Break our shackles

Socialism cannot be an abstraction or some ideal in the far-off distance. Capturing the State machine is not a goal in and of itself. It is only a means to realise the goal, which is the emancipation of labour, of all exploited, by the creation of a worldwide classless society. It is the only way to solve all the burning problems facing humanity and the only way to avoid its relapse into barbarism. The future is with the rule of the freely associated producers. The future is a socialist democracy. The future is with world socialism. People have the power to take control of the ways of creating wealth and to subordinate them to our decisions. New technology far from making our lives worse has the potential to make this control easier. Automated work processes could provide us with more leisure, with more time for creativity. Cybernetics could provide us with unparalleled information about the resources available to satisfy our needs and how to deploy them effectively. But this alternative cannot come from within the system, from the insane logic of the market. Those who advocate halfhearted reform of the existing system preach capitulation to capitalism.

Without food, shelter, and a few other basic necessities, no human individual can survive. Contrary to other animal species, humankind cannot get such necessities through purely individual nor through purely instinctive endeavours. In a slave society, a slave can only get food by submitting to his master’s will. In a feudal society, the serf can produce his own food, providing he obeys the rules imposed upon by his baron, such as work for him for nothing, for example. In our capitalist society, the average person can only get food in exchange for money, and he or she cannot get enough money to buy the basic necessities of life without selling their labour power, their ability to work. Generalised commodity production and a market (money) economy was imposed through institutional changes and specific economic processes (like the Enclosures) upon tens of millions of human beings on all continents, against their clearly expressed wishes and their successive revolts. This was the historical chain of events that led to the emergence of ruling classes, the production of surplus value by the working class (i.e., the constant reproduction of capital and of a capitalist class). If a serf works three days a week on his own patch of field and three days a week on the lord’s manor, the origin of the lord’s income is quite clear: unpaid labour by the serfs. Likewise, a worker adds value to that of machinery and raw material by applying his muscles, nerves and brains to them during a work day, the fact that he reproduces the equivalent of his wages (or the value of his labour power) in, say, four hours a day while actually working eight hours, means that he gives his employer half of his work week for nothing, exactly as the serf did. There you have the source of profits’ (or more accurately, rent, interest and profit). In the case of a slave or a serf, the process is crystal clear but in the case of a wage-earning industrial worker it is obscured by all kinds of successively intertwined money transactions and market relations that makes it more difficult to see. But it doesn’t make it any less real. The capitalist class is compelled by generalised commodity production, by privately owned means of production and the resulting market competition to maximise capital accumulation. This limitless drive for enrichment (production of exchange-values as an end in itself) is made possible by the fact that the social surplus product takes the form of money.

The task of socialists is not to patch up the system. It is for the workers, ‘the associated producers’, to take control of production into their own hands, and to subordinate it to their own consciously assessed collective needs. Only then will those who actually perform the labour of one sort or another have a motive for a correct and honest assessment of the amount of their own labour available for production, and an incentive to use it in the most efficient and least arduous fashion possible. The only alternative to the anarchy of capitalist accumulation and the market is genuine socialism. The job of socialists is not to identify with those who want reforms in order to hold it together capitalism but to find ways of putting our ideas across and stand for revolutionary socialism for real people power.