Capitalism is to be condemned

 The contradictions of life under capitalism have engendered deep-rooted feelings of frustration. The wealth pouring from the factories and the farms has not assured many of prosperity nor offered security about the future prospects. Instead, of an expected welcome release from burdensome toil, the prospects of automation and robots have become a source of anxiety, producing the threat of chronic unemployment and the spectre of a new recession to follow, rather than the promise of peace and plenty. No wonder people feel alienated.

The most pressing need facing humanity is to progress from the anarchy of capitalism to the planned economic system of socialism. The price to pay for delaying this task will be more poverty, increasing hunger, mounting disease and continuing wars. To these has now been added the climate change and global warming which could make all the higher forms of life extinct. Under the impulse of intolerable pressures the working class have repeatedly initiated struggles pointing in the socialist direction but to no avail, having stopped short of actually overthrowing and replacing capitalism.  It has now become almost a life-and-death question for people of the world to construct the socialist alternative to capitalism.

Socialism will only be achieved by emerging from the struggle against capitalism when the majority of the people create democratic organs that take into their hands the means of production and subject them to democratic planning. We either learn how to live a humane and harmonious way with one another and the environment around us, or we shall not live at all. The fundamental source of resistance to life under capitalism is the working class alienation. If an academic can show that alienation can be done away with under capitalism, that workers will no longer resist their conditions of life and work, then he demonstrated the end of the working class as the force for social change. But no matter how many times we re-define capitalism it does not get rid of the presence and importance of the working class. The working class has to look beyond capitalism. A socialist is one who, having investigated the causes of present-day social discord, decides that these causes are found in the private ownership of the means of wealth production and who therefore endorses the necessity for a co-operative commonwealth and common ownership in order to eliminate private or sectional monopoly, and secure the advantages for the whole people. For sure some reformists express a certain amount of sympathy with the idea of socialism, when all that is intended by them is a kindly feeling towards those in poverty, but by no means do they endorse the collective ownership and control of the land, mines, minerals, machinery and transport, without which no one can be a socialist. By common (or collective) ownership is meant ownership of the whole people, ie the raw material and machinery of production to become the property of the public, and industry to be regulated by experts in the common interest, and the workers engaged in the less pleasant or more arduous kinds of work would probably work fewer hours on a rotational basis than those in the more agreeable occupations.

Once again then, socialism (or social democracy) involves the transfer from present day private ownership to common ownership of all those agencies of wealth production necessary for supply of life’s necessaries for the whole people. The fact is that private ownership of the means of wealth production fails most lamentably to provide all the people with the necessities of life. The fact with private enterprise there are children by the million who never experience healthy conditions. The first and only item of importance to the capitalists is to obtain profit, never for securing public welfare.  

Of course, some individual capitalists may be well disposed towards the community and possess what they call Christian charity but they are competing in the world’s market against all other capitalists in the same trade also seeking a share of the market; to compete effectively, they must place the commodity on the market as cheaply as, or cheaper than, other competitors. In order to do this, they must ever have regard to cheapening the cost of production, and the bed-rock policy pursued in purchasing raw material to be worked up into the finished commodity, and also in the purchase of labour force, is to purchase as cheaply as possible and sell as dearly as possible. Therefore they keep wages down to the lowest possible margin, there is not an exception to this rule; it does not follow that an employer will necessarily be ever trying to reduce the wages of the men, there are two conditions generally operating to make that difficult, the one is the organised power of the workers to resist encroachments of the kind, and the other is that generally speaking men who receive the best wages are really the cheapest producers, but what the capitalist ever aims at is paying as wages of the lowest proportion possible of the total product of the factory. In short, as Karl Marx long ago explained, the capitalist is always after the “surplus” ie that the largest possible amount of the total value produced in the establishment shall come to him as profits, and therefore that the least possible should be absorbed as wages, expenses of management and general upkeep of the establishment.

It necessarily follows that each group of capitalists is continually on the lookout to save wages, and therefore every new device in the way of what is termed labour saving, which is really wages saving machinery is made use of and the result is that there is a constantly diminishing proportion of the total produce of labour going in the form of wages to those who perform the total labour and a constantly increasing proportion of output going as profit to the capitalist. Not a trade can be named but confirms this contention. That is not the worst phase of the matter. It will be seen that with the ever increased power to produce commodities the market is stocked with increasing ease, and by men who have been engaged in producing serviceable commodities producing so very much more than they receive in wages and therefore more than they consume, the markets are glutted, and these same men are thrown into the ranks of the unemployed, not because they have failed to work effectively, but because they have produced so abundantly and consumed so little of it, they are therefore discharged and prevented from getting even a sufficiency upon which to live. This is the direct effect of private ownership of the means of production for the purpose of making profits for the capitalists, instead of working co-operatively in the common or public interest.

We socialists declare that the whole world bears witness to the truth of the statement as to the effects of production for profit for capitalists and that being so we declare the present system stands condemned. A more grossly unfair system than the present could not be devised.

Some opponents smugly declare that socialism has been tried many times in various countries and has “always proved a failure.” None of these attempts have been of a genuine socialist character. Every government that can be named has been brought into existence for the express purpose of maintaining the domination of the propertied class, and to keep under subjection the proletariat or propertyless class. So long as individuals belonging to the propertied and dominating section continue to exercise control and ownership of the means of production, and decide as hitherto they have ever decided the character of the law and the control of the judiciary, no country is ready for socialism. Socialism can only exist when the people collectively own the instruments and agencies of production and distribution untrammelled by sectional monopolistic power, wielded by a bureaucracy.