It’s an old theory that the cause of poverty and misery is “too many people.” At first sight this theory might seem to make sense, but what it ignores is that although the population of the world has increased so has its ability to produce. Productivity has increased such that now plenty for all is quite possible—when once the wealth of the world is owned in common so that the motive of production can be used.
Many anti-immigration advocates believe this myth of overpopulation and that Britain is already “overcrowded"; this drives rents up; immigration only makes matters worse. We must point out that it’s quite invalid to treat what is called Britain in isolation. The population and resources of this island are not an independent unit producing for itself in isolation from the rest of the world.
Today the world is one economic unit; all the parts of the world are interdependent. But the political units into which the world is divided tend to obscure this. So if we’re discussing economic problems we can only do so validly by treating the world as a whole. In the division of productive functions in the world some parts concentrate on producing raw materials, others manufactured goods, and others workers. These productive resources are only brought together under capitalism through the workings of the market. Today Britain is one of the parts where there is work and African countries where there is not. The tendency will thus be for workers to migrate from Africa to Britain. Just as if there were a demand for wheat in Germany wheat would tend to go there. This is no fancy example: under capitalism workers are commodities just like wheat, cocoa or coffee.
Many say immigrants should stay “in their own country.” But workers everywhere, save in the legal sense, have no country. The wealth of the world is monopolised by a tiny minority on whom they depend for a living. Workers from the various parts of the world have no opposed interests. They are all in the same economic position: wage and salary workers work for those who own. Their interests are the same: to end the system that degrades them by treating them as mere things.
The Socialist Party doesn’t advocate multi-cultural integration of immigrants into our way of life. What is “our way of life" but working for the wealthy? Socialists aren’t interested in helping the owners get workers who are less used to wage-slavery to adjust, integrate or fit in with capitalism. Socialists suggest that workers everywhere organise to end the way of life capitalism imposes on them.
Nor do Socialists hold much trust in laws to ban discrimination. The power of the State can’t stamp out the prejudices which arise out of the very system it is used to uphold.
It is only in a world where wealth is commonly owned and democratically run by the community in its interest that prejudice and antagonism between peoples will disappear. In a socialist world there won’t be the built-in generators of prejudice there are under capitalism.
In Labour Party left-wing circles nationalisation is still seen as socialism or at least as a step towards socialism. But the Socialist Party view the matter differently. Nationalisation is just a way of running capitalist industry, a form of state capitalism. Nationalisation preserves the right of the former owners to a free income from the unpaid labour of the working class. Only, instead of getting their tribute as dividends and interest on private shares and stocks they get it as interest on government bonds given as compensation. The Stock Exchange is an elaborate market which allows capitalists to switch their money from industry to industry in accordance with the rates of profit. Many shareholders took the chance to use this mechanism: they sold their stock and used the proceeds to buy private shares again. As Marx pointed out the capitalist couldn’t care where his money is invested, in whisky or bibles, as long as he gets his profits. As a matter of fact, some shareholders may not have been too unhappy about the nationalisation as it gave them a chance to get out of a particular.
To the Socialist Party nationalisation has never had any attraction, either as a means or an end. State capitalism is not in the interests of the working class and for this reason we are opposed to it. What we stand for is something different.
Supporters and opponents alike often mistakenly analyse the tendency towards state capitalism as socialist. Indeed, as a result of years of misuse the word “socialism” has now virtually come to mean “state capitalism” for most people. But socialism must be clearly distinguished from State capitalism otherwise the working class will be intervening on the political scene only to support State capital against private capital, just as in the last century they intervened to support the industrial capitalists against the landed aristocracy. Socialism means a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by and in the interests of society as a whole. While state capitalism retains all the features and categories of the capitalist economy – the wages system, commodity production, profits, money, banks socialism abolishes them. Socialism is opposed to both private and state capitalism and alone is in the interests of the working class.
Socialism alone can provide the economic foundation for the full and free development of men and women.
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