Workers’ Councils

The policy adopted by the Labour and Social-Democratic parties in Europe has generally been described as “parliamentarianism”. By which is meant the idea that a parliament dominated by working-class representatives can, through various types of legislation, control the existing system of society in the interests of the community as a whole.

While workers have made some gains this way, more and more people are becoming aware that such a path offers no solution to any of the major problems they face, because it leaves untouched the basic structure of society which is their root cause. (Which is why the Socialist Party has always opposed any policy of social reformism).

In many radical political circles, especially those that have originated in or worked in conjunction with the Labour Party, the failure of this policy has been attributed, as much to the mechanism of parliamentary elections as to the nature of social reformism itself. It has been argued that the experience of Labour and Social-Democratic governments proves the uselessness of parliamentary institutions to the workers.

The alternative form of organisation offered has usually been “workers’ councils”, or factory committees along the lines of the early Russian Soviets. These are said to be more democratic and responsive to the needs of workers.

Obviously, a council made up of revocable delegates is more democratic than one composed of individuals elected for a fixed period of time, but in other ways, the typical workers’ council or factory committee is less democratic. It is organised on a narrower base and excludes those not employed such as the unemployed, old and young people, housewives and the disabled.

Despite their shortcomings, elections to a parliament based on universal suffrage are still the best method available for workers to express a majority desire for socialism.

Furthermore, although parliament run by Labour or Tory politicians is incapable of controlling the economic system in a rational and humane way, it is the centre of political control in advanced industrial countries. The minority of people who now monopolise the ownership of wealth do so through their control of parliament by capitalist parties elected by workers. Control of parliament by representatives of a conscious revolutionary movement will enable the bureaucratic-military apparatus to be dismantled and the oppressive forces of the state to be neutralised, so that socialism may be introduced with the least possible violence and disruption.

Parliament and local councils, to the extent that their functions are administrative and not governmental, can also be used to coordinate emergency measures when socialism is established.

We are not saying that workers' councils are therefore quite useless. On the contrary; like trade unions, they can often play a useful role under capitalism in the struggle of workers to maintain or improve working conditions and wages, and to resist capitalist authority at work. Factory or workplace committees, or something similar, would also play an important part in the democratic management of production inside socialism.

Representatives elected by workers to parliament have continually compromised to the needs of capitalism, but then so have representatives on the industrial field. The institution is not here at fault; it is just that people’s ideas have not yet developed beyond belief in leaders and dependence on a political elite.

When Socialism is established

When socialism is established it will be necessary to set up councils at local, regional and global levels for the administration of social affairs in every aspect of productive activity. Also, there will have to be councils whose function will be to coordinate the work of the various specific councils. The majority of the people in a local area will make decisions affecting that area specifically, the people in a certain region will make decisions for that region and everyone will make global decisions.

This will mean that everyone must have access to vast amounts of knowledge, concerning what each area produces, where it is stored, and how what is needed can be got from one place and moved to another. All this knowledge can be stored on the internet so that people can receive whatever knowledge they wish at the touch of a button.

When it comes to voting on specific issues people need to go no further than their living room. Even today TV reality programmes invite viewers to deliver their verdicts. If this is possible under capitalism, one can imagine the tremendous advantages that can be made in a socialist society when people will be able to utilise the technology built up under capitalism as well as improve on it.

People could if they wanted to, check and see how a certain project was progressing so that whatever was happening could be under the constant scrutiny of society as a whole. Who would not want such a society? So why not organise politically "for its speedy establishment?

This is Socialism. Are You a Socialist?

 If men and women understood what socialism really is and means they would flock to the socialist movement. They would strive just as hard for the advancement of the socialist idea as any capitalist ever schemed for profits because socialism is the only hope in the world for working people.

It is necessary to repeat a truism that few people can deny, but many forget. There are two classes in society.

The capitalist class owns the factories, farms, transport, communications and all the machinery for producing wealth

The working class who are forced to sell their energies to the private property owners, because they, the workers, do not own the means and instruments of wealth production, and are propertyless.

There is a clash of interests within capitalism. On the one hand, workers organise in the industrial field in trade unions to struggle for better working conditions, and higher wages while capitalists strive to force wages down. Conditions are favourable for workers in their struggle if there is little unemployment and unfavourable when there is widespread high unemployment.

