It is absurd to pretend that governments can manage the
economy. In fact their job is to manage 'us' in the interests of the parasite
economic class of exploiters, who pay big bucks to support their elections to
this end regardless of which party label they are flying under, hence their
insistence upon reassuring the electorate of their 'business friendly ' nature.
This ensures that whatever political hue the elected reps are, the electorate,
like turkeys voting for Xmas, remain in conditions of waged slavery, subject to
the dictates of the capitalist market. If their first duty is to get elected to
'government' then they are not operating in the interests of the workers. They
are just another capitalist party, which they are anyway but various supporters
and enemies, see them as some kind of 'socialism' light. The Labour Party are
not socialists and never were so. Real socialists do not have nor do they need,
leaders. It is time for workers to stop supporting 'business friendly' parties
of capitalism and envisage how we may usher in the new, global post-capitalist
future where we won't need governments 'over' us and can run a commonly owned,
free access democracy for ourselves. Capitalism cannot be tamed and must be
replaced. Real socialism is a post-capitalist society not some business
friendly stitch-up of the workers. If you are convinced, however, that groups
or parties promising reforms deserve your support, we would urge you to
consider the following points.
The campaign, whether directed at right-wing or left-wing
governments, will often only succeed if it can be reconciled with the
profit-making needs of the system. In other words, the reform will often be
turned to the benefit of the capitalist class at the expense of any working
class gain.
Any reform can be reversed and eroded later if a government
finds it necessary.
Reforms rarely, if ever, actually solve the problem they
were intended to solve.
This was summed up by William Morris over a century ago:
"The palliatives
over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because
they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading,
grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant,
meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on
a fresh side."
The profit motive of capitalism is a major cause of the
problems we face in today's society: ever increasing inequality, poverty,
alienation, crime, homelessness, environmental degradation—the list could go on
and on. There are countless ways in which the working class (and indeed the
capitalist class) suffer as a result of the profit system. Unless we organise
for a revolutionary alternative, the profit system will continue on its blind,
unswerving path. The problem is that workers are willing to give their power
away to representative governments when in reality they only can represent the
interests of the capitalist class and govern 'over' you. The world has the
productive capacity to provide a high standard of living for all, to provide
security and comfort for all, to create safe workplaces and clean industries.
The only thing keeping us from reaching these goals is that the workers don't
own and control that productive capacity; it is owned and controlled by a few
who use it solely to profit themselves. The Labour Party, since its foundation were
as dangerous to the capitalist system as a pantomime lion to its audience. To
project a change of a 'governing' party as a potential 'alternative', is capital's
great electoral trick.
It stands alongside the "Great Money Trick" and
waged slavery, clothed in the ideological rhetoric of Freedom and Liberty,
which consists of freedom to plunder surplus value from the wage worker and
liberty to globalise this plunder at the point of a gun if necessary. Rather
than contemplate a change of government 'over' you, consideration needs to be
given to a change of the economic and political system in order to establish a
post-capitalist, common ownership with a delegated democracy, which requires
administration being the preserve of the majority in conditions of free access
to the collective produce of this majority and the elimination of privileged
ownership and control mechanisms.
We don't need leaders. We need to stop being so slavish and
establish the post-capitalist society.
What we saw in 2008 was the enactment of a welfare state for the rich, a
kind of state socialism for the financial elites that Marx predicted. But with
this comes an increased and volatile cycle of boom and bust, bringing the
system closer to disintegration and collapse. We have undergone two major stock
market crashes and the implosion of real estate prices in just the first decade
of the 21st century. The corporations that own the media have worked overtime
to sell to a bewildered public the fiction that we are enjoying a recovery.
Employment figures, through a variety of gimmicks, including erasing those who
are unemployed for over a year from unemployment rolls, are a lie, as is nearly
every other financial indicator pumped out for public consumption. We live,
rather, in the twilight stages of global capitalism, which may be surprisingly
more resilient than we expect, but which is ultimately terminal. Marx knew that
once the market mechanism became the sole determining factor for the fate of
the nation-state, as well as the natural world, both would be demolished. No
one knows when this will happen. But that it will happen, perhaps within our
lifetime, seems certain.
“The old is dying, the
new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid
symptoms,” Antonio Gramsci wrote.
What comes next is up to us. There has to be a sea-change in
workers political consciousness so they begin to consider electing themselves to
administer a post-capitalist society. The idle the world comprises of the top
1%. The poorest worker produces more wealth than any of the capitalist
parasites who own and control the means of living. The capitalist class bring
nothing to the table other than already stolen surplus value which they have
extracted from the exploitative wages slavery system. It is a collective
working class problem and requires a collective working class solution which
removes ownership and control of the means and instruments of producing and
distributing wealth from the parasite 1% capitalist class and making them
common with free access and democratic control by all. If we want real social
change we need to get rid of this slavish attitude get some yourself and make
the revolution instead of looking to business friendly leaders, with or without
backbone, making undeliverable promises of reform. Let us haste the day for a
move onto a commonly owned, free-access, post-capitalist delegated democracy
over the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth rather than
over the people.
Workers already run capitalism from top to bottom. They are
managers, scientists, government workers and so on. They are more than capable
of understanding and running the new society in common in everyone’s interest.
They are also subjected to a heavy schooling process and national interest
propaganda from cradle to the grave with vested interests controlling media and
so on. They are rightly suspicious of any grand superimposition of planned
economies such as the disastrous Soviet state capitalist experiments. The
success of capitalist propaganda to mislabel those as indications of
'socialist' failure, has to be reckoned with, along with the incapacity of the
pseudo socialists left to educate 'themselves' out of the same narrative, in
order to participate in 'real' revolutionary propaganda activities alongside
fellow workers, rather than engaging in trickery of workers to gain support for
so called 'Left' governance OVER them. The alternatives presented within
politics are little more than tinkering with the re-imposition of status quo
options and are never articulated outwith those boxes of understanding.
"While
theologians are disputing the existence of a hell elsewhere, we are on the way
to realising it here: and if capitalism is to endure, whatever may become of
men when they die, they will come into hell when they are born." – William Morris
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