Workers are wage slaves!

Many people are worried about the welfare state–and so they should be. Governments around the world are cutting back on social spending because the capitalist class can no longer afford to pay for it at its previous levels. In times of economic difficulty, welfare spending is always the first element of state expenditure for governments to look to reduce. The reality for many of the working class who are unemployed, disabled, or a single parent (in other words, a huge swathe of the population) it is difficult for them to sleep easy in their beds. This is indeed a class issue. For the capitalists and their mouthpieces try to divide us – employed against unemployed, the fit against the sick. A united class struggle within capitalism but against it is our only answer.

The fact that a privileged few can make decisions in secret that affect the lives of thousands gives the lie to the notion of democracy under capitalism. There is a name for the sort of system where a privileged few can decide what information is fit for public consumption. It is, effectively, a dictatorship. Science and technology present itself to many in present-day society as a hostile force to be opposed, when it could so easily be turned to the task of satisfying human needs? These conflicting calls for secrecy and openness can reflect the conflicts of interest between different sections of the capitalist class, as well as between the capitalist and working classes. But technology and the products of our own hands do not just appear as a hostile force. Under capitalism, they are in fact a hostile force. Modern farming technology provides us with the means to feed the world. Forget the hypocritical cant of the politicians when they tell us that things are changing. Everything will stay the same until we organise to change it. When our own food system threatens to destroy us and appears to us as a force beyond our control, then there is a danger of doubting the ability of our thinking to distinguish the truth. In a period of social declines, such as that we are now in, men and women are faced with two options: accept that there is no way out and resign themselves to their fate, or confront reality and fight to change it. We in the Socialist Party have taken the latter course of action. As members of the working class aiming to come to a materialist understanding of the society we live in so that we can begin to change it, we look forward to the day when our “crackpot” position is vindicated.

A vote for the lesser evil is a vote against the greater evil. But it is also a vote for the system of lesser evil politics that basically gives voters no say in policy, handing all power over to Party pundits. For lesser evil voting to remain legitimate, there has to be a difference between the two parties. It’s in the interest of both parties to show a difference from the other because then someone who is politically inclined will choose the option they like best. If they were the same, why would anybody vote for either of them?

Workers, it matters not to you under whose rule you are, nor whether empires rise or fall or what dynasties may topple and “democracies” arise, because if wage-slavery continues, these changes leave your position absolutely unaltered as a class! To abolish poverty and unemployment, wage-slavery and war, and a thousand evils of the capitalist system is within your power. It is you alone who can affect your emancipation. Organise to capture the powers of government and completely control the destiny of your class - the wealth-producers of the world. Your only enemy is the international capitalist class. You alone can achieve the greatest purpose the mind of man has evolved—International Socialism! Under that system alone can come about the brotherhood of man, liberty, comfort, and peace for all. Hail the “socialist commonwealth of the World." So long, therefore, as capitalism survives must we endure class warfare. Socialisation of the means and instruments of production and distribution in the interest of the whole people is the only possible solution. When the workers become educated enough to realise the possibilities behind our proposals, the doom of capitalism will most assuredly be at hand.

The stupendous crime of the international capitalists will come fully home to their victims when they find that all their sacrifices have left them simply where they were, facing the old familiar evils. Capitalist politics and politicians prosperously reeking in their treachery will be ripe for utter discredit. Our day will come—our harvest will be ready for the garnering The place, therefore, of all those who are with us in mind, more now than ever before, is in our party. Let us have every ounce of our strength organised for the coming struggle. The working class will gather understanding from history, ancient and modern, and not be led astray by sentimental talk about the rich and the poor being of one mind and one spirit. Beware of men who talk about reconciliation between the working class and the master class. That is impossible. The only firm ground upon which the working class can successfully stand is the full recognition of the class war and the determination to fight on to the end—the social revolution; the inauguration of socialism.

We in the Socialist Party are often told by those to whom we expound our political and economic principles and beliefs: "Yes, no doubt socialism would be a very fine thing if it could only be brought about, but it cannot—it is only a beautiful dream." We accept such statements as a challenge from all those who hold those ideas.

The vast majority of the people in every capitalist country in the world belong to a class who have to work for their living. But a proportionately very small class are free from such necessity. Why? Simply because they can obtain all they need without work—from the labour of the workers. These fortunate individuals who are not under the necessity of working for their living amass wealth in ever-increasing accumulation. In contradistinction the position of the wealth producers generally does not improve, in fact, it tends to become worse. Each year finds them, in spite of wise expenditure, frugality, temperance, and all the enforced wisdom of economic stress, no better off.  they live and die in poverty after a toiling existence of a beast of burden. They are looked upon by the owning and ruling capitalist class simply as wealth producers, to be exploited in every sphere of labour. Their very lives are owned and controlled by this small but extremely powerful and dominant group of non-producers whom we call the capitalist class. They possess the land and all the means and instruments of wealth production, distribution, and exchange. Not only that—they sit in the “seats of the mighty," completely control the making of the laws—which, of course, are always enacted to conserve their own class interests—and thus economically and politically are, in every sense of the word, the Master Class. The masses have to live, and having nothing to operate in their own interests, owning no means of production, possessing only their power to labour, they are compelled to sell that labour-power to those who possess the means through which alone it can be productively used. So they must work under the terms and conditions dictated by their masters.

