A World of Abundance (1997)

From issue 13 of the World Socialist Review

All work done in this society called capitalism can be classified as necessary, because no employer would pay for unnecessary work. We must assume that all the work we do is “useful — in the defense industry, the prison system, advertising, banking, brokerages, the judicial system and many more activities that do not produce “wealth.” I regard wealth as something tangible, like a jumbo jet or silk stockings.

Socialists advocate the establishment of a system of production for use rather than the present system of production for profit. It would result in all the above work becoming unnecessary. These workers could then spend their time building jumbo jets or perhaps making silk stockings . . . or whatever.

I dare say that there are millions of folks engaged in professional sports, music, movie making and many other fields of what we call entertainment. The boss obviously thinks that this is a useful part of his system. I would think that it makes the worker’s life more tolerable, and this is the main reason for its existence, though I’m sure the boss likes to be entertained also. The socialist has no objection to being entertained. Since there would be no money involved in a socialist society, the entertainers would be truly dedicated to what they do.

In a socialist society, as in any other society, mankind must, as the first requirement, produce necessities such as food, clothing and shelter; after that, anything goes — perhaps a trip to the moon? It all depends on your priorities.

I urge you to give some thought to the establishment of socialism . . . where fabulous salaries, dividends, landlords and bosses will no longer exist: no wars, no countries, no national boundaries. Instead, a worldwide community of people who for the first time will be able to control their destiny (within the limits of time and space).

With the aid of nature, the workers of the world produce everything you see around you, everything, I mean everything. Why must we buy what we produce? Socialists want free access to all goods produced, owning everything in common with all five and a half billion of our neighbors: true democracy, an administration of things, not a governing of beings.

Raise your sights, folks. Make it happen . . .

William Hewitson

Letters on Socialism (1997)

From issue 13 of the World Socialist Review

The following two letters, written by socialists to their local newspapers, found their way into our mailbox not too long ago. We reprint them here to show that, even with a tightening corporate lock on the free expression of opinion in the media, it really is possible to put the case for socialism before thousands of readers who have never before heard of it. Any other comrades who writers to editors (whether or not they get them printed) can send copies on to the World Socialist Review, and we will print them too.

The first letter is addressed to the editor of the Santa Maria Times (California), and the second, to the Arizona Daily Star of Tucson, Arizona.

Marx may have been right*

I’m going to garner a few passages from a book written 150 years ago . . . I write in response to the article, “Working with nothing to show.”

The “division of labor” has been going on for more than 150 years . . . One author explained what was happening and what would continue to happen, and I quote, “the special skill of the laborer becomes |worthless. It is changed into a monotonous force which gives play to neither bodily nor to intellectual elasticity, his labor becomes accessible to all.” He goes on, “In the same measure, therefore, in which labor becomes more unsatisfactory and more repulsive, in that same proportion, competition increases and wages decline.” And again, “the capitalists vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of employees.”

He adds a little humor: “If the whole class of wage-workers were annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for 'capital,' which without wage-labor ceases to be ‘capital’.”

“Thus the forest of outstretched hands entreating for work becomes ever thicker, and the arms themselves become ever leaner . . . Crises increase and become more violent.”

The author whom I have been quoting was Karl Marx, and of course we all know that the owners of the communication networks would never give any supportive information about him.  . . I simply write to let you know that the present conditions were forecast many years ago and they will certainly get worse.

No one can fix Capitalism.

—William Hewitson 

* Heading added by the editor.

The Classless Society

I can still recall my first encounter with racism. It occurred many decades ago at an English elementary school when I was called “Jew-boy.”

But I also recall that throughout my life there has not been one day without either a major or minor war. Poverty (which is the economic status of the working class compared to that of the capitalist class) has been continuous and pervasive worldwide — together with unemployment, insecurity and, of course, racism.

All these social evils have been, and always will be, impervious to reformism for their eradication.

I ask the rhetorical question. What is there so sacrosanct about capitalism that the accusing finger is never pointed at it as the culprit and cause of all these prevailing miseries — except by only a handful of the population?

As long as the vast majority does not understand how capitalism functions, scapegoats and racism will flourish as red herrings, diverting the working class from its historic mission — the peaceful and democratic elimination of capitalism.

