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Saturday, August 04, 2018

The fruits of the earth belong to all, the land to no one

Human beings are not machines and we could, if we wanted to, choose to change the way we live completely. Instead of choosing from the limited menu we face today, we could invent new recipes and set the menu ourselves. In the world today the potential exists to satisfy everybody's needs. People would not need to eat sub-standard food, live in unfit housing and have to make do with what they can afford. Everybody would have free access to all the world's goodies. In this type of society, there would be the widest possible choice. People would be free to travel anywhere they fancy. They would be free to choose what work to do and what methods they use to do it. Socialists do not live in the "taken for granted" world. We do not take for granted that there will always be wars, starving millions and homeless people. We recognise that these problems result from the way society is organised at present and they are not inevitable. When the vast majority of the world's people decide that enough is enough, a new society can be built. Socialists are simply people who have a clear understanding of how such a society can be built and the Socialist Party exists to persuade people that a society where the world's resources are used to satisfy human need is sensible — now.

The history of all hitherto existing society", wrote Marx and Engels at the beginning of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, "is the history of class struggle." To which Engels added the qualification, in the English edition of 1888. "all written history”. Certain historians have understood this to mean struggles in which one or other of the contending groups recognises itself as a class and is consciously pursuing its interests. In other words, that class struggle has necessarily to involve an element of class consciousness. The drawback of this view is that class-conscious struggles have by no means been a permanent feature in all written history, thus negating the claim. The Socialist Party, on the other hand, has always understood the class struggle to be a basic feature of any exploiting class society, whether or not those involved are aware of their historical role. The class struggle necessarily goes on whenever there is exploitation of one class by another; whenever, that is, part of what one section of society produces is appropriated by another section. It is the struggle between members of the two classes to maximise or minimise the amount appropriated. The slaves who refuse to work hard and the slave owner who whips them are both engaged in the class struggle, even if neither consider they belong to one of two separate classes in society with antagonistic interests. So is the modern wage or salary earner who demands better working conditions, higher wages or shorter hours, or who resists having to work harder; or, indeed, who turns up late for work or takes days off. The class struggle — resistance to exploitation by the exploited class — is a daily, permanent feature in any class society. We say that class struggle is a permanent feature of any class society—governments continually seek to extract as much profit as they can from the wage and salary working class and workers resist in any ways they can. individually as well as collectively.

 G.E.M de Ste Croix of New College. Oxford, in his The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981) puts it
  “Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact, of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure. By exploitation I mean the appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others: in a commodity-producing society this is the appropriation of what Marx called "surplus value". A class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of degree of ownership or control); to the conditions of production (that is to say. the means and labour of production) and to other classes. . . The individuals constituting a given class may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class, and they may or may not feel antagonism towards members of other classes as such.
  It is of the essence of a class society that one or more of the smaller classes in virtue of their control over the conditions of production (most commonly exercised through ownership of the means of production), will be able to exploit — that is. to appropriate a surplus at the expense of — the larger classes and thus constitute an economically and socially (and therefore probably also politically) superior class or classes.”
One of the important pre-requisites for a major political figure is a personality distinctively different from any other politician. Yet all potential leaders must have one thing in common — they must conform to the current interests and values of the ruling class.  Naturally, for capitalists, the successful personality reflects the "instinctive” ambitious drive for competition among individuals. All potential candidates in the personality stakes find it beneficial and essential to project the image of being a captain of industry or the right politician. To be successful, candidates must ensure that the selection process carefully irons out all the unacceptable personality traits and enhances all fashionable characteristics.  Out of the necessity to gain the workers’ overall support and to cater for individual workers’ preferences and phobias, politicians are presented as a particular ideal type. Every election is a confirmation that capitalism, despite its defects and outdated social and productive relationships, only survives because of working class support. What is not widely discussed is the reason for a fundamental contradiction in interests. On the one hand, there is the majority who suffer, as a class, the consequences of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, conflict, and human misery. On the other, there is a minority who profit, as a class, from these social problems. Yet the majority see no contradiction in this state of affairs and, indeed, regularly supply and provide the means for the minority to live in luxury. Clearly, the working class view of the world is distorted, both by them and for them. Before capitalism’s image-makers can fulfil their role, and in order for them to perpetuate the process, certain conditions must prevail. They thrive on plausibility and promises, depending on a degree of gullibility and ignorance, and literally profit from a poverty of knowledge. Without these pre-conditions no image-making industry would be able to mould the working class into passive and docile individuals.  From our present experiences and past circumstances, we know there have been periods when trade has increased and unemployment decreased. Therefore, like night follows day. we know any talk on future periods of prosperity are not only plausible and a promise but a virtual guarantee. But this does not tell us what will be the main consequences of such a state of affairs: firstly, it will be a period of prosperity for capitalists; secondly, it will be followed by a period when trade will decrease and unemployment will increase. Promises need constant renewal. What better attraction to capture a person’s attention than another one dressed up in the image of a leading politician? At a stroke, plausibility is retained and in addition, the human interest angle is provided with a more feasible object against which to register discontent. Political figures, therefore, serve as a distancing mechanism between the system itself and the working class. The non-solution of problems is presented as a fault in the make-up of the personality, whereas in reality social problems demand a social solution. When people suffer a contradiction between their prejudices and their daily experiences, it is experience which is ultimately the stronger force. 

When we use the term "exploitation" it is to refer to the relationship between the small minority who own the means of life and the great majority who produce all of the wealth and live in poverty. We are not out to quarrel about the varying degrees of poverty suffered among ourselves. So long as that is all that workers are doing — arguing about whether a teacher should get more or less than a civil servant or a transport worker — the wealth owners will be laughing all the way to the bank. The wages system is really a form of institutionalised robbery whereby the rich get rich by paying the wealth producers less than the value of what they produce. In return for a price (a wage) the boss buys the labour-power of a worker for say a week. During that week the worker produces or helps to produce goods worth greatly more than they could buy back with their wage. That is the nature of exploitation in capitalism. The price of the labour power of a service worker. like a teacher, is calculated with reference to such factors as how much on average needs to be spent in the training of the worker and roughly what standard of living needs to be enjoyed (or suffered) by that worker in order for him or her to be in the right sort of condition for the demands of the job. Also taken into account is the need for money to be available for workers to rear another healthy generation of geese to lay more golden eggs. But this last factor is progressively being taken account of less as females have entered the workforce more prevalently and two incomes have almost become an expected prerequisite (from the employer's view) for having a family.

Capitalism exerts a constant downward pressure on the living standards of workers as the owning class try to get the best screw from the wealth producers as possible. Capitalism is a worldwide social system which is founded on the fact that a small minority of men and women and governments own and control society's means of life. The social conflict engendered by the antagonistic interests of the wealth producers and the wealth owners means that a police force is needed in the same way as the competition between rival factions of the owning class create wars and the need for the most murderous weapons with which to fight them. These needs are endemic to the social system and you can no more have one without the other than you can have a war without casualties. Socialists are not in the political arena to negotiate with the bosses for a few more crumbs. We want a majority to democratically take over the bakery. 


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