By Wendy Robertson
According to Karl Marx, capitalism is a system based on the debasement, enslavement and exploitation of the majority by the few. Marx provided a scientific analysis for the struggle for human liberation, and a method to make it happen. He argued that socialism could be achieved only through the revolutionary overthrow of the existing capitalist political and economic order. The famous call of the Communist Manifesto, "Workers of the world, unite!", was a call to arms.
Marx's analysis has never, of course, been popular with newspaper owners, other capitalists or the politicians who serve them. In Marx's time, they maligned his views, claiming that the inequalities of the system are not innate and that, through capitalism, humanity would enjoy ever increasing development and rights.
One hundred and fifty years later, the debate is still hot. Even in the face of the mounting environmental crisis, the increasing misery of the majority of the world's people and economic crisis, it is still maintained that capitalism is able to deliver. Even among those who think that capitalism has to go, too few believe that it is possible that the majority will rise up and take control of their own destiny.
What conclusions does Resistance draw in the debate? Resistance is organising campus seminars across the country with speakers from the Democratic Socialist Party, to present our view as to why Marx was right.
Speakers:
Lisa Macdonald is a member of the National Executive of the Democratic Socialist Party. She has been a member of the DSP for 17 years. She has been a feminist activist for over 20 years and is the national director of the DSP's women's rights campaigns. Macdonald frequently writes in Green Left Weekly.
Sue Bolton is a member of the National Executive of the Democratic Socialist Party and has been politically activist since the 1970s. As the Australian politics writer for Green Left Weekly, Bolton has analysed the GST and Liberal industrial relations legislation. She has been part of struggles for women's rights, against racism, for peace and nuclear disarmament and against logging in old-growth forests. She also has extensive experience as a trade union militant on Brisbane buses and in the ACT public service.
Dick Nichols became a Marxist as a high school student in Lithgow. He is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party National Executive. Nichols is the national organiser of the DSP's trade union work and has a long history of involvement in trade union struggles. He was a branch councillor of the Australian Railways Union and fought the privatisation policies of the state government. He has been the editor of Links magazine, the international journal for socialist renewal.
[See Meetings ... Parties ... Anything for details, or phone your local Resistance branch.]