Technologically, wealth can be produced with comparative ease to satisfy the needs of all. Buying, selling and profit are therefore no longer required. They should be replaced with production and distribution solely for use with free access to all goods and services, eliminating money and the wages system.

This will never happen until the world working class realizes, amongst a multitude of other concepts, that the society’s fundamental problem is its division into classes — not races. We all belong to only one race — the human race, and we merit a new system of society worthy of our potential and intelligence.

—Samuel Leight

Only a socialist working class can replace capitalism (1994)

From issue 11 of the World Socialist Review

The concept of an industrial union implies a condition of wage-slavery. When workers organize in unions, they are carrying out a defensive strategy—exerting pressure on their employers (the owners of capital) to increase wages and improve working conditions. By doing this they hope to counteract the continuous tendency on the part of the capitalist class to keep wages down. Employers want to maximize profits, and the way they do that is to exploit the working class as much as possible. Employers deploy a battery of pressures to keep wages down (and profits high)—pressures ranging all the way from lockouts to death squads—that workers resist by organizing into unions.

Unions—a tool of resistance

Before capitalism trade unions did not exist. No one had ever heard of one, and no one had ever formed one. Artisans had formed guilds to regulate standards (although they also wanted to keep out unwanted competition); peasants and slaves had risen up in insurrectionat intervals. But only wage-laborers, those possessing nothing but their own working abilities, could experiment doggedly with what the bourgeoisie once liked to style “combinations against trade” until they had fashioned a tool of resistance to use against the owners of capital.

Wage-earners have in principle no other means of survival than selling their working abilities to some employer for a wage or salary—no means, at least, recognized by what passes for economic “science.” This alone suffices to make employment slavery; but the whole reason for employing anyone is that, by reducing the bulk of the population to depending for its survival on employment, capital can accumulate itself by maximizing the difference between wages and the total value of the product reaching the market (surplus value or profit). [1]

Empirically speaking, people are compelled to pay to stay alive via this system of legalized robbery. Most people have considerable difficulty obtaining the money to pay with. Only in this context do unions (trade or industrial) make sense. The very notion of a union assumes a condition of wage-slavery—of employment—whether or not the union itself aims to eliminate production for profit.

The only “mission” of unions is to improve the conditions of wage-slavery within the capitalist system. To accomplish this, unions need only be anti-capital. Nothing requires them to be anti-capitalist; and ordinarily they aren’t. Workers may be anti-employer some or all of the time—but the most compelling argument for unions is that they enable workers to sell their labor-power on the market at its value. One way or the other, unions promote employment (which, again, is slavery). In system terms, they favor the continuation of a system that requires poverty to be the lot of the majority. Daniel De Leon’s notion that “the mission ofUnionism is to organize and drill the Working Class for final victory” [2] in the class struggle between workers and capitalists has little basis in history and no basis in fact.

Economic organization

Resistance to capital, furthermore, can take innumerable forms that don’t need to originate in the workplace. It can appear as political action, as social protest or as some combination of the two. While these are in the main reformist initiatives intended merely to improve the functioning of a bad system, they foreshadow the growing importance political action will assume as the number of socialist workers grows worldwide. If anything, the role of unions in the class struggles of late capitalism faces an uncertain future. As the “economic organization of the working class,” they do not bid fair to “organize and drill” it for anything but short-term resistance.

The need for unions implies the poverty of a class-divided society; their persistence into a classless society is in any case unlikely, since common ownership is grounded in free access to abundantly available goods and services. What differentiates socialism from capitalism is precisely that no one can conveniently “accumulate” the usefulness of goods and services, and no one can be denied the use of what they need. Abundance cannot coexist (as a basis for organizing society) with employment and poverty—with exploitation, the very condition whose intensification, at the dawn of capitalism, gave rise to the need for unions in the first place. A world of abundance will require no defense against exploitation. (Unions might very well on the other hand—after the revolution—serve as a good point of departure for organizing the production and distribution of wealth.)

Reorganizing production

The free associations of workers that under socialism will replace capitalism’s companies and enterprises (as we know them today) will take forms that must remain hidden from our eyes even at this late date; for the working class as a whole has yet to put the same originality into experimenting with ways of reorganizing production as it had earlier demonstrated in learning to resist capital—transforming the wild, inchoate rebellion of individuals into a socialized, organized resistance. Not until such experimenting has reached a fairly advanced stage on a fairly large scale will we be able to make intelligent guesses as to how society may organize the production and distribution of wealth after capitalism. Such experiments (under capitalism) could even, to take a hypothetical instance, assume the form of organized labor “taking and holding” the function of capital investment in a reactionary effort to save the system from revolution.

