Rich V Poor

Philanthropists ask themselves  “What can be done for the poor?" and recommend food banks and homeless hostels.  Some wealthy celebrity chefs devote time and investigation to diet, to show if a person can live on a few pounds a day to sustain themselves. Others in answering the question, “What can we do for the poor?” reply by saying we will pass reforms to ameliorate their suffering with free healthcare and education so they can have “equality of opportunity.”

This whole business of doing something for the poor is degrading. The real question is, “What can poor do for themselves?” They can do all things required, if they are independent, self-respecting, self-reliant. The poor can organise. they can combine, unify and cooperate. The poor  are in the majority. They have the most votes and in many lands where the ballot is all-powerful, peaceful revolutions can be achieved.

What can the poor do for themselves? They can tell each capitalists that they do not want nor need  not accept their patriarchal guardianship; that they are capable of self-management.  Wage servitude in the capitalist system is the last phase of labour’s slavery. This system, like those that preceded it, must go the way of all things. Society changes ceaselessly.

 The motive of capitalist production is profit and the only issue of “recovery” for the employers is recovery of profits. Such “recovery” will not alter at all the condition of the working class as wage slaves, or change the conditions of the exploited in relation to the exploiters. In fact, the recovery of the profits of the wealthy  can only take place on the basis of the further intensification of exploitation, the further impoverishment of the people, with a higher level of  the unemployed, and the increased immiseration of the working class through so called austerity. The motive of capitalist production is the securing of maximum profits. Production of goods is in fact an incidental aim of capitalism, as is employment. The capitalist organises production for the purposes of increasing profits. When conditions are such that profits can be increased by increasing production, the owners of capital do so, and when conditions are such that profits can only be increased by cutting back production to keep up the price, then that is what the business class does. Thus if it serves to increase profits to increase the numbers of workers in production, then this is done; but if profits can only be increased by intensifying exploitation, getting more or the same amount of work out of fewer workers, then this is done instead. These fundamental features of the capitalist system cannot be eliminated without removing the capitalist system itself.  Capitalists pretends that this crisis is not the result of the capitalist system but merely a result of erroneous policies, financial mistakes of this or that individual, corporation or government.

The richest 20 percent on Earth consume about 76 percent of all goods and services produced every year on Earth, with the bottom 20 percent consuming about 1.5 percent of all goods and services, while a small free of about 26 million humans own and control about 40 percent of Earth’s wealth, living in luxury with almost unlimited options for travel and entertainment, living cheek by jowl among billions of humans mired in poverty, owning almost nothing, doing almost the equivalent of slave labor day in and day out all their lives, yet living in constant fear of being fired from their jobs, who are condemned to poverty by their wages, in most cases within miles of where they were accidentally born, where they grew up with little or no opportunity to learn relevant knowledge about how the world works, in many cases not even having an opportunity to learn how to read or write.

All the capitalist parties, all the parties dedicated to the continuation of the capitalist system of wage slavery, are against the interests of the working class. The reason for the weakness of the trade union leaders traitors is not simply the cowardice and spinelessness of various individuals. but that the poor can never rely on the actual leaders because their entire position depends on the maintenance of the capitalist system. The Socialist Party say the poor can educate themselves. The can read and study until they can see as clearly as others the coming events, and prepare for their arrival. We hold  that the poor must take into their own hands all available means of emancipating themselves and their children from wage slavery. No movement can afford to neglect its educational activities, and that the mischievious results of the false ideas spread by the enemies of the poor can only be combated by the spread of genuine education. It cannot be repeated too often that everything depends upon the poor themselves they make themselves fit by education, organisation, co-operation and self-imposed discipline, to take control of the productive forces and manage industry in the interest of the people and for the benefit of society.

 But as already stated, most of all they can vote for a change so they are no longer poor. The poor can and must fight the attacks on their living standards  but they cannot restrict themselves to addressing only the symptoms. They must prepare for removing the source of the disease, the capitalist system of wage slavery, which is the source of all the problems facing the poor. The socialist revolution is not only a possibility, it is a necessity.