The Socialist Party provides no career for any individual, but some organisations, the capitalist political parties, for example, normally allow their political leaders to use the party machine as a means of carving out a career full of honours and wealth. Much more then must this be true of the Government, the executive committee of the ruling class. The Cabinet, representing the outlook of the capitalist majority in Parliament is the servant of a minority of the population, the minority which owns and controls die resources of the country to the exclusion of the mass of the population. This state of affairs will continue until the workers cease sending defenders of capitalism to Parliament.
The Government then represents the collective interests of the capitalist class. The principal part of its task is to keep the propertyless working class from challenging the position of the exploiting class. The workers must, in other words, be fobbed off with promises, bemused with fine-sounding, but empty, phrases, bought off with petty concessions, and—if everything else fails— beaten down by force in the name of the law. What, then, is the first qualification of the politician who wants to be useful to the ruling class? Obviously, it is that he shall have the confidence of the workers or at least of a large number of them. He must be popular. Only so can he misdirect the sheep on behalf of the wolves, who are his paymasters. Like the quack doctor, he must have a patter. He must speak the language of the factory and market-place. He must be able to dress up his capitalist nostrums in phraseology which makes them look like the real thing for the workers. As with the man so with the institution. The politician and the Cabinet must be trusted and respected. No breath of suspicion of personal self-seeking must be allowed to blow on them. In order to serve most effectively as cover for the brutal methods of factory exploitation and the tortuous ways of finance, the political institutions must stand forth as beacons of purity and unselfishness. That is all there is to it.
How You Are Robbed.
From whence come the dividends upon which the capitalists live? From the results of the work you do. Let us illustrate this point by taking a particular instance. You and some of your fellow workers are employed by a certain company and that company pays you wages and salaries. Now if the company makes a profit they must make it out of employing you because your class does all the work of producing for the company. In other words, you and your fellows produce a quantity of goods that sell at a value which is greater than the value of your wages plus all other expenses. There is a surplus and it is out of this surplus that the capitalists of this country, and the rest of the world, live luxuriously and amass fortunes.
The capitalists pay you as little as they possibly can and urge you to increase the amount of your production, because the more you produce and the less you take the more there is for them. They are helped in this process by the fact that you compete with each other for jobs and those who work most efficiently for the wages they get stand the best chance of getting and keeping a job. Efficiency does not necessarily mean doing the best job. You may be constructing jerry-built houses or doing similar shoddy work. Efficiency under capitalism means producing the greatest possible amount of profit for the capitalist which also involves working at high speeds. Sometimes, as in America, they pay higher wages because they have found they can get more out of you by doing so; that is by exploiting you more efficiently. But such higher paid workers are more rapidly exhausted, and, in the long run, are no better off than those on lower pay.
Another method adopted by the capitalists to increase what they can get out of you is the introduction of new technology and automated methods of production. This increases the amount of wealth each worker produces and reduces the number the capitalists need to employ—Puts many of you out of a job to swell the unemployed army. It is class ownership of the means of production that is the root of our troubles. This is what is wrong with society to-day. This is why we suffer poverty and insecurity and all the misery associated with poverty and insecurity. No reforms put forward by any political party touch this class ownership of the means of production; at best they only aim at easing some of the worst evils. Even in this, they are generally unsuccessful as you know from your own experience. No sooner is one evil eased than another, maybe worse, appears in its place. While you remain dependent on the capitalists giving you a job, in order that you may live, reforms cannot relieve you of poverty and insecurity.
To-day you do all the work of society yourselves. The capitalist does nothing except draw his dividends. He tells you that you cannot get on without him because, according to him, nothing can be done without money and he has the money with which to pay your wages. But money does not make anything and people have made things where money was unknown. Even your ordinary history books tell you about people who made the things they needed without having to use money. It is only because goods are bought and sold that money is needed. If buying and selling were abolished money would lose its function. If you distributed to your, selves the goods you produce you would not need wages. Just as you produce and distribute goods now at the behest of the capitalist, in return for wages, which only enable you to buy a portion of them back, you could distribute them freely to the whole of the community, including yourselves, to-morrow, without the need for wages. If all the people who make up society take over the means of production and distribution and own them in common, the work of production would still go on. But instead of an idle class taking for their own enjoyment a large portion of the wealth produced, they would take part in the production of it, and it would be distributed according to the needs of each member of the community. That is socialism.
Nothing short of socialism can alter your condition of life for the better. We, in the Socialist Party, are neither dreamers nor good-natured idealists. We are working men and women. Like you are. like you, we belong to the working class and consequently we are poor. Our poverty has limited the amount of propaganda we could do. Our Literature will show you how steadfastly we have adhered to the same position since we first formed our party. Our funds come out of our own pockets and those of our sympathisers. We have not, and we do not want, any rich benefactors, who might try to influence our policy. Our party is ours and it can also be yours. We are faced with the same problems as you are; our interests are the same as yours. We have found the only solution to our troubles and we want you to join us in helping to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. Society is controlled through Parliament. Parliament makes and administers the laws. It does so at present on behalf of the capitalist. That is to say, laws are made and administered on the basis of the private ownership of the means of production. The laws are made to protect this private ownership. But you and your fellow workers are the people who have voted the nominees of the capitalists, and others who support the continuation of the wages system, into power at each election. Therefore, if you want to abolish capitalism you must vote into Parliament delegates whose sole business will be to abolish capitalism and introduce socialism. This they can do as soon as a majority of workers like yourselves become convinced that Socialism is the only remedy for social ills and vote a majority to Parliament to introduce it. Remember we are not going to do anything for you, and no "leader” can get you out of wage slavery. It is you who must do the job yourselves. It is the working class itself that must take charge of its own destiny and build a new society worth living in.
Do you want to live under a free social system, owning your own means of production and using them for the equal benefit of all, or are you content to remain a human beast of burden, fettered to the insecurity of life as a wage worker? The choice is before you.
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