We are working class

Try an experiment. Dress up smart in a suit and tie, and walk into some corporation and say: “Hello, I’m a sociologist, I’m here to do a study. Could I just walk around and talk to people?” And then you walk up to somebody and say: “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to some office, and you find someone with a little name plate, and it’s a supervisor. And you ask him: “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to a different place, and you walk in and there’ll be a rug. And you say to him: “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to a different floor, all carpeted and you’ll find it gets harder and harder to get in the doors. There’s more and more secretaries, and phones, and the carpets gets thicker and thicker. Eventually you have to make appointments. And then you hit the barrier. Here is where you switch from the people who carry out decisions to people who make the decisions. And that’s your local ruling class. And from your test, you’ll find that all institutions are structured in the same way. A pyramid from the top going down. This goes for government, for the political parties, the army, the churches, the universities, for every basic institution. And when you get to the very top of these structures, to the most powerful people, you will invariably find people who own big property.

The capitalist class and the working-class stand openly opposed to each other. The class lines are clearly defined. There is no mistaking who is a capitalist and who is a worker, who is rich and who is poor. The capitalists are banded together in their Chambers of Commerce, the CBI, and their trade associations. Worker are organised in trade unions. While there remain many workers outside the unions, for all effective purposes—as in all vital industries—the organised workers dominate the situation. That is to say, that while the industries of the country could be run without the unorganised workers, they could not be run without the trade unionists. In the past, ruling classes were proud of their role. They would walk around with feathers in their hats, or luxuriant robes and things, and when they went down the street, people would say: “Hey, there goes one of our ruling class.” Nowadays, they don’t do that. Now, somebody in the ruling class could walk right by, and you wouldn’t even know it. They dress just like you. They’re incognito. They go around saying that there are no longer any classes, that everybody’s ‘middle-class’, only that some are a little more middle-class than others. In other words, they are frightened to reveal their own existence. They have to hide it. And there are good reasons for that. One of their problems, of course, is that they’re so small in number. They are few and we are many. The smallness of the ruling class means we have more power in comparison. So how do they maintain their rule? The reason is simple. The mass of people are under false illusions.

The capitalists are the most astute, the most cunning, the most resourceful and the proudest ruling class in the world. They have become so by centuries of experience of robbery and pillage and piracy in all parts of the world. They know how to create the atmosphere of liberty but yet rule and rob with an iron fist. It knows how to manipulate democracy. It knows how to have “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the Press” which is no freedom if you cannot afford it. The propertied interests respect neither religious texts, nor logical propositions. These are always moved to action to protect their interests. They hold the world by their power, and they only respect power. They know how to create and end revolts. They know how to corrupt the leaders of people abroad and at home with honours, flattery, social position, money. The working-class is enmeshed with the webs woven by men “honoured” and paid by the capitalist class, always at the ready to play the part of Judas. From experience they possess a wide knowledge of how politics operates. Such a ruling class knows well the art of protecting itself. The capitalist class has at its disposal a powerful media, colouring the minds of millions of peoples’ outlook on life, determining largely their political opinions, fashioning their thoughts, moulding their minds to a servile acceptance of things as they are or as the controllers of these mouthpieces of capitalism desire them to be. The capitalists realise their strength in this connection and ensure their control of it. All this and much more is well understood.

On the workers’ part it is perfectly known that society is fully ripe for the transformation to complete social ownership and control and nothing stands in the way but political consciousness of the people themselves. No serious student of history would attempt to say how near any country is to revolution in terms of months or years. Our work, therefore, is still that of agitation, education and organisation. Our revolt cannot be just against politics and the distribution of the surplus-value. The revolt must be against value production itself. A worker’s fundamental function in all societies, past, present and future, was to create use-values. Into this organic function of all labour, capitalist production imposed the contradiction of producing value, and more particularly surplus-value. Within this contradiction is contained the necessity for the division of society into direct producers (workers) and rulers of society. On this class distinction rests the bourgeois distinction between economics and politics. The working class must now give notice that it is ready to solve these contradictions and abolish labour as “labour”. It seeks to substitute instead a meaningful creative activity with a social aim as the end and the exercise of its natural and acquired faculties as the means.

