Capitalism - Each Against All

 

A few can rise out of their class and become traitors and renegades to their own working people; the mass is going to remain where they are. They can rise when the whole class rises together, to real social power. That’s why Eugene Debs said: “I want to rise with my class, not out of it.”

We are a class-stratified society and are getting more so. And no amount of media talk can disguise this fact. The most fundamental social fact is that the people are divided into classes, and the walls between the classes, instead of growing less, are getting higher. Class barriers are increasing. The picture is becoming clearer and clearer: on the one side, Big Business, property and its CEOs; and, on the other side, labour.

When they talk to you about “unlimited opportunity” for “social mobility” but working people live out their lives on the level at which they happen to be born and that is the bone and gristle of the capitalist class system. It is hard to find the media that tells the truth about capitalism, its exploitation and oppression of the people.

The voice of socialism is clear and distinctive and beyond the reach of effective argument because it speaks always and everywhere for this powerful idea: Without the fight for economic democracy, and without the fight for socialism, there can be no social progress. The question of our times grows clearer: the struggle for socialism or world destruction.

Economic power is political power. Don’t let anybody fool you otherwise. Economic power is direct political power. And the bigger industry gets, the more integrated its technology, and the more interdependent its parts, the more dependent the whole society and its government becomes upon those who own and control that technology. What this means is that, with the growth of big industries and monopolies, corporate share in total power has grown enormously.

Socialism will eliminate exploitation. It will rid the world of inequality, competition, social robbery and the nationalism and imperialism that gives rise to global war. In the absence of world socialism, a planet of human harmony, science and technology is now capable of destroying all mankind. Socialism has now moved from the realm of the possible or probable into the realm of necessity in order to save life itself.

 What better plan has anyone offered anywhere for the ending of capitalist anarchy than the socialist reconstruction of society? Is there any plan that goes to the root of the evil as does that to make the means of production the property of the working people, controlled by them, for the production of the things the world needs, ending the limits set by money and markets?

 

Wolves in Workers' Clothing

 

While the Socialist Party support sound trade union action they have to point out, too, that trade unions, though necessary and useful organs of working-class resistance, cannot emancipate the working class from capitalism—that can be done only by a socialist working class politically organised to take control democratically of the machinery of government, for the purpose of abolishing capitalism and introducing socialism. Equipped with sound socialist knowledge, and the will to unite for victory, the working class will achieve its emancipation, in spite of the confusion and disillusion spread by office-seeking political opportunists.

The occasional reference to socialism from the so-called revolutionary left-wing betrays the historical irony that those who now adopt the terminology of socialist revolution are deeply committed to the maxim of the German reformist, Bernstein, that “the goal is nothing, the movement everything”. For them the goal is everything, the movement is never more than a means to it. They care more for movement than for direction; more for growth than for principle; and more for the tactics of a struggle than for the nature of victory. 

The Socialist Party refuses to sacrifice our socialist goal for reformist demands and as a result, it is labelled utopian. This universal slur from the left is reserved for those clear-sighted workers who enter the historic battle of the classes because they look forward to the fruits of victory and not the ‘reality’ of repeated defeats.

The Socialist Party aims to establish a system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. Those who reject that aim are the idealists, stumbling among the chaos of capitalism, searching for new brick walls to bang their heads against.

It would be extreme arrogance for socialists to devise detailed plans for the lives of emancipated humanity after they have carried out the political act to establish socialism. Like Marx, we are not the designers of a Utopia, but we do not fear prediction and speculation regarding life in a socialist society.

In socialism, a baby will not be destined to accept the label of class. Male or female, black or white, mentally and physically normal or abnormal, it can expect the freedom to develop as a social individual in a world based upon the practice of co-operative equality.

The capitalist-style family will not exist if indeed the family is retained in any form. Certainly, there will no longer be imposed sex roles, indoctrination in the name of education, and repression in the name of discipline. Now, a child must learn to become a wage slave — or, if lucky, a supposedly cultured parasite. In socialism, children will learn from experience over which they will have control.

