Protest and Survive

 Any conception of socialism must include the empowerment of the working class to determine its own destiny. Whilst we can debate and sketch visions of what a future society might look like, all these discussions will prove meaningless unless we can find a way to acquire the power required to make them concrete.  Given the seeming powerlessness of the working class at present, what means can the working class be elevated to power?  In a sense the working class already has a massive latent power over society just waiting to be realised, the task then is unlocking this power. When workers are organised in accordance with their class interests they are better able to wield their latent power. The working class is the real agent of change. The slogan of “revolution” has been misused so blatantly that it has lost its meaning.  The workers’ movement is lacking political  clarity. The problem is the lack of of consciousness. Why don’t workers put an end to capitalism – given its destructiveness to humans and the environment. If you don’t know where you want to go, then no road will take you there.

To be a socialist means first and foremost to be on the side of the working class. Socialists are not against reforms but oppose reformism as a political practice. Socialists support any reform that will help the cause of the working class and the poor. The working class can win concessions but only for a certain period before the ruling class tries to take these reforms and concessions back. In a class society, the struggle between workers and the capitalist ruling class is of a permanent nature. The intensity of this class conflict and struggle can vary and there can be lulls at times. Both classes have different interests and clash with each other to protect and further their interests. The capitalist ruling class wants to exploit the working class to the maximum. On the other hand, the working class has no other option but to fight back for their survival.

Marx  explains that “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of this mode of production as self-evident natural laws”, that “the organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance”.  Marx added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker”. Accordingly, the capitalist can rely upon the workers’ “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them”.

Of course, by necessity workers will often struggle, over wages, working conditions and the defence of past gains. But as long as workers look upon the requirements of capital as “self-evident natural laws”, those struggles occur within the bounds of the capitalist relation. Sooner or later the worker will accept his subordination to capital and the system keeps going. People commonly think that there is no alternative to the status quo. To go beyond capitalism, we need a vision that can appear to workers as an alternative common sense, as their common sense.

The struggles of workers against capital transform “circumstances and men”, expanding their capabilities and making them fit to create a new world Marx argued. Even though their goals in these struggles may be limited to ending the immediate violations of norms of fairness and justice and may be aimed, for example, at achieving no more than “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”, people change in the course of struggle. Despite the limited goals involved in wage struggles, Marx argued that they were essential for preventing workers “from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production”; without such struggles, workers “would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation”. People struggle over their conceptions of right and wrong, and what socialists attempt to do is to explain the underlying basis for those struggles. The moral campaigns for "rights" while acknowledging its importance to the working class there is also to go beyond them by articulating and showing what is implicit in these concepts and struggles are only to be contained within a new society.

 Marx pointed out, the root of exploitation under capitalism is not insufficient wages per se, or the depredations of finance. The process of exploitation under capitalism necessarily implies that for accumulation to take place on one end, the worker must be paid less than the value of their labour-time on the other. The more capitalist production expands, the less time the workers has for themselves. The struggle over exploitation is fundamentally the question of whether the worker has the time to fully develop her intellectual, social, and creative powers, or must devote this time instead to the reproduction of a hostile, alien, and benumbing society, with no time to call their own. This is a ‘bread and butter’ question in its own right. Socialism is to create a world where labour-time for all workers can be reduced to a minimum to leave the  maximum time for leisure pursuits, socializing, sports, art, music, writing, debating, and all those things that have been considered the good things in life. There is no known process of capitalism that can achieve this aim.

The establishment of socialism involves workers taking power themselves and exercising collective and democratic control over workplaces, and resource allocation through democratic planning, the complete democratisation of society.  Socialism is "a movement of the immense majority, acting in the interests of the majority".

Our World

 

Right now the whole world is under the rule of capitalism. This rule is based upon private property and the production of commodities for the market. A small group of persons is in possession of the monopoly of the means of producing these goods, and of the means of distributing them; this group is the capitalist class. This monopoly assures this class undivided economic domination over millions of working people, who possess no means of production, and who are forced to sell their labour-power.

Capitalism separates the producer from his or her tools. The owner of the tools (factories, machinery, transport, etc.) buys labour-power (or hires workers, as we would say) to operate them. The more they produce, the higher their profit. When it is not profitable to produce, he lays off the workers.

