The Ripening Workers’ Movement

 

Workers are now confronted with the prospect of a global cost of living crisis. Capitalism is now embarking more definitely upon its long cherished aim of reducing the working class living standards. Despite the efforts of our masters, we have the inevitable outcome of the cyclic nature of capitalist production recession – “prosperity” - to recession again. That this crisis is more convulsive and more deep-going than preceding ones is caused mainly by the growing interdependence of world capitalist economy, making the crisis appear almost simultaneously in every capitalist country, and becoming more acute in all its manifestions.

Across  industry everywhere the pressure upon the workers is increasing. The capitalists are seeking to shift the burden of its economic difficulties further onto the backs of the workers.  That increasing working class struggles will grow out of the present recession is a foregone conclusion. More speed-up, more automation, more uncertainty of employment. Strikes are sweeping the world, constantly gaining in scope and intensity.  Working class forces are now being set into motion. The time of subservient submission is coming to a close and  the organised workers are now offering active resistance to the vicious attacks of capitalism. The unorganised, unskilled and skilled workers have begun to stir with a new fighting spirit. The unions will be compelled to seek new policies, new methods, which will go beyond the obsolete demarcation lines. The signs indicating discontent and unrest are everywhere. Ever more strikes  give evidence of working class exasperation of their deep seated grievances and expressing their rebellion against the employers. Without a question of a doubt serious economic struggles are once more looming.

With working people awakening, to unite their struggles is the task of our fellow workers. Persistent organisation work of building unions and preparation for future strikes is now particularly necessary, not merely sporadically in certain sections but as far as available forces and conditions permit on an international scale.  Lessons of the past should be taken advantage of to help guide the present and the future; and in time that the working class learns this lesson. The ebb and flow of the workers’ movement are part of the natural laws of social change. This process and its speed are not automatic. The future orientation of the workers’ movement still remains intimately bound up with the lessons of the past from which it has not yet drawn the necessary conclusions. At this moment the first necessity is the most elementary ground-work. Millions are still blissfully ignorant of their economic future and the employers have set to work actively to divide workers because of their fear of real working class action.

To the capitalist class the longer workday represents so much more absolute surplus value produced without any additional investments in the instruments of production owned by them. More surplus value spells more profits. This is the basic reason for their bitter opposition to any shortening of the workday. They have no intention of granting it without the most severe struggle. In fact they would rather, pressed to the wall, grant many other concessions which do not cut so directly into their profits. They know that the shorter workday is a real gain for the working class. 

Cuts in real wages hit the workers in the most direct sense and become an important lever to help set them into motion against their class enemy. Regardless of all the servile efforts of the Labour Party to prevent their resistance, the workers will move nevertheless, compelled by these circumstances.

The working class now runs industry to its own misery for the profit of its oppressors, but the day is near when it should take those industries that have been built up with its blood and sweat and transform them from means of profit for a handful of parasites into the means of its deliverance from slavery and degradation.

 The working class being the only class that works denies itself the satisfaction of its desires, with the result that wealth is accumulated in the hands of the capitalist class. The workers are in a huge majority over the capitalists. When they understand socialism, they can change the system. They can take over the means of wealth production, making them common property. They can arrange for the continued production of all necessary wealth and the manner of its individual appropriation and consumption. 

Class Conscious

 Today the workers are facing a ruthless capitalist offensive. They must fight against rampant unemployment, against wage cuts and speedups, and against the deterioration of schools, health care, pensions and all social benefits. 

The Socialist Party explains the cause of all these catastrophes. It shows that it is the capitalist system, the system of private ownership by a few robber barons of the factories, mines and mills built by the working millions, that causes all this misery. The facts are these: the masters are out to exploit the workers as much as possible, and the workers strive to secure as much as they can of their products for their own consumption; the masters are out to reduce the workers to slave status, and the workers to achieve the dignity of free men and women.  It is the story of the merciless class war between the haves and the have-nots. In this war, the have-nots, have only one weapon of self-defence -- the weapon of class struggle.