No society can operate without work, and neither will socialism. Not employment, which is simply the capitalist word for slavery, but useful, self-imposed, creative work. Production in a socialist society will be for use, not profit; with each member of society giving according to his or her ability and taking according to self-determined needs. There will be no wages as a price for a worker’s labour power, nor money as a barrier to the world’s wealth. Free access will be the basis of wealth distribution.

Without the compulsion of wage labour, men and women, if they are able to, will contribute to the tasks of production and distribution. Work will be transformed by socialism; no more dull conditions, no more master-slave relationships, no more shoddy production of cheap commodities, no more need to do one job for life. The aim of work will be the production of the best and the satisfaction of the producer. The latter is an important qualification. There will not be a producer-consumer division in socialism, but satisfactory lifestyles both inside and outside the production process.

A Socialist society will be a political and economic democracy. Everyone will own everything' since private property will not exist. Does that mean we shall have the right to take each other’s coats? No: it means that men and women will use what they need, sometimes permanently as in the case of a coat, sometimes temporarily as in the case of a library book. There will be no rights of property. If someone takes another’s coat — either by accident or because they are acting irrationally — then there will be free access to as many new coats as are needed. Economic democracy will mean that decisions about production and distribution will be made socially, either by the whole of society — which would be no problem even today, with current methods of world communication — or by those involved in the processes, if society is prepared to leave the decision to them. We do not aim to replace the present capitalist elite with a new bureaucratic elite. The socialist revolution will be a permanent revolution in the sense that once enacted, people would have to participate in running society.

Free mobility will be available for everyone in a socialist society. Today, workers are born and they die in one country, usually without travelling far out of its borders. No boundaries, nations or provinces will divide socialist society. The world will be one. That is not to say that we aim to create a monolith, devoid of cultural, language and other variations.

Social organisation in socialism will not depend upon governments, leaders or parties. These only exist in a class society, where laws are the expression of the ruling class's interest. When the socialist working class take power, they will use the law to dismantle capitalism and build socialism. Once that has been done, there will be no laws created by one section of society in order to control another.

Just as there will be no secular laws, so there will be no laws of the phoney creation of primitive man - god. Socialist society will have no need for religions and utopias beyond the grave. What if a minority within socialism want to continue their religious lifestyle? Then they shall be free to do so, and those who want to walk across the Red Sea or jump from a high building without a parachute may do so too.

The morals of socialism will be fashioned by common ownership and free access, and by the sovereignty of democratic decisions. Taboos about sex will be as laughable as taboos about witchcraft are today. To those conditioned by the popular prejudices of capitalism, socialism seems amoral. In truth, it will be a society which will reflect human urges — the imagination and the self-interest of humanity.

“An injury to one is an injury to all.”

 

Mutual aid is basic to human nature.  Most of us think that no one goes without food, healthcare, or housing. Human beings are born compassionate. Altruism and charity are strong traits that build communities,

There is only one world. The capitalist economy is truly global. Economic booms and slumps spill over national borders and ripple around the globe in synchronous waves. So do revolutions. Working people  must unite across borders to defend their common interests. Despite language barriers and cultural differences, our similarities are overwhelming.  Our lives are remarkably alike. National borders exist to maximize profits. Jobs are allowed to migrate to cheaper locations, while the people who work those jobs are blocked from re-locating to higher-paid regions.

The accepted solutions to these problems is generally posed as either free trade or protectionism. However, both policies benefit the capitalist class. Protectionist policies shield weaker industries from global competition, while free-trade policies enable stronger industries to penetrate foreign markets. A more effective strategy is  for workers to defend all jobs as if these borders did not exist. he solution is to include all workers in an industry into unions that do not stop at national borders and to demand wage parity across the globe. This is a pro-worker antidote to the divide-and-rule profit policies of employers. One union long ago recognised this - the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies.

