Read the text of our latest Young Socialists leaflet below!
We’ll be out campaigning in towns and cities around the country this summer, organising young people in the fight for socialist change. If you would like to get involved with campaigns and meetings near you, get in touch with the Young Socialists today.
This system doesn’t work
Across the world, capitalism is broken. Based on profit ahead of everything else, it is totally incapable of giving us a decent standard of living. In fact, it can’t even maintain our levels of pay, healthcare, public services and education.
Britain is in decay. Cancelled trains, late buses, and NHS waiting lists all blight our lives. Infrastructure at every level, including our schools, hospitals and roads, is crumbling. This is despite the best efforts of workers who face understaffing, and are underpaid and overworked.
For the capitalist class – who are wealthier than ever before in history – it’s more profitable to gamble their money in the stock and bond markets, or simply hoard it, than it is to invest in what society and young people desperately need.
Meanwhile the cost of living crisis is further eroding any last bit of hope the vast majority of us hold for living an independent future. Privately owned energy companies hike our bills and as a result are pocketing record profits.
Crippling rent increases are forced on us in return for overcrowded, slum housing. Big landlords raise the rent and banks jack up the price of mortgages. Owning your own home is now a distant dream for the vast majority of us. We finish college and university only to enter a world of work plagued by low pay, insecure contracts, and bullying bosses.
That’s not to mention the threat to the planet itself which capitalism’s ruthless pursuit of profit poses. World capitalism, based on different capitalist classes competing for profit, is a barrier to the cooperation and democratic planning of global resources necessary to reverse the ecological crisis. Meanwhile the war in the Ukraine underscores the ever increasingly unstable and dangerous world decaying capitalism is creating. Capitalist politicians whip up racism, sexism, and transphobia in attempts at divide and rule.
We need a socialist alternative
In response, workers are fighting back across the globe and in Britain. The wave of ongoing industrial action shows that the bosses and the Tories can be beaten back. Further mass action, particularly coordinated trade union action, including a 24 hour general strike, could force this split and warring Tory government out of office altogether before the next general election in 2024.
But what political alternative do we have to the Tories? Keir Starmer has been fighting to erase every last remaining shred of Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity manifesto within the Labour Party.
From opposing above inflation pay rises for workers, to promoting the role of private companies in the NHS, to ditching Corbyn’s pledge to scrap tuition fees, Starmer is straining to assure big business that he and Labour will be a safe pair of hands to represent their interests in government.
With British capitalism in severe crisis, a Starmer government will mean even more vicious attacks on our wages, living standards, and futures. The fight will be on between us and the rich.
That’s why alongside our struggles in the workplaces and the streets, we need a new workers’ party which can fight for workers’ and young peoples’ interests in Parliament and the council chamber.
Young Socialists and the Socialist Party say it is vital any such party is armed with a socialist programme. The struggle for above inflation pay rises, proper funding for our NHS, mass council house building, decent and well paid jobs will be fought against bitterly by big business both in Britain and internationally.
That’s why we need to build a mass movement which fights to replace capitalism with a socialist society! We want to help build a mass movement to take the commanding heights of the economy – including the banks, monopolies, transport, the energy companies and industry – into democratic public ownership under workers’ control and management.
On that basis – a socialist basis – it would be possible to introduce a democratic plan of production to meet the social needs and wants of all in society, and to build a world free of all oppression, division, climate destruction and war. Get involved with the Young Socialists this summer to discuss how we can fight for a socialist transformation of society in Britain and across the world and fight for our futures!
Young Socialists says:
- End low pay – scrap youth rates and zero hours contracts. Pay rises for all that at least keep pace with inflation. A £15 an hour minimum wage now. Support striking workers!
- For decent jobs! For a mass programme of socially apprenticeship and training schemes with a guaranteed job at the end.
- For free education. Scrap tuition fees, cancel student debt, and replace loans with living grants that rise with inflation.
- Councils must set no-cuts budgets. Restore services, reopen libraries, reverse cuts and re-employ sacked council workers. For a mass council house building programme.
- Fully fund the NHS – stop privatisation and give staff a 15% pay rise.
- Re-nationalise energy companies and the other privatised utilities. For a socialist plan of production to combat climate change, including a free-to-use, expanded, renationalised public transport system.
- For united working-class struggle to end all forms of discrimination, prejudice and oppression.
- Kick out the Tories – but Starmer’s Labour won’t fight for us! Build a new workers’ party based on a socialist programme.
- Fight for a socialist world! Take the banks, monopolies and major industry into democratic public ownership to provide us with a future!
Young Socialists 