When workers are unable to get employment, they are barely able to survive. The state now makes sure that they do survive — just — which at least prevents the streets being blocked by destitute people. This is the pressure upon workers to practise thrift, to put something by for a rainy day, to organise their budget, to accept the rightness of their place on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Put in another way, this is the pressure on the subject class under capitalism to comply with that social system with its private property, its degradation and its insecurity. Most workers view the stigma of their class uncomplainingly, even cheerfully. Most of them regard their exploitation as natural, when in reality it is inhuman and distorting. Day to day, year to year capitalism goes from one crisis to another crisis. And it is the workers, the majority of people in this world, who suffer. As capitalism survives it will continue to cause hardship, anxiety and stress to the working class.
Modern states exist because of the conflict of interests in modern society. This conflict is due to the capitalist ownership of the economic resources of society. The international capitalist class is divided into competing groups endeavouring to secure control of the raw materials, trade routes and markets of the world. The most powerful of these groups use the machinery of the various states as weapons in the struggle.
The solution of the conflict lies not with an ‘amorphous’ people but with a working class organised to emancipate itself, internationally. In the place of capitalism, with its economic chaos and political strife, it will establish a social order based upon the common ownership of the means of life and their democratic control in a class-free community.
Capitalism will always bring problems to the working class. Although the other parties claim to be able to do something about them, experience tells us that these problems are insoluble within capitalism. We live in a social system which is based on the class ownership of the means of wealth, production and distribution. One effect of this is that the wealth we turn out is made, not to satisfy human needs, but to serve the interests of the class who own the means of production.
The interests of that class are in the production of wealth to be sold so as to yield them profit with which their capital can be developed and expanded, and so buttress their privileged position in society. This process takes place through the exploitation of the other class — the working class, who do not own the means of production and who have to sell their labour power in order to live. The lot of this class is one of exploitation and poverty.
Whatever the wealth they consume it is always restricted to what they can afford from their wage. And it is always inferior, sub-standard, made so that it comes within the purchasing power of a wage packet. This is what is meant by working class poverty. At no time under capitalism will the working class have the freedom to enjoy the best that society can produce, and have unrestricted access to it. Yet without that freedom, they must always be said to be living in poverty.
Housing, for example, is a continuing sore which the parties of capitalism cynically aggravate in their drive to pick up votes. Yet inadequate housing afflicts only those who can afford nothing better; it is not a problem experienced by the capitalist class. Medical and social services are also restricted when they are applied to the working class (not that the capitalist class need the attentions of social services; they have their own ready-made version). But the point is that the workers must always rely on the less-than-best, and very often the downright shoddy. Yet they are the class which produce all the world’s wealth; they make the very objects and services to which they are denied access. The outcome of all this is disillusionment and despair. At one election after another, the working class turn to various parties in blind faith that their promises mean something and that somehow capitalism can be made to work in their interests. When these hopes are shattered, there is often a deeper disillusionment, with democracy itself or with the principle of political action to change society. The only reason some governments seem to be more successful than others is that some have the luck to come into office when a depression is lifting. The unlucky ones come in at the start of a depression.
Socialism, in contrast, is the idea of hope. Socialists do not offer themselves as leaders, putting forward a better version of the same old discredited policies. Our case is that the working class can get rid of their problems; to do this they have to abolish capitalism and replace it with a society based on the common ownership of the means of production and distribution. We go further, and say that the working class can and must do this for themselves; no leaders can drag them by the nose into the new society.
Until that is a reality, socialists have no interest in the drab machinations of capitalist politics, except to offer them unremitting hostility and to expose them for the sham they are.
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