The Trouble with Capitalism.

 

Capitalism is a social system that produces all sorts of contradictions. Tremendous technical advances should mean a better society but inside capitalism, it leads to better ways to maim, kill and destroy. Improvements in the production of food should lead to a happier world but it produces exactly the opposite. 

“According to Marx, capitalism is a system of accumulation. Profits are made but can’t all be consumed by owners. Extra profits need to be recycled through the market. ‘The only way you can successfully recycle them is to either expand your existing business or diversify into another business,’ says Shutt. ‘It all depends on the ultimate consumer, consuming more and more. It has to grow, growth is built in.’ The problem is that as profits are invested into the market, generating more profits that in turn have to be reinvested, production expands until it reaches a level that can no longer be absorbed by consumers. The market is glutted, and recession results. But the destruction of capital and jobs creates pent-up demand for the whole process to begin again in time. That, in brief, is the business cycle.” (www.redpepper.org.uk/Prophet-of-doom)

Banking, hedge funds and the myriad financial off-shoots that make up Wall St and the City of London are central to the running of modern capitalism. They produce nothing of course but then neither does the industrial capitalist class. It is probably a bit unfair to say they produce nothing. They certainly produce nothing useful, but it certainly produces hypocrisy in large doses.  Speed the day when banks and other financial institutes are part of the unlamented history of capitalism along with all its apologists, both religious and secular.

The Party’s pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative predicts millions of socialists preparing “programmes of action for immediate implementation once the movement has gained control of the powers and machinery of governments.”

When today we join the Socialist Party we join the world socialist movement; we withdraw support for capitalism even though we have to live in it for the time being; we take the first few faltering steps towards building the socialist future. A few hundred of us make no impression on the dominance of capitalism; a few thousand of us will begin to make an impression. As our numbers grow we will infiltrate and revolutionise the media, the educational bodies, the workplaces, the arts, cultural, scientific, leisure and other worlds.

The hard part is to get from here to the beginning of there…

  The main thing is that as more of us give up supporting capitalism and start building a socialist world we shall put some flesh on the bones of common ownership, democratic control, production for use and free access.

 

Capitalism’s continued existence does not require a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory. All it requires is the support, or more likely acquiescence, of the overwhelming majority in their own exploitation.

The conflicting interests of sections of the capitalist class do not affect the workers’ interests. They are robbed by the whole capitalist class and the way in which the capitalists divide the spoils between themselves makes no difference whatever to the workers.

The working-class forms the great bulk of society. They produce all wealth. Instead of owning the wealth themselves, they allow the capitalist class to own and market it. Born and educated in a capitalist world, it is hard for them to conceive of any method of distributing wealth other than by exchange.

The capitalist method is ownership of the means of wealth production by the capitalist class; enslavement of the working-class by compelling them to sell their energy for wages, and setting them to the production of commodities to be sold on the world’s markets. It is this method, this system, that causes unemployment and poverty, not the high cost of production and Trade Union restrictions, and the only cure is the removal of the cause; the abolition of capitalism.

All workers organised in the mad competitive struggle for markets, as well as the millions of unemployed should learn the truth about capitalism. They should organise with the Socialist Party for its overthrow, and for the establishment of a system where production and distribution will be carried on for the people by the people themselves.

Class ownership of the means of life is the cause of working-class misery. Substitute ownership by the people, production and distribution by the people—leaving out the cash basis—and unemployment will no longer be the name with which we shall designate the long periods when our labour is not required. Modern methods of production can satisfy all our needs and leave us with ample leisure for enjoyment.