Whenever workers endeavour to gain a few extra crumbs from the cake they themselves bake the capitalist class and its apologists remind them of the need to be realistic. By which they do not mean that workers should acquaint themselves with Marxian economics and the workings of the class struggle but rather that the employee class should accept less today in exchange for a promise of a share in Utopia tomorrow. In the meantime the working class have to endure the deprivation of their inferior social position, while the capitalist class can continue to enjoy their parasitic privileges derived from profit, interest and rent.
The only problem with the capitalist Utopia of tomorrow is that the closer it gets, the more it resembles the capitalist nightmare of the present. Just like the Christian fairy stories of life after death for those who accept hell on earth, so the economic gurus and assorted media hacks try to convince us that their masters’ fantasies have some basis in reality; prosperity is round the corner. Just be patient. King Capital has only reigned for three centuries. All we have to do is wait a little longer and as if by magic, all social evils will vanish. Magic is the appropriate word; it is probably the greatest con-trick in history.
Capitalism is not the only social system through which human evolution has passed. Before private property relationships evolved the hunter-gatherer groups practised a form of primitive communism. Society was organised on this basis for about 40.000 years. As people discovered new ways of living such as farming in settled communities so the communistic social relationships became a fetter to further development. Economic necessity produced the change to private ownership initially taking the form of chattel slavery, then feudalism and finally capitalism. Capitalism has not always been with us and there is no reason to assume it will be. Human society is constantly changing — at times slowly but at others open revolution occurs, as in the capitalist revolutions of 1789 in France and of 1917 in Russia.
But why do societies undergo changes? The realists might explain change by reference to the supernatural (God's will) or the superhuman (the Great Man theory). Socialists look at history in terms of cause and effect. In order to survive men and women must produce and distribute the necessities of life; food, clothing, shelter and so on. Consequently the most important aspect of social organisation is concerned with the ways in which the production and distribution of wealth is arranged.
As Marx wrote in The German Ideology:
We set out from real, active men. and on the basis of their real-life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily. sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality. religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence They have no history, no development; but men. developing their material production and material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness. but consciousness by life.
In other words history is concerned with the development of material production and its effects on other aspects of human society. As the methods of production change they come into conflict with the existing social relationships — a contradiction that can only be resolved by revolution.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious. artistic or philosophic in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
(Karl Marx: Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Lawrence & Wishart. pp.20-21.)
The key to understanding any social system is that the economic foundation of society is the basis on which the intellectual superstructure is built; changes in the former lead inevitably to changes in the latter. This does not deny the influence of ideas on history. but analyses the source of these ideas.
Capitalism is a social system based on the private or state ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. The riches of society are monopolised by a parasitical minority; the capitalist class. In contrast the majority working class who produce all the wealth of society have no stake in capitalism. As the means of life are owned by the capitalists, the working class must sell theirmental and physical energies to the capitalists in exchange for a wage or salary. In return the capitalists employ the labour of the wealth producing class in the process of producing and distributing goods and services in the form of commodities. They do this not out of any philanthropic concern for the workers, but with the intention of selling the products on the market at a profit.
Surplus-value does not originate from any special or superior qualities on the part of the capitalists; since labour is the only source of wealth (other than nature) then it follows that it must be the source of the proportion of that wealth which is appropriated by the capitalist class as surplus-value. This is only possible because workers are capable of producing new values in the production process in excess of what is required for the reproduction of their ability to work. Like all other commodities the price that this ability to work (labour-power) can command in the market is determined by what is needed to produce and reproduce it. which means workers are paid as much as they need to go on living.
A class struggle is an inevitable result of the division between those who produce but do not own and those who own and do not produce. Each class tries to increase its share of the socially produced wealth at the expense of the other. The class conflict is institutionalised with the use of trade unions on one side and employers' federations such as the CBI on the other. Generally workers are more successful in periods of boom when the employers seek to avoid interruptions in production. Conversely, during trade depressions workers have to accept less or face the dole, as competition for employment tends to reduce wages and salaries. Necessary though this struggle is. it can never change the inherent nature of capitalism. The ruling class remains and through the state it controls the police, the armed forces and the judiciary; all of which can be deployed in the class struggle.
Production under capitalism is anarchic, as the profit requirement must be placed before the needs of the majority. Capitalism does not exist to serve human need; if the state of the market dictates that goods cannot be sold at a profit production is curtailed, workers sacked and stocks destroyed. That is why tens of millions of human beings starve to death every year, while farmers are subsidised not to produce food and food is accumulated in storage mountains. Alongside over-production for the market there is under-production for human need.
This basic contradiction has remained despite reformist attempts to eradicate working class social problems. They have failed as they address effects rather than the cause: commodity production. Capitalist parties of left, right and centre all claim they can control capitalism; history proves otherwise. Numerous governments have introduced legislation to solve problems such as inadequate housing, unemployment, pollution and racism. Yet all these problems stubbornly remain. Over the last one hundred years politicians, whether sincere or opportunist, have promised us the world; they have delivered today's horror story.
Socialists are not cynics, sneering at the efforts of reformists and offering no solutions of our own. Unlike the reformists, the SPGB and its companion parties abroad do not make promises of Utopia. Indeed we make no promises at all. The social relationships of capitalism must be replaced with those of socialism. Private and state ownership will give way to common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources. Access to wealth will be on the basis of self-determined need and individuals will contribute to society according to their ability. Commodity production with its absurd mechanisms of buying and selling will be confined to the history books.
Socialism will not create itself, nor can it be established by a vanguard. The inhabitants of a society of democratic participation will necessarily have reached a level of consciousness capable of administering it. Socialism presupposes socialist consciousness on the part of the majority, before the revolution. The socialist majority will be able to use bourgeois parliaments and congresses to capture political power and convert the private property relationships into those of common ownership and thereby abolish the state. The great task which confronts the working class is to organise consciously, politically, and democratically throughout the globe so that a speedy end may be wrought to the system which denies us access to the full benefits of modern technology and of the world s resources.
Malcolm Prangell
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