Social Being

Social Being is an archival project that brings together primary documents concerned with the recovery and presentation of world-socialist thought. It is intended to grow over time.

Archival text practice: Editorial intervention is identified, language modernisation is minimised, and retrospective interpretation is not imposed.

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Guiding Principle

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
— Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “Preface”.

Cooperation

Man is, if not as Aristotle contends, a political, at all events, is a social animal.
— Karl Marx: Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 13, “Co-operation”.

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Lives

The writers were seamen on the Australian coast, and foundation members of the World Socialist Party of Australia (1924). Others will follow.

Writings

Their writings are relevant for as long as the working-class (waged, salaried and self-employed) produces surplus-value (profit, interest and rent) for the capitalist-class (private, corporate and government) and accepts it as the human condition.

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Class Struggle

The only class struggle we can win is over how we spend our lives—living to reproduce our subservience to capital, or to reproduce our shared humanity. The only class-struggle worthy of humanity is between world capitalism and world socialism. Everyday struggles are capitalism's sideshows.

Class Consciousness

We make class rule impossible by turning the global means of production (the world’s productive resources and forces) into the common heritage of each under the democratic control of all as the continuing basis of World Socialism.