Politicians are not miracle-makers

The parties and politicians you vote for all stand for capitalism. Those elected are in office now because of your mandate; you elected them to preside over your own poverty and exploitation. Political leaders are incapable of waving an economic wand to conjure away our problems. No one seriously believes anymore that politicians are capable of improving matters. Our interests as workers have not been served in the past and, unless we are prepared to reconsider our whole approach to politics, have no prospect of being served in the future. We would suggest that you consider taking control of your own lives. Instead of electing politicians and parties to run your own exploitation, you can organise your own future. We, the working class, can mandate our own representatives to go into the seats of government, local, national and international, and abolish the entire system of private and/or State ownership of the means of living which gives the accumulation of profits priority over our needs. We call on all workers to join us to establish a society based on serving our needs instead of the profit needs of the minority class which dominates our lives today. We can create a world in which poverty, famine, slums, unemployment and international conflict could not exist. Such a system we call socialism: a moneyless, classless world in which we all share in the ownership of wealth; a world in which we co-operate voluntarily to produce all the things we need and where we will have free and equal access to satisfy our requirements.  Sounds utopian? Not as utopian as expecting our working-class lives to have changed for the better by the time the next election comes around.

Your birthright, like that of workers anywhere in capitalist society, from New York to Moscow, from London to Peking, is that of a wage slave, the right to try and sell your mental or physical ability to produce wealth to any employer who thinks he can get a return on investment. Your "right" to submit to the poverty of employment or the dire poverty of unemployment. Your "right" is the freedom to do what you are told, whatever the colour of the rag that floats at the top of the flagpole.

Our current economic system, capitalism, is based on private ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth produced by the workers i.e. the land, resources, the factories and machinery, the transportation systems etc. Goods are produced with a view to making a profit that comes from the extra value that the worker puts into the products over and above his wage. That is, after working for part of the day to create enough value to pay his wage, the worker then continues to work to create the value that becomes profit. Capitalist production is commodity based, meaning that goods are produced only with a view to making profits. If that profit doesn’t materialise or is less than expected, production ceases, no matter what the need is. Food, in many parts of Africa, is a prime example of this system in action. No profit, no production, can’t pay, can’t have, is the logo of commodity production. Capital accumulation must take place for the system to work. Investors expect to take away more than they put into an enterprise. Capital then is value in perpetual search of additional value, and it this continual search for augmentation that drives, or derails, the capitalist mode of production. It must be, of course, predicated on continual expansion, ever greater destruction of the earth to extract resources, ever greater factories, machines, and production systems, ever greater markets to absorb the extra products. Capital’s search for greater value means that the managers of the investment funds and the corporations involved in every aspect of production are charged with finding opportunities for producing the greatest value. In this, they are in a life and death struggle with their competitors. Lose the struggle and your capital investment dries up and you are taken over or, worse, you go bankrupt.

Given this analysis of our economic system, it is not surprising that qualities such as ethics, loyalty, or morality are tossed aside when it comes to the economic survival of a business.

In the short term, there is very little that can be done to reverse the situation. As noted above, when the prospect of profitability returns, capital will be invested again and the recovery will begin. Union activity through pressure on employers, collective bargaining, demonstrations etc. are always available to mitigate the worst aspects of the system, but are even less effective during a recession, as current negotiated concessions of wages and benefits attest. In the longer term, we must examine the system that creates so much wealth but delivers so little to the general population and yet so much to the few owners. It is a change in this ownership that The Socialist Party proposes. Presently, capital dominates our life. It tells us that we must get a job to survive, then tells us when and how we do it, what the conditions of work will be, and even whether we will work at all. We propose that a new system of producing and distributing wealth is needed, one where the ownership of the world’s resources, and the means to turn them into useful goods, is owned by all, in common, and operated democratically, in the interests of all. That would mean all mankind would get a proper diet, housing, clean water, education, healthcare, and the need for continual wars over who owns the resources (the major cause of all wars) is ended.