Capitalism: Social Disorder

It is impossible to discuss any important political problem of our time, let alone take a part in resolving it, without a clear understanding of what socialism really signifies. It is just as impossible to get such an understanding from the writings and speeches of capitalists, their statesmen, politicians, hangers-on, apologists, or any other beneficiaries of their rule. The true social significance of socialism escapes them because they precisely are prevented from doing by their own social interests and prejudices. Whoever does not know the real relationships between the social system of capitalism and the social system of socialism, may well be ever so intelligent in fields like physics or but in the most important field of social knowledge, he or she is helpless.

Working people are free when they do not serve as a means of achieving the goals of the ruling class but, instead, are themselves the chief goal of society, the object of all its plans and production. Where there is the abolition of exploitation, of hunger and of poverty. Socialism begins with the interests of the individual— not just the chosen few but all working people. There is not a single popular movement anywhere in the world that proclaims its allegiance to capitalism. The most that capitalism can expect from the people nowadays is not support but cynical tolerance, as a lesser evil compared with the alternative of universal anger, disillusionment, bitterness, hostility and open warfare directed against it. Capitalism has never able to solve a social problem.

A socialist looks upon the social system not as stationary but as constantly in motion. Evolution prepares the way for revolution; revolution is only a part of the evolutionary process. The social system is made up of a net of social relations, the most decisive of which are the economic, that is, those productive relations which result in the satisfaction of our basic needs, food, clothing, shelter. The struggle for life becomes the struggle for the means of life, which more and more becomes a struggle for the means of production of the necessities of life. Here we have the basic factor of all society, the forces of production.

While production is a social act, the appropriation of the product, under the present system, is individual. Under capitalism thousands of workers co-operate in the production of a single article, yet the article does not belong to them but to the owner of the means of production. The workers are merely paid wages for the use of their labour power. Simultaneously the owner of the industries becomes progressively more divorced from the productive process. As small partnerships become big corporations or are driven out of business by the monopolies, the original entrepreneurs become mere rentiers, share dividend collectors. The corporation also develops, becomes more and more a public utility. The state begins to take a hand, and to run the industry. The former individual owner now becomes a purely parasitic hanger-on, his dividends paid regularly by the state apparatus which he controls in the form of government bonds. Within the factory a rigid hierarchical dictatorship, where the dead machine rules over living labour, where the person is transformed into a cog of the machine, where work becomes wage-slavery. Outside the factory dictatorship is replaced by economic chaos, mankind ruled by prices which it cannot control, where the wild forces of the market make people the victim. Even in “prosperity” the life of the worker is not a very happy one. It is only through the hectic fluctuations of supply and demand, it is only through the frantic rush of “successes” and bankruptcies that society “decides” and “plans” the production of social wealth.

Capitalism is tremendously wasteful and destructive of men, goods, power, land. The ultimate destiny of all useful goods is to be consumed. Yet under capitalism goods are not produced to be consumed, but for profit, and if a greater profit can be made by destroying the goods, the destruction takes place. Imagine a farmer who will plough under his crops while millions are starving and in want simply to maintain its market price. Here it becomes crystal clear how capitalism throttles the productive forces and how, if mankind is to develop and to grow, capitalism must be wiped out. At a time when millions are starving we must watch mountains of the necessities of life deliberately destroyed. Can a crazier system possibly be imagined? What is the way out of these contradictions and who is to show the way? Capitalism creates such a tangle of contradictions and conflicts as to be absolutely insoluble. The capitalists and their political servants in the seats of government are blinded by their self interest, by the profits which they make as beneficiaries of the present system. The ideas of the ruling class will always be along the line of protecting their private property and their right to exploit their workers. The socialists see that nothing can free society from its convulsions except the change in the mode of production from a capitalist one, of private ownership of the means of production, to one where the means of production are socialised and classes are no more. The capitalist class and the working class hold opposing interests. Who, then, can provide the way out? Certainly, it is clear that it is not the capitalist class. It is, us, the working class, who bear the full weight of capitalism upon our backs. As workers we fight against the increasingly worsening conditions imposed upon us and we come to the realisation that the only way out is to take what we have produced. To take over the means of production, the mines, mills, factories, resources, utilities and run them for our own benefit. Then we will have production for use and not for profit. Then we will end both despotism in the factory and anarchy in the market. Then society will administer and allocate its resources according to a social plan that will benefit all. The capitalists want to keep the old relations of exploitation. They resist the rise of the workers' power but our victory cannot be forever delayed. The Socialist Party will continue to push forward to where humanity will have reached a rational system of society, no longer choked by out-dated redundant social relations and where society will be a free one and mankind emancipated.