Nick Beams, a member of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board and national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in Australia, demonstrates that the present situation is, in the final analysis, the outcome of fundamental contradictions within the capitalist profit system itself. He outlines the socialist perspective and program that the international working class must adopt in order to reorganise social and economic life to meet the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of the world's population, not the profit requirements of a wealthy elite.