Without faulting De Leon’s Marxism, his “socialist” industrial unions seem more explicitly designed to fit into this hypothetically described scenario than to cultivate a socialist majority determined to replace capitalism entirely with common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole of society. His theory does not give workers an adequate basis for uniting to cast off the chains of wage-slavery. 

[1] Workers who don’t actually produce wealth—and these are in the majority nowadays—have the dubious privilege of suffering their employers to preserve the surplus value the latter have scooped up at the point of sale. The same pressure tactics work just as well, and for the same reason: cheaper workers mean a higher return on invested capital.

[2] Preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World.

Talking about a revolution. No apologies to Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao! (1993)

A Short Story from issue 10 of the World Socialist Review

Overheard in the lobby off a welfare hotel . . . 

Nick L: I say with a well-organized team and enough support from the general public at the right time, we can do it: we can take over the state and reorganize it from top to bottom.

Karl M: But wouldn’t that make you just another management team?

Nick L: No, no, no! Of course the team’s head would be in the right place. Once we took over, we’d make sure things moved in the right direction. OK, we’d have to plan on a complete renovation of the playing field, and sure, it probably would take quite a while before we were off and running . . . 

Karl M: I still don’t see how the “general public” fits into this. Nothing seems to change for them. You keep all the old rules—work for pay, return on investment, everybody still needs money to get what they need, and nobody sinks any capital into anything unless they’re sure they’ll at least get it back. Where’s your revolution?

Nick L: Eventually, everything will work out.

Leo T: Yeah, provided all the team members play by the rules—

Joe S: You heard him, everything works out. Period.

Nick L: Things just sort of unfold automatically: A team with its head on its shoulders, sticking together and teaching the public, step by step, how to end the game of exploitation, you know, with lots of feedback and all that crap—I mean, hey! How can we go wrong?

Karl M: You call it a revolution, but there’s nothing socialist about it—that’s what can go wrong! You can’t just expect to replace one set of managers with another. “Eventually” never comes. The only change that works is right now.

Mao Z: Oh, come on! You mean right here—in this room?

Leo T: [Sotto voce] Hey, be careful! There’s somebody over there who might be listening . . .They might be police—

Karl M: No, that isn’t what I mean: that’s closer to what you meant, in fact. What I meant was, you have to get rid of capital and wage labor everywhere as your first move. If you don’t do that, no amount of screwing around with the machinery of state is going to matter. Your “team” will only get caught up in making it work. You’re dreaming if you think you can “guide the masses” like that. The relations of exploitation you start out with—based on wage-labor and capital—won’t waste any time telling you what to do.

Mao Z: Oh, now wait a minute . . . You don’t just announce to the public that the game is over as soon as they’ve all sat down! The struggle against exploitation is like any good match: it could last forever if need be. The play is everything.

Leo T: The public needs to be led!

Nick L: There—you see? Outvoted!

Karl M: We’ll see about that.

Leo T: Listen, keep your voice down—someone could be listening!

Karl M: The point is simply to end the game. According to the rules, certain people own capital and they invest it, deciding in the process how everyone else will live and work. That just isn’t a community in any basic sense of the word. What we need is another set of rules: people in general decide what they can’t do without and make it known to whoever produces it. In the process everybody decides for themselves how they will live and work. We all take turns making sure production happens.

Nick L: Hello-o! Hello-o! I’m sure that’ll work just fine. How will you manage all of a sudden to turn people made passive or lazy and irresponsible by centuries of repression into paragons of reason? Think! Think!

Karl M: Think for yourself! Sooner or later, we’ll all have to.

Joe S: But without capital, how can you run the state? And who’s going to invest what you, sitting there in your nice easy chair, have “abolished” in your head? We’ve got to have a ruling class to struggle against—or are you just thick?