Capitalism has made labour-power a commodity to be bought on the labour market. As with any other commodity, the cost of labour-power (wages) is determined by the cost of production. The cost of production of labour power is in the main what it takes to maintain the worker at his accustomed standard of living. It is, therefore, the cost of living that determines wages under capitalism.

The economic domination of the capitalists is secured by its political rule, and by its state organisation, which gives it a monopoly over the means of applying coercive force. The working class, economically oppressed, subjected politically and culturally, is the slave of capital. Capitalist society, built up on the exploitation of an overwhelming majority of the population by a minority, is torn in two, and its whole history is one of conflicts between the classes. The struggle of the capitalist system for world domination leads to a special form of competition among the capitalist states, finally expressed in wars which are equally inevitable accompaniments of capitalism, as are crises and unemployment.  In truth the worker is the slave of capital.

We have been saying since our founding that with capitalism removed the production of socially useful articles and services could be vastly increased, so that a socialist world, with people taking freely what they need, is a practical proposition. Let our rulers deal with problems of the present system, we refuse to help them. We are with our class, we are glad to see them kicking and we hope they will continue to do so until a consciousness of what causes the conflict between capital and labour enables them to see the necessity of joining with us to put an end to it. The implements of labour must not be allowed to remain in the category of capital. The people must own in common all those things upon which they in common depend, so that wealth may in future be produced for the use, benefit, and the enjoyment of mankind.  It is high time working people realised that the great barrier in their way, the great barrier to their enjoyment of all the nice things they make, is the fact that they don’t own the means of producing them, the land, mines, factories and transport systems. For the workers to wipe out this great barrier something far different to nationalisation. They will have to democratically take over industry and transport and run it for the benefit of society as a whole. They will have to abolish the wages system and achieve the organisation of a society in which all things are made for use only, and are freely distributed to all.

Time was when the Labour Party paid lip service at least to the idea of dispossessing the capitalist class of its wealth. Only a few years ago they were pushing the panacea of nationalisation, that travesty of a conception of socialism, but that has disappeared from any election manifesto. Now, nationalisation has become a dirty word. The latest idea is a wealth tax—nothing too sweeping, mind you. But let us come down to fundamentals. Income is any case dependent on wealth—it is ownership of wealth that really matters and all the wishful thinking in the world cannot wish away the fundamental fact that the pattern of wealth ownership has remained virtually unchanged. Roughly 10 per cent. of the population still owns roughly 90 per cent. of the country’s wealth. And that is the fact that matters.  The existing social system's fundamental basis is that the means of production and distribution are privately owned and concentrated in the hands of a small minority.

Revolutionary Practice

 Most on the Left who are denouncing economic inequality and poverty take the system of private ownership for granted and merely call for greater income equality on its basis. What must be called into question are the reason commodities, money, and other privately owned things exist in the first place. As long as a system composed of private ownership of such things continued to exist, problems such as widening economic disparities, and poverty would be inevitable.

Today a variety of problems related to the economic system exist. Many people are treated as expendable resources by disreputable firms that subject them to excessively long working hours. And an increasing number of workers are unable to find permanent positions and have to settle for temporary jobs. The finance sector has swelled compared to the real economy, and speculative bubbles periodically expand and then burst, generating mass unemployment. All of these problems are peculiar to capitalism, and the fundamental cause is an economic system that prioritises profit. Human lives are sacrificed to money, throwing society into chaos.

 

The working class is the product of capitalist society. As such, its mindset is subjected to the influence of this society. Its consciousness is developed under the pressure of its masters. Education, the media and social life—in short,  all the factors shaping the consciousness of the working people—are powerful conductors of the influence of capitalist ideas and attitudes.

It is based on the recognition of the dependence of people’s thinking on their material environment. Such a recognition was characteristic of many progressive thinkers, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They all recognised that the mental servitude of the masses was generated by the material conditions of their situation in the present society. And all of them drew the conclusion that only a fundamental change in the material conditions in which the people lived,  only a fundamental transformation of society, would render the masses capable of directing their own destiny.

But who will change these conditions?

