We need revolutionary change

 

We have seen that the capitalists all over the world try to find a way out of the pandemic and global warming or themselves by throwing the burden of the crises upon the workers through wage-cuts, reductions in social insurance, speed-up in industry, lengthening of working hours, and by intensifying their competition against each other through trade wars, etc., and by engaging the world a  blood-bath of wars. The capitalists have developed a whole series of additional “remedies” to cure the economic weaknesses of capitalism and to shield themselves from their effects.

Every new decade a “new capitalism” is hailed as ushering in a new era. Its proponents declared that it provided the way to liquidate the conflict between capitalist production and exchange, and that, consequently, it had solved the tormenting cyclical crisis. The “new capitalism” is to abolish poverty, to do away with the class struggle and to open up an endless perspective of industrial development. Its champions boastfully declare Marx disproved and that there never will be a revolution. What a sad awakening is always in store. The capitalist dreams turn into nightmares. Capitalist recessions and economic crises are upon us again and with more devastating effects than ever before. This  “new capitalism” proves to be very much a part of the old capitalism.  It was all a sham and a delusion. In fact, capitalist economic “plans” are not plans at all, in the sense of a fundamental control of the whole resources and production of society.

The implications of all this are clear: to escape the encroaching capitalist starvation and to emancipate themselves, the workers of the world must and will take the revolutionary way out of the crisis. That is, they will carry out a militant policy now in defence of their daily interests and abolish capitalism and establish socialism  and by “abolition” of capitalism we mean its overthrow.

Capitalists perform no useful function in society. Their rake-off from industry and the land is sheer robbery.  They are a deadly detriment. The first requirement for further social progress is to abolish this class of parasites. The capitalist financier has come to be no better than an idle wheel in the economic mechanism, serving only to take up some of the lubricant. The capitalists, with their program of mass poverty, exploitation and war, are a menace to humanity.

The setting up of a socialist system will greatly increase the productive forces and production itself. By liquidating the contradiction between the modes of production and exchange, it does away with economic crises, with all their waste and loss. Where there is no capitalist class to demand its profit before production and distribution take place, and where the producers as a whole receive the full product of their labour, there can be no economic over-production and crisis.

 Consequently, unemployment, with its terrible misery and suffering, will become a thing of the past. The many millions who now walk the streets unemployed will have fruitful work to do, to the benefit of all society. With the deadly limitations of the capitalist market removed, the road will be opened to a virtually unlimited expansion of industry and mass consumption.

Socialism will result in an enormous increase in industrial and agricultural efficiency. The socialist system of planned production, based upon common ownership of industry and the land, is incomparably more efficient than the anarchic capitalist system founded upon private property, competition and the exploitation of the workers. Socialism will wipe out great waste, inherent in the unplanned, competitive capitalist system. It will liquidate the hundreds of useless and parasitic occupations and whole tiers of government bureaucrats. It will turn into useful social purposes the immense values consumed by these socially useless elements. Capitalism blames crime upon the individual, instead of upon the bad social conditions which produce it. Hence its treatment of crime is essentially one of punishment. But the failure of its prisons, with their terrible sex-starvation, graft, over-crowding, idleness, stupid discipline, ferociously long sentences and general brutality, is overwhelmingly demonstrated by the rapidly mounting numbers of prisoners and the long list of terrible prison riots. Capitalist prisons are actually schools of crime.

Socialism will also conserve the natural resources of the country which are now being ruthlessly degraded in the mad capitalist race for profits. Mankind is by nature a gregarious and friendly animal. We do not make war because we dislike others of our own species, differing in language, religion, geographical location, etc. Wars have always arisen out of struggles over the very material things of wealth and power. This is true, whether humanity has been living in a tribal, slave, feudal or capitalist economy, and whether it has obscured the true cause of his wars with an intense religious garb or with slogans about making the world safe for democracy. The cause of modern war is the policies of the capitalist nations to rob foreign peoples in the world struggle for markets, raw materials and territory. In a society in which there is no private property in industry and land, in which no exploitation of the workers takes place and where plenty is produced for all, there can be no grounds for war. The interests of a socialist society are fundamentally opposed to the murderous and unnatural struggle of international war.

A New World to Come

 

The toiling millions, find it impossible to live in the increasing austere conditions everywhere and some  are getting ready to end capitalism and to establish socialism. As Marx said:

“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital . . . grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation, but with this grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of capitalist production itself.”

