Let’s get organised to fight for socialism

Socialists protest the deportation of refugees to Rwanda (picture: Guy Smallman)

A world plagued by war, poverty, racism and climate destruction threatens the future of humanity. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Resistance, strikes and fightback waged by ordinary people offer us hope that change is possible. 

Capitalism has a grim record. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the response to it by the West, which has pumped arms into the battlefields, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

And as a growing number of people in Britain fall into debt, food poverty and homelessness, our leaders still manage to find the money for war.  Inter-imperialist tensions make the once unthinkable idea of nuclear war more and more acceptable to sections of the ruling classes. 

That seems irrational, but how our rulers acted during the height of Covid-19 and the rulers’ inaction over the climate crisis shows that the bosses’ logic won’t save us.   

At the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow 2021, the Tories and over 100 other nations’ representatives pledged to stop cutting down forests. But a report on Monday showed the area of a football pitch of mature tropical trees is felled or burned every five seconds.

Tropical forests destroyed last year released 2.7 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, the equivalent of the fossil fuel emissions of India.  Bosses’ commitments meant nothing when profits were at stake.

It would be easy to despair. That’s why the strikes, anti-racist mobilisation, environmental campaigns, protests over transphobia and abortion rights—and much more—are so important.

They offer the potential for change which will never come from a Labour Party that is auditioning to be the favoured choice of the ruling class. In another retreat Labour this week confirmed it now has “no plans” to raise £3 billion from Amazon and Facebook through a digital services tax it had previously called for.

We need to go to the root of the problem, the capitalist system that allows profit to take priority no matter the destruction it causes. Misery and death are built into the system where parasites such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos play around in space whilst hoarding masses of stolen wealth.

Those reading this newspaper and website are not the only ones who understand there is something deeply wrong in society.

We need to organise collectively and democratically to be effective. And we need socialist politics based on resistance in the workplaces and the streets with the end goal of uprooting the system.

We urge those who are reading this paper, and the thousands attending this week’s Marxism 2023 festival, to join the Socialist Workers Party and to be active in building the alternative to capitalist destruction and despair.

To join go to bit.ly/JoinSWP