Letter: Am I Class Conscious? (2017)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Am I Class Conscious?

Dear Editors

1. I believe my 7 billion brothers and sisters (the family of Man) should all have the same natural rights to participate in and enjoy the full benefits of civilization.

2. That this can only be possible when the means of life belong to and are democratically controlled by everyone.

3. There exists an owning class and a non-owning class whose interests are diametrically opposed. The former take the surplus product, produced by the labour of workers, which they sell to make a profit. The latter are given a wage by the former which in many cases is just enough to provide them with life’s necessities for a week. Which means they have to keep on working 5 days a week for 50 years. At which point they are too knackered to work any more, and they are given a cheap watch, a small pension, and told to piss off.

4. Neither the government nor the opposition want to change the system; because they are doing very nicely out of it, thank you very much. The system is the common hack they take turns at riding. It’s like what the country people call ‘ride and tie’. You ride a little way then I.

5. The workers of the world (in modern parlance, the 99 percent) have nothing to lose but their chains of bondage by organizing their emancipation from the owning class.

6. The owning class back in the mists of time made up laws which now mean that the resources of the Earth, the wealth of the Earth, the means of production and distribution – the Earth, in short – is the property of 1 percent of Man when it should be the common ownership of all. Every baby born today, and for all the days till the end of time on Earth, should have bestowed upon them the wealth of Earth as a birth right.

7. Capitalism is not and never will be a fair system of society. The money system doesn’t and never will work in the best interest of mankind or even a majority. It is an insane game that has one aim: To make a profit. If played to the end, it will mean destruction of humankind. The only way to win is not to play. But to instead establish a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the human race.

8. That the afore-mentioned system is the only way to give people maximum leisure time to enjoy their lives; to give free access to the best standard of goods that can be produced; to remove the threat of nuclear war; and that the increasing damage being done to the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and lands on a daily basis in the quest for profit can be reversed before it’s too late.

9. The revolution must be peaceful. Non-violent revolution is after all the best kind. By that I mean most likely to succeed.

Lee Paine, 

Manchester

Reply: 

Yes –Editors.