Everything you use, everything you eat or wear, your car, your housing — you didn’t make any of these things. We don’t produce these things as individuals. We produce socially. People in one part of the world make things which people in another part of the world use. But, even though we produce socially, through co-operation, we don’t own the means of production socially. And this affects all the basic decisions made in this society about what we produce. These decisions are not made on the basis of what people need, but on the basis of what makes a profit. Take the question of hunger. There are people going hungry all over the world and yet, because of the profit system, many governments are subsidizing some farmers not togrow crops to eat but to put into cars as fuel. Farmers don’t make their decisions by saying: “We need a lot of corn so I’m going to plant a lot of corn.” They never say that. They say: “How much money am I going to make if I plant corn?” Did you know that if decisions were not made on this basis, then the USA alone would have the potential to feed the whole world? The productive potential is there. Take the question of homelessness. We could build beautiful free homes for every family. They could wipe out every slum in a matter of a few years. The potential exists, not only in the factories and materials for building, but in the potential to build new machines and factories. Yet, they are not going to solve the housing question because it’s not profitable to build houses. You have the unemployed not hired because it’s not profitable to hire them. In addition, you have a mammoth, organised effort to create waste. For instance, if you designed a car for that would last 50 years, they wouldn’t use it. Because that would destroy the purpose of making cars, which is to produce profits. We have the people who consume a great deal but don’t produce anything. Then you have things like the people in the advertising industry. They don’t do anything really useful or necessary. Another example of how the potential for meeting human needs is destroyed because of the profit system. Say you are a capitalist, and you’re about to build a factory. Do you say: “I’ll build it where it’s nice, where there are trees and fresh air, and where the workers will have nice homes and will be able to go mountain climbing or hunting or swimming?” No, that’s not the way you think. You say: “Well, where’s my market, where are my raw materials coming in, how can I make the most profit?” And this means you might build the factory where you will pump even more poison into the air. Things are getting worse.

Socialists have been accused for many years of wanting to overthrow capitalism by force and violence. When they accuse us of this, what they are really trying to do is to imply that we want to abolish capitalism by minority action, that we want to force the will of the minority on to the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we can win a majority to support a change in the system. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and other democratic rights. So, say you go to your job one day and test it. Wear a big badge that says, “Vote Socialist”. And watch how fast you get promoted. Watch how you are treated. Formally you have the right to have any political view you want. But, the truth is that in all these institutions there is a very worked out, institutionalised way of going up. And on the way up, you sell your individuality, you commit yourself to the values of the system. And you learn very fast that in return for full commitment to the system — for personal discipline, for showing up every morning wearing the right clothes, keeping your hair short, and the rest — in return, you get privileges. It’s done on the basis of privileges. That is what holds the society together. All the institutions under capitalism are ideological institutions in the sense that all of them maintain and demand support for the system. So it should be no surprise to you that the higher you go in a corporation, the higher you go in the university structure, the higher you go in the army, the people get more and more reactionary. They get more and more consciously pro the system; they are more and more for whatever crimes the system has to commit. They simply wouldn’t be there if they weren’t.

If tomorrow the plutocrats and oligarchs cancelled all elections, did away with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so on and if there was any dissent throw you all into concentration camps. How long do you think the ruling class would stay in power? They couldn’t do it. Their power is already limited by a certain consciousness that exists in the mass of the people. Their power is limited by the fact that the mass of the people believe in free speech, in free assembly and in democracy. Many believe that the ruling class has unlimited power – not true. Of course, our rulers will suppress opposition to them insofar as they can get away with it. And they will use the most brutal means available if it suits their needs. But they will try to keep the repression in the bounds of what they can get away with without waking up the majority of the people, without destroying the illusion of democracy. Because, if the people begin to wake up, that’s a big danger.