Socialism will be possible only when the workers, those who meet the needs of society, decide that they are determined to lay the living conditions of mankind on a new foundation. The whole future of humanity rests on the emergence of the working people as the creative force in society. 

Capitalists and the propertied have control over all means of subsistence; they regulate production, and they rule society. Workers, always threatened by poverty and always in danger of being unemployed must of necessity endure the conditions it suits their masters to impose.  We live in a world where a few have it all and the rest have nothing. Those who have nothing are allowed to live only because it pleases the former, and in return for their labour, they receive the minimum required to allow them to render the services demanded of them.  The mere fact that strikes happen shows that the workers have a certain awareness of their rights and there is a level of suffering past which they refuse to go. This is why the strike has become such an important factor in history.

While it is true that the capitalists control all means of subsistence and can call upon the entire machinery of the state to guarantee their possession and unimpeded use of those means—without which the workers can neither work nor survive—it is also true that the workers have greater numbers and that they alone have the effective capacity to produce. Ultimately, therefore, there is no doubt that, if the workers wanted, they could demand the entire product of their labours and thus radically transform the existing social order.  The fact that the masters know that they cannot exploit the worker beyond a given limit without triggering a backlash damaging to their own interests is what sets a limit upon exploitation.

The misery of unemployment is a big burden on the shoulders of all the workers, employed and unemployed. For the capitalists, however, it means big profits. A desperate army of unemployed is a weapon in the hands of the employers for squeezing more exploitation out of the workers still on the job. In turn, this produces yet more victims for the ever-expanding ranks of the unemployed. The longer the breadlines, come the more demands for wage cuts, work rule changes and other concessions.  The bosses' message is clear: either work harder and faster for less or join the dole queue. Nothing can be expected from the profit-hungry capitalists but more foodbanks.

However, we should not believe that strikes suffice to solve the social question, or even improve the conditions of all workers in a serious and enduring way. No matter how determined the workers might be to rebel against living conditions that fall below a certain standard, with production organized as it presently is, there are even stronger circumstances at work crushing all possible resistance. The swelling numbers of the unemployed, crises, and relocation of industries will persist as long as private property and production for profit endure, and poverty will merely swing between the highest and the lowest point without ever going away, forcing workers to travel the same treadmill over and over again.

While they wage the daily struggle of labour resistance, the resistance societies must also aim at a higher target: the transformation of the system of ownership and production. Socialists arraign the present system of production for profit, in that our health and lives are directly and detrimentally affected. Our struggle is to transform production for profit for the few to production for an ever-expanding system of a rich and wholesome life for the benefit of the society of producers.  We have philosophy, economics and history on our side calling for the surrender of the capitalists.

The Curse of the Capitalists

The Socialist Party proposes that the working class take the state-power into their own hands, to establish socialism, a class-free society. The workers will be convinced of this necessity by socialist education, driven home, unfortunately, by bitter experience. Thereafter the State will “wither away.” the need for its existence ended, never to return. It is quite possible to feel the hard knocks caused by a class division of society, without appreciating their theoretical significance or the action which should follow that appreciation, i.e., a determination to spread the knowledge that alone, when sufficiently widely diffused, will enable the workers to take the essential step of overthrowing the capitalist system in its entirety and replacing it by its logical and evolutionary successor—Socialism — a society where the whole of the means of production and distribution are the property of the whole of the people and operated democratically for the benefit of the whole of the people.

We sympathise with our fellow workers’ endeavours to improve their conditions and it is possible that there will be a greater realisation of the necessity for organisation and action by them to obtain better conditions. But it is still true that organisation and better conditions cannot do away with the booms and slumps which are inseparable from capitalist society, so that eventually workers, will finally reach the point of understanding that it is the system of society itself which is at fault.

Workers ask themselves why is it, despite the most glaring of capitalism’s evils, i.e., poverty, hunger and war the emancipation of the worker is no nearer its achievement. Some suggest it is the lack of political unity among those described as socialist and the Socialist Party often receives such criticism. We are told that we should disregard our disagreements and differences with the Labour Party, the Trotskyist left-wing and with the anarchists. Success would soon arrive by  the merging of these separate groups and it would so increase the effectiveness of campaigns and the socialist movement would rapidly grow. Our reply is  that would only be an illusory agreement. They do not mean the same thing as we hold by the term “capitalism,” and their “socialism” is fundamentally different and irreconcilable to our understanding. If unity occurred it would be a confusion of contradictory voices and opposing messages.

