To answer this question, we re-post this video recording of Harpal Brar, Chairman of the CPGB-ML, speaking at the Oxford Union in 2008, explaining that capitalism cannot save the planet!
The debate took place just after remembrance day 2008, when the big British capitalist banks (RBS et al.) had collapsed and were being bailed out to the tune of £850 bn – for which we are all now paying.
Before starting the debate, the President of the Union led those gathered to pay homage to the soldiers who fell in WW1 and WW2.
As is generally the case on these occasions in our society, still dominated, run and organized by and in the interests of the very monopoly capitalists who led 100 million workers to the slaughter in order to prop up their system, there is much solemnity and grandeur without any real explanation, understanding or enlightenment.
The slogan “Never again!” looks particularly hollow now, when the capitalist system stands mired in a crisis far more protracted and profound than those of 1911 and 1929 which led British, French, German, Japanese and American capital on the road to war production and war to keep their rickety and self serving financial system on the road.
We will shortly be publishing our series of seminars on communism, starting with the communist manifesto here.
Only working people, taking the reigns of power and the economy into their own hands in order to plan life and production in a rational and meaningful way, putting the happiness and well-being of the earths vast toiling masses at the center of those plans, can avert the impending disaster of a third capitalist world war.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed, imperialism has been on a ceaseless drive to war to maintain its monopoly profits for the few parasites who benefit from this rotten, corrupt, decadent and moribund system.
This is the meaning and content also of the so called ‘peacetime’ wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya; and all the other overt and covert military, diplomatic and economic anti-democratic interventions perpetuated by NATO and its member states against sovereign and independent nations since WW2.
It is up to us to stop it. Let us resolve to do so on this, remembrance day 2011, 93 Years after the end of WW1.
Let us also remember, that the Russian proletariat, 94 years ago in October 1917, by rejecting fratricidal slaughter and instead taking the path of the revolutionary overthrow of the Bourgeois order, brought their nation out of WW1 a year earlier than the rest of the world, and opened up the vista of a bright, peaceful and prosperous socialist development.
Faced with this alternative: Either Socialism or Barbarism – Let us take the road of October. [speeches from our meeting to celebrate the 94th anniversary of the October revolution will be uploaded here soon]
Remember the dead – Smash Capitalism!