Abolishing Wage Slavery

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833  was when Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire (with the exceptions "of the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company," the "Island of Ceylon," and "the Island of Saint Helena"; which were eliminated in 1843). The Act was repealed in 1998 as part of a wider rationalisation of English statute law, but later anti-slavery legislation remains in force. Contrast with the future ‘Abolishing the Wages Slavery System, An Act of Revolution’ the task of workers worldwide and will require no government, crowned or elected state heads approval. Contrast the "parliamentarianism" of the reformists, which involves sending representatives to Parliament to run capitalism, with the socialist policy in which a socialist majority mandates recallable delegates in order to dismantle the state machine, from a position of control.  Contrast the circus of capitalism society with a post-capitalist, socialist one.

Production will be for use and not for sale on the market. Distribution will be according to need and not by means of buying and selling. Work will be voluntary and not imposed on workers by means of a coercive wages system. A human community will exist and social divisions based on class, nationality, sex or race will have disappeared. You will need to 'make' it happen. A plague on all the politics of capitalism. The governments of the world may well introduce a thousand reforms, but we would still continue to live in a world ravaged by starvation, war, homelessness, unemployment, poverty and every other social ill. We would still live in a two class society, with our real needs subordinated to the wishes of a minority. Why campaign for crumbs when the whole bakery is there to be taken? No matter how well-intentioned the politicians are, or how colourful their promises, they are bound to fail because they do not control the system – it controls them.

Workers produce all wealth. A tiny percentage exploit the fact of workers necessity to labour in return for a ration of the wealth, while the minority parasite class own and control the means and instruments for producing the wealth. It is capitalism with its anarchic market system which cannot satisfy human needs as production is turned off if profit isn’t realised thus producing the distribution problem which ensures inequality of access, ad infinitum. There will not be any states national, imperial or otherwise with overlords or entrenched interests in a post- capitalist socialist society so there will be no political classes or privileged overseers. This is a global phenomenon. Workers run this exploitative system from top to bottom. In effect there are only two social classes, 10% capitalist and 90% workers, whether better off workers or poorly paid workers. They are still dependent on a wage or salary check to access what they collectively produce. They are still only a few pay slips short of a food bank while the parasite class live in ease and luxury. The solution to this is not a redistribution of wealth via tax or other measures. This only perpetuates the system of exploitation. It is the political dispossession of ownership of the means and instruments for producing wealth from the capitalists and its transfer to the world’s population and the ownership in common with fellow workers worldwide.

Economist Thomas Piketty joins a host of deluded people who think that capitalism can be reformed in ways which benefit the majority. This nicer capitalism can't exist, never will exist and can never be in the interests of the real wealth producers. That isn't the movers and shakers, the big boys and girls in the city, or the manufacturers, but is the world’s working class. It is not clear how Piketty defines capitalism. He seems to mean what the French call capitalisme sauvage, or unregulated, wildcat capitalism. If so, then his claim to have shown that ‘capitalism simply cannot work’ is reduced to the lesser claim that unregulated capitalism cannot work. This is a powerful refutation of the free marketers, but is still suggesting that capitalism can be reformed ‘to work’. The similarity between Piketty’s view and that of Marx on how capitalism works to make the rich richer is obvious but there is a difference. Piketty is more concerned with the distribution of the income from capital while Marx was concerned with the accumulation of capital itself irrespective of who owns it (whether individuals, corporations or the state) or who benefits personally from it.

Piketty claims that the data his research uncovered ‘contradicted nearly all of the theories [of inequality] including in Marx and Ricardo.’ He doesn’t say what he thinks Marx’s theory was, but elsewhere he has made it clear that he is criticising the theory of the long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall (a position held, in different forms, by both Marx and Ricardo). He doesn’t think that there is any such tendency. And of course, unlike Piketty, Marx never advocated trying to stop or reverse capital accumulation and/or the rich getting richer through legislation or government action. The distribution of property income amongst the rich can be changed, but that would make no difference to those whose income is derived from working.

Exploitation of wage slaves takes place at the point of production. Employment is not a route out of poverty, rather employment for wages or salaries is the source of wealth for the few and poverty whether real, actual, or relative for the many.

The global working class collectively produce all the wealth in society and has access to it collectively rationed by the wages and prices market profit system. The profit system can't help doing this. It's the only way it can work. Which is why it must go. One thing is certain. The Tories, LibDems and Labour—and now UKIP—have nothing to offer. They all support the profit system and are only squabbling over which of them should have a go at running it.

What's the alternative?

If we are going to improve things we are going to have to act for ourselves, without professional politicians or leaders of any kind. We are going to have to organise ourselves democratically to bring about a society geared to serving human needs not profits. Production to satisfy people's needs. That's the alternative. But this is only going to be possible if we control production and the only basis on which this can be done is common ownership and democratic control. In a word, socialism. We are talking about a world community without frontiers. Only on this basis can world poverty, hunger and the destruction of the environment be ended.

The socialist alternative to the profit system is:

1. Common ownership: no individuals or groups of individuals have property rights over the natural and industrial resources needed for production.

2. Democratic control: everybody has an equal say in the way things are run including work, not just the limited political democracy we have today.

3. Production for use: goods and services produced directly to meet people's needs, not for sale on a market or for profit.

4. Free access: all of us have access to what we require to satisfy our needs, not rationed as today by the size of our wage packet or State handout.

There has been an alternative since 1904 when the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed. Their objective ,"The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community. They have consistently advocated this post capitalist solution which consists of creating a new world organised democratically, globally, regionally, locally by ourselves without elected political leaders based upon the organising tenet of, "From each according to their ability to each according to their needs"

Common ownership means that society as a whole owns the means and instruments for distributing wealth. It also implies the democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, for if everyone owns, then everyone must have equal right to control the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth.

Common ownership is not state ownership. State ownership is merely the ownership by the capitalist class as a whole, instead of by individual capitalists, and the government then runs the state enterprises to serve the capitalist class. In the self-proclaimed "communist" states the state enterprises served those who control the party/state apparatus. The working class did not own or control. It produced for a privileged minority.