Fighting for equality means the fight for socialism

The process of concentration is part and parcel of capitalism. Behind it lies the relentless drive for greater and still greater efficiency, and before it the all-important quest for profit. Marx saw it operating in its very earliest stages over a hundred years ago and foresaw that its effects would become more and more profound. Each time someone comes along to advocate a new scheme for reducing inequality he or she has to explain why earlier schemes failed. After all those years and all these “cures”, capitalism exhibits just the same “two nations" that the Tory Disraeli described over a century ago. 

Equality cannot be attained except by the abolition of the whole present system of wealth ownership and production. The working class should give up following futile schemes for achieving the impossible dream of an equalitarian capitalism. Their interest lies in establishing socialism.  Capitalism will keep producing the evidence of its own contradictions and inhumanities. Capitalism’s constant search for profitability is a fundamental source of instability that will ultimately undermine all efforts to reform it. There is only one way of cutting through the confusion. The future of society rests in the hands of the people who make it and organise it. The working class of the world can decide whether the waste and destruction of capitalism shall continue.  But when the working class has woken up, when they have realised that false ideas can only be answered with knowledge, when they have decided that they do not need leaders to run their lives and their ideas for them, capitalism will stop rolling on. For the working class will also have realised that socialism is the answer to the problems of property society. 

The Labour Party aims for power to run British capitalism. And no party has yet succeeded in doing that to the benefit of the great majority of the people. Workers everywhere—who are the majority-should see through the false propaganda of the Labour Party and of the other organisations which stand for capitalism. Capitalism can only be run in the interest of the capitalist class. The majority of us—the working class—suffer the brunt of the system’s evils, which only socialism will remove. Conservative and Labour Party delegates at their conferences, full with their pet reform measures, often take no account of the basic facts of capitalism, which contradict the intention of their proposals.   It is not possible for capitalism, with all the commercial rivalries, its diplomatic intrigues, its "defence” secrets, etc., to be administered openly, for everyone to see.  

The needs of capitalism itself often wipe out many of the politicians' promises and those that survive and come onto the Statute Book have little, if any, the effect upon the lives of the people who have been persuaded to vote for them. Capitalism grinds on, leaving the mass of its people to be exploited by a privileged few, who do very well out of the arrangement.

 Sooner or later ignorance will have to yield to the growth of socialist knowledge and the realisation that war is not just a nasty accident but has its roots in the private property basis of modern society. It is an ever-present menace so long as capitalism survives. The sordid squabbles over markets, trade routes, and other considerations, give way eventually to armed conflict, but no working class interest is involved, and no social problem is solved by fighting. When each war is over, all that can be said is that countless workers have died to preserve the conditions for another holocaust later on. Someone once said that the next war really begins where the last one ends. We could not agree more. 

 We, the working class, are the victims of a brutal aggression, renewed day by day in the episodes of the class struggle. We want to be rid of our conquering aggressors, the capitalist class. The Socialist Party has always and rightly resisted the blindly optimistic reformist view which can, against all experience, hope that things will right themselves and life become progressively better without a fundamental change in the basis of human society. That means hoping that the capitalist leopard will change its spots, and we know it will not. Socialists do not consider their task as hopeless but remember that economic forces, as well as human reason, are on our side against the brutal power of the propertied class and their agents. One of the first duties of working-class organisations when they declare their abhorrence of the iniquities of foreign capitalist governments is to show clearly and unmistakably that they are opposed to their own ruling class and free from the suspicion of condoning its actions. Many fail to understand the nature of capitalism—whether governed by dictators or self-styled democrats. That lack of understanding is to be found in every country, and the task of fostering an international working- class outlook and international organisation is made more difficult by ignoring it. Internationalism will only have a sure foundation to the extent to which such illusions are ruthlessly cut out. A first step is to tell foreign workers frankly that with the best will in the world the amount of practical help that can be given is strictly limited, and therefore it is necessary for them not to build great hopes on succour from abroad to make up for their own weakness. The best help that the workers anywhere can give to their foreign comrades is to redouble their efforts to strengthen the socialist movement in their own country and hasten the day when the workers will control social affairs.

There is an alternative to them all. Socialism will bring us a world of peace and plenty. That is a world worth working for because it is a world worth living for. The key to social progress is the level of knowledge and understanding which the people attain. When they begin to see through the promises and the posturing of political leaders, the first gleam of hope for the better life will be on the horizon.