The basic problem of capitalism is the source of all its weakness is found in the fact that this system does not carry on production for the benefit of society as a whole but for the profit of a relatively small owning or controlling class. The industries by which society must live are owned by private individuals or by the government who ruthlessly exploit the masses who work in these industries. Under capitalism production is regulated not by the needs of the majority but by whether or not the capitalist or ruling class can make a profit by such production; commodities are not produced primarily for use, but for profit. Even the limited progress that capitalism has accomplished for humanity has been achieved at the cost of incredible misery, poverty and slaughter of the working class.
Conflict and disruptive struggles between individual capitalists and between rival capitalist States are systematic. There exists a division of capitalist society into classes of exploiters and producers, with resultant class struggle between them. Capitalist production is anarchic. Capitalism can live only by a rapid extension of its market. The innumerable individual capitalists and companies, compete and ruthlessly exploit the toiling working class, produce whatever they think they can sell. The development of the capitalist system has not been even and steady, but by a series of jerks. The zigzag graph made by the cyclical crises is quite familiar. First, the upward trend, a period of industrial expansion, with rising prices and wages, an era of good employment, “prosperity” and optimism, gradually developing into a boom, with its characteristic orgies of feverish production, stock speculation, etc.; secondly, the downward trend, with the gradual surfeit of the market from excess production, slowing down of industry, wage-cuts, fall of prices, mass unemployment, financial “panics” and general economic crisis; and thirdly, the trough of the crisis, in which the productive forces are diminished and the choking surplus of commodities, in the low state of production, are consumed or wasted in various ways and the markets thus cleared for a fresh race between the swiftly expanding productive forces and the more slowly developing capitalist market. The current recession showed how whole sections of the capitalist economy can fall into paralysis, and this paralysis spreads.
The cyclical crisis also greatly sharpens the major social contradiction of capitalism, the ever-active antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class. In economic crises the capitalists always seek to shift the economic burden onto the workers through wage-cuts, etc., and this still further stokes the class struggle. Hence, the capitalist cyclical crises have been especially periods of great strikes fiercely fought, growing class consciousness of the workers. A basic indication to-day of the general crisis of capitalism is the increasing revolutionary upsurge throughout the world. It varies in intensity from intensified protest movements to increased strike actions to actual struggles for power. Workers, faced by intolerable conditions, are exhibiting the characteristic signs of radicalisation. Workers everywhere are beginning to penetrate the lies of capitalism.
Capitalism has created the objective conditions for socialism. But it can go no further. Capitalism has provided its own executioners and grave diggers, the working class. Socialism is no longer is it simply the aspiration of an oppressed working class. Now it is a living, growing reality. Socialism abolishes the chaos and anarchy of capitalist production and social organization; it does away with the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalist industry, breeder of industrial crises and war. It sets up instead a planned system of economy in harmony with the global character of modern industry and social relationships. Instead of a hodge-podge of competing enterprises, socialism will create a great, inter-linked and co-ordinated modern industrial-agricultural machine; instead of a profit-making apparatus to fatten a few while millions starve, it socialism will building its industries for the benefit of the producers. In socialism there is no exploitation. There will be no ruling, owning class, no class to get a rake-off from the worker’s production.The main task of all capitalist governments is the suppression and exploitation of the people.
The capitalists, as is their wont, seek to justify their destructive type of competition by asserting that it is rooted firmly in human nature. Such appeals to “human nature,” however, must be taken cautiously. By that method of reasoning it would be quite easy to conclude that the rich capitalist who heartlessly casts workers out of the factory penniless and gives no thought as to their future has quite a different “human nature” than of the Amazon hunter who, with his high sense of tribal solidarity, before eating his kill, calls loudly in the four directions in case perchance there may be another hungry hunter nearby. Changed social conditions develop different “human natures.”
Socialism will be use machinery and technology on the broadest scale possible to produce the necessities of life in the industries, transport systems and communication services. Socialist society will also know how to develop the creative and artistic impulses of the people which are presently checked by poverty and slavery, hamstrung by the profit-making motive, where the masses and poisoned by anti-social codes of morals and ethics. Every free community will involve the maximum cultivation of the intellectual and artistic powers of all. The imprint of individuality and originality will be upon everything. Socialism frees humanity from the stultifying effects of the present struggle for existence and opens up before it new horizons of joys and tasks.
The socialist revolution is the most profound of all revolutions in history. It initiates changes more rapid and far-reaching than any in the whole experience of mankind. The hundreds of millions of workers, striking off their age-old chains of slavery, will construct a society of liberty and prosperity and intelligence. Socialism will inaugurate a new era for the human race, the building of a new world. The overthrow of capitalism and the development of socialism will bring about the immediate or eventual solution of many great social problems. Some of these originate in capitalism, and others have plagued humanity for scores of centuries - war, religion, superstition, prostitution, famine, disease, crime, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, race and national chauvinism, the suppression of woman, and every form of slavery and exploitation of one class by another. Capitalism, with its wars, wage slavery, slums, crooked doctors, etc., undermines the health of the race and destroys its physique. Socialism with its healthy dwellings and working conditions, its nutritious and plentiful food, will offer well-being to all.
Socialists have and must always interest themselves in the nature of the capitalist state. They must fight to have it democratised even from the point of view of capitalist democracy. But in that struggle we must be constantly be teaching the workers that not capitalist democracy and not the capitalist state will bring us socialism but workers themselves.
We take it for granted that socialism cannot be introduced by a change of the constitution and the enactment of one law after another. We take it for granted that the state is an instrument to serve and protect the interests of the capitalist class. The police, the military, the courts and all the powers lodged in government departments and ministries are all freely at the service of the ruling class. Behind the Parliamentary majority there must stand the organised workers – there must be mass struggles and participation to secure the necessary transformation of the State machine. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the whole class exercising political power, realising new forms of organisation. It is the class struggle in its most intense form that will decide what class will have power and whether a socialist world will be created.
Capitalism, based upon human exploitation, stands as the great barrier to social progress. There will come day in the not so far distant future when our children, immersed in this new life, will look back with horror upon capitalism and be aghast by just how long we tolerated it for.
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