The capitalist treadmill

Competition must go. The abolition of the exchange economy and its institutions must be replaced with the rational, socialist organisation of labour that mankind may become free to build his or her own life and to be human with the others. Marx analysed the capitalist system of production. He exposed how it rests on the basis of the exploitation of man by man. All value comes from labour. Because they own the means of production, the capitalists hold the whip-hand over the workers. They do not own them, as a slave-owner owned his slaves. They pay them wages. But the wages are not equal to the real value produced by the worker. The worker works only part of the day to earn his wages. The rest is free labour for the boss. This is surplus value, out of which the capitalists make their profit and accumulate wealth. Because of their great economic power and wealth, the owners of the means of production dominate in every capitalist country. They run parliament and the press; their ideas prevail in educational and religious institutions. The laws are made to suit their interests. The State, the army, the police and the courts, defend, in the first place, their property. However democratic it may appear on the surface, every capitalist state is in reality a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Capitalism, in its time, was a progressive social system. Capitalism is now obsolete. Socialism puts an end to the contradictions of capitalism by abolishing private ownership of the means of production and placing them under common ownership. It overcomes the class and national conflicts inherent in capitalism by abolishing the exploiting classes and the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is a classless social system. All members of socialist society will enjoy full social equality. The all-round development of the people, accompanied by the growth of the productive forces sufficient to ensure abundance of goods, enables the principle to be applied: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Labour will cease to be a burden. Everyone will recognise that to work for the benefit of the people is a necessity willingly performed as life’s first need. A new era in human history will open. The victory of socialism will ensure the eradication of all types of exploitation and oppression, a future of peace, friendship, well-being, and unlimited advance for all peoples of the earth. Selfishness, ignorance, superstition and other evils of the acquisitive society will disappear. Mankind will enter upon a greater freedom.

The working class must make its stand against the capitalist system – whose lust for profits and interest, for investments, markets and expanded capital, for raw materials and cheap exploitable labor, can mean only exploitation and abject slavery. It is just impossible to make the profit system work in the interests of the majority. The purpose of production remains the same – how much is there in it for the owners of capital. The profit system, you see, has one unshakable purpose: PRIVATE GAIN. Under capitalism or the profit system, it is necessary to maintain and, if possible, increase the gap between wages (or what it costs in labour power to produce goods) and price (or the exchange-value which those goods have on the market). This gap exists because the worker only receives the price of his or her labour power and no share in the values he creates. With socialism, there will be no wages at all and there will be no prices or market values in the sense of goods obtainable only on the basis of paying for them. Under capitalism, the worker the end of his work week, receives wages which simply go to refurbish him for another Monday. And so it goes on for the worker under capitalism – a continuous treadmill (broken only by unemployment), with the worker never quite catching up to his or her strength of the week before, but always forced to go to work on Monday. In socialism, all this is changed. Goods are produced for the use of men and NOT for the profits which they bring in to bosses. Labour power is no longer regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is not purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. Men and women, inside socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs and for their mutual development. The sufficiency of goods which people and machines can create will be given to members of the community to develop their bodies so that their minds can grow rich in the wealth of human knowledge, aesthetic appreciation and artistic creation. From day to day, from week to week, and from year to year, individual creativity will widen rather than narrow, as human productive and intellectual achievements increase. Mankind, no longer fettered by the necessity of working not only for their own material maintenance, but for the bosses’ even more material profits, will be freed to live more fully. The time that each must work will be small, yet the goods produced for all to enjoy will be plentiful. People will learn how to control the method of production and distribution that now controls us. Socialists will produce for use according to a reasonable plan and without a thought for the odious notion of profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain, socialist society will produce abundance for all. That's a fact. The global human family will arrange its standard of living as easily as affluent families do today. Humanity which has been freed from the capitalist system will also have been freed from wage labour, price and profit. That is why, instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” workers must inscribe on their banner the REVOLUTIONARY watchword: “Abolition of the wage system!” Socialism is the ONLY answer!