Workers’ industrial organisation, whether in trade unions or other bodies, is necessary as long as capitalism lasts even though it is only defensive since as long as the owning and employing class control political power they are in the end in the stronger position. The Unions will, and should, fight state legislation that limits their ability to defend their hard-won economic gains is obvious, and socialists will be, and are, helping in that fight as individual members of trade unions.

The Socialist Party is composed of people who have been attracted to our ideas and practices just because they are revolted and fed up with the failures and hypocrisy of the capitalist system. Our ability to exist as a socialist group is based on the fact that we represent a concept of socialism which has nothing in common with  Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Mao.

There is the struggle of the people to make ends meet with frozen wages and rising prices. There are empty places in the fridge and in the wardrobe due to being unaffordable yet found in plenty in the supermarket. The mounting cost of living is becoming more and more acute with no real relief in sight.

 Replace the system of production for profit with the system of production for social use and the lives of working people becomes transformed into greater leisure, better health and happier, fuller life for the vast mass of humanity. Socialism is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution, upon production for use as against production for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions, class privilege, and class rule, and upon the production of such abundance that the struggle for material needs is completely eliminated, so that humanity, at last, freed from economic exploitation, from oppression, from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Much can perhaps be added to this definition, but anything less you can call whatever you wish, but it will not be socialism.

The World We Live In

 

Capitalism is kept alive not by coercion but by ideas. These ideas it instils into people from the day they start thinking to their last day. The education system, the media, and religion, are all the means by which the thoughts of the people are shaped. They are used by the class that controls them to argue that the society we live in is fundamentally good and correct. By and large, the working class accepts these ideas. If it did not, capitalism could not exist very long.

The aim of the Socialist Party is to achieve common ownership of the means of production and distribution to replace the existing capitalist system. Our planet  could be a paradise for all working people. But on the contrary, we have hell on Earth.  Poverty prevails amid the ability to create plenty. People are starving while food goes to waste. Wars are fought in the name of peace. Our world  is divided into rich and poor, a tiny handful of rich who need not work and the overwhelming majority who toil their whole lives 

 Capitalism is a class society, based on the exploitation of the great majority of the people, the working class, by the small minority, the capitalist class. Because production is carried on for profit and not to meet the needs of the people, capitalism leads to poverty, recessions and war.

Capitalism is a society based on exploitation is one in which one class, through its ownership of the means of production, is able to live as a parasite class, not producing, but living on the labour of—that is, exploiting—the other class, who are obliged to do all the real productive work on which the life of the society as a whole depends.

Capitalism is a system in which the means for producing wealth (the land, the mines, factories, the machines, etc.) are in private hands. A tiny handful of people own these “means of production”. The immense majority of the people own nothing but their power to work. Profits are the motivating force of all capitalist production. No other incentive is given any serious recognition. Production for profit and the people’s needs, therefore, become opposite poles. So long as the profit motive prevails as the single dominant factor in production, to which all other factors are subordinated, the needs of the people will naturally be utterly disregarded

Under capitalism, money is used to make more money. Profit drives production, not social needs. And capitalist production does not proceed in a straight line upwards. It is subject to recurrent crises of “booms and slumps” that destroy and waste much of the value previously created by society (workers). The welfare of the people is simply trampled on by the profit-hungry businesses: their search for profits is a ruthless rampage that leaves a trail of misery, ruin, hardship and poverty. This is how capitalism works.

Capitalism is not interested in the welfare of the people. Capitalism is interested only in profits. Manufacturers do not produce commodities because people want them or need them. They produce what they expect to sell, and sell at a profit. Capitalism is a system of production for the accumulation of more capital. Companies, therefore, produce only the products that give them the greatest profit. Capitalist production is not only carried on for profit, it depends for its very survival upon profit – upon ever-increasing profits. It depends upon the accumulation of capital and constantly increasing opportunities for profitable investments. Realization of profits in turn depends upon increasingly larger markets to absorb the rising output of consumer goods which is a necessary condition for the absorption of capital goods. Thus continued expansion is a prime necessity for capitalist survival.

