The conversation of resistance

We live in an age of crises. Their causes seem complex and diverse and indeed they are, but  capitalism’s contradiction between human needs and the needs of capital leads us to self-destruction. Britain’s best-known economists Adam Smith made the following observation about the capitalist model that ruled the world throughout modern history:

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

A century later Britain’s next best known economist, Keynes said:

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

Today, Britain is the fifth richest country in the world and we have the obscenity that every major city and town possesses a food bank to help the poor.  Capitalism has been around for centuries, and it’s still as monstrous today as it was when the popular anthem Jerusalem refers to “dark satanic mills.”

Capitalism has looted and or wrecked nearly every advance civilisation made. The stranglehold pro-capitalists have on economic thinking must be opposed and overcome. Almost everything that’s wrong in the world is wrong because of capitalism. It must go. Many have pointed to numerous events in the twentieth century as the beginning of the end, but capitalism has proven more resilient than they anticipated. It has stubbornly refused to die; it must be killed.

The word “revolution” automatically conjures up images of The American Revolutionary War.  But as the writer Dmitry Orlov points out; “The American Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all because the slave-owning, genocidal sponsors of international piracy remained in power under the new administration.”   In the end, after all the bodies had been buried, King George was out, President George was in, and it was business as usual among the wealthy upper crust, their underlings, and the slaves.  An actual revolution requires a change in ideology.  The main change here was in the profit margins.  No more pesky taxes to pay to the British Crown.  This was no revolution.  More like just a revolt against upper management.

Today’s multi-national slave-owners know no borders. There are just two classes — slave-owners and slave laborers.  Ethnicity, nationality, and religion perform no function other than to distract the minions of slaves, playing them against each other, lest they notice their owners behind the curtain, pulling the levers and controlling media misinformation while playing patriotic songs, maintaining a constant state of warfare. Zbigniew Brezinski, once a top US statesman, described the situation concisely and accurately:

“People, governments, and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations.”  Emphasis on “must”.

Despite the warnings of its own scientists, capitalism continues to plunder the environment and cause catastrophic climactic change because the need to pursue profit and accumulate wealth trumps all other concerns. Forced by its own economic imperatives capitalists must seek to intensify exploitation and to reduce costs that don’t generate profit, no matter the social consequences. Capitalism cannot act otherwise than to impose austerity, attack wages and especially the social wage (pensions, health-care, unemployment benefits, etc) because the source of its profit is exploitation. Despite the available knowledge and means of production that make the eradication of poverty entirely possible, capitalism everyday creates ever more hunger, and homelessness, more insecurity and anxiety. New information technology has the potential to create free time for us all but is used by capitalism for the pursuit of profit and to increase the intensity of work for some as well as to make others superfluous. Religion, ethnicity, nationalism and other ideologies are used to mask the fact that the wars raging around the globe are in essence struggles for possession of capital.

Never was there such a glaring contrast between what is and what could be: on the one hand, capitalism, absurdly creating overproduction and massive hunger at the same time, causes ever more misery and threatens even the survival of the human species. On the other, today’s knowledge and technology  when liberated from the capitalist straitjacket, could free all humans from lack of food, housing, health-care and other needs, and begin to repair the planet. The necessity to end capitalism is clear. The crisis of capitalism will deepen in the years to come. The attacks on the working class will accelerate. They will meet resistance. Workers cannot defend themselves individually. They need to join together in order to gain critical weight, so unification of struggles will be pursued, the more the attacks of capital are aimed at ever-more victims. Of course those struggles will be recuperated many times. But the sheer size of the resistance may move the goal-posts. Together with a growing awareness of class power, an awareness of what’s possible can grow.

Revolution is necessary, Marx thought, “Not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way” but also because communism requires, “the alteration of men on a mass scale which can take place only in a practical movement” (The German Ideology): An alteration of consciousness that can only occur in a context of class struggle. The deepening crisis implies that workers’ resistance against capital’s attacks on its living and working conditions is ultimately doomed, as long as it stays a defensive struggle. Yet, defensive struggles will be important in that process of transforming consciousness, not only because their limits must be experienced but also because they can unify workers, bring them together, which in turn affects consciousness, increasing awareness of the class’ potential power. For revolution to be possible, there has to be a revolutionary subject, that is, a social force that has the capacity to carry it out. That social force is the working class (or proletariat.) It is the part of the population which is compelled to sell its labor power to survive. Today that is the vast majority of humankind. The fundamental antagonism between the capitalist class and the working class exists not only during periods of open class struggle (strikes, demonstrations and work-place occupations etc.), but also in the daily reality of exploitation, the extraction of surplus value from the working class. Objectively, the working class is more unified than it ever was possesses the capacity to free society from capitalism. However, this capacity is only potential. Even if capitalism were to collapse this very day and abandon its control over society, the workers would not know what to do with it for lack of revolutionary consciousness. The working class is not born with revolutionary consciousness and bourgeois mystifications and ideological fog prevents it from seeing reality as it is. Once when this fog lifts as a result of the experience of the struggle and of revolutionary propaganda will clear consciousness emerge.

Capitalism is based on exploitation, on paying workers less than the value they produce, and pocketing the difference, the surplus value. At first sight then, in order to end capitalism, it would suffice to give back the surplus value to those who produced it, so that workers get, individually or collectively, the full value of the labor time they perform. This would not end the value-form, the unspoken common understanding of the world, of work and its products, of people and things, as value, quantities of abstract labor time. People would still produce (private or state) property, to be sold and bought with money in one form or another. Only a redistribution of value would have been achieved, while the foundation of capitalist society would remain untouched. On this foundation, capitalism would survive, albeit through crises and chaos.

Redistribution of wealth is the rallying cry of the Left today. Its claim is that the economic crisis results from lack of demand which would disappear if money taken from the rich would be used to raise the buying power of the many. Given that overproduction is a fact, and that the gap between rich and poor has grown to obscene proportions, this argument is attractive. But it is based on a misunderstanding of what it is that is produced and accumulated, on a misunderstanding of value.

Real wealth is not the purpose of capitalist production. Commodities must have a concrete use-value, but this is only a vehicle to transmit abstract value, whose accumulation all capitalists are compelled to seek. That is the real purpose. Real wealth is only created in so far as it serves this purpose, in so far as it creates new value, capitalist wealth. A redistribution of wealth would not change this. It would not remove the obligation of production to be profitable, it would not end exploitation.

There are those who claim that the stark reality of capitalism’s horrors will make the choice for revolution self-evident. That it will become crystal-clear that capitalism is doomed and socialism is the only solution. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. While these horrors are visible to all, how they relate is hidden in a myriad ways.  To remove that opacity should be the aim of all revolutionary political organizations.

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." (Theses on Feuerbach)

Marx’s oft-quoted remark did not mean that philosophy was complete and workers must now simply apply it to change the world. It meant that theory is not an end in itself, that it is pointless if not tied to action that challenges the capitalist world. Theory must be where the struggle is. Therefore, the political organization must aim to participate actively in the struggles of the workers. ‘Participate’ rather than ‘intervene’: instead of making one-sided interventions, we seek to participate in the conversation of resistance, in which theory inspires and develops action, and is, in its turn, inspired and developed by action.

It is to this struggle that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is committed.