Socialists believe everyone has the right to the basic necessities of life—all the things that are necessary to become a happy, willing, caring and productive member of society.

Economic and social equality, democracy and freedom are essential to this goal. As socialists, we want to disarm the world’s military, we want to end war, we want to share the wealth of the world—wealth that we create by our labor—on the basis of equality and justice for all. That is socialism’s goal. War and capitalism’s competitive private-profit motive of production are the antithesis of this goal.

Competition under capitalism, contrary to uplifting civilization, has brought nothing but cruelty, devastation and war.

In a May 19, 2025, article in the New York Times by Williom J. Broad, titled, “A Scientist Fighting Nuclear Armageddon Hid a 50-Year Secret”:

“In a blinding flash, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay killed at least 70,000 people. Deadly like no earlier weapon, it was still quite limited in contrast with Dr. Garwin’s superweapon. One proposed version had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. The mind boggles at such numbers. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization.”

The threat of more war and nuclear annihilation was capitalism’s gift to the world by the victors World War II.

And the saber-rattling is ramping up yet again. On June 2, 2025, Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer promised to bring his country to “‘war-fighting readiness,’ by building up to 12 new attack submarines and invest billions of pounds in nuclear and other weaponry as part of a new military strategy for a more dangerous world.”1 On June 13, 2025, the U.S.-backed Israeli Defense Force launched a military attack on Iran.2 And Trump celebrated his birthday, June 14, 2025, by rolling out “28 M1A1 Abrams tanks (at 70 tons each for the heaviest in service); 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers; more than 100 other vehicles; a World War II-era B-25 bomber; 6,700 soldiers; 50 helicopters; 34 horses; two mules; and a robot dog” on the streets of Washington, DC—an astounding display of his brutal ego and the death weapons of capitalism.3 Even Putin managed to resurrect the legacy of Joseph Stalin—the man responsible for the slaughter of tens-of-thousands of the revolutionary workers and leaders of the Russian Revolution, and the resulting demise of the USSR, and its return to a capitalist economy.4

Capitalism’s message is clear; humanity must compete against each other to survive. The one with enough wealth and power to build the biggest bomb wins.

As ordinary working people we must accept as natural the possibility of nuclear annihilation, while competing on an unequal playing field just for the basic necessities of life.

Our children are dependent upon the financial resources of their parents. And as parents, we are solely responsible for their life and wellbeing.

We must work to put food into ours and our children’s mouths. We are either lucky enough to have relatives that can help us with our children, or we must pay others to take care of them or leave them unattended while we work.

It takes a village to raise a child—but not for the poor. There is no village when everyone around you is starving which is the situation with over 2.8 billion of the poorest people the world over.5 You can’t share food if you don’t have any.

Even in the wealthiest countries ordinary working people are struggling to keep up with healthcare, food and housing costs. And so are all their relatives and friends. That’s the point.

The natural order of capitalism is that there must be a vast gap between the wealthy and the poor—between the masses and the elite. It reinforces the capitalist myth that those that have accumulated all the wealth are better, more intelligent—more evolved than the masses. Their wealth is their proof!

This has been pounded into our heads in every way possible. Capitalism teaches the masses to think that those who have more are better and more deserving than those who have less.

Most importantly, capitalism wants us to think that those who are better off financially must guard against the poor—keep them in their place—because if they are allowed to have more, then those who are “better” will have less. Capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system destined for annihilation.

The offspring of the capitalist class are set for life the moment they are born. For them, competition is a means to increasing their wealth while risking nothing themselves.

Big businesses compete by reducing labor costs while increasing profits—either by replacing workers with AI and machines, speeding up production—or moving their entire facilities to countries where labor is cheap and labor laws are virtually non-existent. And—as workers—we must compete with each other for the privilege of being exploited and oppressed.

Competition for survival

Applying for a job is competitive. So is renting an apartment, buying a house—even reaching for the last can of beans in the supermarket can be competitive because there is not enough to go around—so the strongest or fastest or the one with the most money gets the beans.

But the capitalists who own the factories that produce those beans will accumulate vast profits for themselves because the cost of labor to produce the beans is a tiny fraction of the money they get from selling them.

That, in a nutshell, is how capitalism works in favor of the bosses at the expense of workers every time.

The capitalist trajectory is toward more cruelty

Capitalist competition, underscored by the threat of nuclear annihilation, is consciously designed to pit us against each other.

Instead of encouraging us to perform to the very best of our ability in cooperation for the benefit of all, capitalist competition rewards cruelty, aggression, deception, bullying and hatefulness.

They portray the rule of the wealthy over the poor as a natural order of human nature that can never be changed. When industries’ profits begin to falter businesses must extract more from their workers.

Pitting workers against each other facilitates their money grab by placing blame for hardship on the poorest and most vulnerable workers.

The current mass scapegoating of immigrants as the cause of all of our economic woes fits right in with their strategy of divide and conquer—to get the working class to blame each other instead of the economic system of capitalism.

Succumbing to the propaganda of divide and conquer among the working class is what keeps the capitalist dictatorship in power.

