The world needs socialism

The future of the working class in Britain is unavoidably bound up with the workers of the world as a whole. Only if we wage war against capitalism on the basis of being part of the international working class will we achieve victory over our oppressors. Central to the capitalist economic system is the exploitation of workers by capitalists. The means of production – raw materials, machinery, buildings, transport, etc. are owned and controlled by a small minority of capitalists. This means that the people, the working class, have no choice except to work for capitalist employers so as to earn a money wage to buy the goods and services, the commodities, necessary for them to survive. On the face of things this relationship between capitalist and worker seems to be a fair and equal one: the worker agrees to do so many hours work for the capitalist and in return the capitalist agrees to pay a certain amount of money in wages. In reality this relationship is an unequal and exploitative one because the wages paid to the worker are less than the value of what he or she produces. The difference between the value of what workers produce and what they receive in wages constitutes the profits of the capitalist employer. Massive exploitation of the working class is an integral part of the capitalist economic system and will persist for as long as does capitalism.

Not only do capitalist exploit workers but the system operates in such a way that capitalists constantly have to try to exploit workers even more. Different capitalists producing the same kind of commodity are competing with one another in the market to sell their products. Failure to sell the commodities produced by his firm means bankruptcy and ruin for a capitalist and the main way of ensuring steady sales is to offer given commodities on the market at a price below that charged by other capitalists. If a capitalist is to reduce his prices without reducing his profits then one way is to increase the hours of work of his employees without paying them any more wages. Sometimes employers get away with this move (for example, paid tea breaks and cleaning-up time being abolished), but where many workers are organised in trade unions, it is not easy for capitalists to force workers to accept such an increase in the degree to which they are exploited. Another ploy is to speed up the rate of work, increase its intensity, and thus reduce the cost per item by forcing the workforce to produce more commodities in the same time as before. In the car industry this generally takes the form of speeding up the rate at which the production assembly line moves. Again, this does happen but in a given type of production there is usually a very definite limit to which the pace of work can be increased and anyway workers are likely to resist such a move.

It is important to realise that capitalists are not always looking for ways to increase the degree of exploitation of workers because they, the capitalists, are inherently greedy but that they do this because of the way in which the capitalist economy operates leaves them with no choice if they are to stay in business. Similarly, if workers are not to be worked to death and totally impoverished then they have no choice except to take a common stand together against capitalist employers so as to resist employers’ attempts to exploit them even more. This is done by forming trade unions to defend wage levels and working conditions. Even so it is obvious, especially with the onset of the present economic depression, that trade unions only have a very limited capacity to defend the living standards and working conditions of the working class. While trade unions are a necessary means of defence of the working class against the capitalist class it is also the case that they pose no fundamental challenge to the whole capitalist system. Trade unions do not challenge the right of capitalists to exploit workers but only the degree to which this takes place. Even the most militant trade union struggles, involving workplace occupations and clashes with the police, pose no fundamental challenge to the dominant position of the capitalist class. Capitalism has produced a vast number of ulcers on the body economic and politic. Government tries to deal with each of them separately and by itself. The more, however, they go on trying to remove theses evils by palliative measures, the more does it becomes clear that they can only be abolished by the abolition of capitalism itself.

The justification for palliative measures lies in the fact that they make it easier for the workers to organise themselves and enlighten themselves about the real meaning of capitalism and the part that they are forced to play under it, and show the thinking worker how futile it is to dream of reforming capitalism. They furnish besides that a rallying ground for those workers who cannot see beyond their own nose. A real danger, however, arises when people try to persuade the workers as well as themselves that socialism only means the sum of a number of such petty legislations and regulations. By that means socialism gets the credit for measures which are in all but the name measures for defending capitalism against socialism and all the disadvantages which arise from that fact are written down to the discredit of socialism.

The Socialist Party’s task is to point out how inadequate all such reforms must be to remove the evils from which the workers were suffering and impress upon them with the need for the abolition of production for profit. When our organisation talk about the inevitability of socialism we assume that the workers will continue to struggle. Were they to sit down tamely and wait till socialism came to them, they would soon become mere slaves. Socialism can only come when workers, both politically and economically, grow class conscious and so well-organised as to make their exploitation impossible That is what we understand by Social Revolution, and our ideal – that of human liberation.