Meet the new boss - Same as the old boss

FOR CLASS WAR

Our job is to overthrow the capitalist system and so socialists are always accused of setting class against class and trying to create ill feeling. Yet the real fact is, we only point out what already exists. They exist because some men live by owning the factories and mines and machines, and the most part have to go to work on these machines which they don’t own. The boss tries to squeeze as much profit out of the worker as he can. The worker tries to wring as close to a living wage out of the boss as he or she can. And if the workers stopped struggling, they’d just be squeezed more, that’s all. That’s why there’s a class struggle.

There are nice bosses and nasty bosses just as there were  kind slave-masters and cruel ones. Socialists want NO slave-masters and NO bosses. There are no small employers, no working capitalists, no friendly relations between masters and men. There is only one connecting link between the employers and the employees, and that link is to be found in the money the worker finds in his pay packet. We’re going to do it by getting rid of the profit system, which exists only because there is a class of exploiters and a class of the exploited.  Workers meet this class war everywhere, but do not always recognise it. It is our work to label its every manifestation, in order that workers may recognise it.

We have always said that in present times the worker is not class-conscious – that is, knowing and understanding his class subjection and its cause, and therefore knowing and understanding his class interest in overthrowing the institutions which keep him so. This is not the case with the capitalist. They are thoroughly class-conscious and never lose sight of the cardinal principle of the class struggle. While the average worker has little to do with politics, the other class know its value, not merely to their whole class, but for each sections of their class. All government is therefore class government.

These days the media  proclaim that employer and employee are partners in industry and decry "wasteful and futile" strikes, describing them as obsolete and unnecessary — it is interesting to understand what the bosses  really mean when they speak of harmony. Workers are not regarded by their masters as human beings – they are only reckoned as so many items in the balance-sheet, and troublesome items at that. The capitalist class hold no illusions. It looks upon the working class as its class enemy. It still employs every weapon at its disposal to keep its supremacy from anti-union legislation to secret black-lists of those “trouble-makers”. The press and TV will endeavour to soften or obliterate the divisions. There is no question of removing those divisions or their causes as those are inherent in a system which sharply divides society into two classes, the propertied and the propertyless, master and slave, owner and owned, employer and employed. But those divisions may eventually lead to revolt on the part of the subject class unless they can be softened or bridged over by a seeming identity of interest.

The Socialist Party stands alone as the standard bearer of socialism. The class war is our war and our only war.  It is time to line up in the class struggle regardless of race or nationality for the overthrow of class rule and for the emancipation of their class and humanity. A win at football is the result of many moves and counter-moves. We do not lie down and weep when our side loses a goal. No, we roll up our sleeves, pull up our socks, and carry on, determined to get two goals in return. So it is the same with the class war.