Towards Socialism

The capitalist class possess few in number yet the largest amount of wealth. Both the  Conservative and Labour Parties represent them.Political leaders are ready to make all kinds of wonderful promises for a beautiful future time when they shall be the government. But for the workers in their present troubles they have no help or guidance what to do. Capitalist politicians have often proclaimed a new world which would lead to a new Heaven on Earth. But the only road to salvation for the workers is the path of revolution.  Capitalism can only maintain itself by driving down the workers, by harder and harder exploitation. Longer hours, lower wages and more misery.  It is the same struggle of all the workers all over the world.  To demonstrate our strength and our unity we must stand together. No worker must stand against a worker to the advantage of the capitalists. Working people who try to find a way clear through the hardships of present-day conditions are faced with a hard task.

 The worker lives by selling the use of his body—the employer lives by buying that use. It lies in the nature of things that the buyer should on instinct struggle to buy cheap and the seller to sell dear. Hence it was a foregone conclusion that the history of the relations between employer and employee—between “capital” and “labour”—should be one of conflict between these two, a constant battle over the price of the commodity labour-power—over wages, hours, and working conditions. The working class is thus a commodity slave class, serving as a source of profit to the capitalists.

The capitalist text-book will tell us that when the worker wants more money, the boss refuses, the worker throws up his job and seeks another. There are still some who are foolish to still   believe that the relation between worker and boss is one of equality because if the worker doesn’t like his job he can resign and look for another. Even in the days when jobs were easy to find the “equality” existed mostly in the imagination.

The capitalists, not only own or control the chief means whereby we work and live, but, in fact, control the whole governing machine. They pull the strings. And they use their power to make themselves richer and richer—at our expense. They hire workers to make profit out of their labour; their capitalist production is for profit, not for use: and to get more profit they slash wages, carry through speed-up and worsen conditions. This mad race for profit ends in a crisis; and then they try to get out of the crisis—and we pay the price. Poverty, insecurity and now hunger are making inroads in the homes of millions: low wages, long hours, to the point of physical exhaustion, is the lot of the workers if they are “lucky”“ enough to even have a job. The result is increases in the number of industrial accidents or occupational illnesses, more sickness and a higher death-rate amongst the working-class . This is Britain to-day for working men, women and their families. But British workers are not blind to the fact that the British capitalist class is just as ruthless and savage as any other capitalist class. Workers are facing the fact that all capitalism has nothing to offer and that they nor their families have any hope or future under capitalism.

There is no need for a single worker to be overworked or in dread of losing his job; no reason why an unemployed worker should lack the necessaries of life. All over the world millions of workers are year by year coming to realise these facts and to see that nothing except the existence of capitalism prevents them building up for themselves a decent and secure world. Everywhere the workers are becoming less and less willing to put up with an entirely unnecessary state of semi-starvation. They are showing themselves more and more determined to insist upon their right to food, clothing and shelter for themselves and their families. But to get this, capitalism must be overthrow. How can the workers end Capitalism? Without breaking the power of the capitalists it is impossible to get rid of capitalism or to build socialism. It is a question of votes and of political power. The answer is revolution.  The workers have the power to overthrow capitalism. It is the capitalists who are powerless.  It is the workers who are strong from the very moment that they unite, organise and resist.

Socialism - a system of society in which production would be controlled and directed by the workers in the interest of the workers - is a conceivable alternative to the existing system. Apart from tolerating this existing system in the hope that by patching and mending, wangling and contriving it can later on be made somehow it will become less and less unbearable—apart from this option, socialism is the only alternative before people. The co-operative commonwealth that has been the aim of generations of working-class in this country will attain its full meaning and realisation only with the ending of capitalist rule. It will mean that the capitalists will be deprived of their ownership and control of the factories, mines, transport. All these means of production which they have used and misused only to make profits for the bosses and poverty for the workers will be taken from them and will end production for profit and instead will carry on production for use. The needs of all will be met, and new needs and pleasures now denied to the working class will be created and satisfied by a socialist organisation and extension of production.

True only a tiny minority of workers call themselves socialists. It matters little how people describe themselves. More important is that they do the things that they should and must do, or suffer defeat and hardship from refusing to take that course. The essential thing is the direction in which things are moving.