While many capitalists promote the mobility of capital to cross frontiers for free trade, few support opening borders to the free movement of workers. Demarcated national borders control and to divide the working class. In all nations, forcing native-born and foreign-born workers to compete makes it easier to exploit both groups. The result is rising inequality within nations and between them. National divisions are maintained by racism, the myth that the people on one side of a border are fundamentally different from those on the other side.

The way humanity is divided by nationalism and sovereign nation-states prevents people from working together to solve their common problems such as climate change and pandemics. Competing nations can never solve international problems like war, environmental pollution, and global warming. In a world without borders, people could solve these problems. Because capitalists can never have enough profit, they continually push to expand their control into other nations. This inevitably leads to war, and the victors redraw the borders to consolidate their conquests.

While goods and services cross borders with minimal restrictions, the workers who create these goods and services are denied the same right. Borders allow corporations to move production to lower-waged countries. The same borders prevents workers from migrating to higher-waged countries. The answer is uniting to improve life on both sides of the border. The division of the world into nations conflicts with an international economy where parts are produced in one nation and assembled in another, where the finished product may be sold in a third nation, serviced by workers in a fourth nation, and dumped as garbage in a fifth nation.

Most people do not want to leave their homes and families; they migrate to survive. Abolishing national borders would enable us to raise global living standards, because goods and services developed anywhere could be made available to everyone, everywhere, and because the vast resources that are currently devoted to policing borders and waging wars could be used instead to meet human needs. The benefits of world socialism will be so great that our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed ourselves to be divided for so long.  Enough is enough. It’s time to end the division of humanity into have-lots and have-nots. However, capitalism is not about sharing.

The work that we do each day should provide for human needs: feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, treating the sick, and raising living standards. Instead, the surplus-value  produced by working people is confiscated by the bosses to accumulate capital to support the profit system that deprives the majority of what they need.

By standing together, we can claim the abundance that rightfully belongs to all. That is the Socialist Party message to all to hear.  Our planet can produce more than enough to meet everyone’s needs. The myth of scarcity has one purpose: to justify not sharing the social wealth. There is no evidence that society cannot meet human needs. On the contrary, the resources spent on war alone could provide everyone in the world with a good life. The myth of scarcity is used to dismiss the possibility of a world of plenty for all and instead legitimize fabulous wealth for a few and falling living standards for the rest of us. The myth of scarcity is necessary to reconcile the obscenity of growing wealth alongside growing poverty regardless of the incredible potential of technology and robotics. 

Socialism is no pipe dream

 Under capitalism, ownership of the means of production is effectively restricted to a tiny segment of the population—the capitalist class. The vast majority of the population—the working class—have no means by which to make a living save by selling their labour-power to a capitalist (or the state). Labour-power is bought and sold on a labour market; it is in fact a commodity.  On the job, workers are told what to produce and are driven to produce as much as possible. Unless pressured by a strike, the capitalists will do little or nothing to improve working conditions, not even those relating to workers’ health and safety. Even if some capitalists were to take a more charitable attitude, none of this would change because of the competitive pressure of the market. If a corporate board or a particular capitalist enterprise was to become benevolent and voluntarily increase workers’ wages and improve working conditions, this would necessarily entail reductions in profits. The company in question would be unable to compete successfully. It would lose its share of the market for its product, as other companies could and would sell for less. The price of such benevolence would be eventual bankruptcy. Under capitalism, nice guys do finish last. The fact is that private possession of the means of production inevitably results in exploitation.

Capitalists only employ workers when they can be reasonably assured that the value of the workers’ product at every stage of production will exceed the value of the workers’ wages, creating what Marxists call “surplus value.” In other words, all capitalist production is premised upon exploitation, upon paying workers far less in wages than the value of what they produce. Consequently, to argue that exploitation is “contrary” to capitalist ownership is ludicrous.

