There are the two main features of the production for profit economic system.
Firstly, the labourers on the average replace the value of their wages for the capitalist class in the first few hours of their day's work ; the exchange value of the goods produced in the remaining hours of the day's work constitutes so much embodied labour which is unpaid ; and this unpaid labour is so embodied is divided in the shape of profit, interest and rent, the spoils to be argued over and shared out by the employer, the banker and the land-owner. The surplus value provided out of unpaid labour enables the idle classes and their dependants to live in luxury at the expense of persistent overwork and misery for the producers themselves.
Secondly the other feature is the antagonism between the socialised method of production and the individualised system of exchange. This brings about unmitigated anarchy in the shape of recurring world-wide crises, which throws workers out of work when they are as anxious for employment for their subsistence. The introduction of new technology increases uncertainty of employment.
How to make money is the be-all and end-all of this ruinous system of competitive production for profit. All life is subject to the rule of the market - going, going, gone! Knocked down to the highest bidder. For re-construction and re-organisation of society is what we socialists continually strive for so none shall be able to force others to work for their profit. We say this is a class war. We mean to break down competition, and instead create (or rather enhance) co-operation.
The Revolution is prepared in the womb of society, it needs but one organised effort to give birth to a new world. The first great revolutionary effort of the workers will be to take political power for so long as the capitalist stronghold of the State has not been captured, all proletarian measures will be refused or if conceded, it will be in such a form that they become illusory, and only benefit the capitalist class. When the capitalists are dispossessed of political power, then only will the workers’ party be able to commence their economic expropriation. There will be neither wages nor market prices. Human society will then once more have entered a period of communism.
The whole world has divided into two camps, for or against the social revolution. Between socialism and capitalism there can be no peace, no co-operation, but only class war, till one or other wins. The workers can do away with the capitalist class and can exist without it, because the workers are the producing class. But the capitalist class could not exist without us.
Capitalism has become an obsolete oppressive system that ought to be got rid off. A relatively small minority recognise this and are consciously anti-capitalist, but the majority continue trying to satisfy their needs within the system rather than by overthrowing it. So there is no real possibility of overthrowing that system and attempts to do so degenerate into futile reformism and/or terrorism, whatever the “revolutionary” rhetoric. There is no difference between a Labour Party and a Tory’ Party today – both accept that they must make the system work, and work against us. These days people are rightly cynical about the “policies” and “programmes” of political parties. Leninist ideas are widely discredited. A substantial proportion of the population needs to be drawn into active political struggle and confront questions of what society is and how to get out of its clutches. There is no crisis that the ruling class could not resolve if it was allowed to, but with the masses politically active, the possibility arises of the ruling class not being allowed to recover and of people taking their future into their own hands.
In boom conditions, many workers can expect better jobs, with a higher standard of living and better conditions (relatively). Capitalists can find opportunities for profitable investment with international trade expanding although the different nations and sectional interests are fighting over their share of an expanding “cake” but there is always room for compromise about who benefits more. Nobody is actually asked to accept being worse off than they are already. Reforms may be fought bitterly, but there is scope for reform without shaking the whole system apart.
In a crisis all this is reversed. The cake has gotten smaller and the fight is over who is to bear the loss. Among capitalists the fight is over who is to survive as dog eats dog. The struggle for international markets between nations as well as between individual financial groups intensifies. Between capitalists and workers there is no longer room for compromise. Reforms become impossible and even past concessions will be rolled back as the government and the bosses plaintively explain “We can’t afford any benefits any more”. Within the working class too, there is less unity as people find themselves in “hard times” where it is “everyone for themselves” and search out easy scapegoats to blame for their mounting difficulties.
All that stops the continued expansion of wealth and opportunities is the capitalist system of production for private profit. All that is needed for the unemployed workers to use the idle plant to produce goods that people want and need, is a socialist system of production for use instead of profit.
Fortunately, the confusion on the Left is so great there is at least a chance the existing “Left” movements will disintegrate completely and there will be room for something new and genuinely revolutionary to emerge. We witness the demise of a number of Left parties and mergers and unity of the survivors. The task of building an alternative to the Left is, at present, primarily negative – exposing and undermining their reactionary ideas. But we need to be constructive at the same time, to open the way for a revolutionary movement that is fighting for progress rather than reacting against capitalism, and that is about winning political power to actually implement the social changes it is fighting for, instead of whining about the present rulers of society. If the working class do not form a political party that aims to take power from the old regime then the old regime must continue. It will not just disappear in a burst of anarchist enthusiasm.
It has been said that there can be no blueprints for the future because the people themselves will decide how to build the new society as they are building it, nevertheless, it is appropriate to put forward a few ideas for discussion about what to do to start building socialism. Marxist concepts that sum up important truths from the history of revolutionary struggle seem empty because they have been repeated so often as banalities. If socialists do not propose alternative ways of living that are more desirable and effective than those of the old system, then why should anyone support a revolution? So we need to go beyond denouncing what the existing system is doing and start offering constructive alternatives, even though any such proposals are bound not to be fully worked out in every detail and aspect at this stage. Reformists will make endless proposals as to how the present system should deal with problems and questions of how socialism would cope with these problems will forever crop up.