 Financiers, share-holders, industrialists, all who live on the labour of others, exist on the wealth they themselves have no share in producing. The consequence is this system of wage slavery produces a host of social evils of the most appalling type, such as unemployment, sweating, prostitution, poverty, starvation, disease, and untimely death.

Consider all the marvelous technological production that exist to-day—means that enable the wealth of all kinds to be produced in prolific abundance—have been made by and are operated by the workers. Yet we continue to see the damning indictment of the present system daily— hunger in the midst of plenty; overwork for those who starve, ennui through unbroken idleness for those who possess the world; unemployment side by side with sweating; abundant opportunities for all-round development for the favoured class, and deprivation of access to all that life should give them for the workers, whose lives are compulsorily wasted by the all-compelling exigencies of a vicious system. All the channels of knowledge, the wisdom of the ages, the finest triumphs of man in the domain of art, literature, music, and science should by right be available to them, for it is they who produce the material foundation from which all these spring.

 The wealth stolen from them has been the means of their enslavement. The capital which is used against them to produce wealth and also yet more capital they alone produced. Now they are slaves of the machine. They are poor because they are continually robbed; they are continually robbed because this social system, founded upon their robbery, continues to exist. They are only sellers of their labour-power, enriching others at their own expense, forever sacrificing their own desires, interests, aye, existence, that the exploiters may exploit them, and the plutocrat continue to plunder them! 

We claim that we are the only political party who show the workers that they hold the key of their emancipation in their own hands, that they alone can set themselves free. The present system will be its own undoing. The rich as a class grow richer, the poor ever poorer. and so capital is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, making ever more uneven the ratio between the exploited and the exploiters. As capital wields greater power the conflict of class interests grows ever stronger, and labour consolidates its forces and the struggle becomes more class-conscious and bitter. Now it will be seen that this system automatically produces it own opponents—the proletariat or propertyless working class—and also the incentive for the latter to wrest from the capitalists the power to exploit and oppress.

Now here is the crux of the whole question: how are the master class to be stripped of their terrible and oppressive power? Other things being equal, the men who succeed best in accomplishing their purpose are those who know exactly what they want to do and how best to do it. First of all, then, the victims of the present social system must find the answer to the question, how are they to emancipate themselves from their servile position?

Clearly, since that position arises from the private ownership of the means of production, the first thing that emerges is that such private ownership must go. The only alternative to the private ownership of the means of production by the few possible to-day, with the present stage of development of those means, is social ownership—ownership by the whole community. With the means and instruments for the production and distribution of wealth owned and controlled by the whole community there can be no other object in operating them but to produce wealth FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE COMMUNITY. The means of living belonging to the whole of the people, none is outside their ownership, nor, on the other hand, can any person have ownership in these things as an individual, but only as a cell in the social body.

As a consequence of this, the whole social fabric must reshape itself. The only means of productively applying it belonging to the community, labour-power must come under communal control. No person can purchase it because, in the first place, he or she has no means of exploiting it, in the second place, no worker would desire to sell his or her labour-power to another since we have the opportunity of exercising it through the communal means, and thirdly, since the whole of the wealth produced under such a system belongs to the community, there is no exchange within the community, and therefore money— the means of exchange—loses its function and its value, and becomes useless for the purchase of labour-power or anything else. The sale of labour-power for wages, then, must disappear with the abolition of private property in the instruments of labour. The whole wages system, in fact, must collapse with the change in the property condition, and a new set of relations must arise between social units, in which the relations of master and man can find no place. The class division, by which the people of every country are divided into exploiters and exploited, employers and employed, masters and slaves, rich and poor, according as they are propertied or propertyless, must vanish with the rest, giving place to a unified community of workers, socially equal because equal possessors in the economic basis of society—the means and instruments of producing the social wealth.

How can the workers accomplish this splendid end? We claim that the fundamental means to achieve this is to capture the political machine. Capture and control that, and we capture and control the governing machinery of the State. The armed forces of the oppressing class will then no longer be a menace to the workers, but an instrument for their emancipation. The whole of the people will be ruled by the will of the people. Democracy will have become a reality at last.

Wealth will be produced for the use and enjoyment of ALL by the marvelous modern means of production, and with the minimum of effort. Thus abundance of opportunity for all-around culture and development will be accessible to all. Art will have an undreamed of renaissance. Science will no longer be a slave to death-dealing purposes, but put to living, helpful uses for humanity.

Socialism is inevitable. Capitalist, exploitation forces the workers on the road toward it, and is itself a mighty means of education. But nevertheless, the need is imperative upon all who desire socialism, to do all that they can to educate their fellow workers and to awaken in them a like desire.