Capital does not build anything

"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois." (1879, Marx and Engels)

We are with Marx and Engels for the abolition of the wages system.

Workers run and manage capitalism from the top to the bottom and even police themselves. The PC or laptop you are using, the clothes you are wearing the food you eat and the money you shift about is the product of waged workers selling their commodity, labour power at less than its value to produce a surplus value.

 This is a vast inter-relationship of labour globally which adds value to the capitalist’s commodity via socially necessary labour time. This is everything you can think of from infrastructure building to shithouse manufacture and installations, to children mining in less advanced capitalist nations. Workers have no capital worth mentioning. Capital on its own can do nothing, it can't light an oven or dig a ditch, until it is invested in an exploitative opportunity and it is the labour of the working class globally whether by hand or by brain, which is utilised to this end of producing a surplus over and above the invested capital. Capital itself is dead labour. In times of economic uncertainty such as presently financial capital reserves, may be used to speculate and create bubbles but this is just gambling until markets pick up.

One of the amazing things about capitalism is that whereas machinery creates abundance millions are in want.

As always, Marx hit the nail on the head.

“It is not the case that too much wealth is produced. But it is true that there is periodical over-production of wealth in its capitalist and self-contradictory form. The limitations of the capitalist mode of production become apparent:

1) In the fact that the development of the productive power of labour establishes, in the falling rate of profit, a law which becomes, at a certain point, hostile to this mode of production itself and which can only be overcome by periodical crises.

2) In the fact that the expansion or contraction of production is decided by the appropriation of unpaid labour and by the proportion of this unpaid labour to materialized labour in general, or in the language of the capitalists, by profit and by the proportion of this profit to employed capital, by a definite rate of profit, instead of being determined by the relations of production to social needs, to the needs of socially developed human beings.

Consequently, the capitalist mode of production reaches its limit at a level of production which would be wholly inadequate in terms of the second proposition (production for needs) it comes to a standstill at a point determined by the production and realization of profit, not by the satisfaction of human needs.” -Capital Volume 3

Poverty is also relative to the surplus it creates. Poverty absolute or relative, and war (business by other means) are inevitable concomitants of capitalist competition over raw materials, markets, trade routes and geo-political interests. The export of the absolutes of poverty and war does not change the fundamentals of this system. Workers are all in this together and have a collective social class interest. How many echo their master's voice in responding to people who are worse off than themselves. The separation of 'poor' into categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Or the notion that there is a 'middle-class', when even the majority of high-earning workers are under no illusions as to themselves being a few salary cheques away from a food-bank.

Capital does not produce anything. It is only invested when a profit can be realised by the workers in extraction, refining, distributing, researching etc. Who flies the helicopters? Who builds the helicopters, makes the overalls, cooks the meals, educates the workers?  Workers do this. Capital cannot drill holes or build rigs or move ships. It is the worker who conceives, plans, builds the push button, auto machines and relative to the surplus produced is collectively exploited by virtue of not owning the product of their collective labour, as its realisable value torrents upwards to the parasite class, who own the stolen surplus value (capital) which is only required in a production for sale class system. Indeed he may not personally be exploited like a kid in a Welsh mine, but the kid extracting the raw earth materials in a less developed country is a part of the exploited chain in his/her tools for the job.

The rules of engagement are very simple. It matters not if machines can replace human drudgery if production is for sale with a view to realising a profit for the private, corporate or state owner of the means of production. Ownership and control by a minority class is subjugation of the majority. It requires social control over the majority. It matters a great deal, indeed is a revolutionary, post -capitalist solution, if ownership is common, in a production is for the use of all, in a free access, democratic, commonly owned world,

Freedom from waged slavery will also free workers from work in this instance and enable the application of the operating tenet, "From each according to their ability to each according to their needs". It is the ownership and control of robotic resources along with everything else in and on the planet which must be made common, to enable a free access post-capitalist society. Costs, as expressed in economic monetary calculation will be irrelevant in a commonly owned society. We will have calculation-in-kind and production-for-use with free-access.

It is workers presently who run capitalism from top to bottom. They will be more than capable of running the new society without any parasitical economic elites or governments 'over' them.

The Socialist Party is against a mythical past. We are for the future, opposing capitalism in all of its incarnations. We say a plague on all attempts to reform it, as impossible delusions and include state capitalism as per post-feudal Russia and state-capitalist nationalisation variants, as per successive Labour and Conservative governments. All doomed to failure, as too, the Thatcherite neo-conservative and Blairite governments 'over' us.

"The workers must organise for their emancipation. They can do this, and only they can do it. I cannot do this for you and I want to be frank enough to say I would not, if I could. For, if I could do it for you somebody else could undo it for you. But, when you do it yourselves, it will be done for ever -and until you do it, you have got to pay the penalty of your ignorance, indifference and neglect." (Eugene Debs)

Wee Matt