The Socialist's Task

We live in a world in which many people recognise that things have gone terribly wrong. For socialists, the central feature about the ownership of wealth is that it gives the capitalist not only unearned income, but control over the whole productive system. The fact that some workers own their homes, a car and a few other assets in no way alters this monopoly of the means of production. Capitalism remains a system for pursuing profits and limitless accumulation, amidst wage-labour. The faults of capitalism are endemic, built in — and so to target them, an opposition must challenge the system as a whole. Piecemeal social reform is useless against a structure sustained by competitive inequality. Many in the workers’ and environment movement possess anti-establishment politics, but do not consciously wish to overthrow capitalism itself. They fail to understand the nature of the system they oppose and the sorts of social revolution necessary to radically change it. They view capitalism not as the system that runs our lives, but merely as a set of policies pursued by the elite currently at the top. We have to understand capitalism if we want to have a better world.

Marx’s account of capitalism provides an account of the growth of economic inequality. The fundamental tendency for inequality to increase under capitalism is built into the exploitative structure of the capital-labour relation. Effectively separated from means of production and consumption, the mass of wage workers are forced to sell their ability to work (labour-power) to those who own productive capital. Capitalists consume labour-power by compelling workers to toil in excess of the time needed to reproduce the value of their wages. This unpaid surplus-labour — surplus-value — is the source of profits under capitalism, creating the structural inequality in incomes between capitalists and labour. As competition among capitalists produces the concentration and centralisation of capital, increasing mechanisation, and a reserve army of unemployed (and underemployed) workers, the capitalist class becomes numerically smaller while appropriating even larger portions of total social product. The necessary tendencies towards periodic crises of profitability, rooted in increasing capitalisation of production, lead to even greater inequalities as capital becomes centralised into even fewer hands through waves of bankruptcies of inefficient firms; and the workers’ share of total output is reduced through wage cuts, speed-ups and the like. The dynamics of capitalist accumulation necessarily produce growing inequality.

George Orwell noted in A Road to Wigan Pier “genuinely revolutionary socialism” would have no chance of reversing the tide unless its supporters put aside their factionalism, ceased using jargon that few people could understand, and mobilised around propaganda stressing justice, liberty, and the plight of the unemployed. To win mass support, he wrote, “All that is needed is to hammer two facts into the public consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.” 

To bring home to the mass of workers the true facts of the situation will be a formidable but vital task for the Socialist Party.