To
save the humanity, a different social system is required to be
built—one based on cooperation, equality, and freedom, with
production for use not profit, with self-management of all aspects of
society. Admittedly only a few of our fellow workers are for this
now, but for the Socialist Party, this remains to be our
revolutionary goal. Whether politicians mean well or are hypocrites,
their policies and programmes are simply inadequate for the crises we
face. The result is that we are still on the path to an environmental
Armageddon and the destruction of civilisation. The reality is that
the system cannot deliver solutions. If we really want to build a
movement for socialism, and to avoid merely replacing one set of
rulers for another, the Left needs to rethink its understandings of
class and the nature of the State in light of the evidence and learn
from the mistakes of the past, instead of repeating them and
expecting a different outcome. The Socialist Party seeks to create a
society which will involve neither buying nor selling, nor employers,
nor employees.
We’re
the ones who build things, make things, provide services, make things
work, provide the ideas. But though we build the world around us, it
does not belong to us. Everything that has been built around us is
the result of our work and yet we don’t work for ourselves. We
produce not for ourselves, but at the behest’s and whims of others.
The worker is compelled to labour for the purpose of producing
something to satisfy the wants of others who, holding the things
necessary for his life, thereby control him. He is, therefore, still
a slave. We are the ones who are told what to produce, how to produce
it, how much, and how fast. We are the ones who receive a pay cheque,
be it high or low, not for selling what we produce but for selling
our power to work. With that pay cheque we try to buy back what we
make. The source of someone else’s profits comes from our work.
Capitalism is based on wage-labour and if a theoretical
non-capitalist market economy was a reality it would have to be based
on self-employed farmers and artisans.
Industrial
production can produce goods at a lower cost per unit than handicraft
production, with complete laissez-faire, competition would eliminate
most of the independent, self-employed artisans. In other words,
industry would begin to be concentrated into the hands of the firms
employing industrial methods of production. With complete
laissez-faire, competition would result in those firms which employed
the most productive machinery winning out against those employing out
of date and so less productive machinery. So, there would be a
tendency towards a yet greater concentration of industry into the
hands of the big firms. What about the displaced independent artisans
and the members of bankrupt workers’ co-operatives, some may ask?
How would they get a living? Would they not in fact be obliged to
sell their skills to the firms that had won out in the battle of
competition? But if wage labour appeared then so would profits and
exploitation. If these profits were to be shared but the continuing
competitive pressures would oblige them to give priority to investing
them in new, more productive machinery so as to be able to stay in
business and not go bankrupt themselves. So even if it were possible
to go back to the sort of “free” market economy, the
tendency would be for capitalism to develop again. Examples being the
kibbutzim and the Mennonites communities which have begun to employ
wage labour and orient their production towards making profits and
accumulating these as new capital.
When
the worker has found an employer he receives in return for his labour
a price known as wages which represents on the average what is
necessary for his sustenance so that he can reproduce the energy to
go on working, and also produce progeny to replace him when his
working days are over. During the working-day the worker produces
wealth equivalent to that for which he is paid wages, but this does
not require all the time of the working day. In providing for his own
keep he has also produced a surplus and this surplus belongs to the
employer. This may eventually be split into profit to the
manufacturer, rent to the landlord, and interest on capital invested
by a financier. As capitalism develops the time in which the worker
produces his own keep decreases while the surplus accruing to the
capitalist increases. During this development the productivity of
labour increases at an accelerating tempo: The worker continually
produces more with less.
So when a man sells his labour power
a number of hours for a certain wage, the amount of necessaries to
produce his wages is always smaller than the amount of labour which
the employer receives from him, the difference between what the
worker receives as wages and what his labour power produces during
his working time, constitutes the sole source of unearned income,
i.e., capitalist profits. So profits exist because the worker sells
themselves to the capitalist, who then owns their activity and,
therefore, tries to control them like a machine.
Wage levels
will vary with “the respective power of the combatants” as Marx
puts it and in the long run this will determine the value of
labour-power and the necessaries of life. From the point of view of
wage-labour , wage levels and the value of labour-power depends on
the balance of class forces, on what workers can actually get from
their employers. As wages are also regulated by the relation of
supply and demand, a surplus of labour power (the unemployed) is
necessary to prevent wages swallowing up all profit. Therefore the
unemployed army is a vital necessity to capitalist production, and
there can be no solution under capitalism.