The intellectuals of humanity who come out of the privileged classes, that is to say, individuals freed from the material conditions that overwhelm the thinking of the masses—that was the answer of the Utopians and political leaders. The task of performing this transformation fell to the legislators and to the philanthropists

Marx observed in “Theses on Feuerbach”:

“The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and education, and that, therefore, changed people are products of other circumstances and changed education, forgets that it is them people who change the circumstances and that the educators must themselves be educated. Hence, this doctrine must of necessity divide society into two parts, one of which is elevated above the other (in Robert Owen, for example).” 

Applied to the class struggle, this means the following. Driven by the very “circumstances” of capitalist society that form its character as a subjugated class, the proletariat enters into a struggle against the society that subjugates it. The process of this struggle modifies the social “circumstances.” It modifies the environment in which the working-class lives. In this way, the working class modifies its own character. From a class reflecting passively the mental servitude to which it is subjected, it becomes a class that actively overthrows all subjugation, including that of the mind.

This process is far from straightforward. It does not take place evenly in all sectors of the working people, nor all aspects of proletarian consciousness. It will not, of course, be complete when a combination of historical circumstances makes it possible or even inevitable the working-class tearing the apparatus of political power from the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The workers are condemned to enter socialism burdened by a significant share of those “vices of the oppressed”.

In the process of the struggle against capitalism, the proletariat modifies the material environment surrounding it, thereby modifying its own character and emancipating itself intellectually and spiritually.

Likewise, in the process of using its conquered power to systematically construct the entire social order, the working class eventually frees itself from the intellectual influence of the old society, because it achieves a radical transformation in the material environment by which its character is determined. of 

But only as the result of a long, painful and contradictory process in which, as in all preceding historical processes, social creativity develops only under necessity,

And the pressure of needs. The conscious will of the members of the working class can appreciably shorten and facilitate this process. It can never bypass it.

Some on the Left assume that if a cohesive revolutionary minority, with the will-power to establish socialism, seizes the machinery of state administration and concentrates in its own hands all the means of production and distribution as well as all organisational institutions of  society it may if guided by the ideals of socialism create conditions in which prevailing attitudes can be purged of its past belief-system and be filled with a new content, such as Che Guavara’s “New Socialist Man”. Then, and only then, will the people on their own and take the path to socialism.

If this ideal was followed, it would lead to the diametrically opposite result, if only because, in Marx’s words, the “educators must be educated,” and because, therefore, such relationships established between the “advanced” minority and the “ignorant” masses, educate the dictators in all possible ways, but not as people capable of directing the course of social development along the path of building a new society.

 

It goes without saying that such an education can only corrupt and debase the masses. The only possible builder of the new society, and consequently the only possible successor to the former dominant classes in the administration of the state, is the working class considered as a whole, including knowledge-workers, the workers of intellectual labour, whose cooperation in the direction of the state and the administration of the economy is so obviously necessary. (Marx wrote Capital to “shorten and lessen the birth-pangs” for socialist society to emerge from the womb of capitalism.

This change must manifest itself in every part of the life of society. This is only possible with the maximum development of the organised self-activity  of all the component parts of the working class—that is, under conditions that absolutely preclude the dictatorship of a minority standing “above society,” along with its indispensable companions of such a dictatorship: authoritarianism and bureaucracy.

This “despotism of capital” allows capital to create conditions for its own accumulation. However, workers eventually see through this mechanism to understand that protecting their own lives requires safeguarding the lives of the unemployed, and “by setting up trade unions, etc., they try to organise planned co-operation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class.” as Marx explains.

In the process of freely constructing a new society, working people will re-educate themselves and reject those behaviours and traits that come directly into conflict with the tasks they face. This applies both to the working class as a whole and to each of its individual sectors.

Marx points out, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” The possibility of such revolutionary practice is conditioned by human activities and the environment reproduced through those activities.

Our goal is not to merely to change masters, but to cease having masters altogether.

 

Defend the Vote

 

These days rivalries between the capitalists of the world appear to represent a struggle between democratic and autocratic forms of government, in which one or the other is at stake, the question, “What is democracy?" requires investigation.

