In Marxist analysis, capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers through wage labour. Capitalism, as Karl Marx pointed out long ago, separated the producer from his or her tools. The owner of the tools (factories, machinery, transport, etc.) buys labour power (or hires workers, as we would say) to operate them. The more they produce, the higher his profit. When it is not profitable to produce, he lays off the workers. Under capitalism, labour is never paid enough to buy back all that is produced. If it were, the capitalist would not retain a margin of profit, since it is the difference between what is paid to labor and what the capitalist receives for his products that determines his profit.
Once the workers have introduced a socialist system of production, then more production will mean more for everybody. The more we produce, the more we would eat. The more backlog of products we would have, the less we would work until we had used them up. This will be so because socialism will wipe out the distinction between the owners of the machine and the users of the machine. The working class will become the owners AND operators. The separation between the worker and the means of production introduced by capitalism will be ended by socialism. Until such a socialist system prevails, wage labor will remain a commodity to be bought on the market by capital. The wages of labor will continue to be determined by the cost of living. It must therefore be the aim of labor to fight for higher wage rates and a shorter work week and let the capitalists worry about production. As with any commodity, the value of labor power is based on the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the worker’s maintenance and reproduction. This cost must be covered by the workers’ wage. Thus the wage is not an individual payment; it also has to maintain all family members who do not work. This value is not just the bare minimum needed for physical survival. To repeat, then, productive labor under capitalism is labor that produces surplus-value for a capitalist. To produce surplus-value, workers must sell their labor-power to a capitalist.
The aim of the Socialist Party is the abolition of class rule and class conflict, with all their evil consequences, and the development of a society in which the few shall no longer be able to enjoy luxury and ease at the expense of overwork, want, and insecurity for the majority. This is today a practicable idea. So great have science and technology increased our productive capacity that an abundance of all the good things of life for the whole population could be produced without subjecting any person to drudgery or exhausting toil. The continued existence of poverty can be overcome.
To assure plenty, security, leisure, and freedom for all, it is necessary that the existing property system, the existing forms of economic control and distribution of wealth, be changed. Property institutions are the creatures of law. By law they have been changed in ages past, and by law they can and must be changed in the years to come.
The Socialist Party does not condemn personal possessions. It condemns the private ownership of the socially necessary means of production, under which the workers are employed only on such terms as assure and unearned income to the owners and are thrown into unemployment whenever the owners cannot profit by their labour. Only by the common ownership and democratic control of such productive wealth, doing away with exploitation and making the satisfaction of human wants the ruling motive in production, can the ideal of a class-free society be realised. The interest of the wage-working class demands this change.
The choice before us is either to permit the uncontrolled development of capitalism to concentrate all power further into the hands of an oligarchy and reduce working people to abject servitude, or to assert the right and duty of the people to control and remodel its economic life.
The first principle of the Socialist Party is the wholehearted dedication to democracy. No dictatorship, whatever its avowed purpose, can be trusted to bring liberty, plenty, and peace. The institutions of political democracy must be defended. The appeal to insurrection must be repudiated. It is unnecessary and unjustifiable in any country where the orderly and peaceful methods of democracy are available,
In the name of freedom, in the name of honesty, in the name of civilisation itself, for the good of those now alive and of the future generations yet unborn, we call upon the workers of the world to join us in winning the good new world which is within our reach.
No comments:
Post a Comment