It would be wrong
to confuse exploitation with low wages. It does not matter if real
wages do go up or not. The absolute level of those wages is
irrelevant to the creation and appropriation of value and
surplus-value. Labour is exploited because labour produces the whole
of the value created in any process of production but gets only part
of it back. On average workers sell their labour-power at a “fair”
market price and still exploitation occurs. As sellers of a commodity
(labour-power) they do not receive its full worth i.e. what they
actually produce. Nor do they have a say in how the surplus value
produced by their labour gets used.
The worker goes into the
labour market as an article of merchandise, and his wages, that is,
his price, is determined like that of any other article of
merchandise, by the cost of production (i.e. the social labour
necessary), and this in the case of the worker is represented by the
cost of subsistence. The price of labour power fluctuates by the
operation of supply and demand. There are generally more workers in
the market than are actually required by the employers, and this fact
serves to keep wages from rising for any length of time above the
cost of subsistence. Moreover, machinery and scientific applications
are ever tending to render labourers superfluous, with a consequent
overstocking of the labour market, decrease of wages, and an increase
in the number of the unemployed. Under these conditions relative
poverty is necessarily the lot of the working-class.
We have
the worker entirely dispossessed of the means of getting a living
except by selling himself as an article of merchandise to the owners
of the means of living. This is wage-slavery. While capitalists are
as a class against the workers as regards the ownership of the wealth
produced by the working-class, they, the capitalists, are also
antagonistic to one another in the endeavour to get the larger share
of the markets. It wasn’t just Marx but also Fourier who pointed
long ago that this competition could only end in monopoly, and we do
see concentration an going on in every branch of industry.
Many
seek a capitalism with the rough corners smoothed out, the utopian
aspiration of a tamed capitalism. What is really required is a
fundamental change of the economic basis of society. Many seek an
idealised world and call for governments not to interfere in the
operation of the market, to let market forces operate unhindered –
laissez faire – and that the detrimental effects of the capitalist
system can be eliminated by taming global corporations. For as long
as capitalism has existed state “interference” or state
“intervention”, in the economy has always existed. A
corporation-dominated government is really the logical outcome of a
class-divided society where the state must serve the owning minority.
Individualists attack socialism because they fear the whole of the
wealth of society shall be owned by a number of persons incorporated
into a State or a bureaucracy, instead of being, as at present, owned
by private individuals. They maintain that the right of the
individual is supreme, and condemn any action on the part of a State
or collection of individuals, that interferes with their desires. But
socialists are not statists, that if the working class was compelled
to work for a State instead of for individual employers then
wage-slavery is not abolished, but is intensified. The worker to-day,
while compelled to work for an employer, still has some sort of a
choice among those masters, but with the State as the only employer
he is compelled to work for that employer and under all of that
employer’s conditions, or take the only other alternative –
starvation. State-capitalism or as some like to call it State
Socialism) would intensify slavery, but state-capitalism is not
socialism.
People completely misunderstand Marx if you believe
that his solution was to have GOVERNMENT-OWNERSHIP of the means of
production and his object was to simply just to REDUCE the power of
the capitalist because he wished a mere re-distribution of wealth
between capitalists and the working class. He stood for the the
ABOLITION OF THE STATE and he stood for the ABOLITION OF CAPITALISM
[not its replacement by capitalism in another form]. Critics of Marx
should go to the source and forget what the state-capitalist
Leninists or Trotskyists say and understand that Marx was in favour
of the abolition of the state and its replacement by an “association
of associations”, i.e. by a co-ordinated network of neighbourhood
councils and producer-controlled production units. Marx made quite
clear when he says “The existence of the state is inseparable from
the existence of slavery…”
Many
have consistently failed to acknowledge or have dismissed as
irrelevant the fact that the right of private property leads to
control by property owners over those who use, but do not own,
property (such as workers ). Free-market capitalist system leads to a
very selective and class-based protection of “rights” and
“freedoms.” For example, under capitalism, the “freedom” of
employers inevitably conflicts with the “freedom” of employees.
When stockholders or their managers exercise their “freedom of
enterprise” to decide how their company will operate, they violate
their employee’s right to decide how their labouring capacities
will be utilised and so under capitalism the “property rights” of
employers will conflict with and restrict the “human right” of
employees to manage themselves. Capitalism allows the right of
self-management only to the few, not to all. Bosses have the power,
workers are paid to obey. Workers are subject to control from above
which restricts the activities they are allowed to do and so they are
not free to act, make decisions, participate in the plans of the
organisation, to create the future and so forth.