 In the UK, assuming a politically educated electorate, the machinery of government can be used to carry out the wishes of the majority. Adults possess the vote. The vote returns members of their choice to Parliament. Parliament is a law-making institution; no law can be passed without its consent, no government could continue without its support; it controls finance, approves appointments to the various administrative departments, the army, the judiciary, the civil service; in all except very minor domestic matters, it prescribes the power of the titular head of the state, the monarch.

The composition of the House of Commons, and, ultimately, the existence of the government rests upon the votes of a majority of the people. The government, therefore, depends upon the will of the people, which on major issues it could not defy for any length of time. The will of the people might be a negative, apathetic or unenlightened, and in that proportion any government might treat democratic practice with indifference. This, however, is evidence of the immaturity of the electorate, not of democratic institutions. An enlightened electorate would have the effect of making Parliament ever willing to placate the wishes and interests of those who can take away their power.

Democracy as it is practiced to-day is adapted to the needs of modern conditions. It is the basis of parliamentary government in the advanced capitalist countries. It has reached, broadly speaking, perhaps the highest point possible in a society where class conflict is dominant. Certainly, it has reached the stage where the workers, who are a majority of the population, can through their elected delegates gain complete control of the state machine. In this country democracy has reached this point through centuries of development and struggle, and has passed through many phases. Parliamentary government in many of the less advanced capitalist countries represents, broadly, stages through which in this country it has passed and through which they are passing. In many cases all the appearances of democratic government exist without the reality.

In Britain the struggle for the reality of power has resulted in the complete victory of democratic Parliamentary government over autocracy. It has reached a point where Parliament is no longer the mere tool of autocrats and cliques, but the highly developed instrument through which the majority can impose its will if it wishes. Fundamentally, it can be stated that each stage in struggle for the expansion of the democratic basis of Parliamentary government has been won by different sections of the people through their ability to exert sufficient pressure upon the governing class of the day. With succeeding sections of the capitalist class, the pressure was exerted through their possession of wealth and of their ability to pay taxes. Money governments must have. With the working class the pressure was exerted through its ability to discipline and organise itself in the industrial field. This is the more possible where capitalism is the more highly developed and the workers are brought more into contact with each other through the massive nature of the capitalist productive forces.

Democracy is not the outcome of an idea. It is the inevitable outcome of the class struggle. Its degree of maturity or immaturity in different parts of the world is a measure of the political stage which the class struggle has reached in different countries. Where economic development lags behind the more advanced capitalist countries, there, too, within general limits and with certain exceptions, does political development and the maturity of democratic government lag behind. So there, in many cases, the conditions are less favourable for the workers to obtain immediate democratic rights. The latter is an important factor to take into account when workers struggling for democratic privileges have to decide on the form that the struggle should take in any particular set of circumstances.

 Socialists understand the historic nature of democratic government and its relationship to the goal to which human society is moving: There can be no socialism without democracy. Socialist support for democracy, therefore, arises out of an understanding of the nature of capitalist society. The more that understanding is spread the less danger there is to democracy.

Something on Labour Theory of Value

 

To the working class, a  lesson should be clear. Unless they organise to take and control these great social forces, they will soon be the hopeless serfs of gigantic monopolies embracing whole continents. What are the workers doing about it as their masters organise into larger and still larger corporations, nationally and internationally. We are faced with the greatest aggregations of capital the world has ever seen.  They must resolve that socialism is an issue to be decided now, in the immediate present.

Many allege that Marx is out of date. The real fact is that the capitalists and CEOs are aware of the truth of the labour law of value with their continual and unceasing efforts are made to reduce the time taken to produce commodities. It is not the price-fixing that we see at work specially in the monopolistic corporations. It is the cost-cutting schemes and planning to so increase output per man that less labour is embodied in each article, thus enabling them to outsell their rivals and increase their profits.

A business that cannot invest enough capital to install the most up-to-date technology cannot compete with the efficiency and labour-saving methods of others. If it was simply a matter of will to charge higher prices there would be nothing new or modern about the super-capitalists. All sellers have the will to get the highest price the market will bear, but to-day, as well as a century ago, the seller’s will depends upon suitable conditions for its gratification. The huge firms find the way to wipe out their rivals is to produce cheaply. The way to produce cheaply is to reduce the amount of labour involved in producing each product. Hence capitalists invests in  modern large plants with the latest machinery and enforce working conditions that  speeds up their workers.

