For All Or For None

Every state is the dictatorship of some class over another. It is a body of armed men organised by the class in power to suppress the rights of those classes opposed to the continued rule of the dominant class. The economic system and the state structure, that prevails today is a capitalist economic system, a capitalist state structure — a reality that cannot be denied by any trickery of words. The government is an executive committee for managing the common affairs of the capitalist class as a whole. The State acts on the basis of the naked self-interest of the ruling class. The state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another. The fundamental political problem for the capitalists  is to protect their class interests of the small exploiting minority while obscuring the true nature of its state from the great majority of the people. All the laws passed by the capitalists’ politicians have as their purpose the further enslavement and robbery of the masses and the protection of the unjustly acquired wealth of the rich, who produce nothing of value, but appropriate the product of the sweat and blood of the workers. No matter how fine-sounding these laws which will apply "equally” to rich and poor alike, they were only written to deceive people. The 1946 Employment Act and the 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act legally obligate the president and Congress to use all available means to achieve full employment. Reformists try constantly to get the masses to trust in the legal system and have faith in their “rights” granted by the capitalists to their wage-slaves. Appeals to paper promises and prattling on about a fake legal “right” awarded by the capitalist government are worse than pointless.

The interests of the capitalists and of the working class are irreconcilable. Pitiless exploitation and the anarchy of the market oppress working people in a thousand different ways. Capital must accumulate in order to survive. It grows by keeping for itself the surplus value produced by workers after they have reproduced the value of their labour power, their wages. Surplus value is the source of all profit. The unending search for surplus value, for profit, is the motive force of capitalist production. Capitalism can produce only for profit. It is forced constantly to seek new ways to achieve the maximum rate of profit. In its restless search for maximum profits, spurred on by ruthless competition, each capitalist company is bound to attempt to increase its productive strength to the full. The capitalists cut their costs of production mainly by stepping up their already vicious exploitation of the working class. They cut their wage bills by reducing wages and sacking workers. They also make the remaining workers work longer hours and they increase the intensity of labour. Capitalists also reduce their wage bill by buying more advanced machinery in order to produce the same goods with less labour. In times of economic recession the capitalists tell us to tighten our belts and toil harder for them, “in the national interest”. They try to increase exploitation so as to get the huge profit needed to start capital expanding again. Competition among the vying capitalists to minimise losses is fierce. In this battle the winners as well as the losers lay workers reduce living standards to offload their crisis onto the backs of the working class. The working class must fight all attempts by the capitalist to shift the burden of their economic crisis. We must resist all wage cuts, unemployment, speed-ups, tax rises, and cuts in government welfare services. We must make the capitalists pay for their own crisis rather than people being kept from working to keep wages low

Working is the exclusive means of income and occupies a great portion of time of workers. It is a source of dignity and achievement. Workers run and maintain machinery, build factories and homes, work up the various products for the market—in short produce and reproduce society. When there is a crying need for more services and products for people it is a tragedy that many are forced to be unemployed. It is the nature of the capitalist system itself behind this madness. unemployment results from the basic drives of capitalism. Labor power is a commodity brought to market by workers. To keep its costs down capitalism can either raise the supply by forcing new layers (e.g., migrants) onto the labour market, or it can lower the demand by automation of  labour-intensive production processes. It does both. Capitalism has an inherent drive to introduce new technologies, to revolutionise production. The chief result is accumulation by reducing the proportion of living labour to “dead labour": machinery and materials. Marx made the striking observation that while generals win wars by recruiting armies, capitalists win their competitive wars by firing them. Under the impact of automation, workers are thrown into the street to form what he called the “industrial reserve army,” a mass of disposable labour which could be used in several ways. One is to supply masses of labor when and where the need arises without disrupting production elsewhere. Another is as a weapon against the employed workers, a constant downward pressure on wages and their militancy.  Workers tossed on the streets are often confused and demoralised, while those with jobs are cowed and become protective of them.

 Marx also noted:
1) the size of the reserve army depends on the needs and conditions of capitalist production; it does not indicate absolute overpopulation;
2) it varies with the cycles of capitalist development—smaller at the end of the boom period, larger in times of crisis—but its existence is constant;
3) it has an active element that Marx termed the “floating” section (including part-timers), a more destitute “stagnant” part, and a “latent” element composed of a population rendered superfluous by productive developments in agriculture and other spheres where capitalist methods were being newly introduced.

Work can now be transferred to different parts of the world with much greater ease, in order to seek cheaper labor or force workers to accept less. The result, along with a further concentration of capital, is the internationalisation of the reserve army. Alongside the automated factory, the sweatshop has re-emerged.

The working class must overthrow the dictatorship of the capitalist by socialist revolution. Our enemy is the capitalist class and all those in league with them. We place our hope in the people, helping them to raise their understanding of individual oppression to collective oppression, from collective oppression to class oppression, from awareness only of economic oppression to awareness of political oppression, and from awareness of the need for reforms within the existing system to awareness of the need for political struggles for socialist revolution. The politicians have shown time and again that they serve big business first. If we fight back, we can win but any gains or concessions acquired in the past were won because capitalism feared something greater: workers’ revolution. And now even these gains are being eroded and disappearing. If the aim of workers’ resistance is only to persuade politicians to grant reforms, and is not a struggle about making workers conscious of the need for all-out confrontation with capital then it will be all a futile effort that merely raise false hopes. To advocate struggles for reforms and expect the struggle itself to turn automatically into revolutionary demands would be equally illusionary.

The Socialist Party does, however, recognise the revolutionary potential created by the recession. There is a heightened awareness among workers that this system will never fulfill their needs nor grant their demands. Reformists simply no longer has very much to offer. Despite it being a long and difficult struggle, the fight for socialism is now very much worth engaging in, particularly knowing what the bleak capitalist future has in store for us all. That is why working people should join us in this effort.