Away with Capitalism

“Forward is our watchword, whether we like it or not.” Joseph Dietzgen

Capitalism can offer us very little else but a series of crises of one sort or another.

Our fellow-workers are beset on all sides by those who would have them fight for what are designated as their liberties. The workers are led to believe that their forefathers fought for and won something the present generation must guard as a sacred treasure. The ruling class give it the name “Democracy,” and millions are worked up into a state of frenzy by the capitalist class and their lackeys, until they are prepared to fight and die for their "privileges” and their “freedom.” The history of the working class is one of sorrow and starvation, of slavery and of shame. There is nothing in it that would justify us in risking our lives to preserve. The Socialist Party considers it is foolish to support war for democracy and die for capitalism. We think it is best to fight against capitalism and live for socialism. If you realise the truth, of your position, you will refuse to be hoodwinked by any call to patriotism made to induce you to protect capitalist interests. It is life we want, not death. When the means of life are “ours,” fellow worker—the life that is life shall be yours.

The capitalist class owns what is essential to all; the working class, owning nothing, sell their lives in the form of human energy, mental and physical, to the owning section. They receive in return wages—food, clothing and shelter—barely sufficient to generate in their bodies the quantity and quality of labour-power they are called upon to deliver. All over and above what is required to keep the working class in fair working condition, after the wear of the machinery of production has been made good, goes to the owning class in the shape of rent, interest and profit. All the capitalist class does is to speculate on a good thing. When a worker has sold his labour power to the owning class it is no longer his, the use of a thing belongs to the buyer.

As far as the Socialist Party is concerned, the theory of class-conscious proletarian revolution on a world-wide scale in the highly developed areas of capitalism and the introduction of socialism or communism, whichever you prefer (the terms mean the same thing to us), is still a part of Marxism. Marxism to us is the Materialist Conception of History, the Critique of Capitalism, the Labour theory of Value, Class-struggle, and, of course, quite logically from these flows the Socialist revolution. The idea of socialism being established in one country, or backward countries, apart from being in complete opposition to this proposition, has been adequately dealt with in our literature, particularly in the pamphlets on Russia. What existed in Russia was not in the least like the definition of socialism used by socialists. In Russia, production and distribution were largely in the hands of the Government as was in the past the coal mines and railways, etc., here. They operated to produce commodities for sale at a profit, and backing them financially is the very large Russian national debt owned by large and small bondholders. There was in Russia as great (or even greater) inequality of income as in this country though not as great inequality of ownership of accumulated wealth. Also though Russia has private trading it has not the British company system of shareholders.

This is state capitalism just as are the nationalised industries in Britain. And when did socialists ever describe it as socialism? We can of course answer for ourselves that the S.P.G.B. never did so on any occasion since its formation in 1904. The form of society that has emerged in Soviet Russia, despite its dictatorship—personal or collective—its slave camps, its mass murders, etc., is not so much removed from that of Britain or France or the United States. In Russia, large numbers of workers were employed by the State for wages. Goods and services are not rendered just because they are needed, but, like elsewhere, for a profit. The peasants of Russia are exploited like the peasants of France or Spain. The workers of Russia were exploited just like the workers of Britain or America. The land, the factories, the means of transportation, were not the property of the people but belonged, again, as elsewhere, to a few. In Britain or the United States, we call it capitalism: a society of wage-labour and capital. In Russia, the Communist Party call it “socialism.” But the Socialist Party still called it Capitalism—State Capitalism. Socialism would have none of the features of the former Soviet Union. Socialism will be a free society and democratic throughout. The means of living will belong |o all. Secret police, dictatorship and the horrors of a coercive State will no longer be necessary.

Socialists have also a simple solution for the problems of nationalism. It is that all people shall be enabled to live happily wherever they are or wherever they want to go. It is the only solution and it can only be applied when the world has become a socialist world. It cannot be applied in a capitalist world.

All the non-socialists claim that they have a solution that can be applied now. They pay lip-service to various forms of the principle of "self-determination," the principle that nationalist groups should be free to decide for themselves. It sounds fine but it cannot solve the problem even though if the group is powerful enough with or without military aid from outside, it may succeed in breaking away and setting up its own government or joining another country. It cannot solve the problem because the material on which Nationalism feeds—differences of colour, religion, language and tradition—exist everywhere in every country and because the economic conflicts which capitalism constantly produces at home and internationally will always inflame this material; as fast as one conflagration is put out others spring up. And the economic conflicts taking on the nationalist disguise, with its fever and hatreds, go on between independent nations just as much as when a national group is struggling against alien rule.

 Capitalism is a competitive world in which national groups survive by armed force. No government, whatever its professed principles, will voluntarily see its armed strength undermined by granting the right of secession to all who demand it. The Northern States of U.S.A. fought a bloody civil war to prevent the Southern States from seceding in the eighteen sixties. British capitalism gave up India because it lacked the means to hold it, but India's sovereign government acts in accordance with exactly the same "what we have we hold " principle as he denounced during the struggles against the British Government. Everywhere the countries that have won their "freedom" show conflict with their own opposition group, the Karens in Burma, the African-Americans in U.S.A., the Israelis and Arabs in the Middle East, the Tamils in Sri Lanka; not to mention the nationalist movements in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

As all these examples show, the word "self-determination" is a misnomer, for none of the nationalist movements accept that individuals shall be free to choose. Nationalism and the struggle "for the bloody rags called flags of civilised savages," is not an honourable struggle but a display of human ignorance utterly without justification for the workers in the modern world. In the primitive society of past ages, patriotism or tribal solidarity was a necessity of survival. In a future, socialist world, freed from the exploitation of man by man, there will be no economic conflicts to masquerade under and take advantage of language, colour and other differences. In the present class-divided and frontier-divided capitalist world,

nationalist frictions will continue to serve ruling class ends until they are overcome by the growth of socialist understanding and socialist international unity.