Scientific socialism

It is a symptom in a crisis of capitalism that the naive faith in the harmony of the capitalist system is shattered in the minds both of practical businessmen and of the theoreticians of capitalist economy. Yet the conventional economists still believe that crises can be avoided, that the swings of the economic pendulum dampened down, the irregularities of the trade cycle ironed out, by some adaptation of the monetary or credit system, by state intervention, by a more equal distribution of incomes with the help of taxation. In short, by reforms which would improve the workings of the capitalist system without touching its basis - private property in the means of production. The various proposals are based on the conviction that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the economic system. A economic crisis is not so much to be explained as to be explained away.

Marx’s economic theories were  killed off and buried generations ago; the university professors tell us so. Ideas must be met with ideas. The Marxist theory makes it clear beyond doubt that there will be crises as long as capitalism exists  and under the contradictory conditions of the capitalist system, there will always remain that curse of recurring crises. The cure of the evil to change the basis of economic life that the satisfaction of the needs of the people, instead of capitalist profit. Instead we are often presented with the “socialism” of those good people, on the Left,  who earnestly wish to remove the inconveniences and injustices of our present social state, but who also wish a little more earnestly to preserve the cause of these inconveniences, who wish at once to suppress or abolish the exploitation of the worker and to preserve the capitalist form of society.

Marx’s main contribution to political economy consists in this, – he started where his predecessors left off. With Marx, value and surplus-value became the key with which he unlocked the inner workings of capitalist society, moreover, showing capitalist society to be one of the many stages of social evolution. Marx dissolved the mechanical view of society, held by his predecessors, into an evolutionary conception of human history.  Marx welded the various categories into a chain of evolutionary causation of the rise and dissolution of the capitalist industrial system, holding to the view that behind the empirical movements and appearances there is a law, a principle, underlying and controlling them, and to which, despite all deviations, they conform. And science consists, not in describing empirical sensations, but in finding their law and causation, of grouping and interpreting them accordingly which is scientific socialism.

 The kernel of Marx’s economic ideas is the labour-time theory of value. What the worker sells on the market—his labour-power— is not and never will be paid “by results”; that is to say, by the total wealth or value-equivalent of what he produces. His wage is paid on “the cost of living”, and his cost of living is far less than the wealth or the value he contributes. This conviction that the working class is robbed of by far the major portion of the wealth it plays the essential part in producing and distributing is the basis of Marxist economics. The only thing which the worker can sell is his or her labour-power. What is paid under the form of wages is not, the price of the labour furnished, but is the price of the power made use of, a price that supply and demand cause to oscillate about and especially below its value determined, like the value of any other commodity, by the labor-time socially necessary for its production, or in other words, by the sum which will normally enable the labourer to maintain and perpetuate his or her labour-power - the cost of living. Workers furnish a value greater than that which they receive. The duration (or intensity) of labour required for a given wage,  exceeds the time necessarily occupied by the laborer in adding to the value of the means of production consumed, a value equal to that wage; and the labour thus furnished over and above that which represents the equivalent of what the laborer gets, constitutes surplus-labour. Surplus-labour then is unpaid labour. On the side of the capitalist, on account of the fierce war of competition with low prices as weapons which rages throughout the field of production, it is financial suicide for the employer to extract from his work-force less unpaid labour than his competitors do. Capitalists are personally powerless to ameliorate the state of affairs.

In order to live, one has to work and to be able to perform any sort of work, one must have at his or her disposal the instruments and the means of labour. Now, these tools and this material are the property of the capitalists. Those who are only in possession of  their own labour-power (or physical capacity for work) are compelled, being unable to live otherwise, to sell the use of that power to the capitalists.  Through their possession of the means of production, the capitalists are, in fact, masters of all who are unable to use their own labour-power themselves, nor able to live without using it. From this economic dependence flows the existence of two distinct classes: on the one hand, those who control the means of labour; on the other, those for whom the actual use of those means is the sole possibility of life - they are the capitalist and the worker.

 Socialists are not the cause of the existence of classes because they recognise their existence. Modern industry has  forced workers to understand the need  of association or combination in their disputes with the possessors of the means of labour, and thus the interests to be defended have to the workers less and less the false aspect of individualistic interests but they appear to them in their naked reality as class interests. Born of the conditions of life imposed upon them in a capitalist society, their class activity takes on a political character. Having strived for and come into possession of political rights, the workers are obviously led to make use of these rights on behalf of their own interests. Inevitably, therefore, the political struggle is a class struggle which cannot end until the political power is placed in the hands of the workers and lead to the disappearance of classes as a direct consequence. Therefore, the class struggle is not an invention of the socialists, but the very substance of the facts and acts of history in the making that are daily taking place under their eyes.

Whether or not a revolutionary situation is arises, the task undertaken by socialists consists in educating the working class, in rendering them conscious of their condition. To win for socialism the greatest possible number of partisans. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is the only party which pursues these aims in a practical fashion, by basing its tactics on the economic conditions of the environment. What is the use, therefore, of talking of anything but socialism? Why waste time talking about  events and  circumstances  forced upon us in the future, but of a character of which no-one can define or describe to-day? Instead of allowing ourselves to be led astray by our various fantastic notions, let us here as elsewhere examine the facts and see what conclusions they impose upon us. Socialism flows from the facts, it follows them and does not precede them - it is scientific.