THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION

 Building a sustainable future will require the end of capitalism and the creation of world socialism.

Stripped down to the basics, the reformist critique of inequality can be described as the rich are rich because they are rich, and the poor are poor because they are poor, and will remain poor until they get more.

 

Socialism is not an idea engendered in the brains of men out of nothing but arises from the present system itself, a socialist must have an understanding of the present system; particularly he or she must understand what is capital. 

 

Capital is money invested in land, buildings, machinery, tools, raw material, labour power, for the purpose of returning a surplus; and the only source from which this surplus can come is the unpaid labour of the wage worker. Capital, therefore, is wealth used to exploit wage workers.

 

Capitalists are rich because they own the means of wealth production, and consequently the resultant product; and the workers are poor because they possess nothing but their labour-power, which they are compelled to sell to the capitalists in order to live. As the value of labour-power is determined by the cost of its reproduction, that is to say, the necessary food, clothing and shelter to enable the worker to maintain oneself in a fit state to do a job, and reproduce by supporting a family, increases in the wealth produced are of benefit, primarily, to the capitalist class.

The essential features of capitalism are:

1. the ownership of the means of wealth production by a propertied class which lives by owning;

2. the sale of their labour-power by the property-less majority for salaries or wages;

3. the production of goods for sale.

The Labour Party does not propose abolishing these essential features of the capitalist economic system. We say that only with socialism will the poverty and insecurity of the workers be brought to an end. The risk of war will be removed only with the removal of the commercial rivalries of capitalism. The Labour Party programme will fail, not because of the personal merits or demerits of its leaders, but because it is wholly a programme of reforms of capitalism.

The Socialist Party alone has seen that there must be socialists before there can be socialism and acts on it. Socialism can only be achieved by the success of the working class in its struggle against the owning class. The World Socialist Movement is built upon the facts of this class struggle. It is useful and necessary therefore to learn what the class struggle really is and the field in which it is carried on.

Our capitalist opponents allege that we socialists make the struggle ourselves by appealing to class hatred and stirring up discontent which should be left undisturbed.

The fact that society is made up of owners of property and those who practically have no property, naturally leads each section to take action to protect its interests. Owners of wealth seek to hold on to their possessions and add to them. The working class, own no wealth as a class and is compelled to take action to protect their interests as a working and dispossessed group of men and women.

 The interests of the workers every day is to live as well as they can while employed by the owning class. Naturally, the interests of workers and owners clash, because the owners employ the workers to get a profit or surplus out of the work done, and the smaller the proportion given to workers as wages, the more there is left for profits.

Is then the struggle between workers and employers over wages and working conditions the class struggle? Is that the struggle which carries the hope of victory for the workers? Is that struggle for better wages and shorter hours, etc., the real fight? Is the workshop, the factory, the mine or strike headquarters, the real final and chief battleground of the class struggle?

The workers must seek masters and obtain the best terms for the sale of their working powers. The whole working life of the working class means that they are engaged in the class struggle, a struggle to uphold the interests of their class in the daily conflict with employers.

It does not depend upon the workers’ state of mind, ignorance or alertness. The struggle is bound to exist whether it is recognised or not. The existence of a body of the population with no means of living but of working for the group of owners —that fact alone denotes a class struggle. The workers cannot take action to seek work and wages without displaying the conflict of interests between them and employers, and the inevitable struggle that is involved in it.

THE ECONOMIC FIELD.

The continual struggle about hours and wages seems to some to be petty and ineffectual, and they, therefore, deny that these daily struggles of trade unionists and other workers are a part of the class struggle. But these never-ceasing battles over details of wages and hours are the actual result of the conflict of interests and are inseparable from the struggle of the working class to live as wage slaves in a society which allows them no other way of living as a class.

The field of industry is therefore a battleground of the class struggle, but it is not the only one. Around the question of “the job,” and job conditions, the workers are always compelled to struggle, and always will be while there is a working class dependent upon employers for existence. The changes in hours and wages always taking place never destroy the power of the employers over the workers. Through all the variations of hours and wages, there is but, on average, a subsistence wage for the worker, with rapid exhaustion of his physical powers. The economic battleground of the class struggle is limited to guerrilla warfare, with no chance of a victory for the working class.

LIMITATIONS OF ECONOMIC ACTION.

In the industrial field, the power of the workers to fight the employers is small to-day. The workers have practically no savings, and cannot stop work for long. To withhold their labour-power from the employers is in most cases to simply postpone their surrender.

The workers cannot stop the use of modern wages-saving technology. Almost every step in industrial development throws the scale heavily against the workers, who in spite of the long strikes and lock-outs are eventually defeated.

Trade unions, too, have helped to keep alive a narrow, sectional or trade outlook among the workers and do not easily promote a class outlook. It takes much time for the various branches of workers to realise that the competition and conflict among themselves is itself a result of the position of the working class. The workers do not quickly grasp the fact that they are driven to compete with each other because the economic system of to-day reduces each worker to a seller of merchandise (labour-power) in a market where there are fewer buyers than sellers.

Where is the sinister and powerful factor which plays so much havoc with the workers’ efforts to fight for better conditions? That factor is the labour leader who, for the sake of careerism or to earn the goodwill of the employers—side-tracks the struggles of the worker into blind alleys and trusts in the employers.

THE POLITICAL FIELD.

The employing class maintain their supremacy in the struggle because they have control of powers which enable them to defeat the workers. That power is political. How are the great strikes of our time smashed? Not because the employers rely upon economic means, but because they make use of the law at the disposal of the political rulers. Every Emergency Powers Act, Trades Disputes Act, and prosecution of strikers shows where the real power lies.

Beyond the mere victory in a strike, the employers have the wider and permanent victory of being still in control and possession of the means of production, etc., and that is why they so carefully and strenuously seek to retain control of the political machine.

The real success in the class struggle by the workers can only be secured if they are able to obtain control of the machinery by which the employers at present dominate. That is if the class struggle is to be waged victoriously by the workers they must win political power, and thus get the machinery in their hands to put an end to capitalist ownership.

 

The economic battlefield of the class-struggle is one therefore where the workers are bound to continually struggle within capitalism for a bare existence.

 

The political battlefield of the class struggle is the only battlefield where the workers can finally win and abolish the struggle altogether by abolishing classes and capitalism altogether.

 

Necessary though it is that the workers should struggle on the economic field, the most important battleground of the class struggle is on the political field. But they must become conscious of their class interests—they must fight for socialism.

Emancipation from Money 7/7

 

What a waste of the ingenuity and skills of the computer analysts, programmers and software and hardware engineers. All these digital algorithms are being designed for one purpose: to allow those with money to access it and to deny those without wealth in a society based on private property and buying and selling. Another example of how today under capitalism scientific knowledge and technology are prostituted and used to serve anti-social ends.

In a rationally-organised society, where we produced goods to satisfy the various needs of people and where people had free access according to their individually-defined needs to what had been produced, the same technology could be used to set up and operate the efficient system of stock control that would be needed to ensure that the stores were always stocked up with the products people had indicated they wanted.

The economists tell us that property and buying and selling are inevitable because of the scarcity of resources — because there is not enough wealth to go around, there has to be monetary rationing. This would be a good reason for the existence of money were it true, but as it is evidently false we must dismiss it as yet another example of the confusion of the experts of the economics text-books. We are now surrounded by a capacity to produce an abundance of wealth

It is at this stage in the argument that the economists bow out of the argument the psychologists step in. “Fair enough’’, they admit, “we are prepared to accept that there is no economic reason for money rationing.” The real reason money is needed, they say, is because without such rationing we would all take more than we need. Greed becomes the reason to oppose a money-free society. However, it is a product of a system in which private property exists. Imagine if everyone was given unlimited money to spend on what they liked—but for just one day. Of course, the stores and the shelves would be emptied, with people hoarding provisions in anticipation of the coming day when their wage packets would once again restrict their spending. So poverty, or the expectation of poverty, breeds a desire to not only obtain enough to survive but to obtain more than your poverty allows you. The desire to escape poverty under capitalism is labelled greed.

Now think about a money-free society where all goods are freely available. Will people take more than they need when they know that wealth will be there for the taking whenever they want it? The psychologists, with their minds contaminated by the conditioned behaviour of property society,  conclude that always men and women must act as anti-socially as we are forced to now. Yet it is not “human nature” that stands in the way of a money-free society, but our consent to the continuation of private property. When we wage slaves to get rid of the institution of property, money will have no more use than gas lighting in an age of electricity. Exchange will have no meaning when there are no property rights to pass from one person to another. When the community commonly owns and democratically controls the means of producing and distributing wealth, there will be no non-owners to buy things from or sell things to, to steal from or to give to. Wages will be replaced by cooperative labour; classes will be replaced by social equality; money will be replaced by free access to all wealth. The richness and beauty of the world are there for enjoying. We have always argued that many workers would arrive at conclusions similar to those of socialists on their own, without encountering socialist speakers or publications.

