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The working class is crucial to the socialist revolution for essentially two reasons. One is that the process of production, the production and transportation of food, clothing, shelter, etc., is fundamental to any society and the section of society which can gain control of that process can gain control of the society as a whole. For example, a strike of teachers may have considerable political impact but it brings nothing but the immediate activities to a halt. But workers in a steel mill, on a railroad, in an auto plant, can affect the economy far beyond their own specific workplace. The second reason for the centrality of the working class is that the socialist revolution must involve the transformation of work and the workplace or it is not a social revolution at all. Whatever else may happen - and a revolution is a vast, complex totality - if the workers do not gain possession of the means of production, then governments may have been overthrown, but society has not been transformed.
In their minds most of the workers involved in these class battles fight without ever conceiving of themselves as a class confronting the ruling class and its state. They think of themselves as fighting this particular boss, or the bosses in this particular industry; and they do not usually add up the experiences into a comprehensive generalisation of the class nature of the capitalist society.
The fact is that classes exist and hey exist because some men live by owning the factories and the machines, and the rest of us have to go to work on these machines which we don’t own. The boss squeezes as much profit out of the worker as he can. The worker tries to gain as close to a living wage out of the boss as he or she can. And should the workers stopped struggling, they’d just be squeezed even more. That’s why there’s a class struggle. There are SQUEEZERS and there are the SQUEEZED.
Consciousness of any kind cannot exist without a mind for its repository, any more than a mind can exist without a body. Socialist consciousness requires a repository where it can be accumulated and ordered, from which it can be instilled in others, and by which it can be constantly revised, checked, renewed and defended. The ingenuity of man has invented the mass socialist party, the political organisation of the working class. Without a working class with socialist consciousness and a revolutionary party organising its action on that basis, no victory, no socialism.
Workers should see that the Socialist Party reflect their interests more consistently than our opponents. In all lands the interests of the working-class are identical. With the development of world-commerce and production for the world-market the position of the workers in each country becomes increasingly dependent on that of the workers in other countries. The liberation of the working-class is, therefore, a task in which the workers of all lands are equally concerned. Being conscious of this fact the Socialist Party proclaims its solidarity with the class-conscious workers of all lands. We would contend that only a socialist party is capable of winning the battle of ideas for the struggle against capitalism is at the same time necessarily a struggle of the socialist against capitalist consciousness. Victory in the one case is impossible without victory in the other.
The great wealth of the world is the product of the labour of countless people. But while the working people created this wealth, they do not own or control it. The capitalist system has concentrated the ownership of the tremendous productive forces in the hands of a small group of capitalists. This creates a basic conflict: production is collective, involving the coordinated and interconnected labour of millions, but the control of it, is private. The capitalist exploits the working class and creates poverty and economic insecurity. Businessmen invest capital and plunder the natural resources. The system of capitalism is a system of economic chaos, plagued by periodic crises. These crises are inseparable from the economic system and is exacerbated by the speculation of the bankers, financiers and industrialists, each tries to profit off one another and because of this individual greed, the working people suffer, and the economy is thrown into turmoil.
At first, banks served mainly as intermediaries for payments. With the development of capitalism the activity of the banks as traders in capital became more extensive. The accumulation of capital and concentration of production in industry led to the concentration in the banks of enormous amounts of spare money seeking profitable application. The share of the large-scale banks in the total amount of bank turnover steadily grew. In every country a small handful of the biggest bankers and industrialists hold in their grasp all the vitally important branches of the economy and dispose of the overwhelming bulk of social wealth. Management by capitalist monopolies inevitably becomes the rule of a finance oligarchy that become too big to fail and receive government subsidies and bail-outs. The oligarchs begin to rule in the political sphere too. The operation of capitalism is an obstacle to the well-being of society. The situation demands a new, more rational system of economic organisation that will use the productive forces for the benefit of the vast majority of society.
As it is, millions suffer and the capitalist class benefits from this immeasurable misery of countless numbers of people. This exploitative and oppressive system, where profit is master, holds millions hostage to hunger and want and it has poisoned the very air we breathe and polluted the water we drink. The situation cries out for change, for a new, more rational social system – socialism!
Out of capitalist competition paradoxically arises the concentration of industry. For the competitive struggle, waged primarily by cheapening costs, develops the imperative to produce more and sell more. This involves the necessity of enlarging the scale of production, emphasised by the pressure of technological change, with its constantly greater demands for fixed capital and raw materials, and the efforts to overcome a fall in the rate of profit by increasing its mass. Thus capitalist expansion and accumulation are accompanied by the gradual but inexorable rise to power of large-scale industry. Small individual producers are replaced by giant corporations, applying the most efficient methods of modern production and distribution, accessing the markets throughout the world, controlling the supply of the raw materials. Thus competition gives place to monopoly that crosses the confines of borders.
In capitalism the core economic property relations involve the separation of the direct producers from the means of production (class of propertyless proletarians), the commodity form of the products of social labour (including labour power) and the ownership of the means of production by capitalist enterprises.
Ownership and management are separated . Ownership is vested in stockholders who own but do not manage and merely receive dividends. Management is vested in the CEOs. The owners of shares knows nothing of the enterprise, except its dividend yield and stock market quotations. Corporate industry is institutional or impersonal, albeit the older relations of private or personal ownership and appropriation persist. Separation of ownership and management permits seizure of control by the financial oligarchy, which imposes its dictatorship over industry and permits overly generous remuneration for their services. Class lines may appear blurred but they have become more rigid and class differences grown more acute.
Creating a socialist world where people live from birth to death never having to suffer under the chains of wage slavery is what all of us should be fighting for. This is socialist consciousness.
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