There are just two types of people in the world: the people who own property and the people who sell their ability to work to those property-owners. Marx thought that was created for a good reason: to increase economic output. Capitalism, for all its evils, has created abundance. The cost, however, is a system in which one class of human beings, the property owners (in Marxian terms, the bourgeoisie), exploits another class, the workers (the proletariat). Capitalists don’t do this because they are greedy or cruel (though many may be). They do it because competition demands it. That’s how the system operates. Capitalism is a Frankenstein’s monster that threatens its own creators, a system that we constructed for our own purposes and is now controlling us. The only thing that can reverse things is political action aimed at changing systems that seem for many people to be simply the way things have to be. We invented our social arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us.
We urge our fellow-workers to learn well the lesson of class hatred taught to them by the master class; let the toilers of the world steep themselves in a knowledge of the class war, and act always with that as their guide. No compromise; No quarter, politically and economically, must be our slogan. The poverty and misery of the working class is due to robbery and the remedy is to stop the thieves by ousting them, first from political, and then from economic power.
The class struggle embraces a multitude of matters. It takes place over wages and hours at work. It takes place over working conditions, safety, speedup, etc. It takes place over firings, penalties for being late and absent. The outlets of this struggle are numerous and varied. The official strikes, wildcat walk-outs, the sit-down, and the slow-down. Other forms exist. When the worker reaches up and flips the counter on his machine a few dozen times without increasing his production, when he turns in production figures beyond what he actually produced, when he spends half an hour beyond that time necessary to perform his biological functions, he is engaging in a struggle against those who exploit him. When he tightens up a nut, takes it off, and then puts it on again to kill time on the line, he is carrying on a struggle against his capitalist employers. When workers have grievances, these arise out of the fact that a class is seeking to make more profit from them. When workers have grievances for higher wages, these grievances stem from the fact that the workers must struggle for their standard of existence against the class which seeks to keep wages down.
A school of thought believes economic action can be used as a lever to push the workers along a political road, towards their “emancipation.” How is this possible if the workers do not understand the political road, and are only engaging in economic struggles? The answer is that “leaders in-the-know” will direct the workers, much as a guide-dog steers a blind person. But these leaders can also lead the workers in the wrong direction, toward the wrong goals (nationalisation and state capitalism), as the workers later find out to their sorrow. The Socialist Party approach of education – rather than the non-socialist approach of leadership – is much better. Through education, it can be pointed out to the workers that strikes and go-slows arise out of the nature of capitalism, but that they are not the answer to the workers’ problems. These economic struggles settle nothing decisively because in the end the workers still wear the chains of wage slavery. It is the political act of the entire working class to eliminate the exploitative relations between workers and capitalists which can furnish a final solution.
Is not this giving leadership to the workers, to point these things out? In a sense it is, but it is a leadership of a different type. It is not the non-socialist leadership of a minority which knows (or thinks it knows) where it is going over a majority which does not know where it is going and merely follows the minority. It is the socialist “leadership” of educating workers to understand the nature of both capitalism and socialism, so that, armed with this understanding, the workers themselves can carry out the political act of their own emancipation. The non-socialist leadership is based on lack of understanding among the workers. The socialist leadership is based on understanding among the workers. This is the lesson of all the expressions of class struggle among the workers. These struggles can be used as a means of educating workers to the real political struggle – socialism. They should not be used as a means to gain leadership over the workers or to lead them along a political path they do not understand.
Many different and competing radical groups identify different incompatible societies as 'socialist'. The aim of the socialist movement is not a workers' state or a proletarian dictatorship. It is the abolition of all classes in the human community created through anti-capitalist struggle. A socialist movement ends wage labour and abolishes itself as a class, with all other classes, creating a world human community. There are just two types of people in the world: the people who own property and the people who sell their ability to work to those property-owners. Marx thought that was created for a good reason: to increase economic output. Capitalism, for all its evils, has created abundance. The cost, however, is a system in which one class of human beings, the property owners (in Marxian terms, the bourgeoisie), exploits another class, the workers (the proletariat). Capitalists don’t do this because they are greedy or cruel (though many may be). They do it because competition demands it. That’s how the system operates. Capitalism is a Frankenstein’s monster that threatens its own creators, a system that we constructed for our own purposes and is now controlling us. The only thing that can reverse things is political action aimed at changing systems that seem for many people to be simply the way things have to be. We invented our social arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us.
All socialists who can be considered to have any claim to that title agree in putting forward the necessity of transforming the means of production from individual into common property. Socialism is a society without money, without a state, without property and without social classes. People come together to respond to some need of the human community and engage in collective activity that does not involve wages and the exchange of its products. The circulation of goods is not accomplished by means of exchange: quite the contrary, the by-word for this society is "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". Productive activity will no longer be tied to the idea of ownership, but to an awareness of satisfying human needs. The creation of new social relations between people will lead to a very different human activity and so it must be understood that production will not simply be what it is today only without money. This new organisation of productive activity will not eliminate the need to estimate the needs and possibilities of the community at any given time. But these will no longer be reduced to a common denominator measured according to a universal unit. It will be as physical quantities that they will be counted and will interest people. "Consumers" will not be able to apportion blame to "producers" for any imperfections in what has been made by invoking the money they have paid, since none will have been given in exchange. We socialists do not recognise any particular part of the wealth produced as being due to the capitalist but contend that all wealth is produced by the labourers, and they, and they only, have a right to it.
With socialism the government of people gives way to the administration of things. The state is the defender of the dominant class. Capitalism, we are often told, can be made green. Incentives can be established. The corporations previously leading the way in pollution, plunder, and exploitation can, with a few adjustments, become the world's leaders in the development of clean energy and pave the way to a sustainable future. The truth is that the relentless pursuit of profit is incompatible with a world in which natural resources need to be stewarded and used with all the necessary care. Under capitalism, everything is a business opportunity. The subtitle of Naomi Klein's book, ‘This Changes Everything’, notes, "capitalism versus the climate" and capitalism is winning. Extreme weather events are not viewed by business leaders as problems to be solved; rather, they are seen as circumstances of which they must take advantage.
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