The World We Live In

Members of the working class are:

1. own none of the means of social production;
2. they must sell their ability to perform productive labor -- their "labor power" -- which is given the special name of wages, in order to live;
3. they perform all socially useful labor; and
4. they have no voice in the disposition of their product.

This definition includes workers who wear white collars, blue collars, or no collars at all. It includes so-called "professionals," whose wages are usually called "salaries." It includes the self-employed, those who are sub-contractors. Capitalist propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, owning small holdings of stock do not make a worker a capitalist.

The distinctive features that define the capitalist class are these:

1. Its members own all the means of social production
2. appropriate most of the wealth created by labour; and
3. as owners perform no socially useful function whatsoever.

The Socialist Party is concerned with the future of all humanity. Emancipation from capitalist wage slavery, and the indignities it heaps on the working-class majority will free the entire human race and put an end to classes and class divisions.

There obviously are differences between chattel slavery and wage slavery, but there are also many similarities. One similarity is that the modern system of slavery is one in which people are put to work for the benefit of a small owning class. One difference is that wage slaves are not bought and sold by individual masters at a slave market. Today, human beings are subjected to an even greater indignity -- they are forced to sell themselves piecemeal on the labour market. Ironically, this indignity helps to create an illusion of freedom. What this "freedom" amounts to is that workers may leave the master who employs them whenever they like. However, when they do quit they must immediately seek out a new master. This compulsion to seek a new master exposes their essential servitude. It also shows that wage slavery is really the enslavement of one class by another, of the workers as a class by the capitalists as a class. Another difference is that today's wage slaves often accumulate some personal property, such as a car or a house. This contributes to the illusion that workers have a stake in the capitalist system. What workers do not own, however, are the tools they need access to in order to live. Therefore, they must sell the one real commodity they do own -- their power or ability to labour -- to the capitalist master who owns the tools. This fact exerts a silent, unremitting pressure on the worker to follow a life pattern of economic dependence essential to capitalist production.  Today's wage slave may never be "sold down the river," away from spouse and children. However, by wage cuts, lay-offs, shut-downs and other decisions over which workers have no say, the capitalist master class destroys more families than the slaveholders of the old South ever ripped apart.

"Free labour" is a cornerstone of the capitalist economic system, without which capitalism as we know it could not survive. This follows because "free labour," which is only another way of saying wage labour, is the source of profit, and thereby the source of capital. Without a system of labour under which workers produce an excess of wealth over what they are paid there would be no source from which profits could be drawn, and without profit, there would be no way to increase capital. What this system of wage labour amounts to for workers is that they are "free" to sell their ability to perform productive labour on the labour market to the capitalist who is willing to pay the highest wages. This system of wage labor is a cornerstone of the capitalist social order. That is, the ability of the capitalist class to keep its place as the dominant and ruling class in society depends on its ability to restrain its greed for profit to the extent that the dominated and exploited working class can maintain an acceptable standard of living. Otherwise, workers may come to realise that the capitalist system promises only poverty, insecurity and degradation for themselves and future generations.  There are signs that the increased ferocity of capitalist competition on a world scale is leading to conditions in which the ground is being eaten from under the system of free wage labour. As modern technology continues its relentless sweep through all industries, and as capitalism's requirement for human labour declines, plus the free mobility of labour to cross borders is increasingly policed, the ability of workers to earn a decent living is declining precipitously. The spread of modern industrial technology, the vast displacement of human labor, and the resulting competition for jobs that are driving wages down all over the world is setting the stage for a social catastrophe of enormous dimensions

Chattel slaves feared to speak out openly because their masters might retaliate by selling them or their families away. Wage slaves quietly accept capitalist decisions that affect their livelihoods and threaten the economic security of their families are doing essentially the same thing. The modern slave class of wage workers cannot look to any outside Abolitionists for help. They cannot look to any "superior" class to assist them. They are on their own. Not only is capitalism "unfit" to dominate society, it has become a menace to the future of the human race. It is urgent that workers organize their political and economic power implicit in their vast numbers to abolish that system before it leads the world into a new Dark Age in which the vast majority of humanity is reduced to a hopeless level of enforced poverty and social bondage comparable to chattel slavery. Achieving that goal is indispensable if workers are to become the masters of their own destinies and thereby remove the yoke of economic despotism that is synonymous with the capitalist system.