Reformists have always presented their conception of the gradual rise in the standards of the workers and their progressive acceptance of capitalist evolution as the way to socialism, bringing about improved conditions for labour, lending an air of plausibility to the theories about the advancing standards of the working class under capitalism. But the truth of Marx stands out with crystal clarity.

 As the Communist Manifesto says:

“pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth...it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society . . . because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave in his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.” 

The unrest of the working people is worldwide as unemployment balloons and one wave of wage-cuts follows another. The developed world is not exempt from the growing global movement of resistance. Workers, faced by intolerable conditions, are exhibiting the initial characteristic signs of radicalisation in strikes, protests and militancy. The possibility of revolution begins to menace capitalism. There is a revolutionary storm brewing. The producers suffer intolerable exploitation and misery from capitalist conditions. 

The policy of the ruling class is to try to find a way out of the crisis by throwing its burden upon the shoulders of the working class. This is being done by a vast system of starving the unemployed, wage-cuts, speed-up and inflation schemes. Under capitalism, science is a slave to the class interests of the bourgeoisie.

Capitalism is doomed. The capitalist system of private ownership of industry and land, production for profit, and exploitation of the workers is reaching the end of its course. It has outlived its historic mission. The limited progress that capitalism has accomplished for humanity has been achieved at the cost of incredible misery, poverty, ignorance and slaughter of the working class. Capitalism has created the objective conditions for socialism. But it can go no further. The workers of the world are getting ready for their great social task of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism. They are freeing themselves from the illusion that capitalism provides the way to prosperity.

Socialism will abolish the class division of society, i.e., simultaneously with the anarchy in production, it will abolish all forces of exploitation and oppression of man by man. Society will no longer consist of antagonistic classes in conflict with each other, but will represent a united commonwealth of labour. For the first time in its history mankind will take its fate into its own hands. Instead of destroying innumerable human lives and incalculable wealth in struggles between classes and nations, mankind will devote all its energies to the struggle against the forces of nature, to the development and strengthening of its own collective might. The future socialist society will be free of the State. With private property in industry and land abolished (but, of course, not in articles of personal use), with exploitation of the toilers ended, and with the capitalist class finally defeated and all classes liquidated, there will then be no further need for the State, which in its essence, is an organ of class repression. In the words of Engels, the State will “wither away” and be replaced by a scientific-technical “administration of things.” 

The guiding principle will be: “From each according to ability, to each according to needs.” That is, the distribution of life necessities—food, clothing, housing, education, healthcare etc.—will be free, without let or hindrance.

Socialist production, carried out upon the most efficient basis and freed from the drains of capitalist exploiters, will provide such an abundance that there will be plenty for all with a minimum of effort. There will then be no need for pinch-penny measures. 

Capitalism is a crime against humanity

 

The whole world is now chained to the capitalist system. The immediate aim of the socialist movement is to overthrow the capitalist class and the creation of a class-free and state-free society in which the guiding principle will be ’From each according to ability, to each according to need’. As the Communist Manifesto explains “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Capitalism is deeply concerned that the workers do not get this message that the capitalists and their governments cannot cure their problems. The old tricks and slogans  are no longer potent. Pessimism and confusion begin to appear. As the capitalists intensify their drive against the workers’ standards of living, they at the same time increase their propaganda about the impending return of prosperity. The burden of their song is that this is “just another crisis,” that the crises of the past have been overcome and have been followed by “prosperity,” and that the same thing must happen again. The cultivation of such prosperity illusions is one of the principal methods of the capitalists to break the resistance of the workers against wage-cuts and labour intensification

The revolution will be won not with guns, but with words, with argument and persuasion. The capitalist system, with its mounting economic misery, exploitation, racism, war and religious terrorism is already full of violence. Working people suffering under the burdens of recurring and multiple crises, are discontented and want to find a way out of their intolerable situation. Wholesale poverty and hunger  is the order of the day across much of the world. The capitalists who have callously imposed austerity policies upon our fellow workers have, however, been very carefully looked after their own interests. The capitalists waste the gigantic booty in their possession luxurious living, by the creation of hordes of parasitic occupations, by an immense military  to plunder and pillage others,  leaving much of the planet’s population to actually starve and die for want of the barest necessities of life.

