2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, which means there is more wealth in the hands of 0.00003% of the world population than in 60% of it.



In the US, where the highest number of billionaires live, the disparity between the ultra rich and everyone else is at a five-decade high: The richer 0.1% earn almost 200 times as much as the remaining 90%.



According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2018 the threshold to qualify to the 1% was about $421,000 a year. This means that someone making $400,000 a year and someone making $20,000 a year both belong to the 99%, while surely their lives and struggles are not alike.



Bertell Ollman, a professor of political science and a leading expert in Marxism told Quartz the current debate over inequality isn’t too far from Karl Marx’s representation of capitalist society:

 On top, says Ollman, are the capitalists—a small group of people who are interested in maximizing profit at all cost; below them is everyone else, whose work is exploited for the capitalists’ profits. Although it might look different in terms of social status, and income, the position of professionals and that of factory workers, for instance, isn’t intrinsically different.



“Whether it’s the 99%—or maybe the 95%—the middle class is still workers,” says Ollman. “People calling themselves social-democrats are focused on making it easier for the mass of comfortable workers,” says Ollman, pointing to the reforms social-democrats have carried forward in Europe. But Ollman says the European experiments, where some mitigations of capitalism were brought in in the form of the welfare state and regulations, show precisely the limits of maintaining a capitalistic framework while trying to make its reality more palatable to the middle class (as opposed to the working class). “Insofar as social-democrats don’t do away with capitalism, it’s going to turn around and bite them in the butt,” says Ollman. 



So long as the system isn’t changed, he explains, reform can always be undone as soon as there is a government aligned with the interests of wealth. This also ends up alienating workers, who see only incremental progress, and don’t get necessarily captivated by social-democratic political forces. Better welfare structures are important progress, but “most workers are still doing something that is long, hard, dirty, and insecure,” says Ollman, “and that is what they think of, first and foremost.” This explains why those who would benefit from redistribution are often less engaged in the fight for it.



Michael Thompson, a professor of political science at William Patterson University, also sees merit in the framing of everyone against the ultra-rich, while sharing Ollman’s cautiousness. “The idea of 99% versus 1% is significant for one level of analysis,” he told Quartz, “since it’s the traditional middle class that is falling apart.” Patterson says that the current debate on inequality is focused on re-establishing access to the kind of welfare programs that, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and after World War II, all but artificially created a middle class, and that lumping together people of different income (especially when they may have high earnings, but not a lot of accumulated wealth) with the aim of gathering momentum against inequality makes sense from a historical point of view.

Times are bad but the consolation is they have been worse. The very fate of humanity depends on the outcome between capitalism and socialism, since capitalism involves the threat of nuclear world war or environmental destruction. Nations are social structures ruled by definite classes. No nation is ruled or governed without a class structure — a leadership that answers to the class in power but speaks in the name of the whole nation. The real solution to the looming disasters is the socialist revolution. The only road to freedom for the workers is through their common struggle for the abolition of capitalism.



Pessimism can never be a tool for liberation, even though such gloom and doom can the sordid character of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Rather, the Socialist Party case is a heartfelt plea to unify and inspire a divided world. We each have the power to make our class stronger, and nationalism and racism weaker, by reaching out and seeing one another as one people. Though that may seem simple and naive, we have to constantly breathe the spirit of revolutionary optimism. We hold no reason to be disheartened. The apparent political indifference can not continue forever. And, when change comes, the Socialist Party will be in place to achieve its objective. The fact is the left parties have failed to overthrow capitalist imperialism nor do they promote progress towards socialism. Workers recognising their self-interest will see the absolute need for the unity of their class in order to overthrow the capitalist class.



The Socialist Party advocates world socialism. That is to say the destruction of the present class society, which consists of one class who live by owning property and therefore need not work if they so desire, and of another that has no property and therefore must work in order that they may live. 



Socialism insists that this system of society, which is the modern form of slavery, should be changed to a system of society which would give every man and woman an opportunity of doing useful work. Labour would be employed in co-operation, and the struggle of man against man for bare subsistence would be supplanted by harmonious combination for the production of common wealth and mutual services without the waste of labour or material. Everyone‘s needs would be satisfied from this common stock, but no person would be allowed to own anything which he or she could not use, or abuse by employing it as an instrument for forcing others to labour . Thus the land, machinery, and means of transport would cease to be private property. Thus men and women would be free because they would no longer be dependent on  property-owners for subsistence; thus they would be brothers and sisters, for the cause of strife, the struggle for subsistence at other people’s expense, would have come to an end. Thus they would be equal, for if all people were doing useful work. Thus the motto of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, which is but an empty boast in a society that upholds the monopoly of the means of production, would at last be realised.



The aim of the Socialist Party is to replace world capitalist economy with world socialism. Socialist society is mankind’s only way out, for it alone can abolish the contradictions of the capitalist system which threaten to destroy humanity. A socialist society will abolish the class division of society, and  simultaneously the abolition of anarchy in production. It will abolish all forms of exploitation and oppression of man by man. Society will no longer consist of antagonistic classes in conflict with each other, but will be a united commonwealth. For the first time in its history mankind will take its fate into its own hands. Instead of destroying innumerable human lives and incalculable wealth in struggles between classes and nations, mankind will devote all its energy to the development and strengthening of mankind itself.



