It is labour alone which supplies all human wants. It has produced in the past all the capital it now employs, and it is producing all the capital which will be employed in the future. Dividends do not create themselves – they are all filched from labour. Thus all workers are bled.
And what about the capitalist? What is his place in our social system? That the present social system has failed must be apparent to all who have studied it. It has rendered the many subservient to the few and facilitated every method of exploitation. It disinherits the great mass and foreordains their lifelong misery before they are even born. It creates jealousies, hatreds, and mutual injustice. All political institutions are destructive and those in power are self-seeking, dishonest, and tyrannical, and ever ready to dominate and oppress those over whom they exert authority. Our social system is continually driving people to poverty. The world’s wealth is concentrating in fewer hands; millionaires and paupers are both on the increase and the bIg capitalists are swallowing up the little ones. The governments of the world are at the beck and call of its plutocrats while life is getting intolerable precarious to the many. Men and women are wretched with discontent everywhere. Laws are made to protect property and proprietors alone. There is no law for the poor. Plutocracy rules the world.
The fact that the Left over the decades has suffered a serious set-backs; in numbers, spirit, organisation, and ideology, is no secret. Some of the causes for the Left’s decline were outside its own control. The truth of the matter is that the long-sustained boom and its long prosperity had undermined the confidence in Marxist economic analysis. The end of World War Two was firmly expected to produce a return to the depression of the thirties as post World War One had done - it didn’t happen. But the 2007/8 Great Recession changed that perspective. Now ‘radical’ economists working as research directors for labour unions secretly believe that they are surreptitiously bringing back Marxism when they present superficial analyses about ‘the worker not being able to buy back what produces’, misrepresenting this redistributionist under-consumptionist theory as Marxist economics. The over-simplified theory of the reformists is that in a boom, profits rise faster than wages, thus producing a shortage of purchasing power. This takes effect for cause, and fails to dig deeply enough for the underlying reasons. The theory falls down when one considers that the remedy it proposes—rising wages—is a feature of every boom period has never yet succeeded in preventing the collapse.
Frederick Engels dubiously attributed the slowness of socialist development in English workers to the ‘share’ in the benefits of ‘England’s industrial monopoly’ which fell to the working class.‘With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally—the privileged and leading minority not excepted—on a level with its and these soon install themselves as the new elite. Such is the eternal design of the universe fellow workers abroad. that is the reason why there will be socialism again in England.’ The same proposition holds here. Socialism will come again only when economic conditions prepare the way.
In ‘Poverty of Philosophy,’ Marx states: ‘The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital but not yet for itself. In this struggle of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests.’
Whether one agrees or not, Marx’s thought seems perfectly clear. The working class is formed and exists through the organization of the social process. It is an objective fact regardless of anyone’s understanding, or how various individuals picture to themselves their class position. But for a class to understand its own interests and engage in political battles in its own interests, it needs class consciousness. This consciousness is attained however in the course of its inevitable experiences and conflicts with the employing class.
The unique feature of the Marxist analysis is that it describes a basic problems in the capitalist economy which cannot be solved short of doing away with capitalism. Every boom hits its stride because of a growing strength in purchasing power, but this in turn produces a frenzy of competition and expansion in industry which is bound to far outrace the population’s consuming power. The mechanics which force capitalism to this end are not primarily psychological, although that element plays a role in the later stages of an upswing, but are directly economic in character. In the law of the jungle of capitalist competition, each capitalist is forced to fight for his profit position and competitive standing; the race of technology and productivity grows exceedingly swift; every possible particle of capital and credit is drawn into the maelstrom in which money miraculously breeds money; and every encouragement in the way of a boost in purchasing power drives the boom to more dangerous speculative heights and over-expansion of industry. To eliminate depression by a rise in wages adds a trifle of consuming power and keeps the bubble going a while, but only inflates it bigger in the long run.
Poets have written of the existence of a golden age in the dim past. This was just poetic license and an effort to escape from an unsatisfactory present. There never was such an age in antiquity. Man’s ascent from the jungle has been painful and slow, and his history since the dawn of civilization is written in agony, in and in violence. But a golden age has now become a possibility. The means are at hand to abolish poverty and to eliminate want, to escape from drudgery, to alleviate the struggle between man and man for the good of life by providing abundance for all.