 The basic causes of problems should be attacked, not just the symptoms. For the Socialist Party, it is the pursuit of profit which is responsible for the ills of society—for gross inequalities, for the bloodshed of war, for the waste of production, for people's need to obey and conform. Our alternative is a system without money or the profit motive, based on cooperation not competition, with work done by volunteers. We counter the “lazy person" argument by pointing out that there would still be plenty of motivation to work in a society where people would be cooperating to produce the best possible, free of stress and worries. Without useless pointless jobs and the waste of wars and so on. it would be possible to produce an abundance of goods, for people to take as they wish.

Emancipation of Money 6/7

 

Those who meet with the Socialist Party’s proposition that goods and services should be freely available for people to take according to their needs often react by claiming that this wouldn't work because, first, nobody would want to work and, second, people would grab more than they needed so that shortages would again develop.

There are simple answers to these objections. First, the threat of starvation is not, and certainly should not be, the incentive to work. If some work is so unpleasant that nobody would freely choose to do it then it ought to be done by machines or rotated equally among all members of society and not imposed for life upon a few. Second, people only tend to be greedy under conditions of scarcity. If goods were freely available in ample quantities people would soon adapt to taking only what they need.

A money-free society is so obvious a suggestion for this age of potential abundance that it is not surprising that people should come to discover this quite independently of the activity of the Socialist Party. The money system is obsolete and anti-human that in years to come, with the increasing education and increasing misery of modern life, together with growing plenty, we can expect the abolition of money to be treated more and more as a serious issue, to be absorbed into more and more minds. Socialism won’t evolve automatically or gradually out of capitalism. Its establishment requires a decisive break — a political and social revolution — that will replace class ownership with social ownership. The movement for the abolition of money must be political because when we destroy money we destroy the basis of the power of our rulers. They are unlikely to take kindly to this, so we must organise politically to remove them. We must stop thinking of the money-free world as an 'ultimate aim' with no effect on our actions now. We must understand that the abolition of money is THE immediate demand. A practical proposition and an urgent necessity, not something to be vaguely 'worked towards'. 

 It is hard to envisage a world without money. It requires a considerable leap of the imagination to think of life without cash, prices wages or financial worries. From birth to the grave, workers’ lives are conditioned by money. Without it we starve; because of it we are poor; to get it we are forced into wage slavery; if we steal it we can be locked up. These days, those who pose as socialists, but in fact have no other purpose than to reform the capitalist system, are never heard to refer to the abolition of money. 

The Socialist Party stands for a society in which the entire means of producing and distributing wealth will be owned by the entire world community. The resources of the earth will belong to everyone. No laws will exist to preserve the right of one section of society to use things and another section to be denied the use of them. World socialism will be a social order based on free access for all people to all the goods of the earth. In such a society, money would be an out-dated relic. Nobody will buy anything or sell anything or pay for anything. Those who cannot easily imagine such an arrangement should remember that people in pre-capitalist societies would have found our present social order equally difficult to comprehend. Those who have made the mental leap from the prison of the money system to the freedom of world socialism are urged to join us now in our struggle to create the society of tomorrow. The objective is urgent; we have waited for too long.

 Unless you do have a clear idea of socialism then anyone can claim it, defame it and say it doesn't work. The Socialist Party critics say that we ]are utopian because we hold to the view that a new society is the only lasting solution to the mess we're in. “Yes", they say. "the world is heading for disaster, but it's better to try to make smaller changes than go all out for socialism and perhaps change nothing". Instead of succumbing to the prevailing view that things must carry on more or less as they are, we are called Utopians because we dare to suggest that we could run our lives in a much better harmonious way. From their perspective, we should limit ourselves to short-term changes such as changing interest rates or whatever. So who is being unrealistic? Socialism is no more than a description of the social conditions in which human talents can truly blossom. Unless we keep the idea of working directly for a worldwide cooperative commonwealth on the agenda people will always be sidetracked by every arrival of a new problem for capitalism. By describing how socialism would operate we simply point out how our potential could be realised if we used current know-how in a different way. None of this is Utopian.