After abolishing private ownership of the means of production and converting these means into social property, the world socialism will replace the elemental forces of the world market, competitive and blind processes of social production, by consciously organised and planned production for the purpose of satisfying rapidly growing social needs. With the abolition of competition and anarchy in production, devastating crises and still more devastating wars will disappear. Instead of colossal waste of productive forces and spasmodic development of society-there will be a planned utilisation of all material resources and a painless economic development on the basis of unrestricted, smooth and rapid development of productive forces.



The abolition of private property and the disappearance of classes will do away with the exploitation of man by man. Work will cease to be toiling for the benefit of a class enemy: instead of being merely a means of livelihood it will become a necessity of life: want and economic inequality, the misery of enslaved classes, and a wretched standard of life generally will disappear; the hierarchy created in the division of labour system will be abolished together with the antagonism between mental and manual labour; and the last vestige of the social inequality of the sexes will be removed. At the same time, the organs of class domination, and the State in the first place, will disappear also. The State, being the embodiment of class domination, will die out in so far as classes die out, and with it all measures of coercion will expire.



With the disappearance of classes a great field will be opened for the harmonious development of all the talents inherent in humanity.



In socialism no social restrictions will be imposed upon the growth of the forces of production. Private ownership in the means of production, the selfish lust for profits, the artificial retention of the people in a state of ignorance, poverty will have no place in a socialist  society. The most expedient and sustainable utilisation of the forces of nature and of the natural conditions of production in the various parts of the world, the removal of the antagonism between town and country, that under capitalism results from the low technical level of agriculture and its systematic lagging behind industry; the closest possible co-operation between science and technique, the utmost encouragement of research work and the practical application of its results on the widest possible social scale; planned organisation of scientific work; the application of the most perfect methods of statistical accounting and, planned regulation of economy; the rapid growth of social needs, which-is the most powerful internal driving force of the whole system-all these will secure the maximum productivity of social labour, which in turn will release human energy for the powerful development of science and art.



The development of the productive forces of world socialism will make it possible to raise the well-being of the whole of humanity and to reduce to a minimum the time devoted to material production and, consequently, will enable culture to flourish as never before in history. This new culture of a humanity that is united for the first time in history, and has abolished all State boundaries, will, unlike capitalist culture, be based upon clear and transparent human relationships. Hence, it will bury forever all mysticism, religion, prejudice and superstition and will give a powerful impetus to the development of all-conquering, scientific knowledge.



With the enormous growth of social productive forces which has accompanied the development of mankind, humanity will inscribed on its banner: “From each according to abilities to each according to needs!”

With the average worker clocking 47 hours a week, Americans work more hours per year than almost any other industrialized country — 423 more than German workers, 248 more than workers in the United Kingdom, and 266 more hours a year than French workers, according to the latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics. The United States is also the only industrialized country without national parental leave benefits or legally mandated paid vacation. Most European countries require at least 20 days of paid holiday and vacation time — the French actually get an entire month of annual vacation. 



Back in the early days of industrial capitalism, it was not uncommon for workers to work anywhere between 10-16 hours a day. But a bloody, centuries-long battle fought by socialists, unionists, and other similar groups in the United States won us the 40-hour work week in 1938.



Prominent economists like John Maynard Keynes were even making utopian prophecies that we’d all be working 15-hour weeks in the 21st century. 



Keynes’s prediction wasn’t based so much on the continued victories for labor as it was on a belief in increased productivity. Perhaps due to automation, or perhaps in combination with other amazing human achievements, steady increases in worker productivity would make it so that workers could simply work less and less until the weekday/weekend ratio was flipped: two days of work, five days off.



“It was such a struggle for the early organized working class to originally shorten the work week,” economic analyst Doug Henwood explained to Truthout. “But since then, it’s just completely fallen off the radar as a demand of the labor movement. And of course, organized labor is so desperate at this point anyway that they’re not really making many demands. But even just that imagination of what we can do with a shorter work week — it’s just largely disappeared from the conversation.”



“We don’t see payoff from increased productivity in the form of more leisure — it’s just more and more work,” Henwood explained. “The tendency of capitalism, especially in the American system, is just to work more and harder.”



https://truthout.org/articles/its-time-to-shorten-the-american-work-week/



Marx’s son-in-law wrote a pamphlet called the “Right to be Lazy” but his call has gone unheard and unheeded.



https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/guatemala-hunger-famine-flee-north

There is great confusion in the world today over the question of what is socialism. Our aim in the Socialist Party is to try to clear this up.



While Labour politicians talked about socialism, in practice they carried on running capitalism. They did introduce certain reforms which ameliorated the effects of some of the worst features of capitalism in the spheres of health, housing and family support. Collectively, these became known as the ‘Welfare State’ – but they were not socialism. The essential feature of capitalism, that very thing which makes the system one of exploitation and robbery of the mass of wage workers by the ruling class of capitalists, namely the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, this remained untouched.  That did not stop the ruling class from denouncing Labour governments as ‘socialists’ or ‘communists’ at every opportunity. They made the most of their control of the media and almost all sources of information to imprint this ‘big lie’ on people’s minds.



 The Socialist Party exposes the whole machinery of capitalist exploitation of the working-class. The Socialist Party does not oppose supporting reforms under capitalism. What we do not embrace reformism attempting to build support by allying with openly class collaborationist parties. Our generation is living through a fundamental transformation of society in which international capitalism must be  displaced by socialism if civilisation is to thrive.



Socialism must involve the total transformation of social relations. This will mean: