Wednesday, January 27, 2016

The charade of capitalism


Workers don't have a country. The nation is run in the collective interests of the ruling class. Most of us don’t own a single square inch of Scotland. It doesn’t belong to us: we just live here and work for the people who do own it. In or out of the United Kingdom, in and out of the EU, that won’t change. In Scotland, society is run in the interests of those who own the wealth. They argue among each other over billions of barrels of oil, GDP rates, profits and exports, because where the borders lie matters to them. Every border is an opportunity to wring cash out of other property owners. Scotland will remain dependent upon their whims and interests whatever the state of sovereignty. They’ll try to sway us one way or another with crumbs (or the promises of crumbs) but we’ll only get what they feel they can spare to protect their privilege and wealth.

We will remain dependent upon their investments making a profit for them before we can get our needs and interests seen to. The only way to stop this dependency would be for us to take ownership and control of the wealth of the world into our own hands. We could, together, use the wealth of the world to meet our mutual needs and grant the true independence of being able to control our work and our lives in free and voluntary association of equals.

There is no such thing as a, "fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay".  Exploitation takes place at the point of production or you would not be hired. The Labour Party has ever served the interest of the ruling class, even to the extent of supporting war on their behalf .The welfare state would have happened anyway, no matter who was elected. The Labour Party doesn't have socialist roots.  Its aim was always to reform capitalism. Any party which intends to run capitalism with its, waged labour, buying and selling, money system, production for sale on a market, is by definition a capitalist party. Equally notions of employment full or otherwise are nothing to do with socialism. Capitalism can't be reformed and shorn of its rapacious tendencies. It has to be replaced by a new post capitalist social revolution. We fail to see why you should continue to elect people to police 'us' on behalf of the parasitic capitalist class, but require to police 'them', on behalf of the slavish electorate.

You only need to develop a political awareness which dispenses with government over us, replacing the capitalist system with a self-regulated and self-correcting, democratic, global, free access society of common ownership, which requires no police, as it ensures all wealth is commonly produced ,owned and accessed freely without wages, prices, or minority ownership intervening in the free access to it. Remove privileged accumulation of wealth and its political class. Abolish the market and its wages system, establish real socialism.

The biggest charade is the notion that politicians or political parties can left, right, centre, statist, free-market, mixed-market, can make anything other than a marginal difference in running capitalism. Capitalism can't be run in any way which interferes with the exploitative boom-slump cycle of the market system and conditions of wage-slavery for the vast majority. Capitalism cannot solve the problem of distribution, through its market mechanisms, wages or prices, as it must choke off production, as its markets become saturated reducing profit but, always before human needs can be satisfied. All political parties are business friendly in this sense.

The Labour Party in office claimed the benefit for establishing the welfare state. They started clawing back some measures very quickly and putting up prescription charges. Workers are not better off in relative terms. Any changes in welfare system for example increase profits derived from labour. The rate of exploitation is greater. If you are born poor you will die poor with few exceptions.

Nationalisation was in the interests of the capitalist class. State capitalist measures such as that, does nothing about wage slavery or the rate of exploitation. They didn't dispossess the mine owners or railway owners, they compensated them and in many cases paid them with high salary seats on the boards of trade and management which run the industries. Any safety reforms arose out of union action.
Attlee's socialist ‘movement’ must have taken place on the porcelain seat in the lavatory.

Capitalism has to be replaced, through the conscious and informed action of the majority, with a new post - capitalist society, harnessing all of the productive capacity of this one and more, freeing up human resources intrinsic to capitalism, but unnecessary in a new post-capitalist one, banks, money, insurance, armies, navies, war production, and by harnessing all of the infrastructure and techno-structure.

We, the world’s workers, whether waged, salaried, white or blue-collared, can create a world of superabundance, which has free access, without wages and prices, to produce of our collective endeavours, within a global, regional and local democratic participatory framework, by all the world’s people and an organising "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

To do this we, the world’s workers, must dispossess the global capitalist class, whether private individuals, bureaucratic, governmental, or corporate, of their ownership of the means of production and distribution and take them into common ownership. Politicians are irrelevant. Les get rid of capitalism and its politicians for good.

Socialism is a free access society which doesn't need reformist political parties to bring it into being. It only needs a working class conscious of itself and in itself aware, that it is its class interests to overthrow private and state ownership of the means and instruments of creating and distributing wealth and willing to engage with fellow workers worldwide, to replace them with common ownership and democratic control globally in conditions of free access without wage slavery or prices or markets.

Workers have no country. The world for the workers.

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