The Power of the Workers

The parasitic ruling class have always spread the idea that they are indispensable. The more useless they have become, the more adamant they try to impress this illusion upon workers’ minds. “How lucky you are to have us on your backs to direct you. You couldn’t get along without us.” The capitalists, contend, in order to justify their existence, that they alone are competent to rule the state and control industry. The capitalists, of course, try to present their rule and their system of exploitation as eternal. Their lackeys maintain that workers possess a slave-mentality by nature and therefore cannot be permitted commanding positions in political and economic life or in military matters, without overturning the foundations of civilisation. The capitalist rulers try in every way to keep the workers down and to lessen their self-confidence. They want to prevent the workers from understanding their own organised power and from developing their capacities as a class to reorganise the world. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true.

Many years ago workers were told they couldn’t build their own trade unions and administer them. Nevertheless the workers went ahead and created powerful unions.

In reality, the employers and investors live on the toil and produce of the working class and couldn’t exist without them. But to keep the wage-slaves in submission and uphold their system of exploitation, the master class are forced to twist the real state of affairs into its opposite. The capitalists possess their present power, property rights, and privileges as a result of long outgrown historical conditions. This class no longer performs any essential functions in modern society, any more than the appendix performs any useful function in the human body. Today the capitalist class, like a diseased appendix, imperils the very existence of humanity. Society does not depend today upon the capitalist exploiters but upon the working people they oppress. If every share-owner and stock-holder in General Motors were to disappear tomorrow, the workers on the assembly lines could still continue to build cars.

 A worker who now operates a lathe can direct a machine-shop tomorrow and an entire industry the day after. This has been done under capitalism by a few individual workers who climb higher in the career ladder become bosses themselves. What is done by isolated individuals under capitalism can and will be done collectively by the mass of organised workers in socialism, who will collectively own, organise and run industry by means of democratic committees. They will then produce not for the enrichment of a few but for the enjoyment of all. Let our fellow-workers take power and they will learn the art and technique of administration. And they will make social advances that capitalism never dreams of.

In the face of growing hardships and increasing attacks on workers in the factories, mines and fields, and in every sphere of society, growing numbers are taking action and taking matters into their own hands to fight back against the owning class of capitalists that rules. Despite the attempts of the parasites to divide and derail the workers’ movement, it continues to move forward and through many battles to grow ever more potent.

Capitalist society is based on the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class and that all the evils of this society arise from that. But more than that, it shows that throughout history society has been propelled forward through various historical stages by the struggle of the oppressed classes, and that in this era it is the carrying through of the working class struggle, to overthrow and eliminate capitalism, that alone can move society forward. And further it explains how the working class in abolishing capitalism will put an end to the division of society into classes and bring about a completely new era in human history – socialism – where mankind as a whole, through it cooperative efforts and conscious planning, can harness society’s productive forces to advance to heights undreamed of in the past. The movement of the working class is growing and gaining in strength and solidarity.

Throughout society the capitalists are mounting their attacks, cutting funds for education, health, housing and other vital needs of the people, which are sacrificed more and more for the capitalists’ need for profit. And along with all this they practice and promote discrimination and try to divert the anger and militancy of the masses of people against each other–and away from the capitalists themselves. Not content by just by robbing the workers in one country, the capitalists are locked in fierce battle with their foreign rivals around the world in their efforts to exploit all working people around the world, bringing suffering to hundreds of millions of people–all to feed the never satisfied profit-hunger of the capitalists. 

There is only one way that all the suffering caused by capitalism can be finally ended–by wiping out its source, capitalism. And there is only one force in society that can bring this about–the working class. This is the aim of the Socialist Party, not to win whatever concessions which can be achieved, but to build the strength and unity of the working class for the day when it will overthrow the capitalists altogether. There is only one political party in this country that is determined to fight together with the working class for the end of capitalism and the complete emancipation of the working class. This is the Socialist Party, which openly declares that it represents only the working class and seeks, as the highest interest of the working class, the overthrow and elimination of capitalism by the working class itself.