The fundamental weaknesses of the foundations of capitalism hastens  the socialist revolution. The basic contradiction of capitalism, the source of all its weakness and of its final dissolution, is found in the fact that this system does not carry on production for the benefit of society as a whole but for the profit of a relatively small owning class. The great industries by which society must live are owned by private individuals who ruthlessly exploit the people who work in these industries. Under capitalism production is regulated not by the needs of the people  but by whether or not the capitalist class can make a profit by such production; commodities are not produced primarily for use, but for profit. The system of private ownership and production for profit generates the whole series of contradictions and conflicts—economic, political and social—which torment present day society, causing disruption in the economic life and violent struggles between individual capitalists, between social classes and between capitalist states. Under capitalism there is and can be no general plan of production to fit social needs. Capitalist production is anarchic. The innumerable individual capitalists and companies, ruthlessly exploiting the toiling masses, produce whatever they think they can sell by dint of sharp competition with each other. 

War is inevitable under the capitalist system.  The capitalist consciously use war as a weapon for furthering their interests just as they do tariffs and free-trade. Frequently, they hide their war plans behind a mask of peace-keeping and humanitarian intervention. They cold-bloodedly send many to slaughter in order to eliminate their competitors and to subjugate whole populations to their programmes of exploitation. Capitalists consider war as a necessary part of their business. Many  politicians believe that at this time a foreign war would do them a great deal more good than the risks of domestic insurrection and revolution. The world stands in the most imminent danger of shorrible blood baths. The whole capitalist system is a complicated diplomatic labyrinths of war alliances and antagonisms, bred of and stoked by economic rivalry.

The Socialist Party rejects the artificial national boundaries imposed by capitalism and the state to segregate and divide the workers into hostile camps. The nation-state is not a natural community. Nationalism, must not be confused with one’s love for the place and the people with whom one lives alongside. National self-determination is not synonymous with the freedom of individuals, groups communities and certainly not with social revolution. Minorities, struggling to escape the domination of central governments to establish states of their own, will only find themselves shackled by new rulers. The socialist alternative to nationalism is a state-free cooperative commonwealth of various peoples with all other peoples of the world

Socialism, the alternative to capitalism

 

The oldest existing socialist party in the UK has been propagating the alternative to capitalism since 1904

Socialism is almost globally misunderstood and misrepresented. Socialism will be a basic structural change to society, and many of the things that most people take for granted, as "just the way things have to be", can and must be changed to establish socialism.

People tend to accept as true the things they hear over and over again. But repetition doesn't make things true. Because the truth and the facts often contradict "common knowledge", socialists have to show that "common knowledge" is wrong. That takes more words than just accepting the status quo.

Commodity production is organised within the constraints of the circulation of capital. This capital can accumulate, maintain its level or become depleted. The economic pressure on capital is that of accumulation, the alternative is bankruptcy. The production and distribution of goods are entirely subordinate to the pressure on capital to accumulate. Therefore the practical, technical organisation of production is entirely separate from the economic organisation of the accumulation of capital in which cost/price, and value factors play a vital part. The economic signals of the market are not signals to produce useful things. They signal the prospects of profit and capital accumulation, If there is a profit to be made then production will take place; if there is no prospect of profi, then production will not take place. Profit not need is the deciding factor.

This market system, involving the circulation of capital, generates commodity values which are brought into a relationship of exchange in the market, so that value , surplus to the value of labour-power, embodied in commodities is realised through sales. When enterprises calculate costs as a relationship of labour-time to output this is not with a view to passing on socially useful information about the organisation of production. They are calculating costs plus the average rate of profit. Through the exchange of labour-power for wages, capital is invested in the power of workers to produce goods. It is with active labour functioning as deployed capital that capital expands. Labour-power generates more values than it consumes. These surplus values belong to the enterprise in the material form of commodities which are then sold on the market. This is where capital realises its self-expansion and thereby accumulates. The market price of commodities produced must exceed the price of the materials and labour-power required to produce the. This is what costing is all about, it has nothing to do with the practical organisation of production In its overall effect the subordination of useful production to the accumulation of capital distorts and constrains social production. The market is at every point in the system a barrier to exchange between production, distribution and social needs. The circulation of capital confines useful labour within a self-enclosed system of exchangelabour-power. Labour is activated by an exchange of labour-power for wages and this is determined by the capacity of the market to provide profit through sales.