 

Profit is derived from unpaid labour time. Workers’ labour power is purchased on the market by the owners of capital. Put to work, workers produce values sufficient to cover wages to maintain themselves and family. The value produced in the remainder of the working week constitutes surplus value, the source of profit. The commodities produced by workers’ socialised labour are appropriated by the capitalists. They will continue to be produced so long as they can be sold for profit on the market.

Socialism can come

 

Capitalism epitomises selfishness in today's world. We are brainwashed to compete with each other, subscribe to goals defined by figures in authority and obey laws with little or no protest.

Suffering in terms of hunger or lack of medicine or poor conditions can definitely be linked with the doctrine of capitalism, which denies millions of human beings access to the necessary goods, services or opportunities to make life a more equitable proposition.  Many people die from unnecessary causes like hunger (in a world where grain is destroyed or stockpiled to keep market prices high) and illnesses, which medical science has cured in the Western world. The problem is lack of access The problem of preventable, unnecessary illness afflicts the entire capitalist world. Illness in the "backward" countries may take a different form from that in the "advanced" Western world, where disease is very often associated with the stress of survival under industrial capitalism, but that does not indicate that it is any more of a problem to a fair share of all the goods, services and wealth created by labour, managed (and abused) in many cases by capitalists. 

 Socialism is really the simple matter of ensuring that people can get access to enough of the resources their labour helps to produce. The Socialist Party is not aiming at a society of "fair" shares of wealth (which is in any case a dubious concept) but one where everyone has the same rights of access to society's wealth that is. free access to satisfy self-determined needs. This is not in operation anywhere in the world: thus it is not possible to "live" socialism at present.

The ethos of every social system — its morals, laws and so on — is based on its mode of wealth production and exerts pressure on the people to accept and conform. Capitalism's ethos springs from its nature as a society based on the class ownership of the means of life, the production of wealth as commodities and the drive to accumulate capital. The ideas of the working class — who are productive. exploited class under capitalism — and the goals to which they aspire to. are fashioned under this pressure. It is not possible for the workers as a class to operate selfishly, for their role under capitalism is to perform the enormously generous act of producing all society's wealth but allowing their exploiters to appropriate it while they themselves receive only enough to reproduce their working abilities.

The issue of capitalism or socialism is not a moral one. It is not helpful to think in terms of "deliberate injustices" ("justice" itself is a nebulous, variable concept) because even if capitalism were immaculate "just" it would still be a social system which cannot meet the needs of the majority of people. Whatever offences it commits against human interests are in response to its needs as a class-divided society.

Capitalism has been a necessary stage in social evolution and has outlived its usefulness, making it a hamper on human progress. Its "doctrine" was once revolutionary and progressive but now it is reactionary and decadent. The idea of socialism promises to abolish the problems caused by capitalism but that does not make it "superior" in the strict sense of the term. It is truer to say that it is in line with modern conditions and needs and scientifically expresses the nature of the next stage in human society. Understanding socialism is not a difficult, protracted business: the members of the companion parties of the World Socialist Movement have come to understand socialism, not through any special abilities or endurance but because capitalism has convinced them that there is no other way

Socialism cannot be achieved through violence. It must be the act of a majority of workers throughout the world who understand socialism and who take the conscious, democratic step to abolish capitalism and replace it with a society of common ownership. The work of socialists is to change workers' ideas, through debate and persuasion: it cannot be done through violence and repression. The fact that some who advocate violence call themselves socialists illustrates the importance of judging people by what they stand for, not by the label they attach to themselves.

What we seek is socialism

 

Our world is on the brink of an apocalypse—and yet it has implemented policies which avoid the root causes of our impending disaster. Without socialism, technological progress and the dream of a future of endless bounty is no longer tenable.

