WHY CLASS WAR?

Class War is not just another party seeking to gain power or a new way of telling people what to do. Class war is what happens when ordinary people have had enough of being pushed around and decide to fight back. If you're one of the people who've swallowed the crap about "we're all middle class now" or "we live in a classless society" this is the time to stop reading!

We live in a society severely split along the lines of class, where capitalism, the State and the ruling class dominate us. So what do we mean by this?

CAPITALISM

Capitalism is an economic system run purely for profit in the interests of a small class - the capitalists - at the expense of a larger class - the working class. The whole of our present society is geared to the needs of capitalism. It is the mechanism whereby we sell our labour, in exchange for money, to purchase the goods and services we need, which we also happen to have produced in the first place! However, we only get a proportion of the wealth that our labour produces, the rest goes to the capitalists in profit. This is fundamental to capitalism - in order for it to work the many must produce wealth for the few.

Western style capitalism is often hailed as being the "free market", however there is no such thing as the free market, all it means is that they are "free" to exploit us. The situation is exactly the same in the so-called "planned economies" of the "Communist" countries. Karl Marx suggested that capitalism is a machine governed by natural laws - it isn't. It's an economic system run by a group of people who compete fiercely with each other for the right to rip us off.

Capitalism has nothing to offer us except an endless cycle of war, famine, recession and unemployment. It is not inevitable that it will die of it's own accord, it could linger on for centuries yet, lurching from crisis to crisis, therefore it must be destroyed.

THE STATE

Although capitalism is the major form of social organisation in terms of production, there are things that it can't do. Broadly speaking it cannot supply the "social" organisation of society, this hole is filled by something else - the State.

The State is the means by which a tiny minority control and dominate the rest of us, in the interests of the ruling power in our society - the capitalists. To give you an idea of how small a minority we are talking about, the often quoted figures are still true - that 7% of the population owns 84% of the wealth.

The state is a set of institutions and bodies through which government is exercised e.g. parliament, local government, ministries, civil service, police, law, education, and the church. The aim of government is to keep the lid on class conflict, and to contol competition between the capitalists, to make sure of the smooth running of society. It does this by enforcing the laws of private property, and the right of the capitalist to buy and sell it. It doesn't matter whether that propety is land, food, health, sex, factories, houses or anything else that takes their fancy.

But the State came before capitalism, and it has always been a form of control and oppression in the interests of whatever ruling class is in power, and whatever economic system they choose to use. In Britain we are given the "choice", every five years or so, of what Party we'd like to govern us. This, like many other "choices", is a false one, a con trick to fool us into thinking we can change things through the vote. It also gives us politicians, as figureheads, to blame for our difficulties.

But the reality is that the power of the State lies with the capitalists, and the State's own officials - they pull the strings. With power concentrated like it is there is always the risk that a small group can mount an attempt to gain control of the state. For example Fascists or Lenin-inspired communists. This would be nothing more than swapping one set of bosses for another - we want to sweep the lot of them away.