Socialism can only be established peacefully and
democratically by the workers themselves. It cannot be brought about "like
a thief in the night" (Keir Hardie) by reforming or nationalising nasty
bits of capitalism away. What the Socialist Party advocate entails doing away
with capitalism, its politicians and leaders altogether. Socialism stands for
the sole aim of establishing a global system of society in which there will be
common ownership and democratic control of the world’s natural and industrial
resources. We advocate a world social system in which each person has free
access to the benefits of civilisation and an equal say in how their society is
run; a world in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of
profit and used for the benefit of all.
As long as capitalism exists, profits will always take
priority over our real needs. Some workers welcome reforms; some reforms have
improved working class conditions, but no reform can abolish that basic contradiction
between profits and need. No matter how well-meaning the politicians, nor how
colourful their promises, they are bound to fail because they do not control
the system; rather, it controls them. 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?
Many workers are confused about ‘human nature’, arguing, for
instance, that humans are ‘by nature’ greedy, selfish and aggressive and
therefore unable to cooperate to help establish Socialism. What they are in
fact citing are characteristics of human behaviour under varying conditions.
Human behaviour is not fixed but determined by the kinds of society people are
conditioned to live in. We are not born as racists or bigots, any more than we
are born with a desire to burn witches or hoard money. The capitalist jungle
produces vicious, competitive ways of thinking and acting. But we humans are
able to adapt our behaviour and there is no reason why our rational desire for
comfort and human welfare should not allow us to cooperate. Even under
capitalism, people obtain great pleasure from doing a good turn for others. Few
enjoy participating in the ‘civilised’ warfare of the rat-race.
Capitalism can't be reformed and has to be replaced by a
democratic, global, government-less, moneyless, prices-free, free access
socialist society operating the slogan,"From
each according to their ability to each according to their needs." There
is no middle class in society. There are only two classes, the workers and a
minority parasitic capitalist class who live off the surplus-value produced by
the workers. If you have to work for a wage or salary in order to live then you
are a member of the working class which must make the revolution which makes
all wealth the common heritage of all the planet and abolishes class ownership
of the means and instruments for producing wealth forever.
Value is created by labour. Not governments. Certainly,
governments at the behest of the capitalist class by virtue of their minority
ownership of the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth
direct the labour into profitable production of commodities for the capitalist
class. This production is not aimed at satisfying human needs as the tap is
turned off as soon as it is deemed unprofitable to continue and workers are
thrown onto the scrapheap long before satisfaction of needs can be realised. Of
course this is an intrinsic feature of capitalist development where workers can
only ever gain a ration of what they collectively produce, but they produce and
add value by selling their commodity to the capitalists namely their labour
power.It is here at the point of production, where exploitation begins and this
extraction of surplus value from the worlds workers is the basis of profit. Firstly,
capitalism is a system in which wealth takes the form of commodities. i.e.
objects produced for sale on the market. Commodity production is not unique to
capitalism, but the commodity nature of labour power is. So, capitalism is
defined by the fact that the mental and physical energies of most people have
to be sold on the market for a price called a wage or a salary. Where there is
wage labour there is capitalism. Secondly, capitalism is defined by the law of
value. Value is a social relationship which exists in property society where
commodities are exchanged. Where there are no commodities, because production
and distribution have advanced beyond the stage of buying and selling
relationships, there will be no need for the concept of value or for prices and
money. As Marx pointed out, "Value is the expression of the specifically
characteristic nature of the capitalist process of production"
All of the focus is on what is best for capitalism.
Extractive elites are an integral feature of capitalism.
Marx correctly outlined:
1. The boom-slump
cycle endemic to capitalism and how no government intervention—however
benign—would be able to prevent it;
2. How the market
economy would eventually spread its tentacles into every aspect of human life,
conquering the entire planet in the process;
3. How an excess
issue by governments of paper currency beyond that required by additional value
production is the real cause of inflation;
4. Class division
and the modern development of a world economy where the division between the
richest and the poorest is the widest in human history;
5. The growth of
a colossal credit-based financial apparatus that, as time goes on, becomes
increasingly isolated from the realities of the wealth production process on
which it depends.
If anyone doubts the prescience of the Marxian analysis,
consider the following passages from the Manifesto about the development of
world capitalism and the ruling capitalist class:
"The bourgeoisie,
by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely
facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations
into civilisation . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt
the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls
civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one
word, it creates a world after its own image."
And yet:
"Modern bourgeois
society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society
that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like
the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells."
In a world of uncontrollable global economic crises, permanent
warfare, rampaging environmental destruction, unprecedented income inequality,
social dislocation and delinquency, who can in all seriousness say that Marx
was fundamentally wrong? And if his identification of the problems of the
modern world and their trajectory is so accurate his proposed solution for them
must surely command attention too.
Let us abolish the wages system and establish a global, free
access socialist system where production is for use, without rationing of
access by prices, wages or private ownership of the means and instruments for
producing and distributing wealth. Let all wealth be owned in common and
controlled democratically without elites, by the whole population. Check out
what the World Socialist Movement says socialism is, what capitalism is and
inform yourselves as to the replacement of this outmoded system with the new
one.
The Soviet Union had damn all to do with socialism. It was
no more communist than Revolutionary France. The ‘Jacobin’ seizure of power by
the Bolsheviks is testament to this. It merely replaced feudalism with a state
capitalist system. Marx would have told them so, as socialists in the SPGB did
at the time:
"Is this huge
mass of people, numbering about 160,000,000 and spread over eight and a half
millions of square miles, ready for Socialism? Are the hunters of the North,
the struggling peasant proprietors of the South, the agricultural wage slaves
of the Central Provinces, and the industrial wage slaves of the towns convinced
of the necessity, and equipped with the knowledge requisite, for the
establishment of the social ownership of the means of life?Unless a mental
revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place, or an
economic change has occurred immensely more rapidly than history has recorded, the
answer is “No!”
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