The madness called capitalism

You are working for a boss. You are his “hands.” He uses you to make a profit. How is this profit possible at all? Because he makes you work more than is necessary to defray your wages. In other words, when you work you are not only reproducing the value of your own up-keep but you are also producing surplus-value which goes to the owner. The capitalist will sell the produced commodity in the market. If he can produce more cheaply than his neighbour, his profits will be larger. This is why he drives you on to work faster and faster. This is why he introduces labour-saving machinery which results in workers being displaced by new technology, reducing the workforce. They call it progress but it isn’t introduced as progress to better conditions, not to alleviate strenuous labour but to increase profits. This is capitalism in its modern form. This is capitalist civilisation. The antidote to capitalism is socialism, a democratic system of society where the wealth is owned and controlled by the people who produce it.

Socialists say there needs to be a revolution. We propose that all resources, all land and buildings, all manufacturing enterprises, the means of transportation and communication, should be, not private property, but the common property of all of society. We propose that production be made to serve the needs of those who work, rather than to serve the needs of a few parasites. We hold with science that production and distribution of goods can be planned on the basis of common ownership without any class division. The whole world becomes one big cooperative community. The rule is established: “let each person work according to ability; let each person receive from the common stock of goods according to needs.” This is socialism. Mankind itself changes under such circumstances. The State is no more needed. In a classless society, there is nobody to suppress or keep in check. Men and women no longer need the big stick of the State. They manage their affairs without the State force. Mankind is free, forever.

When we socialists s speak of planned economy we do not mean a plan similar to that of Stalin’s 5-Year Plans. What we have in mind is very simple. It is clear-cut. Do away with production for profit. Socialism is about cooperation. In a cooperative society, we can pool our abilities and resources to create more for everyone, and to share it out fairly.

Make a survey of all available resources, plant and man-power. Figure out how much of the products of each industry can be produced. Employ the best services of scientists to improve your machinery and your methods of work. Encourage scientific research to advance science for the purpose of improving life. Distribute the fruits of increased production among all the members of society. Improve their well-being. Increase production still more by further improving machinery and methods according to the latest science. Distribute the benefits of the increased production again among the population without exception, always heightening the technique of production to enrich the economic and cultural life of all the members of society and to ease their labour. Continue this process indefinitely. When you do so there will be no crises, no unemployment, no exploitation, no wars, no fear of the future. Is this impossible? Isn’t it utopian? Aren’t those dreams? We are not against dreaming, but our dreams are real. Our dreams are forecasts of realities to come. We are practical dreamers.

The Socialist Party says democracy has prepared for the workers the means necessary to achieve socialism. Let the worker class use universal suffrage to send Socialists into the legislative assemblies. Let the Socialist Party form a majority in these assemblies. When this is done, the road is open to abolish the capitalist system. To make socialism possible the workers must take hold of the State machinery of capitalism. The Socialist Party does not solicit votes in order to reform capitalism and thereby to make it more effective for the capitalists, we are revolutionary parliamentarians, by which is meant strengthening the working class and weakening its enemies. We go to the law-making institutions, not to tinker them up for the benefit of the capitalists, but to be a spanner in their machinery, preventing them from working smoothly on behalf of the masters. We use, while there, every step of those agents of the capitalists to expose them before the people, to show what these so-called representatives of the people and what all these so-called democratic institutions actually are.

Capitalism creates a situation where the people are dissatisfied, embittered, emboldened by intolerable hardships. Capitalism itself ripens the conditions for revolution. People themselves change under such situations. In the struggle of the working class to free itself from wage-slavery, it cannot be repeated too often that everything depends on the working class itself. The simple question is, can the workers fit themselves, by education, organisation, co-operation, and self-imposed discipline, to take control of the productive forces and manage industry in the interest of the people and for the benefit of society? That is all there is to it. Some argue that workers always need leaders to do the thinking, a “head,” and without this leader, workers would be helpless. It is not the Socialist Party’s theory. All the workers have to do is by self-enlightenment and self-education, collaboration and coordination seek social freedom. This seems simple enough and so it is, yet simple as it is it involves the greatest struggle in history. The capitalist class employs a vast army serves as retainers of and apologists to fight their battles for them. These servile puppets all insist that working men and women cannot determine their own lives.

This task on the part of the Socialist Party, made up wholly wage-slaves, no better and no cleverer than any other but who put their brains into working order, is a difficult one and we are the very last to underestimate its magnitude. But we are not waiting for some so-called “great man” or “good leader ” to come along , but are preparing to do things for ourselves.