End Exploitation

Capitalism threatens the existence of civilisation and of mankind. The system faces problems it cannot possibly solve. The problems that defy capitalist solutions are wide displacement and impoverishment of global populations, racism and xenophobia, and pollution of our air, soil, and water. All these are taking us toward social catastrophe. They are a plain warning that the issue before us, and the whole world, is: perish with capitalism or survive with socialism. It is a grave situation.

The great social questions of our age which demand immediate remedy are: Are we going to keep the system of private ownership? Shall we attempt to preserve a social system that has proved its incapacity to solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty? Do you favour prolonging the life of a society in which a few own all the means of wealth-production, in which labor-saving machinery, instead of lightening labour's toil, throws workers out of their jobs onto the industrial scrapheap? Must mankind pass through still another vicious cycle of depression, crisis, and war? Or shall we do the common-sense thing, make the means of production our collective property, abolish the exploitation of the many by the few, and use our productive genius to create leisure and abundance for all?

If you accept that society must be reconstructed, then there are certain things to understand. The first is that we can expect no help whatsoever from the beneficiaries of capitalism. Here and there, a capitalist may see the handwriting on the wall and join with the workers, but as a class, the capitalists, like the slave-owning and feudal classes before them, will strive to prolong their poverty-ridden, war-breeding system. The workers of brawn and brain must build this new world and emancipate themselves through their own class-conscious efforts. The second thing to understand is this: Though the workers are in the overwhelming majority, and have tremendous potential power, they can apply their collective strength to the task at hand only through organisation. This means organising politically.

The workers who run the industries today, under capitalism, will run them tomorrow, in socialism. The difference will be:

1. that tomorrow, with socialism, production will be carried on to satisfy human needs - instead of for sale and profit.
2. the despotic management of capitalism will be replaced by the workers' own democratically elected and democratically controlled managers and delegated representatives. Their function is that of administering social production for the benefit of all. A social democracy, the most complete democracy ever achieved since the breakdown of the tribal councils of earlier mankind.  This will be a living, vibrant democracy in which all power is in the only safe, place for power to be - with the people. 

Capitalism breeds wars and recessions and it is easy to see why.

What is capitalism? It is an economic system in which goods are produced to be sold at a profit. The goods are produced by the working class in industries owned by a small class of capitalist parasites. The capitalist owners of industry become the owners of the products. The workers get for their creative efforts a wage (or salary), an amount just sufficient to maintain themselves and their families. It is the relation of this amount to the value of the workers' output that is at the bottom of capitalism's depressions and wars.

For the fact is their capitalist exploiters have always paid the workers only a fraction of the value of their products. Worse still, this fraction keeps growing smaller as technological improvements step up labour's productivity while, at the same time, steadily wiping out jobs.

The capitalist class is very much afraid of depressions; because, as Karl Marx pointed out more than a century ago, these periodic economic crises put capitalist society on trial for its life. Hence, preventing the accumulation of surpluses by acquiring foreign markets in which to sell them is of vital importance to our capitalist masters. But every capitalist class in every country is under the same compulsion to unload surplus goods abroad. Consequently, there is hot competition for available markets, and this eventually explodes into -- war! "The seed of war in the modern world," confessed President Woodrow Wilson, "is industrial and commercial rivalry."

"But," say some, "it is no longer true that capitalism would go to war for commercial purposes. Besides, during the past twenty-five years the government has devised means of coping with economic recessions that minimise dependence on overseas markets."

Don't be misled. The Socialist Party says this: Economic slumps and wars are inevitable effects of capitalism, therefore they can never be eliminated as long as the system survives. Only when our economic life has been entirely rebuilt on a new foundation can lasting peace and economic well-being for all be achieved.  we must establish a new society -- a socialist society. We mean genuine socialism and emphatically not the monstrous counterfeits which were the Russian centralised command economy or the present Chinese state-capitalism.

Production for private profit must be replaced by production for the common good. Instead of letting a tiny useless class appropriate the lion's share of our collective product, the producers who create it must retain its full social value. There can be no peace or economic security without socialism. Nor can we solve our other tragic problems until we get rid of their capitalist cause. Put your full influence behind the only movement that can transform this country into a model of peace, abundance, freedom and social sanity.