The Socialist Party advocate a cooperative commonwealth of labour, free of exploitation and oppression. Socialism is no pipe dream. It does not seek to end exploitation and oppression by appealing to the oppressor class to be more benevolent, but by organising to overthrow that class. It does not base its vision on idealistic premises but on concrete facts. It boldly proclaims that capitalist/state ownership of the industries and exploitation of the working class is the root of workers’ misery; that the means to provide material abundance for all, at a fraction of the work time presently required, objectively exists but cannot be realised due to this capitalist/state ownership. For the workers of the world, the choice is clear: The Socialist Party offers the potential to end human suffering.

The Socialist Party reasserts that the global class struggle is a fact, that the working and ruling classes of the world have nothing in common, and that every attempt to prevent the working classes of the world from uniting in their own interests requires the unqualified condemnation of all those who profess to speak in the interests of labour, regardless of their assertions and pretences to the contrary. For that reason, the Socialist Party reaffirms its commitment to the principle that unrestricted emigration and mobility of workers from one country to another is a human right, and that every attempt to limit, control or manipulate the working classes of the world in the free exercise of that right is meant to serve the interests of the ruling classes of the world and also requires the unqualified condemnation of all those who profess to speak in the interests of labour.

Capitalism with its private ownership of the economy and exploitation of wage labour is responsible for economic hardship and insecurity for all workers; that it compels workers for economic reasons to leave their home countries and seek employment elsewhere; that immigration laws, whether promoted by so-called liberals or conservatives, only serve to benefit the capitalist class. The Socialist Party extends a fraternal hand of welcome to all immigrant workers and invites them to join in our efforts to abolish capitalism and establish the free and democratic socialist society of free and emancipated working people throughout the world.

In answer to the many inquiries we receive about the differences between the Socialist Party and other political organisations describing themselves as socialist, we offer the following:

These organisations have two common denominators, both of which differentiate them from ourselves in the Socialist Party.

The first denominator is their common acceptance of the validity and desirability of reforms. Thus, although all of them maintain that some kind of “socialism” is their objective, the realization of socialism is not considered possible for an indefinite period in the future. For the present, they say, the thing to do is to work for social reform, i.e., measures that will allegedly alleviate the suffering of the workers.  Some attempt to disguise their reform platform as “partial steps” or “transitional measures.” They’re still reforms. The Socialist Party makes clear that it is the duty of a bona fide party of socialism always to hold the issue of the abolition of wage slavery up before the workers as our priority, and to expose reforms as delusions where they have not concealed measures of reaction.

The second common denominator of the parties claiming to be “socialist” is that their concept of socialism is one in which industry is nationalised and directed by the State. We in the Socialist Party agree with Marx when he said that “the existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.” Whenever the state assumes ownership or control of a business, all that really happens is that the workers, who remain wage slaves, exchange one master, the private capitalists, for another, the government bureaucrat. This definitely is not socialism. In contrast to the “radical” reformist parties, the Socialist Party calls for the abolition of the political state. Only when the means of production are owned socially and administered democratically by the workers will we have genuine socialism.

 For the reasons stated, the Socialist Party has nothing in common with the Left. However, the best way to compare the differences is to study carefully the history, the literature, the policies and the objectives of those with the socialist label.

Unite for Socialism

 