The workers are in the class struggle but are not conscious of their interests. Hence they fight, blindly and vainly to improve their condition. Inside the unions, in political parties and in their everyday actions they do things which work to the capitalists’ advantage. They continue to act on lines which perpetuate the system that enslaves them, and support men, measures and parties that work against the workers’ interests.

The workers must recognise that the class struggle exists. They must become aware of their slave position, and the way out, if they are to prosecute the struggle to a victorious conclusion for themselves. 

If the working class become conscious of their class interests and welfare, they will refuse to take actions which injure them. The guiding policy for class-conscious workers must be: Will a contemplated action assist the workers to triumph in the class struggle?

 With socialism the need for these national units to claim sovereign power over all internal affairs will have passed, just as city-states and other kinds of full local autonomy were rendered obsolete by the formation of the modern nations. We, the workers, are not the “Nation,” we are the slave class within the nation. The “Empire” and the trade routes are the private property of our masters; they form channels through which they dispose of the wealth of which you have been robbed and over which wars are fought and working-class lives sacrificed. We stand as socialists for the ending of capitalism and with it the noxious maladies it begets. Those who support capitalism through political ignorance are ever likely to be led into both voting and fighting for it while they remain in that mental state. Capitalism requires armed force, apart from military war. It is the final word in their political control over the working class. Capitalism cannot work to your benefit.

Socialist society, through its central organisation, will arrange for the production of goods where natural and man-made conditions are favourable, and will secure their distribution to the localities where and in the quantity required. Socialism goes to the root cause of working-class poverty. It lies in capitalism or the private ownership of the means of wealth production. By the substitution of common ownership you will ensure the leisurely enjoyment of the plenitude you now provide for others. 

A  political party which aims at a social transformation of society, which is possible only by the consent and support of the great mass of the population—We not only believe but argue constantly that a socialist organisation which takes power other than with the will of the majority cannot bring about socialism even with the best of intentions. We insist with the greatest vigour that no “benevolent saviour” can lead to socialism. Such can benefit capitalism, and has but there is one kind of society that cannot be built that way, and that is socialism. We believe that because socialism is different from all other social systems in a very basic respect. Socialism means, if it means anything, that for the first time in the history of man. the mass of people are freed of class rule over them, that they take the stage of history on their own behalf and in their own interests. And this freedom from class oppression cannot take place unless they themselves act. It cannot happen if a utopia – even a well-intentioned utopia, let alone a totalitarian dictatorship, is imposed. It makes no sense to build a movement upon the advocacy of such ideas and yet to advocate overthrow of government by a conspiratorial minority or something of the sort.

A socialist  party cannot attempt while it is a minority to obstruct the carrying out of the decisions of the majority. As long as we do not enjoy the support of a majority – and the socialist movement unfortunately does not yet in this country – and as long as the opportunity exists to reach the ears of and convince such a majority by persuasion and conviction, we will continue to use every channel of persuasion and conviction open to us to gain that majority without which the achievement of socialism is hopeless. To do otherwise would be contrary to our socialist principles.

We do not put any confidence in the ruling capitalist group in this country. We do not give them any support because we do not think they can or will solve the fundamental social problems which must be solved in order to save civilisation from shipwreck. The workers must organise themselves independently of the capitalist political parties. They must organise a great party of their own, develop an independent working-class party of their own, and oppose the policy of the capitalist parties, regardless of whether they are called  Labour or Conservative, the Democratic or Republican, or anything else. 

The handful of very rich who own and control the industrial wealth of the United States want no tampering with their property and their property rights. Any invasion of its private, privileged ground is what big capital fears. 

 We are socialists. We educate toward the replacement of the capitalist system of private profit by a democratic socialist society based on production for use. As democratic socialists, we are unalterably opposed, not only to capitalism, but to any form of what is sometimes called “state-capitalism” – the state should be raised to a position of absolute mastery over dehumanised human beings who are the de-personalised tools of an all-powerful bureaucracy.  It is as abhorrent to us as the capitalist private-profit system!. In one form it is once represented in the former Soviet Union or in today’s China are snot “some kind of socialism,” not even a bad kind; theey are nothing to what resembles.