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| THERE IS POWER IN THE VOTE |
All wealth flows form the working class. The capitalist
class are a parasitic class which can be dispensed with in a sane
post-capitalist society. The business class need the state and live off its
benefits. They use the state (tame capitalist politicians) also to buy off
discontent with reformism. The workers only wrested some conditions from this
arrangement when they had a level of bargaining power during booms. In some
instances benefits and pensions were deferred wage settlements. Nation states
will be a superfluous anachronism in a free access post-capitalist world.
Abolishing the wages and prices system and the markets which ration access to
wealth produced by the world workers, while the parasite owning class live in
ease and luxury will solve forever the problem which capitalism can't resolve
of distribution. Don't settle for the capitalist parasite's reformist crumbs,
take over the bakery. You have a world of common ownership and democratic
control to win. Capitalisms technological and productive capacity is now
capable of producing a superabundance of wealth. Competition with other rival
capitalists creates gluts of commodities, but has to destroy or ration access
to the producers in order to create scarcity of distribution, to keep us as
rationed waged slaves. It thus has outgrown its capacity to distribute
resources.
Communism/socialism is not some secular religious belief,
but the next phase of historical development building upon capitalisms
technology, with educated workforce, which already runs capitalism from top to
bottom (many deluded that they are middle -class),by the way and establishes
participative democracy rather than representative elitist democracy over the
means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth, rather than
governing over people, within a society of common ownership and free access.
Socialism before the Leninists murdered the idea and the pseudo-socialist
reformists sidetracked-Labourites like Will Self. The post capitalist
(communist/socialist /anarchist call it anything) society does away with any
elite class ownership and control, with production for use, not for sale and
access free without wages or prices rationing access. We need a society of
social equals with equal self-determined access to the collective produce first
before generalised rule making becomes redundant. The whole point of dispensing
with leadership as principle and making the revolution which dispenses with
elite ownership of the means of living .We may need to delegate functions as I
don't want to spend my time voting on everything.
Until about 1850 Marx did take up a similar position re
Germany as Lenin did later re Russia but that after 1850 Marx changed his mind
and relied on the working class as a whole developing its own organization and
consciousness.
“That the emancipation
of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,”
Marx, The International Workingmen's
Association 1864, General Rules, October 1864
Violence is only part of minority i.e. elite, (capitalist, state
capitalist) revolutions, Bolshevik, Jacobins etc. It is not necessary now we
have the vote.
“The possessing classes – the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie –
keep the working people in servitude not by the power of their wealth, by the
simple exploitation of labour by capital, but also by the power of the state –
by the army, the bureaucracy, the courts. To give up fighting our adversaries
in the political field would mean to abandon one of the most powerful weapons,
particularly in the sphere of organization and propaganda. Universal suffrage
provides us with an excellent means of struggle.” – Engels to Spanish Federal Council of the International Working Men’s
Association, London, February 13, 1871.
Revolution, as understood by Britain's oldest Marxist party
the S.P.G.B., who incidentally saw the Soviet experiment as state capitalism,
even in it's very early days, can come via the ballot box. It is a
post-capitalist society where all the means and instruments for creating and
distributing wealth are owned in common and controlled democratically by all in
conditions of free access with no wage or price restrictions upon access. The
Labour Party were never a socialist party although many in it considered
themselves as socialists, but set out to reform capitalism while still
retaining waged slavery. This essentially ends up where it starts with
ownership still in the hands of the oppressive parasite class. The Left wing
are still a part of capitalism.
Trying to reform this system is like trying to reform a
leech: it thrives on sucking your blood. Some rent controls here, some health
and safety there, a few more affordable buildings…like applying a sticking
plaster on a cancer. Only the destruction of this rapacious system will yield a
solution. No-one should be able to own a portfolio of properties and thereby
control the lives of others, while the rents from these latter often pay the
mortgages on the rented properties. The other side of the coin is that there
are one million empty properties in this country.
If we had a true democracy where people decided local and
national issues, we could simply take these empty properties and use them. We
could arrange to build where we needed them. We could use all the second homes
that the better off have at their disposal and mostly leave empty. A socialist
society offers this scope and hopefully it may encourage you to ask some
questions about how this current system works and participate in joining our
activity as we favour majority democratic action on the grounds that the
establishment of a society based on voluntary co-operation and popular
participation has to involve such co-operation and participation (i.e.
democratic methods) and say that when such a majority comes into being it can
use existing political institutions (the ballot box and parliament) to
establish a socialist society.
Many anti-parliamentarians are opposed to this, but are not
able to offer a viable alternative (the anarcho-communists pose a spontaneous
mass popular upsurge, the anarcho-syndicalists a general strike and mass
factory occupations—both of which ignore the state and the need to at least
neutralise it before trying to change society from capitalism). If they can
abandon their prejudice against democratic political action via elections, we
invite them to join us in campaigning for a classless, stateless, moneyless
society.
All the capitalist political parties campaigns are based on
deceit and lies. Governments do not run the economy, the economy runs them.
Capitalism cannot be reformed to favour the poor, only the rich can benefit
from the continued exploitation of the poor to produce wealth. Poverty is
relative as well as actual.in relation to the amount of wealth produced workers
rate of exploitation has increased regardless of which party is in government
'over' them.
In boom conditions such as post war it was possible for
unions to achieve some gains and for some reforms to be implemented but these
are always conditional and the capitalist class can claw back any such when there
is a downturn aided and abetted by their pseudo socialist, or fake Leftie
reformist politicians.
“The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s
mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his
mind and body. The raising of wages presupposes and entails the accumulation of
capital, and thus sets the product of labour against the worker as something
ever more alien to him….
“An enforced increase
of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would
only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be
maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and
would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and
dignity.” – Marx, Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“But just as little as
better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the
exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage worker.
A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital,
only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage
worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of
it.” – Marx, Capital, Vol. I,
Chapter – XXV
“A noticeable increase
in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. The rapid growth of
productive capital brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury,
social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the enjoyments of the workers
have risen, the social satisfaction that they give has fallen in comparison
with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the
worker, in comparison with the state of development of society in general. Our
desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by
society and not by objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are
of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
“In general, wages are
determined not only by the amount of commodities for which I can exchange them.
They embody various relations.” – Marx,
Wage Labour and Capital
Creating wealth is the preserve of the workers. Business
doesn't create wealth. Business creation is a parasitic exploitation, of a
poverty relationship to the ownership of the means and instruments of creating
wealth by the vast majority in order to accumulate more wealth in the pockets
of the minority. It springs from privileged ownership and control of resources
by the parasite business class.
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