Here We Stand

 Recognising that only through socialism, the common ownership and control of the means of producing wealth, can the people be freed from misery, we declare ourselves a socialist party, and undertake to campaign among the people to win them to the need to establish socialism. The Socialist Party is composed of is organised to educate the working-class into the knowledge of socialist principles and to prepare them to co-operate with the workers of all other races, colours and nationalities in the emancipation of labour.

Capitalism rests upon exploitation in the workplace, whether in a factory, mine, bank, office building, in the home, or online. All capitalist societies are marked by a sharp separation between the few who own and the many who must gain access to what the former have, namely society's productive property: land, resources, tools, equipment, machinery. Failure to do so means misery and even death. To get such access, people must sell the one thing they do own, their capacity to work. The advantage here obviously lies with the owners, that is, with the capitalists. This fundamental inequality gives capital the power to compel (exploit) workers to labour for an amount of time that is greater than that which would be required to produce the necessities of life. Employees are therefore paid a wage that will buy enough for them to live and to reproduce, to purchase their subsistence. However, their day's work produces far more output than what workers need, and this surplus, when sold, is the enterprise’s profits. These are used to buy more means of production, and the process repeats itself indefinitely, allowing for ever greater accumulations of capital. Businesses become larger and more concentrated, and they expand geographically until they encompass the world. Power grows from the points of production to every element within the larger society, from media, schools, and cultural institutions to each level of government. And as capital augments itself, it comes to infiltrate all the nooks and crannies of our lives, including our minds.

Capitalism is also based upon expropriation, which means the taking of something without payment. This occurs prior to and coincident with exploitation. For example, the private ownership of property in the means of production that distinguishes capitalism from earlier economic systems, came into being largely through theft of peasant lands, either by capitalists themselves or in league with governments (the State). Rural farmers, who typically engaged in cooperative labour on lands that were considered common and available to all for grazing animals, gathering firewood and plants, hunting, and fishing, even for cultivation, now found that the common parcels had become private property and what had once been a right to use them was now a crime. The early history of Europe is one of rampant, relentless, and brutal land robbery. Peasants deprived of their means of sustenance often had no choice but to become wage workers, providing a pool of desperate "hand" to be exploited. Profits made from them could then be used to finance the expropriation of more territory in a reciprocal process that enriched capital and impoverished labour. 

Another form of expropriation is that of nature. Capital considers the air, water, and soil to be “free” resources to be used and abused, so long as money can be made. The disharmonies created between society and nature, while existent in previous systems of production, rise to entire new levels with capitalism. The profits accumulated by polluting air, soil, and water allow for great accumulations of capital, always built upon the exploitation of labour, which gives rise to more expropriation of the earth. Nature eventually loses its capacity for regeneration, and this requires an intensification, by chemical and mechanical means, of the expropriation. Nature is stolen by capital, so that labor can be further exploited. In addition, land, water, even air, are made into commodities that can be bought and sold, again creating new arenas for accumulation. The social costs of capital's abuse of nature is typically borne by workers and peasants. They live where air pollution is worst, where the soil has been most degraded. They drink contaminated water. Their workplaces and their hunting and fishing grounds are fouled in multiple ways. When floods, hurricanes, and droughts, caused and exacerbated by capitalist-induced global warming, descend upon humanity, those of us with least will suffer the most.  Production methods that could significantly lower global warming will always be rejected if there are more profitable alternatives.

If we are to successfully combat exploitation and expropriation, we must counter all forms of inequality within the working class. The class struggle cannot be effectively waged unless we also reject racism, sexism, nationalism and ecological ruin which are central to capitalism's rule. These must be rejected root and branch, attacked all at once and all the time. If we want a social system, one in which production is democratically controlled by workers and communities, with meaningful work, with sustainable agriculture, with human-centered technology, with equality in all spheres of life, with true, substantive accountability, with pollution removed from our soil, air, and water then we must look at the world as an interconnected whole.