We live in an age of crises. Their causes seem complex and
diverse and indeed they are, but
capitalism’s contradiction between human needs and the needs of capital
leads us to self-destruction. Britain’s best-known economists Adam Smith made
the following observation about the capitalist model that ruled the world
throughout modern history:
“All for ourselves,
and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been
the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
A century later Britain’s next best known economist, Keynes
said:
“Capitalism is the
astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of
things for the greatest good of everyone.”
Today, Britain is the fifth richest country in the world and
we have the obscenity that every major city and town possesses a food bank to
help the poor. Capitalism has been around
for centuries, and it’s still as monstrous today as it was when the popular
anthem Jerusalem refers to “dark satanic mills.”
Capitalism has looted and or wrecked nearly every advance
civilisation made. The stranglehold pro-capitalists have on economic thinking
must be opposed and overcome. Almost everything that’s wrong in the world is
wrong because of capitalism. It must go. Many have pointed to numerous events
in the twentieth century as the beginning of the end, but capitalism has proven
more resilient than they anticipated. It has stubbornly refused to die; it must
be killed.
The word “revolution” automatically conjures up images of
The American Revolutionary War. But as
the writer Dmitry Orlov points out; “The American Revolution wasn’t a revolution
at all because the slave-owning, genocidal sponsors of international piracy
remained in power under the new administration.” In the end, after all the bodies had been
buried, King George was out, President George was in, and it was business as
usual among the wealthy upper crust, their underlings, and the slaves. An actual revolution requires a change in
ideology. The main change here was in
the profit margins. No more pesky taxes
to pay to the British Crown. This was no
revolution. More like just a revolt
against upper management.
Today’s multi-national slave-owners know no borders. There
are just two classes — slave-owners and slave laborers. Ethnicity, nationality, and religion perform
no function other than to distract the minions of slaves, playing them against
each other, lest they notice their owners behind the curtain, pulling the
levers and controlling media misinformation while playing patriotic songs,
maintaining a constant state of warfare. Zbigniew Brezinski, once a top US
statesman, described the situation concisely and accurately:
“People, governments,
and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and
corporations.” Emphasis on “must”.
Despite the warnings of its own scientists, capitalism
continues to plunder the environment and cause catastrophic climactic change
because the need to pursue profit and accumulate wealth trumps all other
concerns. Forced by its own economic imperatives capitalists must seek to
intensify exploitation and to reduce costs that don’t generate profit, no
matter the social consequences. Capitalism cannot act otherwise than to impose
austerity, attack wages and especially the social wage (pensions, health-care,
unemployment benefits, etc) because the source of its profit is exploitation.
Despite the available knowledge and means of production that make the
eradication of poverty entirely possible, capitalism everyday creates ever more
hunger, and homelessness, more insecurity and anxiety. New information
technology has the potential to create free time for us all but is used by
capitalism for the pursuit of profit and to increase the intensity of work for
some as well as to make others superfluous. Religion, ethnicity, nationalism
and other ideologies are used to mask the fact that the wars raging around the
globe are in essence struggles for possession of capital.
Never was there such a glaring contrast between what is and
what could be: on the one hand, capitalism, absurdly creating overproduction
and massive hunger at the same time, causes ever more misery and threatens even
the survival of the human species. On the other, today’s knowledge and
technology when liberated from the
capitalist straitjacket, could free all humans from lack of food, housing,
health-care and other needs, and begin to repair the planet. The necessity to
end capitalism is clear. The crisis of capitalism will deepen in the years to
come. The attacks on the working class will accelerate. They will meet
resistance. Workers cannot defend themselves individually. They need to join
together in order to gain critical weight, so unification of struggles will be
pursued, the more the attacks of capital are aimed at ever-more victims. Of
course those struggles will be recuperated many times. But the sheer size of the
resistance may move the goal-posts. Together with a growing awareness of class
power, an awareness of what’s possible can grow.
