Through Pluripolarity to Socialism: A Manifesto

Abstract

The ruling class unable to secure working people their existence is “unfit any longer to be the ruling class” and “impose its conditions of existence upon society,” said Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, urging revolutionaries to smother capitalism in its European cradle, already in 1848. That Springtime of the Peoples was soon followed by the Paris Commune and revolutionary activity worldwide has kept the spectre of communism haunting capitalist classes and advanced the democratisation of social relations in the teeth of determined counter-revolution. In capitalism’s imperial core, working people’s struggles won welfare states and regulated capitalisms after the Second World War, in its peripheries, national independence and developmental states. Meanwhile, some countries, beginning with the Russian Revolution in 1917, embarked on building socialism. Increasingly, they organised production for need, distributed work and its rewards equitably and related to one another in a spirit of cooperation. Despite incomplete successes, great problems and stunning reverses, the struggle they started for a world beyond capitalism, alienation, imperialism and other social injustices continues. Today, after decades of mounting capitalist contradictions, capitalist ruling classes, neoliberal or residually social democratic, in rich countries and poor, are giving Marx and Engels’s words a macabre significance. Over four decades of policies favouring capital, neoliberal financialised capitalism has lost productive dynamism and turned to unproductive plunder, created unacceptable mass poverty, shocking inequality, festering social division, draconian political repression, a growing threat of exterminist nuclear war, mass movements of population and an ecological emergency of climate warming, pollution and biodiversity loss, rendering our planet increasingly uninhabitable. To top all this, today it is responding to a raging pandemic by sacrificing lives to capital and profit and increasing political repression. Rosa Luxemburg famously feared that the alternative to socialism was barbarism. Today, however, it is human and planetary annihilation. By the 2010s, smouldering discontent burst into flames with increasing frequency. The decade began with the Tunisian protests that set off the “Arab Spring” and continued through European protests against austerity. It drew to a close amidst schoolchildren’s protests against climate change, Indian Muslim women’s struggles for citizenship rights, Black Lives Matter, “yellow vests” in France and protests against hopeless economies and political repression, from Turkey to Chile to Nigeria. By 2020, farmers laid siege