The Task of the Socialist Party

The abolition of the profit system, which is the legalised robbery of the workers who produce all wealth, still remains the agenda of the Socialist Party which still stands for that and nothing less. And if one thing is for certain it is that history can change very fast in just a short time. The class struggle can hot up and a lot of complacent grins can be wiped off a lot of fat-cat faces. We ponder how long it will be before our fellow workers realise what an insane society they are living in. A rational one would produce food solely to meet needs, rather than for profit. Don't buy into capitalism. Both the theory and the experience of how capitalism works show that it cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority. Any government that tries this may well, at the beginning, be able to introduce a few favourable reforms but in the end will have to ‘run the economic system’ on its terms, by giving priority to profit-making overspending on reforms. No government can change the economic laws of capitalism. Workers face the capitalists as sellers and buyers of labour power. The former want the highest price they can get, the latter the lowest. In addition, the larger the share that the capitalists take of the wealth produced, the less there will be for the workers who have, in fact, produced all the wealth.

Capitalism is not the fault of the capitalists or the governments which preside over it. They are the victims of a system which needs poverty in order to ensure that the wage slaves have no alternative to employment. After all, anyone with a secure income would not waste their lives working to make an idle class richer. Why, then, is the suffering in the world today necessary? It is needed because the present social system is based on minority class ownership, whereby a small fraction of the earth’s population own and control the resources of the planet and the means of producing and distributing wealth. The system puts profits for the capitalist few before the needs of the wealth-producing majority: the men and women who live by selling their ability to work in return for wages or salaries. Capitalism is a profit system, where the golden law of the market is that production only takes place with a view to sell for profit. Under capitalism, that which cannot be sold profitably is either not produced or is destroyed.  The bosses blame the workers and the most stupid of the workers blame other workers.

 Workers should remember that members of our class are being killed, beaten up, discriminated against and made insecure today and not just in the past. In a world which now, more than ever, is a global village where modern technology has made it easy to unite, the means are at hand for workers of all lands to join our efforts into one movement. We must remember that an injury to one — whatever the nationality or the colour or the sex of the victim — is an injury to our class. Unity to improve our condition of wage-slavery is not what workers in the late twentieth-century should be organising for. The treadmill of trade unionism as an end in itself can only ease the intensity of our exploitation; what is needed is a society where there is no exploitation of employee by employer because there are no classes. Socialism, which will be a society without classes, employment or state machinery, will mean the abolition of the wages system. In a society, without wages people will give according to their abilities and take from the goods and services which are available according to their self-determined needs. The class struggle, which throws up countless victims, will not go away. It will not come to an end until the capitalists are defeated by the workers. That defeat will not require workers to use violence against the bosses — unless, of course, the capitalists have undemocratic ideas about making martyrs of themselves by defying the will of a conscious, socialist majority. But first we must build that majority, and it is for every worker to ask themselves the crucial question: am I to make use of the right to unite which the martyrs of Tolpuddle stood for — and millions of workers have yet to gain — or will I be a martyr to the system which robs workers of our dignity?

Classes are distinguished by how they stand in relation to the control and use of the means for producing wealth. In modern society, there are two main classes: the non-working owning class and the non-owning working class. Marx did not say that the state, should be smashed or by-passed, but that it should be captured by the working class. The state, as the public power of coercion, was an instrument of class rule which came into being with the division of society into conflicting classes and which has been controlled by various classes through its history: ancient slave-owners, feudal barons, and modern capitalists. To say that a class controls the state because it has economic power is to fall for a crude economic determinism. The state is controlled by the class that has waged and won a political struggle to capture it. It is true that the class which is economically progressive has generally been able in the end to win state power, but because of its political struggle rather than its economic position. This is why it is possible for an economically redundant class (like the modern capitalists) to retain power long after it has become redundant. The capitalist class rules today not because of its economic position (as a superfluous class, after all!) but because of its political and ideological leadership of the working class. The capitalist class is wealthy today because it has political power. It retains its economic privileges only because it controls the state. And it controls the state only with the support of the workers. The ruling class is the class that controls the state in the sense of its being used to maintain its economic privileges. It is a political rather than a social concept. To find out which class rules you study how the state is used rather than who fills the top posts. 

We do not doubt that top civil servants and judges and generals are themselves mainly from wealthy families or that they are firmly committed to capitalism. But then, on this last point, so are those who fill the bottom posts in the state machine and so are most other workers. If you have a correct theory of class, you realise that by and large both industry and the state are run from top to bottom by members of the working class, men, and women who are dependent on their wage or salary to live. No doubt there are capitalists who do some of these jobs, but the socialist case has always been that, economically and politically, the capitalist class as a class is redundant as society is already run by the workers alone.  The capitalists control the state not by filling the top posts with their relations but by winning working-class support for the policy of using the state to maintain capitalism. Even if the top posts were all filled by the children of manual workers, with provincial accents, the capitalists would still rule if the state was used in their interests. It is not a question of the social background of the state officials, but of the purpose for which the state is used.

The task of the Socialist Party is to urge workers to look beyond the incessant turmoil of the day-to-day struggles engendered by capitalism. To take up the struggle for socialism and end the servitude of wage-labour once and for all. The same energy and effort now being expended on purely limited objectives could, given socialist understanding, change society completely. Then, from a world-wide basis of common ownership of the means of production and distribution, mankind can redirect social production to the free satisfaction of human needs. Better than an eternity spent bickering over pittances!

The attainment of socialism awaits majority understanding and the use of the ballot-box for that exclusive purpose. The only way to abolish capitalism’s problems is to get rid of the system itself, entirely. There is only one system which can replace it and that is socialism, a world of common ownership and free access, where all the world’s people will live in harmony because for the first time in history we shall be able to express a common interest.  Shall we unlock the door to a socialist future or stay here in our uncomfortable present, like dinosaurs defying the laws of evolution. The future is made, not given, and any worker with any sense will be making it fast before the capitalist future destroys us.