The capitalist system has resulted in benefits such as an increase in production of food availability, increased availability of health care and medicines, increased availability of modern technologies which can substantially reduce human drudgery. Capitalism did bring substantial improvements in lifespan, health and education. But its profit-driven production is restricting access to these basic services. The new technologies of future can have a potential solution to deprivation but an economic system driven by the profit motive will not make it available and accessible to the masses.
Some conceive of socialism as nothing more than the welfare state or the nationalised ownership of the economy. But socialism to be worthy of a movement to fight for must offer something much more and very different from a larger role for the State and government in society's affairs. Indeed, the State under capitalism already plays a massive role in the running of the status quo. To be worthy of description socialist, it must offer a fundamental change from capitalism. State control leaves intact the power of capital in the factories, offices, distribution systems and other economic institutions. This means the capitalists or their functionaries maintain control over society's most important domain, production and the workplace Socialism, however, is based on the mass democratic participation of working people in managing the day-to-day affairs of the economy and society. The socialist struggle is to transform the economy and society. Socialism must be "the self-emancipation of the working class" -- the mass participation of the majority of society in organising to take economic and political power away from the wealthy elite and to construct a revolutionary post-capitalist society that extends into every nook and cranny of social life. Class struggle is to build the power of the working class to run society in its own interests and requires workers world-wide to overthrow the employing owning class.
Capitalism has made it possible to meet all of the world's needs, but control over capitalism's output remains in the hands of a tiny minority. By placing the means of production under the democratic control of the workers who make the gears turn, socialism offers a way to use society's resources to meet human need. The art of capitalist politics is to enable the wealthy to convince the poor to use their votes to keep the wealthy in power so to continue the enslavement of the poor.
One of the most powerful tools we have in the socialist movement today is the ability and opportunity to help people to share their histories. That’s the only way we’re going to win the debate on issues such as immigration. There are people that are anti-immigrant because they don’t know the stories of their fellow-workers. Some people get stereotyped while others are manipulated. All of this division is being driven by fear. Those who perpetrate hatred are often victims themselves. Understanding one another's history has power. Social change doesn’t need to be complicated. The basis of social change is human connection and communication, engaging with one another and exchanging each other's hopes.
The working class are wage workers. That is, they depend for their livelihood entirely upon the money they receive from the sale of their labour power. It must not be supposed that a wage-worker class has existed through all time. People are so accustomed nowadays to the wages idea that a great many of them have considerable difficulty in realising that any form or degree of civilisation could have existed without wages. They are so used to the idea that without wages they can get nothing; they are so accustomed to the hard experience that when wages cease to come in they starve; they are impressed and saturated with the concrete knowledge that the orbit of their lives are inexorably prescribed by the magnitude of the magic wage: they are so inured to the aspect presented by these circumstances of their environment, that the admission that under Socialism there will be neither paying nor receiving of wages is sufficient to cause them to reject the Socialist proposition with the remark: "Can't be done!" But the wages system and the wage-worker, as we understand them to-day, are quite modern social characteristics—newer, say, than St. Paul's Cathedral.
When we speak of the wages system and the wage-worker, however, we have in mind a very definite social feature, and it will be as well to explain here exactly what is meant by the terms, for the benefit of those who are new to the study of social science.
If the wage-worker is new, wages, of course, are not. "The labourer is worthy of his hire" was written many generations before the hired labourer was a wage-worker in the modern sense of the term, just as the reference to Joseph's "coat of many colours" was penned ages before the world knew a tailor. Wages are older than the wages system, just as coats are older than the tailoring trade.
The wages system is that system whereupon the whole of the wealth of the community is produced by wage-labour. The wage-worker is one whose sole means of subsistence are the proceeds of the sale of his or her labour power—wages.
Now the wages system, as here described, obviously could not exist save in conjunction with a certain form of property ownership. It is not that this ownership must be private ownership. Property was privately owned centuries before the wages system grew up. The social system which immediately preceded the present one was based on private property, yet very little of the community's wealth was produced by wage labour then.
The particular form of private ownership which is essential for the development of the wages system is that form which provides a propertyless class - that form which takes away from a section every shred of the means of living except their labour power. In other words, the whole of the means of production must belong to a section of the people.
This particular form of private property did not exist till comparatively recent times. Prior to its establishment, the working class had free access to the land and consequently had not to depend upon the sale of their labour power for their livelihood. They did occasionally work for wages, just as they did occasionally sell part of the produce of their labour, in order to procure money to pay taxes, or to purchase the few things required that they did not produce for themselves. But they never became wage slaves while they had access to the sod, for the simple reason that they had at hand the means of producing all the essentials of life for themselves, without being driven to hire themselves to others.
Even the artisans and the handicraftsmen in the towns, where they did work for wages, had their portion of land, on which they produced many of their requirements, and had, besides, reasonable certainty that, when they had become proficient in their craft, the ownership of the implements of their trade would be within their easy reach, and present them with the opportunity of gaining freedom.
So it will be seen that the wages system is by no means an indispensable part of human life. Our ancestors got on very well without it. Indeed, they had neither use nor need for it until they had been stripped of everything they possessed except their labour-power.
Only when they had been driven from their homes and their fields and converted into propertyless outcasts did the working class resort to the labour market for their livelihood. Prior to that, they had produced wealth for their own consumption, and money had played but a small part in their life. Things have changed greatly since those days; People no longer produce the goods they require to satisfy their own needs and it is utterly impossible for us to go back to the state of things wherein each family produced all their own requirements.
To say that we cannot do without wages and the wages system is to say that which is absurd. Though it is true that wages are the means by which the workers live, it is equally true that wages are the means whereby the workers are robbed. The wage serves no other function than to render possible this robbery. It does not even record the fact that its possessor has performed his share of the world's work, for wages have a fleeting identity, and there is nothing to show how the coins they consist of are come by. With the abolition of private property, wages, and money, it will be very easy to assure that each person shall perform his or her share of the necessary labour of production, and the "problem" of distribution, then would be no problem at all.
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