The Day is Coming

"Without a vision, the people perish" - Book of Proverbs

“Socialism” has been a word which has been something of an empty container into which a wide variety of conflicting ideas can be poured. So we shall be clear upon our meaning - socialism is based on voluntary co-operation rather than state ownership. Many say socialism is dead. As proof, they point to the failure of the Soviet Union. But in Marx's view undeveloped countries like czarist Russia with a minority working class were in no position to lead what has to be a global change from an interdependent world market to socialism "as the act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' and simultaneously" as he put it in the German Ideology. If anything the Bolshevik failure proved Marx right! Marx envisioned not government control of the means of production but control by the working class and democratic planning not by bureaucrats but "by the associated producers." So Marx's own vision of socialism was not proved a failure by the demise of the USSR because it was not tested. Nevertheless, contrary to Marx’s expectations capitalism is still fully alive. The rich get richer and the poor poorer, we are all pitted against each other, millions are killed each year by poverty, war and environmental degradation. Thus, since capitalism isn't dead, neither is socialism yet. To declare socialism finished before capitalism is over is to surrender without struggle an essential means for opposing capitalism. Working people are positioned by capitalism to see more and can grasp the actions of the rich and their needs creates a strong claim on ownership of the wealth that their labour alone creates. Workers can conceive an alternative to the current status quo. Capitalism is an evil that calls for immediate destruction. It has no purpose beyond the infinite accumulation of capital. We can concede that individual capitalists are not necessarily persons of ill-will. The meanness is in the system to whose reproduction we lend ourselves, capitalists from self-interest, workers from dire necessity. The system is a vicious circle.

Labour and capital though antagonistic, are intimately related. Unless joined to labour, capital produces no value; and labour, lacking control of the means of production, cannot make what it needs to live. The imbalance, then, is: control of the means of production by non-producers. Lacking such control workers must sell their labour power as a commodity to those who have such control, subjecting themselves to the latters' will during the workday. Those controlling the means of production, seeing that they can make more from workers' labour than it costs them, grant workers the temporary access to the means of production they need to reproduce their labour and themselves.

It looks like a fair exchange if we overlook the imbalance. Yet this imbalance is signaled by workers' advance of their labour to capitalists before receiving compensation on payday, rather than the reverse. Once put to work, labour power soon fully compensates the capitalist for its cost to him; but it then keeps on adding value to commodities, unpaid, for the remainder of the workday. Workers may have access to the means of production to make what they need, but on condition that, having done so, they continue working, yielding up without compensation the greatest part of the value their labour produces. Marx's name for this unpaid labour done after workers cover their own labor costs is "surplus labour." Its product, "surplus value," is controlled by capitalists. It is from surplus value that profit and capital itself derives. Workers' own savings will never match the accumulation of capital, which they create, but which the system awards to capitalists, along with huge social power. Individual workers may conceivably become capitalists, but the system's imbalance keeps the working class in subservience.

At the heart of the so-called "free" labour contract is a theft effected under a life-threatening extortion. Coerced into this contract by their need, itself due to their separation from the means of production, workers get paid a mere portion of the value they produce in order to reproduce their labour power, hence their lives. They are paid this portion only if they work unpaid for a larger part of the workday. Should they decline surplus labour they will not be allowed enough access to the means of production to do even the labour needed to live. Trade unions may negotiate compensation only for this latter amount of labour. Surplus value is off limits. Marxists call the ratio of what labour costs capitalists to what it produces for them as surplus value, the rate of exploitation. It is often euphemistically called the rate of productivity. Surplus labour is extracted involuntarily since workers would not willingly hand over control of their earnings to others were they not compelled to do so by their separation from the means of production. This imbalance in capital's reproduction thus allows control of the lion's share of the extorted value to be controlled by the representatives of capital. Under cover of equal exchange, this is an exploitation of humans by other humans that is not made more just by being pervasive and normal in the process of capital accumulation. Chattel slavery was once normal.

It will not do to say capitalists are entitled to profit because of their entrepreneurial insight, managerial skill, innovation, risk-taking, etc. These are not unique to capitalists. Persons with these abilities may extract profit from others' labour only if they also own or control the means of production. Many so endowed who lack such control are excluded from profits. Ownership (or control) not skill or talent is the key. Under capitalism all one needs for full entitlement to luxury is enough ownership of the means of production. Nor is providing capital itself a contribution that merits profits. Phoning one's stock-broker is not a productive activity or contribution. "Providing capital" is indeed widely accepted as a productive contribution, but this assumes such entitlement is just, and provides no proof. In the end it matters little if capital's personifications lack justification for exercising power in its name. They control it (and it them); they give orders in its behalf; the police and courts back them up in a power structure with capital at the top. That is the way it is.

Some advocate the solution to exploitation is the creation of workers’ co-operatives and they are heralded as political radicals although such enterprises have been in existence for centuries. Selling one's labour power always means subjecting oneself to domination. Co-operatives can be labeled "masterless slavery" to adapt a term from Max Weber. The fundamental basis of socialism is at the end of the long chain of exploitation the workers have no alternative but to fight back. It is the working class that acts, not the revolutionary political party independently of the class. It may prepare the ground for that action by education and agitation, try to support and strengthen that action when it arrives, unite the diverse sections of the class. From each according to ability to contribute; to each according to needs. That is the best principle that can guide the life of our society today.

The Socialist Party promotes universal cooperation for the common good. We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social system from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede chaotic competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality will be possible. We do not aim for a society where individuality will be crushed out by a system of regimentation. What we seek is a proper collective organisation of our economic resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen. Socialism is not freedom for labour, but the freedom from labour and the use of machinery and technology to make it increasingly possible to bring to mankind freedom of life, freedom for artistic and intellectual activity, freedom for leisure and enjoyment. We do not believe in change by violence. The Socialist Party does not rest until it has eradicated capitalism and put fully into operation the establishment of the cooperative commonwealth.