fight for control of natural resources and markets. Spheres of influence are seized and defended from any potential rivals.
The unflinching support of Western powers including the US and Australia for Israel’s atrocities throughout the Middle East reflects the same imperialism that is hardwired into the system.
The Middle East is important to the US because of its immense reserves of oil, still the lifeblood of modern capitalism. Israel acts as the West’s enforcer, keeping its Arab neighbours in line.
Although the US produces enough oil domestically to meet its own needs, control over Middle Eastern oil production through military power allows it to guarantee oil to its allies.
Israel’s role in dominating the Middle East allows the US to potentially withhold oil from rivals like China.
Fighting the system
In the face of such horrors an alternative is desperately needed. The question therefore is, what would that alternative look like and how can we get there?
In the face of the hopeless failure of Anthony Albanese’s Labor government many are looking to the Greens or independent MPs as an alternative. However, attempts to build a more equal society through parliament have always failed because they leave the foundations of capitalism and oppression unchallenged.
The power to win radical change comes from mass protests and resistance outside of parliament. We need to look to struggles in the workplaces and on the streets, not at the voting booth.
Workers’ role inside capitalism gives them immense potential power. The working class makes up the overwhelming majority of society—not just stereotypical blue-collar workers in manufacturing or construction but white-collar workers who run the schools, hospitals, IT companies and call centres. Through strike action, workers can cut off the flow of profits and exert real power to demand change.
Many important changes have been won through such action. Paid annual leave was first won by striking print workers in 1936 and penalty rates for weekend work were won following major strikes in 1947.
The power of mass working class action is not limited to conditions at work, however.
Working class power has been key to giving social movements the power to force change. Workers have helped win land rights for Indigenous people by supporting the Gurindji strike (the struggle, of course, continues), fought for equal pay for women and mobilised against the Vietnam War.
But to get rid of capitalism we need a revolution to take control of society out of the hands of the billionaires and the rich and introduce real democratic control.
The working class has both the ability to bring capitalism to its knees and to build a socialist society. Over the past 150 or so years, the world has seen numerous examples of this.
Working class power
During the high points of mass struggle, new forms of working-class power and mass democracy have sprung up again and again to challenge the system.
This first took place during the 1905 Russian Revolution, when strike committees developed into workers’ councils or “soviets” as the uprising developed and strengthened.
In the face of the stubborn resistance of the ruling class, demands for higher pay and the right to form trade unions developed into a serious political challenge to the state itself.
Soviets represented a new form of authority based on democratic debate and organisation in the factories, beginning to make decisions about how to organise production and the economy themselves, rather than according to the whims of the bosses.
Although the 1905 Revolution was crushed, the soviets returned in the 1917 revolution, taking control of the workplaces and eventually becoming the foundation of a new state. Unlike in our parliamentary system, delegates to the soviets were subject to immediate recall and received no special privileges.
Similar forms of direct democracy have sprung up since wherever workers have challenged capitalism. After the defeat of Germany in the First World War, workers’ councils spread across the country.
In 1956, the Hungarian workers created workers’ councils to coordinate their uprising against the USSR. In 1973, Chilean workers formed cordones to coordinate resistance to the far-right reaction against President Allende.
These forms of workers’ power can give us some idea of what genuine socialism would look like.
Real socialism has nothing in common with the dictatorship under Joseph Stalin that emerged out of the defeat of the Russian revolution, or similar regimes that claimed to be socialist in China and Eastern Europe.
The wealth of society would be taken out of the hands of the corporations and the billionaires. Unlike the capitalist system, in which the boss has undisputed power within the workplace, workplaces would be run democratically from the bottom up, by the workers themselves.
There would be democratic control over what society produced, ensuring that the economy was run to meet the needs of the people and end environmental destruction rather than to secure profits for the capitalists.
Such a revolution would add enormous weight to the fight against oppression, undermining the division fostered by our rulers.
Russia by 1917 was a backward country riddled with sexism and antisemitism. The October Revolution saw the new workers’ state abolish discrimination against LGBTIQ+ people, make abortion lawful and elect a Jewish leader, Leon Trotsky, to the leadership.
Socialism cannot be voted into existence. It requires the total overthrow of the capitalist ruling class—the overthrow of the exploiting minority in the interests of the exploited majority. And to help make that happen, we need a mass revolutionary party.
Ultimately, it is only through a wholesale social revolution, driven by the organised power of the working class and mounting a direct challenge to capitalism itself that all the disasters and atrocities which accompany it, can be consigned to history.
