Our Aim is True

We live surrounded by inequality. Some have wealth, health, education, satisfying occupations. Others get poverty, ill-health and drudgery. Social mobility scarcely exists. Wealth is funneled to those on top. It is not so much true that “power corrupts” as it is a fact that easily corruptible persons gravitate toward exercise of power. Is this the type of society we want? What does it mean to fight against inequality? The problem of gross inequality in capitalist society is not fundamentally a problem of inequality within our class, between the unemployed and destitute workers and the so-called ‘middle-class’ in relatively more secure jobs and on higher pay. The fundamental problem of inequality is inequality between the capitalist ruling class and the working class.

This inequality between the employing class and the wage workers is taken for granted as a given and is rarely questioned. The income of the capitalist class comes from the unpaid labour of the workers in the form of profit, or surplus value. Everything created by the workers belongs to the bosses. And everything created by the workers contains unpaid labour time in it. The bosses sell goods and services and get the money for the unpaid labour time of the workers — that is, profit. They keep part of it for themselves and become rich. The other parts they pay their banker his interest or their land-owner his rent, the rest they re-invest so that they can get richer in the next cycle of production and selling.

The income of the workers, on the other hand, comes from the sale of their labour power to his or her employer. The workers receive wages or salaries and the amount is always kept somewhere within the range of what it takes to survive. Some workers are paid somewhat more than that and can have a certain degree of comfort, even luxury. Many workers, more and more these days, receive just about enough to get by on in a life of scrimping and saving while others barely get enough to survive. Wages under capitalism are basically what it costs a worker to subsist and to keep the family going so that the bosses are assured of the next generation of workers to exploit. Workers have to struggle to preserve whatever they can through the ups and downs of capitalist crises and periodic unemployment.

No worker can ever get wealthy on wages, no matter how high-paid he or she may be. But the capitalist class as a whole automatically grows richer, (even if a particular capitalist goes bankrupt.) The employing class continuously reinvest their capital and keep alive the ongoing process of the exploitation of more and more labour. The capitalist’s children and grand-children, as a rule, get richer and richer from generation to generation and become family dynasties.

It is in this context, that socialists ask those who are for genuine equality, the question what exactly are you fighting for. If the ultimate goal is to reform the tax code, or to reduce corporate money in politics, or to regulate the predatory capitalist class and the greedy bankers  then it may reduce the obscene excessive levels of inequality a little but most definitely, these palliatives won’t end inequality itself. Class inequality is built-in to the system of class exploitation. The profit system spreads misery and it is time to expose capitalism.

Under capitalism, products and services are only produced and distributed if they can make a profit for the capitalists – those at the top of the system who own the means of producing and selling goods and services, like the factories and the shopping malls. Even when the capitalist system is “working”, when it’s “fine”, it creates massive inequalities between rich and poor. All profit generated by the capitalists always has to be reinvested (as “capital”) to make more profit. Capital never sits still – it’s always moving. Products are made in factories, then sold on the market (exchanged for money), then some of that money pays the workers their wages, while the capitalists pocket the rest as profit. And then the “circuit of capital” begins again. Workers are always short-changed, they never realise the full value of their labour power that they put in because the capitalist always takes out the profit. All the capitalists bring to the table is their legal ownership of the factories, companies and private property in general. Thanks to this or that piece of paper – a share ownership certificate or credit note in their possession – the capitalists are able to make “legal” claims on the profits generated by working people’s labour. The rule of capital is the rule of a crazy market, which creates massive wealth at one pole only to create misery at another.

There is an alternative. If only the system wasn’t run for profit, if only it was democratically controlled by working people, then we could run it on the basis of the need of all – not the profit of a few. That’s socialism – and it is really worth fighting for.