The Socialist Party Versus Capitalism

Turning aside from the horrors of the present, people are thinking about the possibility of another world. Socialists welcome this interest, but are alive to its dangers. It is so easy for those workers who are not experienced in political and economic questions to be taken in by proposals that are useless or worse than useless, and what is at once obvious to the Socialist Party in all these proposals is that none of them are even fresh—all have been tried before and found wanting.

Capitalism, with its private ownership of the means of life, its rent, interest and profit, its buying and selling, and its system of wage-labour has been abundantly proved to be a wasteful, callous, and out-of-date form of social organisation? Only socialism can meet the needs of our age and abolish once and for all poverty and war and the other products of capitalism? If this is true, and it is, then anything other than socialism is not what is needed. There is no half-way house. If the world does not go over to socialism it will remain under capitalism. Socialism involves the abolition of capitalism. It involves the abolition, therefore, of the roots of capitalism, i.e., wage-labour and capital. Inside socialism there can be no wages-system, no finance, no investments. In Socialist society the means of production—land, factories, railways, and so on— will belong to all society; all its able-bodied members will take an active part in production and each and every one will have free access to the means of life.  As Marx and all socialist thinkers have emphasised, socialism will only be achieved by a working class that knows what it is about, that wants s and that organises politically to capture the State machine in order to introduce it democratically. For the workers who are concerned with the real problem of their emancipation and the building of a different and better social system, the only sure line is to give up trusting and hoping in the temporary convulsions of the political Jekylls and Hydes.

The Socialist Party supports trade union organisation; so does the Labour Party. Yet there is a world of difference between the two attitudes. On the political field the Socialist Party does not deny that a particular piece of legislation may, for a time, relieve extreme hardship to workers affected by some outrageous failure of the capitalist system; yet the Socialist Party logically and consistently opposes reformism, the policy of building up a political party on a programme of demands for legislation to relieve all the separate evils. The trade unionist, for the most part, and the advocate of reform, takes capitalism for granted. His aim is to improve wages or to help the old-age pensioner, or reduce the special hardship of the low-wage earner who has a large family. For him capitalism, the wages system and the comprehensive, problem of poverty are things in which he is only remotely interested, if at all. hat does not mean that the trade unionist or the reformer is satisfied with the results of his efforts. He sees that they are not achieving what he wants, but he does not know why. He is usually able to lay the blame on other shoulders than his own. He blames the non-union member, the apathetic, the members of other Unions, or the advocates of other reforms. He asks why all the workers cannot get together and act unitedly; but what he really means is, why will not other workers forget their sectional interest and pet reform and back me up in my sectional interest and the reform which, for the moment, seems to me to be the really vital one. He does not see that trade unionism and reformism have the limitation that they encourage and provoke sectional activity and all the friction arising from it. The skilled craftsman necessarily gets into the habit of mind of trying to enlarge what he calls the “value” of his work against that of the unskilled or semi-skilled grades. The woman worker asking for “equal pay for men and women” is always in danger of blaming male workers for her plight, and, like the craftsman, is equally indifferent to the problems of other groups of workers. 

The question for the workers is what to do about it. For the non-socialist it will be another effort to build up what war has destroyed. For the socialist the question is not whether capitalism can be reformed, can wages keep up with prices, can pensions be increased, but how to end the capitalist system of society. With the replacement of capitalism by socialism, the problem becomes how to handle the economic problems of a system based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution. Production being then solely for use there are no profits, interest or rents to be considered, no problems of prices or wages, no insurance or old-age pensions or worker’s compensation. All members of society will be provided for as a matter of course, not in accordance with the present absurd system based on piecemeal legislation for each particular sub-division of poverty. Mankind’s efforts will be given a new direction, helped on by the vast release of thought and energy.