4/ "The great owners formed associations for protection and they met to discuss ways to intimidate, to kill, to gas. And always they were in fear of a principal--three hundred thousand--if they ever move under a leader--the end."

3/ "The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on."

2/ "And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."

1/ John Steinbeck, 'The Grapes of Wrath': "And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away."

Marx (1875): "from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of [class] society and culture, be the slave of other men, who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor."

Once the obstacle of capitalist private property is abolished, a socialist economic plan on a world basis would establish the conditions necessary to eliminate competitive wars between nation-states and the horrors of economic deprivation, and provide cooperative humanity with economic abundance.

The unhindered growth of the economic forces of society, the economic, scientific and cultural progress of humanity, then requires the expropriation of private property in the conditions of economic production and the cooperative implementation of a world-wide economic plan.

The class of competitive property owners, in the interest of the preservation of its property, then declares war on the already developed productive forces, principally but not only on the class of cooperative laborers.

Economic cooperation on the scale of single competitive enterprises increases productive forces until the time when the further development of these forces becomes incompatible with economic competition, the anarchy of production, rooted in private property.

Private property, which introduces competition into economic production, is a barrier that obstructs the progressive expansion of economically productive cooperation from the scale of the individual enterprise to the scale of a world-wide economic plan.

"Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each case, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time."-Marx/Engels

Marx's "theory explains [capitalist] crises by the contradiction between the social character of production (socialised by capitalism) and the private, individual mode of appropriation. To put it more briefly, [Marxism explains crises] by the anarchy of production."--Lenin, CW, vol. 2, p. 167

The crisis of capitalism, its preparations for world war, its economic inequality, its anti-immigrant nationalism, its destruction of the environment, its ruination of education and health care, its private prisons and militarized police, is rooted in private property and the anarchy of production.

" The specter of a third socialist party, with a mass base, that advocates not merely free bus rides but also nationalizations and expropriations, haunts the corporate-financial oligarchy."--David North WSWS

The abolition of war is possible only on the basis of the world-wide abolition of private property in the conditions of economic production, which would result in the dissolution of the separate capitalist nation-states, and the international and cooperative implementation of a planned economy.

"The SEP advocates neither protectionism nor 'free trade,' but fights instead for social ownership of the productive forces, the elimination of national borders, and the creation of a planned, rationally-integrated global economy."-Principles

"The key industrial, financial, technological and natural resources must be taken out of the sphere of the capitalist market and private ownership, transferred to society and placed under the democratic supervision and control of the working class." SEP Principles

"All efforts to raise the living standards of the working class and address serious social problems run up against the barrier of private ownership of the means of production, the anarchy of the capitalist market, [and] the economic imperatives of the profit system."-SEP Statement of Principles

"The source of the contradiction between what is and what should be is a global economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, and the irrational division of the world into rival nation-states." Statement of Principles of the Socialist Equality Party 2008

"Socialisation will extend to the large enterprises in industry and agriculture. We do not need to dispossess the small farmer and craftsman with a small plot of land or workshop. In time they will all come to us voluntarily and will recognise the merits of socialism as against private property."-RL

"All social wealth, the land with all its natural resources hidden in its bowels and on the surface, and all factories and works must be taken out of the hands of the exploiters and taken into common property of the people."-R. Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (1918): "The first duty of a real workers’ government is to declare by means of a series of decrees the most important means of production to be national property and place them under the control of society."

Ulas Atesci, May Day 2025, WSWS: "No fundamental social and political problems can be solved without seizing the ill-gotten wealth and power of the capitalist class. The wealth acquired by the capitalist class through exploitation and financial profiteering must be expropriated."

Joseph Kishore, May Day 2025, WSWS: "It is impossible to fight oligarchy without breaking its power. And that means the expropriation of the billionaires—the seizure of their wealth and the socialist reorganization of society in the interests of the working class."

"What is required is not a new strategic alliance of national states arrayed against the US and Western Europe, but the abolition of the nation-state system and capitalist ownership of the means of production." David North, May Day 2025, WSWS

2/ "These contradictions are (1) the incompatibility of the world economy with the capitalist nation-state system; and (2) the socially destructive character of (a) capitalist private ownership of the productive forces, and (b) social production."

1/ "The essential causes of the descent into political barbarism are the same economic and social contradictions of the capitalist regime that resulted in war and fascism in the last century." David North, May Day 2025, WSWS

David North
@DavidNorthWSWS
The WSWS did not only analyze the economic, political and social origins and foundations of the American oligarchy. It advanced a solution to the problem: the expropriation of the Oligarchs, the end of capitalist rule and the transfer of power to the working class.

"The basic task of our time is the expropriation of UnitedHealthcare and other major corporations by the working class in a socialist revolution, not 'vengeance' against individual executives. This requires the construction of a revolutionary party." Tom Hall WSWS.ORG

"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of [private] property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures [that] are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production." Marx/Engels