Revolution is necessary, Marx
thought, “Not only because the ruling
class cannot be overthrown in any other way” but also because communism
requires, “the alteration of men on a
mass scale which can take place only in a practical movement” (The German
Ideology): An alteration of consciousness that can only occur in a context of
class struggle. The deepening crisis implies that workers’ resistance against
capital’s attacks on its living and working conditions is ultimately doomed, as
long as it stays a defensive struggle. Yet, defensive struggles will be
important in that process of transforming consciousness, not only because their
limits must be experienced but also because they can unify workers, bring them
together, which in turn affects consciousness, increasing awareness of the
class’ potential power. For revolution to be possible, there has to be a
revolutionary subject, that is, a social force that has the capacity to carry
it out. That social force is the working class (or proletariat.) It is the part
of the population which is compelled to sell its labor power to survive. Today
that is the vast majority of humankind. The fundamental antagonism between the
capitalist class and the working class exists not only during periods of open
class struggle (strikes, demonstrations and work-place occupations etc.), but
also in the daily reality of exploitation, the extraction of surplus value from
the working class. Objectively, the working class is more unified than it ever
was possesses the capacity to free society from capitalism. However, this
capacity is only potential. Even if capitalism were to collapse this very day
and abandon its control over society, the workers would not know what to do
with it for lack of revolutionary consciousness. The working class is not born
with revolutionary consciousness and bourgeois mystifications and ideological
fog prevents it from seeing reality as it is. Once when this fog lifts as a
result of the experience of the struggle and of revolutionary propaganda will
clear consciousness emerge.
Capitalism is based on exploitation, on paying workers less
than the value they produce, and pocketing the difference, the surplus value.
At first sight then, in order to end capitalism, it would suffice to give back
the surplus value to those who produced it, so that workers get, individually
or collectively, the full value of the labor time they perform. This would not
end the value-form, the unspoken common understanding of the world, of work and
its products, of people and things, as value, quantities of abstract labor
time. People would still produce (private or state) property, to be sold and
bought with money in one form or another. Only a redistribution of value would
have been achieved, while the foundation of capitalist society would remain
untouched. On this foundation, capitalism would survive, albeit through crises
and chaos.
Redistribution of wealth is the rallying cry of the Left
today. Its claim is that the economic crisis results from lack of demand which
would disappear if money taken from the rich would be used to raise the buying
power of the many. Given that overproduction is a fact, and that the gap
between rich and poor has grown to obscene proportions, this argument is
attractive. But it is based on a misunderstanding of what it is that is
produced and accumulated, on a misunderstanding of value.
Real wealth is not the purpose of capitalist production.
Commodities must have a concrete use-value, but this is only a vehicle to
transmit abstract value, whose accumulation all capitalists are compelled to
seek. That is the real purpose. Real wealth is only created in so far as it
serves this purpose, in so far as it creates new value, capitalist wealth. A
redistribution of wealth would not change this. It would not remove the
obligation of production to be profitable, it would not end exploitation.
There are those who claim that the stark reality of
capitalism’s horrors will make the choice for revolution self-evident. That it
will become crystal-clear that capitalism is doomed and socialism is the only
solution. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. While these horrors are visible
to all, how they relate is hidden in a myriad ways. To remove that opacity should be the aim of
all revolutionary political organizations.
"Philosophers
have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it." (Theses on Feuerbach)
Marx’s oft-quoted remark did not mean that philosophy was
complete and workers must now simply
apply it to change the world. It meant that theory is not an end in itself,
that it is pointless if not tied to
action that challenges the capitalist world. Theory must be where the struggle is. Therefore, the political
organization must aim to participate actively in the struggles of the workers.
‘Participate’ rather than ‘intervene’: instead of making one-sided
interventions, we seek to participate
in the conversation of resistance, in which theory inspires and develops
action, and is, in its turn, inspired
and developed by action.
It is to this struggle that the Socialist Party of Great
Britain is committed.
