The Socialist Party maintains that the problems of the British working class are identical with the problems of the workers of the world. What unites workers as a class is their relationship to the means of production. Workers produce all value. Bosses appropriate that value and pay the workers as little as workers let them get away with. All workers, no matter what their colour, gender, “race,” ethnicity, nationality, are exploited by the profit system. This is our unifying characteristic. Anything that negates this class concept, that puts workers in alliance with “their bosses” against another set of workers and bosses, weakens the struggle to combat and overthrow the entire ruling capitalist class. Nationalism divides the working class. Workers must unite across all capitalist-created borders and not defend its “own” ruling class against workers in other capitalist countries. Class solidarity is a crucial issue for all workers. There is no such thing as “progressive” nationalism. “National Liberation” movements merely exchange one set of bosses (the colonial ones) for another set (local bosses) and retain the profit system, integrate with world capitalism in one form or another. The ones who fostered “National Liberation” struggles in the formerly colonial world were not fighting for the working class in those countries but for the right to exploit “their own” workers by gaining a piece of the pie that the colonialists had monopolised. These “anti-imperialist” nationalists were still capitalists and were aiming to maintain the profit system. They even showed themselves as willing to rely on aid and arms from the former colonial powers to put down “their own” working class if necessary. The working class cannot share power with nationalist bosses. Such so-called sharing keeps the capitalists and their system of exploitation in power. Racism weakens the working class in two ways. It divides workers and pits one group against the other, diluting working class strength in battles against the rulers. Racism also allows the bosses to use lower-paid black and Latino workers as a threat against white workers struggling to improve their wages and working conditions by saying that black and Latino workers are ready to work for less and take their jobs.
A socialist party must be a mass party based on the concept that every worker can be won over to being a communist. The successful party will not be a vanguard “cadre” party in which a small group claims to lead the rest of the working class. The glorification of individuals leads to slavish followers rather than to build the practice of leadership and critical thinking by masses of workers. Historical materialism is a science explaining the laws of development of nature, society, and thought. It enables us to recognize reality by understanding that things are always in motion, interconnected and interdependent. It is the science that is a guide to collective action that can emancipate the working class. Surplus value refers to the following: In production, the workers create all value but much, if not most, of that value, is appropriated by the capitalist. That is, the owner of a capitalist enterprise pays each worker a wage (as little as possible) equal to only a small part of the value the worker creates. For instance, the value a worker produces in the first two hours of the work-day may equal whatever wage he or she may receive; the value created in the remainder of the work-day goes to the capitalist. That is what Marx called surplus value. From surplus value, capitalists take their own profits and make payments to other groups of capitalists: interest on loans to banks (the banker’s profits); rent to landlords; payments for raw materials, and so on. Thus, most of the surplus value created by the worker becomes profit to all the capitalists involved.
For nearly four centuries the capitalist system has destroyed the lives of billions of workers. Among its many evils it has waged unceasing wars for profit; exploited the workers in its factories mercilessly; caused mass unemployment; used racism to targeted particular groups of workers; ignored the huge death toll from malnutrition, curable diseases and lack of health care; and destroyed enormous regions of the global environment.
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