In the weeks of electoral excitement before polling day you
will have been made to appreciate, at least a bit, that you are, for the
moment, important people. Between elections you look up to politicians and big
business men as important, but during elections it is they who go to endless
trouble to influence you and win your support for them and their policies. It
is you who can make or mar the career politician and you who can place power in
the hands of a government which during its term of office can, by taxation or
by subsidies, raise some industries to prosperity and bring others to their
ruin. It is you who give power to governments in whose hands rest decisions
about peace and war. Whichever of them, you, the workers, vote for in an election,
it is a defeat for you, a betrayal of your own interests. Capitalism exists
only because you, the workers, allow it to exist.
Despite being unable to find lasting solutions to workers’
problems, political parties must always try to combat voter disillusionment.
Behaving like chameleons, they must search for ways to improve their image,
reinvigorate old policies and give the appearance that this time things will be
different, this time the electorate will be given exactly what it wants.
Parties strive to engineer their own
metamorphosis, re-branding policies and redefining the agenda.
Today politics is about achieving political power, with the
main political parties contesting to maximise their share of votes in a
political market in the same way as competing corporations do. The reality of
politics today is that political parties represent the corporate face of
organised groups of career-orientated politicians whose cushy, well-paid jobs
are dependent on selling old and failed political formulae dressed in worthless
verbiage to a gullible electorate. It is not a question of honesty, sincerity
or wise people elected to government may indeed be able to soften some of the
nasty features that capitalism throws up, but a government endowed with wisdom
could not make a system of economic anarchy and competition - a system
predicated on the exploitation of the many by the few - run in the interest of
the many. The socialist case is that the social and economic system that has
got to be changed and not its particular political functionaries.
Voters vote governments out because they appear incompetent,
incapable of finding solutions to the daily problems that confronts wage and
salary earners. But government can never solve these problems because their
permanent solution lies only in the abolition of capitalism and the wages
system. Economic laws that politicians are powerless to change and leave little
room for manoeuvre determine what politicians do and how they must react. It is
not the deceitfulness of politicians that is the problem but rather the
economic structure of society.
But it is not just political parties that refuse to think
outside the framework of capitalism. Most people rarely question the structure
of society and passively support the system that always works against them. In
misguided expressions of defiance that flow from frustration and lack of
understanding, voters repeatedly swap Labour governments for Conservative, or
Conservative governments for Labour - as they have on seven separate occasions
since the second world war – in the hope that it will somehow make a
difference. They are always disappointed by the outcome. Mandating a political
party to administer capitalism means that workers surrender political power to
their class enemy and condone the continuation of their own exploitation, their
insecurity and their poverty - a lesson that workers seem unable to grasp as
the same mistake is slavishly repeated over and over again. Trading one group
of careerist politicians for another can never be the answer, changing
society’s economic structure is the only answer.
Yet another set of dishonest politicians will be after your
vote at the general election. However, in some cases they are calling
themselves 'socialist'. Our analysis of them is not based upon some narrow
sectarianism—it's based upon principle. We do not, nor have we ever, supported
capitalist parties, especially those that dress up in revolutionary garb in
order to hoodwink the workers. Parties such as TUSC are an expression of all
the political mistakes made by the working class last century—from the Labour
Party to the Soviet Union. We do not doubt that well-meaning individuals get
caught up in such chicanery for no other reason than a desire to see a better
world. However, sentiment can never be a substitute for the class struggle.
The Green Party sees itself as the political arm of the
wider environmental movement, arguing that it is not enough to be a pressure
group, however militant, like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Greens, it
says, should organise as well to contest elections with the eventual aim of
forming a Green government that could pass laws and impose taxes to protect the
environment. We say that no
Capitalism is a splintered society; divided not just by
sectional ownership of the means of production but by the economic rivalry of
independent states striving to exercise authority over given geographical
areas. Conventional political parties endorse the framework of capitalism and
compete to win control over the state and to administer the economic system
within its boundaries, which necessarily means perpetuating the wages system
and the persistent hardship for wage and salary earners. The policies
propounded by these parties are similar because they are manifestations of the
same political imperative – a continuation of capitalism – and are
distinguishable only to the extent that they propose different organisation methods
to administer the same economic system.
UKIP can make huge gains in the elections proclaiming the
merits of British sovereignty. We can only wonder at the mainstream parties
fears of a surge in support for UKIP. Considering the views of the Labour and
Conservative parties on asylum seekers and migrant their objections to UKIP do
seem a little hypocritical. They may genuinely abhor the racists in UKIP but
have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made political gains
because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system which
they champion and which gives rise to the politics of racism. If anything the rise
of UKIP is the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to
make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not the fault of the
mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa
despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when
despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises
and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that
workers fall for the scapegoating lies of nationalists and the quick fix they
offer?
Governments do not have a free hand to do what is sensible
or desirable. They can only act within the narrow limits imposed by the
profit-driven market system whose rules are “profits first” and “you can’t buck
the market”.
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