There’s no doubt that capitalism has improved material conditions in general and raised the standard of living for many people throughout the world. The point, though, is that it has also produced distinctive problems of a kind that never existed before, even in more prosperous economies. The basic principle of the capitalist system is the isolation of individuals and their naked exposure to market imperatives. It means eliminating everything that stands between people and dependence on the market, everything that makes them autonomous from the market. And when social life is driven by market imperatives, it’s also subject to the cycles and crises of the market. For example, dispossessed workers, who depend on selling their labor-power for a wage, have nothing to fall back on when the market doesn’t need them. It’s not hard to see how capitalism has created new social problems, and right from the beginning, the state has had to deal with them. From the earliest days of capitalism, the state has had to deal with growing numbers of dispossessed people, people with no property, no access to the means of subsistence, no customary rights, no social or communal supports. The state has had to deal with them not just out of humanitarian concern but out of fear of social disorder, even social disintegration. We see the destruction of communal networks — village communities, and so on — which traditionally gave people some kind of support in times of need. In the earliest days of capitalism, in England for instance, this meant among other things the loss of customary rights to the use of common land, in the famous process of enclosure. It also meant a change in communal values and changes in the way the law was applied. It meant new legal definitions of property in which any traditional commitment to a basic right of subsistence was replaced by the imperatives of profit. As capitalism developed into its industrial form, there were also measures, like changes in the system of relief for the poor, designed to uproot people from their local communities, to increase the mobility of labour.  It means the privatization of just about everything. It means what some people have called a whole new process of enclosure. In agricultural economies, for instance, it can mean outright dispossession of small landholders, or it can mean the imposition of economic policies that force producers to abandon strategies of self-sufficiency in favor of export-oriented strategies, the production of single cash crops, and so on. It also means, as it did in the early days of capitalism, the break up of various social networks which people have relied on for support.

 But even the most neo-liberal laissez-faire have needed at least a minimum safety net. If nothing else, they have to maintain a reserve army of workers, keeping them alive through moments in the economic cycle when they’re not needed so that they’re available when capital does need them. From the beginning of capitalism, the state has had to step in just to maintain social order or even to prevent revolution.  The threat of revolution, the threat of social disintegration in the long years of depression, and so on. Those threats, of course, led to the modern welfare state  committed to some kind of provision for various social needs, like health care or housing, which the capitalist market doesn’t supply, or at least not in ways that are affordable for everyone. There are still societies where even that minimal provision is still an aspiration and not a reality. Today reformists  have retreated from the welfare state. Even Scandinavian countries have been in retreat. Even the most secure gains, like universal education or old-age pensions or public health care systems like Britain’s National Health Service, have been subject to pressures for privatisation and so-called market choice.

 

Provision of social services is precarious not just because of changing political fashions but for a more fundamental reason, and that’s because it’s in constant tension with the imperative of capitalism, the power of the market.  Capitalism has throughout meant, and still means, the degradation  of vast numbers of the men and women who exist under its social system. In the greatest and richest of countries and  cities people pass their lives in wretchedness and misery. The revolts  against intolerable suffering almost invariably failed to secure improved conditions, or, where accidental success was achieved, it meant only that the victors placed the vanquished under the yoke from which they had freed themselves.  Capitalism has shown itself to be not only injurious to the vast majority of individuals, but a definite obstacle to the advance of mankind. The problems of life which now, manifestly, lie immediately ahead of us, cannot possibly be solved so long as we  bow down before the fetishism of money, and imagine that to produce articles of exchange for profit is the highest end and aim of mankind in society.

When all, peoples had reached the understanding of socialism and  embraced the ideas of the  cooperative commonwealth of all, can humanity  attain a higher communal life and fraternal interconnection. Every step will be in the direction of the co-operative commonwealth. Since there is no difficulty whatever in creating wealth far in excess of our requirements, by the scientific organisation and application of the light labour of all to the satisfaction of our social needs, then the  motto, “From each according to ability, to each according to needs,” ceases to be Utopian and becomes a reality.

For such delights in life as we can now foresee to be possibly attainable for all has never yet been experienced, even by the fortunate few. When the beauties and bounties of nature  can be entered upon and enjoyed with none of the degrading drawbacks due to the dire poverty; when work is but the useful and pleasing expression of zeal for the community and regard for the individual, toil and exhaustion being wholly unknown; when, throughout the longer, fuller and more active life which mankind will then be heirs to, the minds of all will be more completely cultivated than those of the most gifted have ever yet been.