For example in the United States there is no real democracy in the sense that ordinary people don’t run this country. The elections are totally phony. The ruling class simply gets up and picks two people, or three, and they say: “Okay, everybody, we’re having elections. Now you can vote for Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton” Then they have their candidates have a debate. But the debate isn’t entirely superficial. The debate often represents a real living struggle between different positions within the ruling class. The ruling class resolves many of the smaller tactical differences they have among themselves through means of elections. Obviously, such elections do not in any way mean that the people have a voice in ruling this country. At the same time, the masses of people believe in democracy. And this belief in democracy is something that actually weakens the rulers. And it is something that gives us real power. There is a power relationship between working people and the ruling class based on the potential power of the working class. Because of this power relationship, you can do many things. It gives us what we call free speech. It gives us free assembly. It gives us the right to organise political groups legally. They don’t suppress these newspapers because they know that the minute they start suppressing papers, it’s going to wake people up and bring a reaction. The only hope the ruling class has is if it can isolate the revolutionaries completely from the rest of the people. That is why the number-one task of all socialists who really want to change the system is to know how to reach the people.

This is one of the biggest problems existing in the labour movement at this point. There’s no way that we radicals can by ourselves wake up the American people. Just forget about that. There is no magazine we can publish or leaflet that we could write so articulately that when you hand it to a worker, he will pick it up and say: “That’s it — I’m with you.” If that were how we could do it, we’d have done it a long time ago. There is only one way it will happen. Capitalism does it for us. The system creates the situation in which people wake up.  The rebellion takes place on all levels. People want to be free and sometimes they realise this is possible. All of a sudden, you have an increase in consciousness, an awareness about the problems of society, created by the capitalists. And this awareness can become much more intensified if you have a crisis — if you have a major war, or a downturn in the economic situation. This is a spontaneous radicalisation, an uprising of sorts, but that will never result in a change of the system, unless it’s organised, unless there is a concept of how to struggle and what to struggle for. We must seek to understand how to change society and know what we want to change it into. Very few individuals come to this consciousness completely on their own. Ideas have been a by-product of the accumulation of thought and experience over the long history of class struggle. The capitalist class has also had experiences, from which they have gained knowledge. They’ve been running the world for a couple of hundred years now. They know how, when an opposition develops, to try to repress it, to knock it down, while at the same time how to manoeuvre and absorb it and buy it off. Let us explain what a reformist is. A reformist is someone who doesn’t like what capitalism does, but likes capitalism. They are try to solve the problems created by the system by supporting the system. They are looking for shortcuts, trying to change the system from within. They hope electing a “progressive savior” will substitute for building an independent political movement of the working people against the ruling class. And there is no shortcut to change the system.

Vanguard Leninist/Trotskyist parties think they can take on the power structure, then they can change society. But they’re not going to change it by themselves. You can’t change it without the majority of people involved. And you most certainly can’t change it when they are against you. The Leftists are merely expressing frustration. They don’t have the patience and the understanding of the need to persuade the people, to win them over, to involve them in the struggle through mass movements. We have is an overwhelming majority of people who have objectively no interest in this capitalist system. They have to be won over, and our whole strategy, everything we do, has got to be directed at winning them to our side. Our every step our every demand, is based on democratic ideas. Socialism does not simply mean that the Socialist Party comes to power, but rather that working people come to power. Any concept, any struggle that ignores this will only end in disaster.

So, to end, we say this. The ruling class is never going to solve its problems through the capitalist system. Therefore, the objective conditions for revolution are going to rise up over and again. We don’t create these conditions, but there is one thing we can do. That is, we can create the subjective factor, by understanding and participating in the revolutionary process, we can make success possible. Are we going to be able to do it? Others have failed to do it. Are we going to be able to build a mass socialist party to overthrow the system? That is the great challenge.