A business’s power to charge higher prices is limited by—

1. the purchasing power of its customers ;

2. the similar goods to be obtained from rival firms ;

3. the use of substitutes when price is too high;

4. the decline in amount sold of these commodities if price is higher than market will bear.

 Attacks on “monopoly prices” lead the workers to look at things from the point of view of consumers of commodities.

Actually the workers are the smallest consumers of the total national production. Their purchasing power is limited to the amount of their wages. The capitalists are able to buy the largest quantity because their “share” of the total output is largest in the shape of rent, interest and profit.

The workers must view matters as producers, being the only class engaged in production. It is where they produce that they are exploited. The demand then must not be “lower prices,” but the “abolition of exploitation.”

Leader-Free

 If you wonder why there are so many socialist, anti-capitalist and otherwise radical-left parties, the answer is there is no way of challenging and refuting the confused theories and spurious programmes other than by building up from the ground an organisation of socialists working only for socialism.

 

The goal is not to make a socialist society for the working class but to encourage the working class to build socialism for itself. 

Using the words of Eugene Debs:

 ‘If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out.’

 

These are not times for reform and tweaking the system. Capitalism is in the process of destroying the Earth. The Socialist Party knows that no leaders are going to pull the workers into socialism. The change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Mainstream politics cannot comprehend the absence of leaders in the movement and that it is not a weakness but a strength, testifying to our determination not to be followers.

Forget about looking for leaders. What we need is a movement that rises from the people and empowers ourselves. People need to stop looking up and start looking around. There is an old adage, that if the people lead, the leaders will follow. People need organisations, and people need to come together. But by self-organisation from the root, you will find that you have got no leaders – and do not want them because you do not lead them.

A leader may say “all that our organisation has gained is because of me”. But it is not so. It is not because a leader persuades the government to be nice, but because the actions of mass movements force the government to give back some of what has been taken from us.

Leaders, indeed, will sometimes pretend that they know best and that the movement depends on them. But they can do this only by withholding knowledge and denying power from others. This is why it is important to make organisations as democratic as possible. The individual leader substitutes for and holds back the capacities of the ‘led’. If we rely on one leader or a group of leaders we are putting ourselves in a vulnerable position because we can easily be misled. Nor is there a leadership to be bought off. A leader comes to symbolise an organisation’s cause and projects it onto one individual that his or her reputation and personality come to represent and embody the cause.

The working class have nothing to gain and everything to lose by relying on leaders.

Leadership is one of those problematic words that needs qualifying. When we say “don’t follow leaders” we mean by this something very specific – a narrow political sense of the term – to denote the idea of surrendering power to an individual or group to change society on our behalf. We are not promoting the false idea that socialism is about “making everyone equal” in their endowments, abilities and so on. There will always exist those who will be better orators or write more lucidly than others.

Structure doesn’t necessarily mean a leader. The best examples of organisation historically can be found in the trade union and labour movement at its best. Take, for example, the structures of trade union branches. These are a product of a long tradition of members debating, agreeing and renewing clear, transparent written rules that create a framework of mutual accountability, self-discipline and individual responsibility. They are there on paper, the responsibility of every member, to be used, contested and, once agreed, followed. That is not to deny that apathy and inertia can set in; the rules become a barrier to creative thinking and change; officials become corrupt or complacent. Yet the rules and basic principles remain, always available.

A socialist party must be a party of no compromise. Its mission is to point the way to the goal and it refuses to leave the main road the side-tracked that leads into the swamp of reformism. Nor does a socialist party advocate violence in the labour movement because it knows the capitalist class has the advantage. It is not cowardice but common sense and it is not heroism that makes a fool rock a boat in deep water, it is idiocy.

The capitalist class can gerrymander elections, miscount and steal votes, plus resort to a thousand and one other political tricks, but such is simply to tamper with a thermometer, it cannot change the temperature. And the temperature is the organised power of the working class.

Power to no one, and to everyone!

Net Zero 2050 (video)