Under capitalism and against capitalism you can demand nothing more essential, more definite, and more encompassing than the abolition of classes, i.e., the abolition of all exploitation. What to some appears as the antagonism between rich and poor, is in reality the class antagonism between the exploiting owners of the production apparatus and the non-possessing exploited workers. We, the workers, are the exploited class. And we demand and fight for, mastery over the production apparatus, where under common ownership in a class-free society true equality will be established. Socialism is the international movement of the working class to abolish the wage system. It is a revolutionary movement OF THE WORKERS, BY the workers and FOR the workers. 

A person who works for wages is a slave, worse than a slave, for a slave can always look to a master to be fed, clothed and housed. The wage-worker is forced to get a job – to sell one’s working strength to a boss or beg, starve or steal.

Men and women can never be free or independent as long as they have to beg the idlers for a chance to work. The man who owns your job owns you. Generally, he will pay you barely enough to live on, while he keeps for himself all the things you make.

And we workers make everything in the world. There is nothing fine, valuable, beautiful, or useful that is used by men and women, no matter who they are, that is not made by the hands and the brains of workingmen or women.

But we are not permitted to enjoy these things. The bosses claim them all. They only give us (in wages) enough to eke out a poor existence.

The whole secret of our slavery lies in the fact that a few people OWN THE FACTORIES, the MINES, the MILLS, the LAND the TRANSPORTATION and the COMMUNICATIONS.

Socialism proposes that the workers who operate the industries shall OWN them in common – that men and women shall work for themselves and shall own the things they make without DIVIDING UP with any property owners. This is socialism in a nutshell. If you are an unhappy miserable worker living from hand to mouth and in constant fear of losing your job, it ought to sound good to you.

 

There is no way out for workers within the framework of capitalism. Struggle as they may improve their lot, and they do sometimes get a few crumbs.  Here lies the root of the trouble. When the majority of workers become class-conscious nothing will prevent them from overthrowing and replacing capitalism by the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of wealth production, which presupposes a money-free, class-free society, in which people will have access to all the good things that society can produce.

Is this too much to ask of those who produce but do not possess? Only you can judge. Would that we could circulate our literature wide and far. Would that our words carry to each one of you weary wage-slaves the message of socialism. Socialism is the movement of your class, the WORKING CLASS. Join it and help yourself and every other workingman and woman to free themselves from wage-slavery.

WORKERS AWAKE FROM YOUR SLUMBERS—YOU HAVE A WORLD TO GAIN.

Capitalism is a Cancer, Socialism is the Cure

 Capitalism has advanced the scientific and technological capabilities of humanity to a stage where we can now feasibly establish a world of abundance, a world without waste or want or war. But the facts speak for themselves. There are now more hungry and homeless people on the planet than at any time in human history.

The Socialist Party is a companion party of the World Socialist Movement. It aims to bring about a non-violent revolution in the ownership of the means of production from private or state to common. In such a society, money will no longer be necessary, as the things and services we require to live fully (food, clothes, medical services, homes, transportation, and other modern human needs) will be freely available to all. This is because the means of production will be owned in common by the entire community, and will be democratically controlled by that community as well, a society in which leaders are replaced by truly democratic decision-making of all citizens.

In a society of common ownership, all war in such a nationless world will be immediately abolished, while the end of starvation and dire poverty will quickly follow suit. Without the barriers of economic cost holding back human progress, more ecologically sustainable ways to provide energy and production for ourselves will be immediately planned and created on a global basis. We will become for the first time in history a truly human family looking after itself.

The only real remedy is to seek at elections a mandate to abolish capitalism. If capitalism were abolished and socialism introduced there would immediately be two big developments through which the poverty, problem of the working class could be solved by increasing the number of men and women actually engaged in production.

One is that the members of the capitalist class, no longer able to live in leisure and luxury at the expense of the workers, would become useful members of the community helping to produce the articles needed by the community.

The second is that all kinds of activities necessary to capitalism but unnecessary under socialism would cease, and this would free millions of workers for production who are now engaged in banks, insurance companies, and advertising, or in the taxation and rating departments of the central and local government; as well as those now required by the capitalists to serve in the armed forces for the competitive struggle with foreign capitalist groups. As we explain the output of wealth could be at least doubled by these means.

