We believe that capitalism is a social system rooted in economic exploitation and many forms of oppression and that it has become a threat to the planet. Capitalism allocates resources in a manner that primarily deepens crises facing humanity (e.g. war, climate change, lack of access to healthcare) rather than alleviating them, and also fails to allocate sufficient resources to socially beneficial activities such as sustainable infrastructure, education, or art. We see how new technologies, rather than making life better for everyone and allowing us to spend less of our time working, instead make the dominant minority (the bourgeoisie) richer, and the exploited majority (the working class) poorer, sicker, unhappier. 
This happens because capitalism is torn apart by fundamental contradictions that cyclically drag the system into deep economic crisis: in a capitalist economy, increased investment eventually leads to diminishing returns. Ultimately this forces the ruling class to either conquer “new markets” and destroy more natural resources to expand the economy, or else leads to a market crash as capitalists cut investment due to the lack of profits. These crashes shrink the economy, wiping out smaller businesses and leading to the increasing precariatization of workers, allowing capitalists wealthy enough to weather the storm to expand once more, concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands as workers are forced to accept worse pay and working conditions due to the reduced demand for labor.
The state, the government and military apparatus, primarily operates to protect the rule of the capitalist system. The Constitution takes great pains to delineate the freedom to conduct commerce (a freedom that only the rich can truly take advantage of), but does virtually nothing to guarantee freedom from hunger, homelessness, or any of the other dangers of life faced daily by the working class. Its laws and police serve primarily to protect the system of private property that allows capitalism to function, brutally punishing the poor for even the most minor transgressions while turning a blind eye to corruption among the capitalists, allowing business executives and politicians to commit rape, start wars, and crash economies with barely so much as a slap on the wrist while simply being homeless can result in jail time and petty theft can end up shot to death by the police. In the United States, the Democratic and Republican parties represent feuding factions of the bourgeoisie; while they may disagree on specific policies, ultimately neither of them is interested in giving a voice to the working class. This is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, government by the rich, for the rich, built on the backs of the poor.
We are fighting to overthrow capitalism through a socialist revolution, that will bring the working class to seize state power, destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, and start building a socialist society. Our definition of socialism is based on the socialization of the means of production under a workers’ state, with economic democracy for workers. The goal of this transitional socialist state is to extend this new society through the world until imperialism (transnational capitalist enterprise) is defeated and a new international classless society can emerge, free of exploitation and oppression. This is what we mean by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat which is the complete opposite of the current dictatorship of the ruling class; all power to the workers and oppressed sectors, none to the bourgeoisie.
We believe the only way to reach the socialist revolution is through the mobilization of the working class and the broad masses towards the development of dual power organisms that can challenge the bourgeois state. This mobilization occurs through various methods: strikes, pickets, demonstrations, occupations, all of which can be valid depending on the strategic needs of the moment. That’s why we support every struggle, no matter how small, for better wages, better working conditions, in defense of workers’ rights and try to develop these struggles into a national mobilization against the government and the bourgeoisie. This method is embodied by the Transitional Program, which combines demands for immediate concessions (e.g. wage increases, safer working conditions, stopping individual unpopular wars) together with historical demands that cannot be granted by the capitalist state (e.g. demobilization of the imperialist military, expropriation of private property for use by the proletariat, political rights for all workers) so that we can fight for the concessions that we need in order to survive today without losing sight of the ultimate goals that we will realize tomorrow. In order to achieve these goals, we fight for the political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie and the government. The working class must be able to build and wield its own political power, rather than being led by the nose by Democrats that would rather see us trapped in the merry-go-round of bourgeois electoral politics. We also fight for the broadest democracy inside the workers’ movement as a means to organize our class and mobilize it. This means constant struggles against bureaucratic union leadership, the labor aristocracy which internalizes and regurgitates bourgeois politics from positions of “leadership” within working class organizations.
Unlike Liberals we do not believe that capitalism can be tamed; the internal contradictions of market economies are guaranteed to generate a cycle of booms and busts, and with them misery, exploitation, and environmental destruction. Unlike social democrats or reformists, we do not believe that the existing bourgeois state is a neutral apparatus that we can wield in order to gradually ease our way out of capitalism and into socialism. Our political analysis demands a total break from the existing economic and political order if we want to avert climate catastrophe and a better life for all working people.
Unlike Stalinist parties, we consider workers’ democracy to be a fundamental precondition to the success of our revolution. A party that does not practice internal democracy will not be flexible enough to respond to the evolving demands of the working class, and will calcify into a bureaucratic apparatus dedicated to keeping the working class in line that is almost as brutal as our existing capitalist system.
Finally, we recognize a strategic difference with anarchist or autonomist groups and intellectualist tendencies, who deny either the need to destroy the existing state, the need to build a cohesive political organization to fight for revolution, or the need to create a new socialist state apparatus to defeat the bourgeoisie.