Why be a wage-slave?

“See yonder poor, o'er – labour'd wight,

So abject, mean, and vile,

Who begs a brother of the earth

To give him leave to toil,

And see his lordly fellow-worm

The poor petition spurn,

Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife

And helpless offspring mourn.”

Burns

The term wage-slaves refers to those who, lacking capital or means of production, have only their labour power to sell to make a living. This describes the vast majority of people in today’s capitalist societies whose sole means of subsistence is the sale of their capacity to work. Just as the feudal-era serf had no choice but to enslave him or herself and his or her family to the manor-house lord, the modern-day serf must indenture him or herself to employers to own a car or home or buy a college education. Unlike the slave and the serf, he or she is a "free" labourer and bound neither to an individual master nor to the soil. He or she is "free" to work or to be idle; "free" from the soil —"free" from the ownership of the means of production and from a secure livelihood; and often "free" from employment because of the competition for the job. The goal of socialists is the abolition of the wage system, which implies the end of capitalism. Profit-determined production will be replaced by one satisfying the actual needs and ambitions of the associated producers. The market economy will end and we will have a planned economy. Social existence and development will no longer be determined by the uncontrollable expansion and contraction of capital but by the collective conscious decisions of the producers in a classless society.

Dependence upon a job and the wages haunts the workers like their shadow. An invisible chain binds them to their machines. There is no escaping the struggle. The workers do and must struggle to keep up their wages and to better their standard of living. In this struggle the odds are always against them and on the side of the capitalists. The competition for jobs keeps wages down to a minimum. If, for a time, there is a brief industrial boom, it is always followed by a panic and unemployment. Every improvement, every invention that increases production, is a further threat. Many instinctive feel that it is getting the worse and ask, “What are we going to do about it?” Organisation is the greatest weapon that the workers have at their disposal. All that the workers have ever gained has been through the power of organisation. The organised power of the workers, of course, presupposes a certain amount of understanding. The power of numbers alone will not solve the mighty problem that confronts the workers. Organisation must be backed by the power of knowledge. Workers must become aware and conscious of the class struggle towards the conquest of political power and the taking possession of the industry and communications. They have to learn that the purely economic struggle has its limitations. And organise for the abolition of the system of wage labour. There is a working class and a capitalist class. There is a class war. Socialism is the expropriation of that capitalist class. You cannot get socialism by a dodge or by intrigues with the capitalist parties. All the capitalist spokesmen, policies of this, that and the other and appeal to the workers to make “sacrifices” to help in this but never touching rent, interest and profits. All these so-called remedies not only fail to touch the root or the evil — the burdens of capitalist disorganisation and parasitism but they can intensify the disease. The crisis is not a crisis of natural scarcity or shortage. Harvests are sufficient to feed all and production capable of providing for all. Millions of workers are willing and able to work who presently cannot. It would seem natural that the outcome should be great abundance for all but that is not the result to-day under capitalism. Why? Because capitalists cannot organise production for use.

Would-be reformers of capitalism including most on the Left urge that if only the capitalists would pay higher wages to the workers, enabling them to buy more of what they produce, there would be no crisis. The advocate the minimum wage, the living wage, the universal basic income. This is utopian nonsense, which ignores the inevitable laws of capitalism — the drive for profits, and the drive of competition. The drive of capitalism is always to increase its profits by every possible means, to increase its surplus, not to decrease it. Individual capitalists may talk of the “gospel of high wages” in the hope of securing a larger market for their goods. But the actual drive of capitalism as a whole is the opposite. The force of competition compels every capitalist to cheapen costs of production, to extract more output per worker for less return, to cut wages and just mostly talk to conceal the real process of capitalism at work -intensified output from the workers, with a diminishing share to the workers.

There is no future on the basis of capitalism. Unless we overthrow capitalism starvation await us if many of the scientific predictions on climate change prove to be even remotely true. Capitalism can find no solution. World collapse or workers’ revolution — this is no longer a debating issue of the future, it is a life and death issue; a fight for life that draws close. The future is in our hands. There is no going backwards, only going forward to the socialist future. The battle between the people’s needs and capitalism grows ever fiercer. It can only end in revolution. We have reached the dead-end of reformism and now the only path before us is revolution. There are voices crying out to know how a world can produce so much food that people starve, and so many manufactured goods that people go without. It is a question capitalism cannot answer. Capitalism has no solution. Only the working-class through socialism can bring the solution - to organise productive power to meet human needs. Only socialists can cut through the bonds of capitalist property rights and organise production for use, to bring common ownership and increase abundance and leisure for all. This is the aim of the Socialist Party to end the power of the capitalist class, to drive the capitalists from possession, and to organise social production. The means of production, the factories, mines, land, railways, docks, ships, becomes the property of society. The workers are free to organise production according to coordinated and connected plans. There is no longer the capitalist anarchy of production by competing businesses for an unknown market, with the consequent gluts and slumps. Instead, the workers are able to determine: We shall produce so much coal, so much iron, so much steel, so much agricultural machinery, so much textiles, cultivate so much land with such and such crops, etc. directed solely to supplying the needs of every man, woman and child. It is production for use, not for profit and every expansion of production means greater abundance and leisure for all.

Capitalism can only seek to prolong its life by casting its burdens upon the backs of workers by ever renewed attacks upon the working conditions and living standards. Various sections of capitalists fight to increase their own competitive power, to cheapen costs of production, to enlarge their own share of the market. But this cutting of costs, since capitalist rent, interest and profits are sacred, can only be carried out at the expense of the workers. Businesses all have the same task; to reduce the living standards of of workers and increase market share at home and abroad. Wages, employment conditions and working hours are attacked on every side with demands for cuts. Labour is intensified. Increased output demanded from every worker for less reward. Speed-up and rationalisation by redundancy or imposition of part-time working are the order of the day. The employers’ offensive extends to the unemployed, no less than the employed workers and it extends equally to all the social services in the Welfare State which are now treated as an unnecessary extravagance to be pared. Health, education and housing are now unaffordable. All these measures requires the weakening of the workers’ struggle. So we see such measures as the Trade Union Bill presently going through Parliament to make more and more strikes illegal; to increasing use of the police and the courts against the workers on strike.

This then is the alternatives before the working class – the continuance of capitalism that means hunger and want for more and more people. Capitalism already grudges the bare subsistence and seeks to reduce it even more. Or socialist revolution, leading to new life for all.