Working people should not be content to remain wage slaves of the capitalists. Higher wages will solve their problem, when the problem is the wages system itself which condemns workers to be wage slaves and to continually struggle for a living wage. The principal lesson is that another year from now, workers will be forced to fight precisely the same struggle again, just to keep close to their present standard of living. It is necessary to take the struggle forwards, to fight for the complete overthrow of the capitalist system of exploitation. There are no solutions within the capitalist system. The choice is between Left-wing capitalism on one side and the Socialist Party on the other. The Left is for the wages system; the Socialist Party for its abolition. The Socialist Party curries no favours of the employing class and grants none. It panders to no-one, relying only upon the awakening working class to muster beneath its banner carry it to victory. The Sociaist Party's goal is to raise the consciousness of fellow-workers to the level of a socialist understanding.
Despite relative gains for some workers, the rate of exploitation continues to increase. Each year, a larger share of production goes for profits, a smaller share for wages and other workers’ income. For the reformists, the citizen's wage or universal basic income has become a siren song. The prophets of the future predict a social order of robots in which only a relatively small handful of workers will be required to operate an automated new technology capable of producing a super-abundance of all requisite commodities. Under this order, they argue, the wages system would become obsolete. Work would of necessity, have to be separated from income, for there would otherwise not be enough purchasers for the ever increasing product of the cybernetics. To avoid total collapse, they contend, it will be necessary to provide a guaranteed income for all without regard to who actually performs the little work involved. Most of these experts do a useful service in criticising and exposing the utter insanity of the present capitalist system. Their analysis of the possibilities of abundance for all under a rational system of distribution of the product of modern technology serves to buttress the socialist critique of the capitalist system – that under capitalism, goods and services are produced, not to meet the needs of the people, but for profit. There can be no argument against the proposition that given time and an uninterrupted development of the tendencies inherent in the technological revolution, the amount of labour required to produce an economy of abundance could be reduced to a minimal quantity. Labour-saving machinery is not objectionable in themselves, for in the long run they produce more goods for people to enjoy. What is objectionable is the way in which capitalism introduces new machines, their use to increase profits at the workers’ expense, to bring on unemployment and depression and hunger. One class—the capitalist class—owns and controls the social necessaries, to wit: the economic resources of the world. That class, for its own protection and perpetuation in power, subjects all institutions to its own interests.
For the capitalists run things for their own profit. They don’t have to pay wages to machines, and the workers not replaced by machines have to produce more than ever. For the workers, automation mean insecurity, and often disaster. Traditional skilled and semi-skilled occupations become useless in many cases. Workers are removed farther and farther from the commodities they produce; they have less and less reason to take pride in their work. In those factories made obsolete by new methods of production, employers intensify speed-up in an effort to compete. If they can, they cut wages and make jobs and working hours “flexible”. Eventually, such factories modernise or have to be closed down. That is the way capitalism operates, the only way it can operate. Socialism will use new technology not to produce unemployment but to produce more goods in less working time. The labour power set free by automation will be used for more science, research, education, health measures and other social services, and to promote wider participation in cultural life and recreation. Thus, with socialism the workers will get all the benefits of robotics. So our main job is to kick out the capitalists and establish socialism, not introduce some half-measure.
The time has arrived to come together and build an economy which benefit workers and communities, not industrialists and financiers. It’s time for people to come together for the battles ahead.
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