In a socialist society, there will be no money and no exchange and no barter. Goods will be voluntarily produced, and services voluntarily supplied to meet people's needs. People will freely take the things they need. Socialism will be concerned solely with the production, distribution and consumption of useful goods and services in response to definite needs. It will integrate social needs with the material means of meeting those needs.

Common ownership is not state ownership. State ownership is merely the ownership by the capitalist class as a whole, instead of by individual capitalists, and the government then runs the state enterprises to serve the capitalist class. In the self-proclaimed "communist" states the state enterprises serve those who control the party/state apparatus. The working class does not own or control. It produces for a privileged minority.

Common ownership means that society as a whole owns the means and instruments for distributing wealth. It also implies the democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, for if everyone owns, then everyone must have equal right to control the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth.

The task of capitalist ideology is to maintain the veil which keeps people from seeing that their own activities reproduce the form of their daily life ,the task of Marxism is to unveil the activities of daily life, to render them transparent. As soon as people accept money as an equivalent for life, the sale of living activity becomes a condition for their physical and social survival. Life is exchanged for survival. Creation and production come to mean sold activity. As soon as people accept the terms of this exchange, daily activity takes the form of universal prostitution.

Capitalist ideology treats land, capital, and the products of labor, as things which have the power to produce, to create value, to work for their owners, to transform the world. This is what Marx called the fetishism which characterizes people's everyday conceptions, and which is raised to the level of dogma by Economics. For the economist, living people are things - factors of production -, and things live money - works, Capital - produces .When men refuse to sell their labour, money cannot perform even the simplest tasks, because money does not " work ". The notion of the "productivity of capital," and particularly the detailed measurement of that "productivity," are inventions of the "science" of Economics.

The production of surplus value is a condition of survival, not for the population, but for the capitalist system. Surplus value is the portion of the value of commodities produced by labour which is not returned to the labourers. It can be expressed either in commodities or in money , but this does not alter the fact that it is an expression for the materialized labour which is stored in a given quantity of products. Since the products can be exchanged for an "equivalent" quantity of money, the money "stands for," or represents, the same value as the products. The money can, in turn, be exchanged for another quantity of products of "equivalent" value. The ensemble of these exchanges, which take place simultaneously during the performance of capitalist daily life, constitutes the capitalist process of circulation. It is through this process that the metamorphosis of surplus value into Capital takes place.

The portion of value which does not return to labour, namely surplus value, allows the capitalist to exist, and it also allows him to do much more than simply exist. The capitalist invests a portion of this surplus value; he hires new workers and buys new means of production; he expands his dominion. What this means is that the capitalist accumulates new labour, both in the form of the living labour he hires and of the past labour (paid and unpaid) which is stored in the materials and machines he buys.

The capitalist class as a whole accumulates the surplus labour of society, but this process takes place on a social scale and consequently cannot be seen if one observes only the activities of an individual capitalist. It must be remembered that the products bought by a given capitalist as instruments have the same characteristics as the products he sells. A first capitalist sells instruments to a second capitalist for a given sum of value, and only a part of this value is returned to workers as wages; the remaining part is surplus value, with which the first capitalist buys new instruments and labor. The second capitalist buys the instruments for the given value, which means that he pays for the total quantity of labor rendered to the first capitalist, the quantity of labour which was remunerated as well as the quantity performed free of charge. This means that the instruments accumulated by the second capitalist contain the unpaid labour performed for the first. The second capitalist, in turn, sells his products for a given value, and returns only a portion of this value to his laborers; he uses the remainder for new instruments and labour.

If the whole process were squeezed into a single time period, and if all the capitalists were aggregated into one, it would be seen that the value with which the capitalist acquires new instruments and labour is equal to the value of the products which he did not return to the producers. This accumulated surplus labour is capital.

In terms of capitalist society as a whole, the total capital is equal to the sum of unpaid labour performed by generations of human beings whose lives consisted of the daily alienation of their living activity. In other words capital, in the face of which men sell their living days, is the product of the sold activity of men, and is reproduced and expanded every day a man sells another working day, every moment he decides to continue living the capitalist form of daily life.

Matters little if capitalism is small or large - either way, it is based on robbery.

The choice of "good" or "bad" capitalism is little different than choosing between typhoid or cholera

Solidarity

 More than 100 campaigners have gathered in Edinburgh to foil an "immigration raid". The crowd assembled amid reports that two immigration vans had arrived at Nicolson Square officers and were attempting to detain people from a nearby restaurant on Potterrow.