FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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Think numbers are boring? These will wake you up. In 2010, 338 billionaires owned as much as the poorest half of humanity. By 2013 it was down to 85. To-day it’s sixty-two billionaires who own as much as 3,600,000,000 workers and their families! All this is gathered from the Oxfam report An Economy of the 1%.
If those numbers woke you up, these should excite you. In 2010 the first issue of the revolutionary communist Red Flag was published in the USA. Today it is also being published in Mexico, El Salvador, and South Africa. The masses are taking their first international steps to mobilize for communism. Communism is a real movement that is changing today’s world. Join it.
Forget all the pious talk about democracy, elections and exercising your right to vote. These sixty-two billionaires have the power to control each and every government any voter anywhere in the world elects. For example together with a few others they have some $7.6 trillion stored safely in off-shore tax havens and that’s just some of their wealth! When you are talking that amount of money you can see how they can set up think-tanks to create pro-capitalist theories, dominate university departments and media conglomerates to legitimize them, and buy lobbyists, politicians and NGOs to popularize them among the masses and so on. Democracy is a joke. Money means power.
We Make It--They Own It
In one sense, of course, it doesn’t matter whether it’s 338 or 62 billionaires because every cent they own comes from our labor. We make the wealth, they own it. And the only purpose of all their money is to make more - for themselves! Capitalists are intensely individual - a tiny elite minority own it. They are totally anti-social. The billions of us are forced to work for them or die.
That is why even when our communist movement is small it scares them. Communists are clear: production can be organized solely around our social needs. We don’t need banks, stock markets and profit sheets. We can’t eat money although money can stop us from eating! 22,000 kids a day die in poverty. It’s hard to say exactly how our communist future will operate—that’s a discussion for the masses—but it’s not hard to know it will be a heck of a lot better than this capitalist world.
One Capitalist Kills Many
All of which brings us back to the sixty-two billionaires. This rapid concentration of capital is a sign of crisis, not health. Marx pointed out long ago that in times of crisis “One capitalist kills many.” This intensified competition has already sparked regional wars, it threatens world war (later articles will look at that).
Last year, mergers and acquisitions reached a record high - some $3.34 trillion. It’s the sort of spike not seen since 2007, the year before the Great Crash. As the world economy shrinks, smaller (and not so small) companies get eaten up by larger ones. Each major merger throws hundreds of thousands out of jobs.
Total global unemployment stands at 197 million {ILO statistics), or 27 million more than the year before the crash of 2007-2008. Even these figures badly underestimate the actual situation. The Hukou system in China denies benefits and legal status to rural workers forced to come work in the cities. The Financial Times reckons between 60 to 100 million so-called ‘illegal’ migrant workers are unemployed but not counted in official Chinese figures. Likewise the hundreds of millions around the world who are under-employed are not counted.
Sixty-two capitalists face billions who grow angrier by the day and who have more fists than the sixty-two capitalists. The material basis for communist revolution is staring us in the face. Join the ICWP!