There presently exists a lack of theoretic preparation for the day when the people can actually abolish capitalism. We are talking about the person who wishes to see another world, but thinks it can come about, if at all, by simply doing away with bosses, or paying everyone the same amount, or whatever political, legal, and administrative reform measures they have been led to believe can accomplish the redistribution of power and wealth and can really make their lives better. The Left tends to reinforce naive confuse visions of anti-capitalism, instead of providing theoretical clarity. A new human society cannot emerge through spontaneous action alone. People need to know not just what to be against, but what to be for, not just “what is to be done,” but what is to be undone––what is it exactly that must be changed in order to have a viable and emancipatory socialism? Unfortunately, this issue receives almost no attention. They have not attempted to remake society totally.
The source of capital is no mystery. Capital is simply money and commodities assigned to create a profit and be reinvested. Profit is made by the "magical" addition of surplus value to the value inherent in the product. The "added value," the profit, is produced by workers. And this capital is born to expand or die. To be useful, the investment must result not only in a profit but in a growing rate of profit. Capital represents the stored-up labour of millions of workers accumulated in the hands of the bosses. Nor is the role of such capital any. mystery. “Capital,” Karl Marx, said, “is dead labour that vampire-like only lives by sucking living labour and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” It is the very essence of capitalism to keep labour at a minimum point, just sufficiently above the starving point so that it can continue to produce – never enough above this point so that the worker could save for a period of not working. The boss has no other interest in the worker. Meanwhile, however, all the accumulated labour of the workers, stored up in machines, becomes ever more potentially productive of goods which, utilised for the workers, would unfold possibilities of unlimited development. Surplus value derives from unpaid wages. The worker is never paid for the value of the product, only for the value of her or his labor time, which is considerably less, and which meanders widely depending upon the historical, cultural and social conditions of a country. Labour-power is miraculous, like the Virgin Birth. You get more out of it than you put in. Workers produce a commodity which has more value than what they get in wages to keep them functioning. This differential is surplus value, which is the source of capital.
But, capitalism, no matter how it plans and hopes and prays, would never actually be able to do more than drive the worker to the bedrock of subsistence – although there is plenty to provide a featherbed of luxury for all.
Only socialism, where the stored-up labour is utilised for the social good, can realise the potentialities of human productivity and development. Only when accumulated labour belongs to those who produce it – to the worker who turns the wheels. Once workers realize, however, that the “return” should be to them and society instead of to the bosses, they will have begun to see the socialist solution. The secret of value, the labour theory of value, that was unearthed by the classical economists and by Marx is what the money barons fear and hate. It is the secret that will set the world free. People will learn how to control the supposedly sacred, eternal, and inscrutable method of production and distribution that now controls us.
People in a socialist world will produce for use according to a reasonable plan and without a thought for the odious notion of profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain, socialist society will produce abundance for all. That's a fact. The global human family will arrange its standard of living as easily as affluent families do today. The socialist says that progress consists not in smashing the giant corporate conglomerates of industry but in taking them away from the private owners and making them the property of the whole people, those who produce all the wealth of the world. Owned by the toiling people, by the workers, the poor farm labourers, the dispossessed and all the poor, these global industries could produce plenty for all. That is the road to socialism, to a world system, of peace, security and freedom. We believe in telling the truth to fellow-workers. We believe only the truth can serve the cause of socialism. We don’t believe in choosing the “lesser evil” over a greater evil. We choose instead something good for working men and women: A socialist party! The Socialist Party demands the abolition of the profit and wages system altogether. In a period the self-organisation and independent mobilisation of the working class, it has opened up the possibility of challenging capital’s hegemony. It has developed and nourished the idea that society as a whole is responsible for the well-being of its members. This social consciousness remains a dagger aimed at the heart of the profit system. For capitalism to flourish, social solidarity must be replaced with the notion of the consumer who is free to make “choices.” To the consumerist vision of the atomised individual we respond: Another world is possible!
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