This is the only way in which the poverty problem can be solved and governments, trying to run the capitalist system, cannot solve it. What they are doing is acting as caretakers for the capitalist class, calling on the workers to increase output but using seductive arguments about “service to the community" which would only be justified if in fact the means of production had been transformed or were going to be transformed into the property of the whole community. While maintaining (with merely superficial changes), the system under which the capitalists exploit the working class. Governments are pretending that exploitation has ended.

It is clever propaganda, but the realities of the class struggle between those who own, but do not produce and those who produce but do not own, will not for long be smoothed over by even the most plausible reformist orator. The working class faced with the same old ruthlessness of capitalist employers will find that they have no defence except the limited defence provided by their own trade unions. In strikes and lockouts, the web of half-truths spun by the labour leaders will be rent asunder, and the workers will have made an advance towards the necessary understanding of the fact that socialism has nothing in common with Labourites.

Know what socialism is

 It is impossible to exaggerate the harm done to the socialist movement, by those who, calling themselves socialists, have taught the workers to believe that state capitalism and social reform are socialism. 

The Socialist Party has always been careful to define what socialism means. Nobody who grasped that definition ever made the error of supposing that state enterprise or public utility corporations had anything to do with socialism. Nor did they imagine, even for a moment that socialism could result from the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia or from a Labour Government. But our critics who ridiculed what they called the “doctrinaire” Socialist Party, all fell into these errors—with disastrous results. We shall proclaim louder than ever what socialism means

Socialism is the common ownership of the means of wealth production. The means of wealth production under capitalism are the private property of the capitalists. The only way to transform Capital (private property) into social wealth is to take it away by expropriating its present capitalist private owners. Socialism cannot be inaugurated by compensating capitalists—which leaves wealth in its money form (capital) in the same hands. Banks are institutions of the money system—Capitalism. They only function for, and in that system: They can only operate when the great mass of production is carried on to exchange products—for profit. They are the clearing houses of that commodity - money; which serves as the universal medium of exchange—which stems from private ownership.

Banks borrow—and lend other people money, i.e., they take deposits, and make advances on security (property). Banks make profits (without which they close their doors) from the difference between the cost of attracting deposits; and what they make by lending or investing a large part of these deposits for short periods. Banks are profit-making concerns of capitalism. They are nothing whatever to do with socialism; which will abolish money and banks, along with parsons, prostitutes, pawnbrokers and politicians.

“Public Ownership” simply means wealth in the form of “public corporation” stocks, quoted on the money market to the highest bidder, in place of private stockholders. Many supporters of the Labour Party are still deluded by the idea that nationalisation is a major step in a policy of gradualism which will “reform capitalism out of existence”. The sledge-hammer blows of events nailed this tragic error.

The establishment of the socialist commonwealth can only be done by “dispossessing” expropriating—not compensating Capitalists. Marx's slogan was“Expropriation of the Expropriators.”

Surely the most realistic attitude for the trade unions together with the rest of the working-class is to take into consideration the most important facts of their existence. First their poverty. Secondly their enslavement, due to capitalist ownership of the means of life, and thirdly their incessant struggle to raise wages above the poverty line to which they are condemned by the merchandise character of their labour-power.

These facts are the outcome of the class ownership of the means of wealth production. Consequently, a realistic policy for the working-class is to organise politically with the sole object of establishing a system in which the means of wealth production shall be the common property of all. Under such a system a real democracy and a settled plan for production and distribution would put an end to poverty. The abolition of classes would end the incessant struggle over wages by removing the cause of class antagonism-, i.e., the class ownership of the means of life and the resulting enslavement of the working-class.

 

Who can now suggest that the policy of the Socialist Party though correct in theory, is one for application only in some remote future? Who would question the practicability of our case?

 

There is no time for complacency. Let us face the fact that time is on our side only if we seize it by the forelock and use it to our advantage. Socialism, the only solution to the problems which confront us, is the need not of the century, but of the hour.

 

Sympathisers, men and women of the working class, we urge you to join us in the struggle for emancipation.

You have but two alternatives. Either the poverty, servitude and degradation of capitalism, culminating in a destructive war, environmental destruction or socialism in which the inventive genius of humanity will be used for the welfare of all society.

Your choice is as simple as it is vital. On it rests the future of humanity.

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.