We socialists are up against the fact of life that another new generation has to be convinced afresh that socialism does in fact represent a superior system for the people, that the idea of the withering away of the state is not a pipe-dream, but a realistic if rough sketch of the future state of human society. The most basic criticism of the Socialist Party is that we have succumbed to utopianism by imagining that socialism will bring an end to the class struggle and usher in a new classless and stateless society of free brotherhood. Socialism will be created only when people believe these things again, and only by reasoned argument can we hope to convince them.
The labour movement arose not to mirror the corruptions and exploitations of our acquisitive society, but to eradicate them. To the extent that trade unionism succumbs to the practices of the business world, it loses its raison d’etre. It does not evoke an image as the protector of the underdog, the champion of progress, the advocate of the brotherhood of man. It is, in the mind of the general public, another special vested interest lobby group. But socialists to be realistic, cannot demand very much more from trade unions than they are doing, that unions by its nature cannot go beyond the specific job of rendering a business service. We hold that they represent the wishes of the union membership. Left to their own devices, the union officials will perpetuate themselves in office and continue to follow the lines of least resistance. A basic redirection of union policies can only be visualised as a consequence of an insurgent mood sweeping the working class as a whole, and finding reflection in union ranks. It is hard to see the unions as initiators of such a change. They will, rather, be beneficiaries of it. But there is no reason to suppose that the pendulum will not swing again in the opposite direction from the present depending on economic and social circumstances. And any new upheaval inside the unions will necessarily assume different forms from previous upsurges to meet new conditions and situations. The union becomes vibrant only when workers are in motion and are interested in alternative lines to official policy, seeking to participate in decision-making. It is a historical fact that democratic participation and spirited controversy occur most commonly when the membership is in a militant state. Discontent can spread through a number of unions, and reflect broader social issues rather than particular local grievances.
Many critics of the socialist idea rest their case on the argument that all previously studied societies have been dominated by a ruling elite, and since it has always been that way, it will always be that way. And of course as their coup de grace those critics eagerly point to the Soviet Union to prove that socialism represented simply the rule of a new elite based on the control of the state assets which was more tyrannical and ruthless than any capitalist free-enterprise system. The supposed rule of the majority, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat’, for the first time in history, has been proven a utopia; that given the opportunity, the working class demonstrated its incapacity to rule, and spawned out of its midst a new exploitative bureaucratic elite. Socialism has unfortunately been presented as a system not of abundance but of scarcity, as a system not of increased leisure and comfort, but of unusual sacrifice and back-breaking toil. Decades of Russian ‘socialism’ has appeared as a system which offered not political democracy and a wider freedom, but conspicuously less freedom than exists in the most advanced capitalist countries. Workers knew they ate and lived better than the Russians, and that was good enough to hold them as camp followers of the capitalists. Socialism renounced its old ambition of world revolution and has shrunk into a number of separate ‘national liberation’ movements
Many so-called thinkers believe in a veritable law of the social development, namely, that in all society there is, and must always be, a ruling minority that grabs all sorts of special privileges for itself, and a ruled majority, whose destiny is to be directed and controlled by the minority and to toil on its behalf. This remains true whether the society is feudal, capitalist, slave, or socialist, or whether its form be monarchical, oligarchical, or democratic, and this will always remain the situation because the majority cannot rule itself. So, while revolutions are sometimes necessary in order to pep up an old worn-out elite, or replace it entirely with an new fresh elite, it does not and cannot change the basic law of minority rule. Even where majority enter into the revolutionary fray, nothing is changed, because masses can only succeed when the have leaders, because that’s the way human nature works. Such a world-view is expressed by Robert Michels in his “iron law of oligarchy” supporting such the proposition that society cannot exist without a dominant ruling group and that “The social revolution would not effect any real modification of the internal structure of the mass. The socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents’ triumph.” It is a view of history according to which, humanity continues to wage its fruitless struggles over and over again, with society ever revolving around the same series cycle of stages, almost without any sense or reason. The career politician, with his or her inevitable pre-occupation with maneuvers and expediencies, dominates the political field.
This constitutes just one more capitalist attack on socialism which is largely a variation of the "you can’t change human nature” argument.
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