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Socialism or Barbarism? We Fight for Socialism!

Editorial for issue 40 of Socialist Revolution magazine. Subscribe now to get your copy!

More than 200 mass shootings have taken place in the first five months of 2023. Every year in the world’s wealthiest nation, nine million children go hungry, and 2.5 million experience homelessness—one in 30 kids. Two-thirds of unaccompanied migrant children are forced to sell their labor power for a wage to profiteering exploiters to survive, some as young as ten. Homeless people reduced to begging for loose change or fast food are choked to death on the subway. From trans oppression to racial segregation, food insecurity to prostitution, the scourge of for-profit healthcare, and the phenomenon of “greedflation,” the miasma of decomposing capitalism can be suffocating. These are the death agonies of a system that refuses to die. But we should never forget that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Wall Street Sign Alex Proimos Wikimedia Commons
In 2021, the average top CEO made 670 times more than their median workers. In 1950, they earned just 20 times as much. / Image: Alex Proimos, Wikimedia Commons

The idea that a better world is possible has inspired socialists since before the rise of modern industry. Centuries later, a world of superabundance and dignity for all is not merely a good idea, but a clear and present material possibility. Oceans of riches have been generated by our collective labor, and infinitely more is just waiting to be untapped. The problem isn’t a lack of wealth or the potential to create more—the Fortune 500 alone account for two-thirds of the US GDP, with $16.1 trillion in revenues and $1.84 trillion in profits. The problem is that a handful of people control most of it, and the pursuit of profit paralyzes the means for producing more.

For decades, corporate profits have soared, and wealth distribution has skewed ever further in favor of the already affluent. From 2009 to 2022, the wealth of the top 1% grew by $12.5 trillion. According to the Brookings Institute: “More than 70% of the wealth generated for US shareholders by 22 companies during the pandemic benefitted the richest 5% of Americans, compared to just 1% for the bottom half of all American families, including most frontline workers.” In 2021, the average top CEO made 670 times more than their median workers. In 1950, they earned just 20 times as much.

Karl Marx
Over the millennia, humans have organized society in many different ways. We can and must reorganize it again, this time in the majority’s interests. / Image: Alfaain Zohra Fathima, Wikimedia Commons

There are 119.2 million workers in the US, and GDP stands at around $25 trillion. This means that in a single year, each worker generates around $214,000. With a total population of 336.5 million, that’s roughly $75,000 per person, whether employed or unemployed, newly born or retired. And yet, the median American worker brings home just $54,000 a year. Millions earn far less than that, and most workers must support multiple people with their earnings. The balance goes to line pockets of the exploiters and their hangers-on.

Over the millennia, humans have organized society in many different ways. We can and must reorganize it again, this time in the majority’s interests. As Marx put it in the Critique of the Gotha Program:

After the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!


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