Industrial Serfdom

The business of making profits is shrouded in great mystery by the capitalists. They seek to make the workers believe that it is by magic that they make the processes of production yield them profits and build up great fortunes for them. Capitalists do not create wealth out of the air in juggling with industry. They make profits because they purchase the labour-power of the workers for less than the value of the goods the workers produce; that is, they do not pay the workers the full value of their labour. There is no other way of making profits out of industry. The power to hire and fire the workers, to give and take away the opportunity to earn a living, carries with it the power to compel the workers to work for such wages as will leave the capitalists a profit from their labour

The opposite of low wages is big profits. The lower the wages for which the capitalists can purchase the labour-power of the workers and the longer their hours of labour, the greater will be the capitalist’s profits. Naturally, the capitalists pay the lowest wages at which they can induce the workers to work. Since they are in a position to deny the workers the opportunity to earn a living if the workers do not accept their terms, they have been able to keep the wages at the point where they yield the workers a mere subsistence, or even less than a mere subsistence. The plain fact is that a numerically small group of people, the capitalists, who own the machinery of production and the natural resources of the country, have the masses at their mercy. They can take from them individually, and collectively for a time, their opportunity to earn a living. They are the industrial barons and the workers industrial serfs. We work long hours, we sacrifice our health and strength in the work of producing wealth for others, yet we do not receive in return sufficient wages to retain our vigour and vitality. We are driven into submission to accept the terms of our masters.

The social evils which we find about us are the result of our economic system and they are not  unrelated issues, that must be remedied separately. We know that businesses do not exist primarily for the purpose of supplying human needs. Their purpose is to make profits for their shareholders. If they cannot make profits for their shareholders, they go out of business. They are interested in producing wealth as a means of securing wealth for the limited number who share in their profits. The motive which drives the vast industrial machine which has grown up under capitalism is the desire for profits. The work of supplying human needs has become a mere incident to the process of realizing profits. The evils of the present social order — insecurity, low wages, and unemployment— are the product of a system in which the supreme purpose is the taking of profits. The system divides people into two classes. Anyone with an ounce of common sense will have to admit that. There are people who work for wages and those who employ wage workers. There are the people who own the industries and those who must go to the owners of industry or their representatives for the opportunity to earn a living. The ownership of industry is the source of the power of the profit-seeking class. It gives them control of the opportunities of the masses to secure the necessities of life. The millions of men and women  who are dependent upon the wages they earn for a living are economic serfs. They have not yet gained the “inalienable right to life, liberty, and happiness,” because their opportunity to earn the necessities of “life, liberty, and happiness” can be taken from them by the owners of industry, and is taken from them whenever the owners of industry are unable to make profits for themselves from the labour of the workers. This makes the capitalists who control huge corporations an oligarchy with almost unlimited power over the lives of the people. No people can be free nor achieve happiness that permits such power to exist in their midst.  The right to elect politicians is a poor consolation when the more fundamental right to earn a living is controlled by a class in society with no other interest in production than to make as large profits as possible.

The idea that socialism would be established through a series of reform measures and legislative acts has been shown to be an illusion. The struggle of the working class is a political struggle for control of the state because it must gain control of the government before it can hope to establish democracy in industry. For the working class to endeavour to take control of industry while all the repressive power of the class state remained in the hands of the capitalist class would be to invite destruction. The work the workers have to do is building a class-conscious political movement which will carry on the work of educating the workers to an understanding of the system of exploitation which now exists and the class character of the government and to organise the workers for the struggle to wrest control of the government out of the hands of the capitalist class. The Socialist Party is the medium through which this work can be done. The reconstruction of the capitalist system into a better world, a world of prosperity, and peace can only be achieved by the working class itself.