Cutting Medicaid and demonizing migrants

On May 29, 2025, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!” Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said. The next day she posted an “apology.” In it she exposed her cruelty and proudly expressed her indifference to the suffering of others:

“I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for a statement I made yesterday at my town hall. I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth. I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

And on May 14, 2025, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who campaigned for “universal healthcare for all” in his bid for Governor, proposed freezing enrollment of undocumented adults in the state’s version of Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal, as soon as January. He also will seek to charge those who remain in the program $100 a month beginning in 2027—a cost they can’t possibly afford.

Further, ICE has removed the children of undocumented migrants from their classrooms—some as young as five or six—deporting them and their parents, ripping them from their communities.

And even though 53 percent of people disapprove of Trumps immigration policies, the deportations continue. As of June 11, 2025, “…the Department of Homeland Security provided TIME with updated figures from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: more than 207,000 deported.”6

Demonizing the most disadvantaged and vulnerable

It’s not only the Republicans who are demonizing migrants, so are the Democrats. In fact, capitalist parties in countries across the globe are reinforcing the demonization of migrants as the cause for the decline in the living standards of their “citizens” while the wealthy get richer.

But “citizens” of the United States have been living on stolen land since the first white man stepped onto this continent.

People in poverty across the world today are being forced to migrate—as they have for millennia. And they are criminalized, murdered and persecuted for it.

Can’t see the forest for the trees

We have been duped for centuries by the elite owners of the means of production and their political mouthpieces who, through the enslavement of the working masses in one form or another, have stolen the wealth our labor created by pitting us against each other instead of against the entire capitalist class who are the real thieves.

We work their land, their factories, their businesses for a pittance, while they wallow in enough wealth to create life ending weapons of mass destruction of astronomical proportions costing trillions of our dollars. Our taxes pay for their weapons—it doesn’t cost the commanders of capitalism a dime.

They make war but they don’t fight in wars—they have us to do that. It’s our blood on the battlefields; it’s our homes that are demolished. And it is we who are sacrificing our lives to enable them.

If we don’t stand united against them, we are succumbing to them

The threat of nuclear annihilation is the ultimate weapon of fascism. It is the threat of annihilation if the power of the ruling capitalist class is challenged. The longer capitalism exists; the calamity of world-ending war becomes inevitable.

Genocide has been a staple of the global expansion of capital throughout history from the ruling monarchs to the corporate executives of the modern-day war industry, and their political representatives among the capitalist ruling class across the globe.

Every war conquest has resulted in mass murder. Both sides of the battle on the ground are annihilated—while the winning commanders—who have not risked their own lives or the lives of their families—claim the wealth and assume the rule over those of us on both sides who managed to survive.

Tricking masses of people into thinking that war and the power of the wealthy elite over the masses, is the natural order of things, is the only way a minority ruling class can endure.

But even trees live in cooperation with each other and their species by separating their canopies to allow light to shine down on saplings.7

A healthy human society can only be built upon cooperation, democracy, social and economic equality. And the only way to achieve that goal is to take the means of production out of the private hands of the wealthy elite and put it into the hands of we who do the work.

We, the masses of humanity working cooperatively together can produce more than enough to fulfill the needs and wants of all while maintaining the highest quality of production methods—production that doesn’t pollute our environment or endanger other species on our planet.

This not only means that environmental protection and the rational use of our resources must become a priority. Producing high quality products must become a priority by ending capitalism’s production of products-designed-to-fail so that they must be replaced over and over. The capitalist production method disregards environmental, and workplace hazards, wastes resources and exploits labor. For the capitalist class, the private accumulation of personal wealth trumps all.

Capitalism is completely irrational and can only lead to the end of life as we know it. That is the destiny of capitalism.

Clearly, the world’s commanders of capital will only get more desperate and violent as their wars against each other for control of natural resources, and the further oppression of the world’s working class escalates.

Only a world socialist revolution can save us

We can end capitalism’s road to global annihilation only if we unite together to disarm the entire capitalist arsenal—both its military and political dictatorship—everywhere.

Cooperating and organizing a unified, democratically structured, force for peace, equality and justice is the only way to transform our world from one of cruelty and brutal competition to one of kindness and cooperation.

Socialism is the only way to rationally and equitably share the wealth produced by the product of our collective labor worldwide without destroying the world in the bargain. It’s our only hope and time is of the essence!

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1 “U.K. Faces Most Serious Military Threat Since Cold War, Starmer Says”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/world/europe/uk-defense-review-starmer-nuclear-submarines.html

2 “June 2025 Israeli strikes on Iran”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2025_Israeli_strikes_on_Iran

3 “250th BIRTHDAY PARADE—Parade equipment”

https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2025/06/03/68287c78/equipment-at-army-festival-parade.pdf

4 “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/world/europe/stalin-image-moscow-subway.html

5 “World hunger facts: What you need to know in 2025”

https://concernusa.org/news/world-hunger-facts/#:~:text=World%20hunger%20by%20the%20numbers,hunger%2Drelated%20causes%20every%20year.

6 “What the Data Reveals About Trump’s Push to Arrest and Deport More Migrants”

https://time.com/7292939/trump-deportations-ice-arrests/

7 “Crown shyness: are trees social distancing too?

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=tree+canopies+separage+to+allow+more+light+onto+saplings&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8