Capitalism has demonstrated its inability to cope with the problem of unemployment except when it is engaged in full-scale all-out war. In peacetime, capitalism cannot prevent mass unemployment. It cannot prevent the so-called labour-saving machinery from being, in reality, labour-displacing machines. As a result, the extension of automation is wiping out jobs at an amazing rate and is creating a growing army of millions of permanently unemployed. But with socialism, there will be no unemployment problem. Since, instead of being owned privately and operated to produce things for sale and profit, the industries will be owned in common by all the producers, and operated to manufacture things for use, there will be no such thing as involuntary idleness. Instead of putting people out of work , robotics will enable us to shorten the work day, work week, and work year, while at the same time it will vastly increase the basis for material well-being. Technological progress will no longer be something for workers to fear but will ensure abundance and leisure for all with a minimum of toil by each.
Robotics and automation can be a blessing. It greatly increases our productivity. It can eliminate what is called the 3-D work, dirty, dangerous and demeaning, the unpleasant, boring, drudgery of many of today’s jobs. It can result in immense improvements in mankind's material and cultural welfare. It can do all this, and more, without imposing the horrors of economic distress on millions of workers and their families. But it can do all these things only if the workers accomplish a socialist reconstruction of society. Only with Socialism can new technology really fulfill its promise of abundance for all with a minimum of labour. Only in Socialism can cybernetics be introduced without causing a single worker to suffer economic distress. In fact, with socialism, robotic processes will be installed and operated as rapidly as it is developed. But, instead of throwing workers onto a scrap-heap, as happens today, the new equipment will make possible a general reduction in working hours. All will then benefit, both in the greater abundance that will be available and in the enjoyment of increased leisure. Robots will be a curse to workers as long as the means of social production are privately owned, and production is carried on for sale and profit. But when this outmoded contradiction-ridden capitalist system is abolished, when the industries are socially owned and democratically administered, and when production is carried on to satisfy human needs -- that is, when socialism is established -- robots will be a blessing for everyone.
Modern production is a social act. All goods and services are the results of the collective efforts of the entire working class. The factory-plants and machines have been designed and built by generations of cooperative labour, and our collective lives depend on them. As the industries and the services are run socially they must and should be owned socially, and carried on for the use of and to satisfy the needs of all the people. Workers of all races and nationalities must unite and organise in accordance with the social conditions and the political traditions of each of their nations. We must be organised politically as a class to demand at the ballot that all the means of life become the whole property of society. The dream that in the attainable future mankind shall live at peace when no person's hand shall be raised against his brother or sister; when family shall become something more than just a matter of kith and kin; when it shall be the solidarity of all the children of earth dwelling together in peace, in harmony, and in abundance.
Isn't it time to understand that instead of hacking at the branches of the evils of capitalism it is far better to strike at the root? Haven't decades of palliatives and reforms have failed to cure or even contain the social ills we have all grown up with? Unemployment, poverty, pollution, racism, crime, violence, war. Who still believes that politicians have meaningful solutions for these scourges? Surely the evidence is overwhelming that if society is to achieve social well-being instead of social catastrophe it must remove the root cause of the problems that afflict it. The root of the trouble is class ownership and control of the industries and services upon which all of us depend on for our lives. Therefore let us not talk about band-aids and quack remedies but about economic class division and what can be done about it. The exploitation of wage labour is global and the evil fruits of that exploitation are global also. The dreadful social results of the wages system are inseparable from it. No wonder society is sick and in turmoil. No wonder workers suffer tragic absurdities such as "overproduction," unemployment, and poverty in the midst of plenty! No wonder industrial "health and safety" is a continuing record horrific disasters and tragedies. No wonder the stewardship of natural resources and the environment plays second fiddle to profit! No wonder the system engenders militarism.
If the wage system imperils society, society must abolish the wage system and its organ of oppression, the state. That is, the immense majorities that comprise wage workers must replace class possession and class rule with social possession and a socialist administration. We must transform capitalist or state-run economies into socialist cooperative commonwealths. What society desperately needs is not more protest demonstrations or "single issue" reforms but knowledge of socialist ideas. We must caution workers to put on their thinking caps because "socialism" is a much abused word. Socialism means social and industrial democracy that is incompatible with the wage exploitation and despotism of "government ownership," "state control" or "mixed economy" schemes.
The socialist project requires the working class to be of ONE MIND and it requires working class UNITY on the political field in order to challenge the ruling class at the ballot box. And here it should become clear that the political field affords the ballot, gives a chance to the peaceful settlement of the great social question at issue. Socialism conveys a plan whereby if so minded the working class majority can take social possession of the means of life and thus at last release mankind from the terrible outrages inflicted upon it by blind, ruthless, ruling class greed. Socialism is truly the one hope of humanity!
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