We cannot always talk about revolution in the abstract.
A large part of the labour force, work for the state at one level or another, directly for the government or as part of a “publically” owned corporations. These are state capitalist industries. They remain capitalist because they still employ labour for making profit by selling goods on the market. The state is responsible for hiring and firing.
Some reformists view this as part of the process that transforms capitalist production for profit into socialised production for use, and wage labour into cooperative labour for the common good. But no matter how much state ownership and “social planning” there may be in a market economy, if production and investment decisions are all regulated by “the market”, they are still basically geared to employing workers to produce goods for sale at a profit on the market. In regards to the labour if the products have to be sold on a market, and there is no market to sell more of that product, then its no good having the government telling a state-owned firm to hire more workers. Those workers might just as well be paid unemployment benefits direct - their services are not required. Labour power is a commodity that is purchased to produce other commodities for sale on the market.
The social revolution perceived by the radical reformists require the transformation of capitalist enterprises into cooperative worker-owned collectives which obviously involves far more than government decrees transferring ownership. It is also assumed that all problems of control would be resolved by decentralisation of authority. After all, the people in charge at the top are seen to be reactionaries, so the more room there is for localised units to determine their own affairs, the more chance there is to adopt more progressive policies. It is imagined that if everybody democratically discusses everything, production units will be able to exchange their products to supply each other’s needs, and to supply consumer goods for the workers, with no more than co-ordination by higher level councils of delegates from the lower level establishments. Actually any attempt to realise that vision would only mean preserving market relations between independent enterprises and not working to a common social plan. The concept has been accused by some critics as being a sort of “parliamentary cretinism of the workplace” - the right to vote can not in itself transform bourgeois social relations into co-operative ones. Most workers expect to have bosses and within co-operatives there would be a tendency to retain or return to the old ways of doing things, with new bosses, in charge (or even back to the same old bosses!). Electing new bosses does not abolish the boss system.
Capitalist enterprises has always been based on production for profit, and nobody actually has much experience in how to run it any other way. Indeed many people allegedly on the “left” seem to be unable to conceive of it being run any other way, and dream of somehow going back to a smaller scale of production, for it to be “more human”. The only real experience we have of socialised labour for the common good has been in a few “community projects” providing voluntary services to the public. Everything else is based on people working for wages under the supervision of bosses to produce commodities for sale on the market. All too often voluntary community projects end up hopelessly inefficient and get entangled in factional disputes about who has the authority, in effect, who has the “ownership”. Then when they go under it reinforces the idea that capitalist production is the only system that can really work.
We should study the positive and negative lessons of the way small scale community projects and co-ops are managed, as well as studying capitalist management of big industry, in order to prepare for transforming the management of industry. The mentality that equates “popular”, “democratic” and “co-operative” with “local” or “community” projects is not just because we want to create some free space within which wage-slaves can manage some of their own affairs. We want to overthrow slavery altogether.
If modern industry is to be run in a fundamentally different way, then essential policy and planning decisions to run it in that different way will have to be taken by some body. Whether they are called the workers council or the factory committee, or the cooperative guild, some body will have to take decisions about the sort of questions currently decided by the managing directors, CEOs and government departments. People will have to take decisions about questions which none of these bodies have the power to decide, since none of them controls the world market, either separately or together, such as in the issue of environment protection. No amount of elections from below or delegates consultations with the masses will change the fact that people will be responsible for the policy decisions in industry and will have to know what is happening. Nor would it change the fact that the appointees are doing the job currently done by capitalists “bosses” and may develop into new bosses themselves (and bosses with wider and more totalitarian powers). This is where only a system of free access that deprives a section of the population of control of goods and services deprives them of the power to control.
The big issues are not decided “on the shop floor”, to use a phrase much loved by advocates of “self management”. Capitalism is already transferring more and more authority on the shop floor to workers themselves rather than supervisors or lower level line management as in so-called team-working. To combat climate change and create renewable sustainable energy sources, global decision-making is needed and we cannot all turn up at world conferences so we require accountable delegates. Socialism is about social control of production, not workers’control. Just saying “the workers will do it” does not solve a thing. Who are these workers who will do it after the revolution, without discussing what they will do, before the revolution? Slogans simply demanding a change in power because it is “more democratic” will get nowhere. The issue of “who decides, who rules” only arises in the context of “what is to be done”. Class conscious and politically conscious workers will be the ones discussing these problems beforehand, and if we do not have any ideas, how can we expect others to?
A socialist revolution has the profound object of abolishing the ownership of wage-slaves by the master-class. A lot of production management has become a fairly routine function which could be readily taken over and transformed by workers’ councils. Workers should have no difficulty rapidly improving productivity over what can be achieved under a basically antagonistic system of “industrial relations” between hostile employers and employees.
