Jettison your 'upperosity'

In 2011, nearly 7 million children died before age five, as compared to 1990 when nearly 12 million did. While that translates into 14,000 fewer children dying every day in 2011 than in 1990, it still translates into the deaths of 19,000 children under age five every day in 2011. How long? How long? The horror that is capitalism is here and now and cannot be civilised or tamed in any meaningful way to eliminate the above tragedy. The ‘Gaurdianistas’ need to raise their sights above their relatively cocooned existence which they personally experience, tinkering about on the margins for some modicum of personal improvement for themselves or others in order to assess, if they are a part of the problem. There is nothing new in any of this. History is forever repeating itself without us learning much from it. The halo of capitalism has been smashed by the recession. The halo of our industrial system is gone. It is no longer a sacred thing, which must not be meddled with because of fear of the consequences. For years the working-class has been silent, a sleeping giant lulled to sleep by its own victories and the ability of capitalism to expand and provide a gradually rising standard of living. The working-class has had to struggle to realise these gains, but this struggle has been contained within the limits and rules established by the system.

The world is rich in natural resources. It is capable of satisfying the needs of all its people. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. A handful of parasites live off the backs of the workers and could not care less about their situation. There can never be class peace between exploiter and exploited, between boss and worker. The working class cannot eliminate exploitation and poverty unless it overthrows the capitalist system. Welfare cuts that are meant to get the jobless back to work are driving down the living standards of hundreds of thousands of people who are in no position to find a job. There never was a golden age of the welfare state. The history of income maintenance in Britain has been the history of coercion, discipline and surveillance. Now new layers of social control has been added. The 'welfare state' is in difficulty across the industrialised world. Despite this, welfare systems will not be dismantled completely — their main aim, after all, is to provide some support for workers who are ill or unemployed so that they might return to the labour market at a later date. They also help mitigate against social unrest. The Government has tried to sell its welfare reforms on the back of mistruths and nasty stereotypes. However, this research exposes what a devastating impact its policies are having on communities throughout the country. Ministers are not cracking down on cheats as they claim, but destroying the safety net that our welfare state is meant to provide for those who fall on hard times through no fault of their own. Full employment is a mirage. When we get close to it, in boom times, we drive up wages where we can as part of the class struggle. There is no right to work in capitalism and anyway, they need a reserve army of labour to terrify the rest of us who get out of line. We really need to consider employment as waged slavery where we can only get back a ration of the wealth we produce while the owners of the means of wealth production siphon off our unpaid labour power. The answer is to make common cause globally with our fellow workers and get rid of wage-slavery, abolishing the wages and prices system.

Left and Right are parts of the same capitalist system. Variations of themes Statist, Neo-Con, Centrist or otherwise. All the left have done with their failed experiments of minimum programmes, to fool workers into supporting their elitist Jacobinistic, leaderist distortions, is bloody the vision of socialism/communism as a classless, wageless, moneyless, free access society, which to get there involved the active emancipation of the working class by their own efforts. There will be no such thing as a socialist 'government'. Higher wages and shorter work hours are sometimes possible under capitalism. But:

'At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!" '  Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 1865.

This revolutionary alternative to capitalism requires you to take control of your political life and consciously aspire to it. It can't be given to you on a plate by a political party. Capitalism cannot be reformed in any meaningful way that is not commensurate with its continuation of its capacity to exploit the majority of their surplus value. This essential part of capitalism ensures that the rich need grow ever richer and cream off enough for further expansion, even if temporarily the employment wage-slavery tap is turned off during a market down turn. They will eventually find new avenues to exploit, no hurry as they are simply rolling in money, but the wasted generation between those points of slump and boom are of no great moment to them, other than encouraging words to, "get on their bikes" or take wage cuts, or move to another country, with a watchful, wary, eye out for civil unrest. We need to stop trusting, even well-meaning politicians, to secure crumbs for us and organise ourselves with other workers of the world to take over and run for ourselves a free access bakery. Even if every M.P. was an honourable person of the greatest integrity, it would only make a marginal difference to our lives as workers. The best thing we can do for the young is for us to educate ourselves a fair bit, discourage them from following the footsteps of the failure of the previous generation which trusted political parties to reform capitalism. Get rid of all our smug pseudo 'squeezed' middle-class pretensions with notions of 'upperosity' and realise that, if we 'have' to work for a wage or salary we are members of the exploited working class, whether we own our home or send young Dimkins to a private school or not.

We are one human species who are capable of much better things than to de-humanise either by the alienation of wage-slavery and thus ideologically driven to profit from it. Rather that the social system creates the circumstances in which accumulation is a driven necessity. The pursuit of Profit in this system means that needs cannot be met. This applies in all countries. Production in capitalism has to be for sale with a view of realising a profit. The vast production capacity cannot be utilised in an efficient manner to satisfy all human needs. It is insanity, now we have this productive capacity to create a superabundance of wealth, we don't put it to a human species orientated use in fraternity with all. Money can become an obsolete method of accounting when all wealth, already created by the world’s workers is owned in common and controlled democratically. A real democracy where each can take according to their needs and contribute according to their ability will have no master or servant.

Nobody wants their standard of living to be reduced, whether as cuts to their wages or their pensions or as the reduced income unemployment brings. But that’s what they get, even though they might vote against it. To imagine that electing another set of politicians is going to make any difference, though, is an illusion. It assumes that governments control the way the capitalist economy works whereas in fact they have to govern on its terms of ‘no profit, no production’. They have to give priority to profits and profit-making. In a slump that means imposing austerity. Henry Ford is reputed to have said that you can have a car of any colour so long as it’s black. Capitalism in a crisis is like that. You can elect any government, but that government will impose austerity.

The fuel that drives capitalism is profits. A slump means that capitalist businesses are investing less than before because it’s not so profitable. The only way capitalism can get out of this is if profitability revives. This happens spontaneously in a slump. The assets of failing and bankrupt firms pass cheaply to others, who can therefore use them more profitably. Interest rates fall, allowing firms that borrow money to invest to keep a larger proportion of their profits. Increased unemployment exerts a downward pressure on wages, increasing the share of profits in new production. Left-wingers and trade union leaders think that the way out of a slump is to increase spending. Get the government to spend more, they say, and that will get production going again. But it won’t. For the simple reason that the increased wages or government spending would have to be at the expense of profits; which would make things worse. Some governments may start off trying to do this but they are very quickly obliged by the economic laws of capitalism to effect a U-turn and impose austerity. That’s the way capitalism works, and it’s the only way it can work. Capitalism is a system that puts profits before people and cannot be reformed to do otherwise. The only way forward is not to vote for a change of government policy or to reform some aspect of capitalism, but to act to replace capitalism with socialism so that the Earth’s resources really can become the common heritage of all and used to serve human welfare.