Wednesday, March 09, 2016

A Movement for the Many


"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor" - Voltaire

Why should workers, who produce all the wealth in the world be denied the right to go where they please to engage in economic activity, or be restricted in their movements, while the parasite capitalist class can export their capital or exploit workers in wealth making opportunities for their self-enrichment, anywhere they damn well please without let or hindrance? Why should workers on benefits (reserve army of wage-enslaved labour for future exploitation by the capitalist class) have to jump through bureaucratic red-taped hoops, for the basic human need of a place to live, while the capitalist parasite class can have luxury homes all over the world? Why should the world’s workers, who produce all of the wealth, have to put up with inferior housing, while the leeching class live in mansions? Immigration is hardly the reason why governments, Labour and Tory stopping building council houses and encouraging their sale, with no 'like for like' new builds.  Immigrants are not the cause of the housing crisis. They suffer the consequences just the same as we all do. The problem is capitalism's production for sale with private, corporate and state ownership of resources by the minority global and national capitalist parasite class. Food, housing, heating and clothing could be freely available as tap water used to be in a sane, democratic, production for use, free access, commonly owned post-capitalist society. We should not need to afford housing. It is a human need and should be a right.

The immigrant workers are not scabs. It is the system of capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and crumbling health services, – not workers, be they ’indigenous’ or foreign. The bosses hope to keep the worst-off sections of workers fighting with each other over shrinking pieces of a small pie instead of uniting to fight for a decent life for all. Workers have no country. We have a world to win. Every country now is part of an integrated global economy and class structure. It is the capitalist class's country and the capitalist class's world. Before anything constructive can be done, capitalism must go and, with it, the artificial division of the world into separate, competing states. This leads inevitably to war, when the capitalist parasitic class thieves fall out. (Business by other means). War and poverty are inevitable concomitants of capitalism. We need to abolish the out-moded and old-fashioned division of the world into nation-states. Instead we need to cooperate on a world basis to meet our material needs and energy requirements. Capitalism must go and workers must make it go. A plague on all parties who wish to retain capitalism. Only workers themselves can bring to fruition the post-capitalist revolution of free-access, delegated democracy, production for use, a price-free, wageless, moneyless, society. Business is not 'people friendly'. Real socialism will do away with the business of exploiting workers in return for a wage or salary and channeling profits to the few.

Socialism should be hostile to all the parties of capitalism, Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Tartan or whatever flag they drape over their wage-slavery administration exploitative activities. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It comes into the world oozing blood form every pore. Dissolve all government 'over' you and elect yourselves into common ownership and democratic control over all the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. Don't whinge that life is not fair. Instead organise with fellow workers worldwide for the overthrow the capitalist system before we sleep-walk into the next world war. There will be no government over people in the post-capitalist commonly owned world. This is an essential feature of minority ownership in capitalist class society. In a classless, commonly owned society, government ceases to exist as an oppressive necessity, loses this feature and becomes an administration of resources. People will organise wealth production and distribution themselves, locally, regionally and globally. In a real delegatory democracy rather than a representative government on behalf of a ruling elites. All wealth will spring, as it does presently, from labour. The difference will be as it is a production for use society, utilising the technological potential capacity of the present, to produce a superabundance of necessities, instead of rationing it, stifling production through the market necessity to profit for a few. There will be no means of exchange as markets cease to exist, when all wealth is owned in common.

The socialist alternative to the profit system is:
common ownership: no individuals or groups of individuals have property rights over the natural and industrial resources needed for production.
democratic control: everybody has an equal say in the way things are run including work, not just the limited political democracy we have today.
production for use: goods and services produced directly to meet people's needs, not for sale on a market or for profit.
free access: all of us have access to what we require to satisfy our needs, not rationed as today by the size of our pay-cheque or state hand-out.

The lesson in the ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ by Robert Tressell, is we workers need to combine, stop being slavishly philanthropic and providing the wealth for a parasitic minority employer class, take all wealth into common ownership and democratic control, abolish the wages system, waged slavery and establish a free access society.

Capitalists greedis the natural outcome of capital accumulation, within an intensely competitive system, where war is 'business by other means'. It has outlived any socially useful function, having developed the means of production and distribution to its present stage, with an increasingly educated, wage enslaved class now able to run the system from top to bottom .


We can proceed to a democratic, socially equal, commonly owned, post-capitalist society where production is for the use of all, to satisfy human needs and distribution can be free, without any necessity for monetary transaction, within a super-abundance of the necessities of life. Housing to be lived in, food to be eaten, medicine to treat illness rather than as at present, commodities to be sold for the enrichment of a minority owning class, with the vast majority rationed in their access by the present wages /salary /prices system. We only have to remove ownership and control by, corporations, states, private individuals and replace it with common ownership by us all, with production for use. Then we can proceed immediately to having free access to the commonly owned wealth thus dispensing with money and all the paraphernalia which goes with money. Abolish wages and prices. Opt to work for a post-capitalist, commonly owned, (not private, state or corporation) money-free, wage slavery-free, free access, production for use, future. You are only 3 salary cheques from a food bank.

Wee Matt

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