The elimination of useless competition would save a lot of trouble, with unified marketing and supply arrangements under socialised planning. As the “market” is abolished, the supply function would become another aspect of production planning, rather than a separate problem of “marketing” and “pricing”. Under capitalism there can be no substitute for the market in an economy based on commodity production. If social production is divided between separate enterprises with antagonistic interests, then they can really only be brought together through market exchange, the best measure of which is money prices. If instead they are brought together by some other form of external coercion, there will inevitably be some misallocation of resources because the quotas set do not exactly correspond to money – the only measure of social needs in a market economy. The socialist solution is to dissolve the antagonism between separate enterprises so that each is directly aiming to meet social needs, rather than responding in its own separate interests. The question of centralisation and decentralisation of enterprise management, is quite a separate question from abolishing commodity production.
Socialism does not imply the restricted range of products available any more than it implies the lower standard of living or longer working hours. There is no reason to anticipate major problems with the replacement of “commerce” by unified supply and marketing arrangements in advanced industrial countries.
If you flipped a switch and tomorrow every place was a co-op, we'd still all be competing with each other, just without bosses. The dizzying possibilities of broad social change that I imagined coming from democratic workplaces all over had been shown to have serious limitations. Even with bosses eliminated from the equation (what Marxists describe as "personifications of capital"), the logic of capitalism remained. Elected workers’ councils in capitalism behave in exactly the same manner as conventional enterprises of having to lay off staff, if there is no market for the goods they produce. Revolutionaries have to raise their sights above the blind workings of economic laws beyond our control because it leaves us, the workers, to enact the conclusions of capital on ourselves. In unprofitable years, if things got bad, we would be forced to fire ourselves, reduce health benefits, or cut our own wages or hours. Certainly we would have more say making those tough calls than if a manager were deciding those things for us and about us. But more say in the operations of capitalism is all that workers cooperatives can offer the working-class.
Worker co-operatives are a shuffling around of the roles that capitalism casts us in, and short-circuits the building of working-class confidence that comes when we confront capital together. Cooperatives in no way challenge capitalist markets, the drive for valorization, or the need to work for wages. I have never heard proponents of worker cooperatives, who believe they can end capitalism, satisfactorily explain how acting as a boss and a worker will challenge capitalist relations, except in the most superficial and rhetorical of ways (i.e. co-ops end hierarchies in the workplace and demonstrate that workers can run things, too).
The task of the Socialist Party is to uproot capitalist psychology from the minds of the workers. Why is the oppressed promised a paradise in the future? So as to blind them to the paradise which the capitalists build for themselves on this earth. It is the task of the Socialist Party to facilitate and to hasten the process of the liberation of the masses from the reformist illusions, to win the working class to the side of the class struggle.
The capitalist system has completely outlived its useful function. It is the system which puts profits above all other considerations. Capitalism offers no future to the people but recessions, wars, violence and a final plunge into barbarism. To avoid such a fate, workers must go into politics on their own account, independent of all capitalist politics to establish a society where the entire world will be united and planned on a socialist basis. This will bring universal peace—and undreamed of abundance for all people everywhere. The real upward march of humanity will begin. The working class can open up the way to this new world. They are the majority. They have the power and all that is necessary is for the working class to understand it—and to use it.
The crisis was world wide in its nature and in its devastating effects, although not uniform in its manifestations in the various countries. Before the economic upturn can be assured it is necessary for capitalism to restore confidence in the continuity of the process of reproduction. And since the realization of surplus-values provides the only inducement to what is popularly called the possibility of profitable investments the necessary steps are taken in that direction. It is accomplished by increasing the rate of exploitation of labour, lowering the cost of production, beginning with a low wage level, extending to the lengthening of working hours and increasing the speed-up of labour and of machine technology. These are among the well known capitalist methods of revival. However, the process could not be set into motion entirely on its own accord. It needed the assistance of state intervention. On the one side were the measures of regulation of industry and finance and on the other the large scale government spending by way of subsidy to corporate enterprise. Freed from restraints employers lost no time in lengthening working hours, slashing wages and speeding up labor and introducing labour-saving technology in order to lower the cost of production. Finance capital has again strengthened its grip on the levers of production and distribution. Profits and dividends are on the rise once more in every field of activity. The main reason for the failure to reduce the number of unemployed is the increased application of new technology and diminishing number of workers employed compared to the total capital investments.
Capitalism has introduced a new form of want, want in the midst of abundance; a new torment of labor, the torment of workers deprived of work while there is an abundance of the means and objectives of working. Despite the so-called prosperity, capitalism is completely incapable of salving the problems of the world. There is the colossal wastage of armaments, and the insanity of national frontiers. Too often people forget the politician’s last lie almost before he invents another.
In socialism, we all shall benefit from the ready service of those who love work for its own sake. Their efforts will go directly to increase the common stock in which all will share.
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