Why we Stand Alone

When automation does all the work, who will own the robots? The answer, of course, is that the capitalist class will continue to own them unless the working class acts to establish an economic democracy in which the means of production and distribution become the property of society. Unless that is done, the modern technology that could be used to provide economic security for all will only benefit a few. New technology is fated to bring more unemployment than we have ever known, more economic insecurity than we have ever imagined and human misery than we ever thought possible. The working class must come to grips with this problem or else be prepared to be reduced to a state of abject poverty and economic ruin unlike anything experienced since past ages, when the majority of people were either chattel slaves or serfs. The Socialist Party declines to believe that the working class will commit collective suicide and permit it to happen. However, workers will have to make a conscious effort to organise their economic and political strength to resist capitalism's anti-social misuse of modern technology. We require to assert or revolutionary right to determine our own destiny.

There is plenty of capitalist testimony to prove wages are down, profits are up, and workers are producing more than ever before. Fewer workers are producing more than more workers used to. Better still for the bosses, they are doing it in less time and for lower wages. Today, there is a huge capitalist outlay for labour-displacing technology. Workers' wages as a percentage of GDP are far lower than they were. Capitalist economics is politics. Socialist economics is politics.

Capitalism has produced wonders that surpassed the wonders of the ancient world. But its wonders of manufacture and commerce produced the monstrosities of capitalist war, of almost universal exploitation and of insecurity. It has proved wasteful to humanity with its ruling class robbing, enslaving and killing. Social democracy can only be revitalised through genuine socialism, offering humankind and its society realistic hope rather than with despair. Nothing much will ever be achieved until the workers have taken control of the state machinery for the purpose of ending capitalism, and that cannot be done until there are socialists to do it. Vague left-wingers who do not understand socialism are as good as useless for the end in view. The reformists say that the way to make socialists is to work up enthusiasm for “immediate demands" and has built up an organisation out of this non-socialist sentiment, gained control of councils and Parliament The workers would be converted to Socialism by seeing how the Labour Party was doing practical everyday work. The leaders would go on preaching socialism and would get a receptive hearing for it because of their successful administration of the central and local government. But has it worked out? Every time we try to explain to the workers what socialism is and how it differs from capitalism we find that the great majority of workers already think they know what socialism is and what is a socialist party. Socialism, they think, is some sort of state-capitalist nationalisation or the welfare state, muddled and confused by the reformists half-measures which were supposed to be a path to socialism.

Nothing so sharply divides the Socialist Party from non-socialist organisations as the recognition that the world needs a different social structure—not just different men or different political parties to administer capitalism, but deliberate understanding action by the working class to replace the existing social system by a socialist one. The extent to which this is appreciated is a measure of political maturity. Those who are politically naive, believe that if they have “good” “wise” leader these saviours can purify capitalism, solve its insoluble problems, rid it of unemployment, poverty and war. etc. Experience proves this to be unfounded. Politicians with no mandate to establish socialism do not when they become the government, have the power to impose their good intentions on capitalism. Instead, they are in its clutches, for instance, Labour Governments which had preached disarmament, peace and high wages in practice rearmed, supported war and imposed wage-freezes. They end by being hardly distinguishable from the avowed supporters of capitalism.

Some people who don't think that socialism is a good idea declare that the Socialist Party objective—a world commonwealth in which money and a lot of other things would not be required—is impractical because some sort of money (or labour-time voucher) is a necessary part of all human societies, even the primitive ones. Without it. they say, no society could hope to work. They are wrong. In any society, an article is money only when it acts as a medium of exchange and as a measure of value and when it contains within itself the social embodiment of human labour power. It must also be able to measure and to equate all and any commodity against any other. The change from private to common ownership—from capitalism to socialism —will mean that as trade and markets cease to exist so also will the need for a multitude of currencies, indeed, for any currency at all. Money could not be of any use in such a cooperative commonwealth.