Karl M: Enough people have to abolish capital “in their heads” before any revolution can get off the ground. Without capital— you’re so right—the ruling class disappears. Like smoke from an extinguished fire. But it can’t just be in my head: it’s got to be in everyone’s head. No more goods and services for sale at a profit. The ending of the game means the starting of the real play, a game without spectators! People say they need certain items— wealth; producing and distributing those items implies only the administration of wealth. No one “rules” anyone, and everyone has control. From each according to ability and to each according to need.

Nick L: Oh, hey, look, I can see you don’t really belong in this group; you’re just too weird to be a real activist like us . . .

Karl M: You’ve just got to start out by replacing the wages system with a system of free access. I can say that here and now, in this lobby, but the only way anything’s going to happen is if a large enough majority of people come to have some idea of how they want to reorganize production the world over—

Mao Z: Will somebody please shut him up?

Karl M: No, I’m serious! Without ending the class struggle first, people will be unable to see an end to their powerless, downtrodden status and will just go on trying to make the world “a better place”; what we all really need is to replace this reality of fragments with an interconnected reality of whole people. Around the world, now . . . 

Nick L: So you’re saying history won’t be able to distinguish my team from—

Joe S: [Walking to the doorway] That does it! I’m leaving.

Mao Z: [Getting up] Yeah, I really can’t deal with this doctrinaire stuff, either. See you in St. Louie.

Leo T: [Huffily] I’m history. [The door to the stairwell slams closed]

Nick L: [Rising and turning around] Happy? You just ruined a perfectly good revolution!

Karl M: I didn’t ruin mine. Look, I really have done a lot of work on the subject. People have fought the introduction or confronted the reality of the wages system with a persistence that is positively impressive: the German Anabaptists who followed Thomas Muenzer in the Peasant Wars around 1525; the English “true Levellers” or Diggers in 1649; 19th- and 20th-century Utopian experiments too numerous to mention—among them, communities based on the writings of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Each of these tried, in its own way, to break with the system of wage labor and capital—and all of them failed for lack of ability to reorganize the entire system of production—

[The stairwell door slams shut] 

Ron Elbert

Life under capitalism: 50 Ways to Leave the System (1992)

From issue 8 of the World Socialist Review

How many ghosts can dance on the medal of honor?

David S. Rubitsky, 72, was denied the Medal of Honor—the U.S.’s highest combat decoration given to a wage-slave demented enough to slaughter fellow human beings on behalf of our capitalist masters.

The reason Mr. Rubitsky did not receive this medal of dubious distinction was that a military review board did not believe his tale of killing 500 Japanese wage-slaves in a single day during world war II. He asserts the real reason he was denied the “honor” has to do with anti-Semitic bigotry.

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B’rith supports David Rubitsky in trying to convince the world that he did indeed perform the near-miracle of slaughtering 500 fellow human beings in one whoop. They termed the military’s refusal of recognition “unconscionable.”

Unconscionable? Seeking praise for someone who claims to have killed 500 people is what’s really "unconscionable.” Only in our capitalist society, with its sick morality of pursuing profit over human needs—and, where necessary, at the expense of human needs—would a massacre qualify one for the status of hero. The fact that what passes for a human rights organization throws its weight behind rationalizing such atrocious behavior just goes to show how warped this society is, how morbid is its mentality.

In socialist society no one will get decorated with medals for being the “most ferocious one alive.” No markets to fight over, thus no wars. Only one world where we all have a common interest in each other’s well-being. Pathetic scenes of old men taking pride in killing fellow human beings will be a thing of the past. It is a future that is long overdue.

W. J. Lawrimore

The working class Joe meets the boss (1986)

From issue 1 of the World Socialist Review

Is there a "Road" to Socialism? (1988)

Book Review from issue 5 of the World Socialist Review

State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management by Adam Buick & John Crump (The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1986)

You have only to attend a meeting of any of numerous groups identifying themselves as "socialist" or ’'communist” to find out one thing: with few exceptions, they do not define their immediate goal as being worldwide in scope. They regard replacing the buying and selling of necessary goods and services with free access to the same as a very long-term aspiration (though the notion enjoys wide acceptance as an abstraction). Between the cup of communism and the lip of capitalism, they claim, there lies a wide gap, and that gap can only be bridged by a complicated and unpredictable series of short-term objectives. Eventually society will be transformed, it is true, but not starting from the present reality as we currently understand it.

Those groups organized as formal political parties seeking to attract the support and/or the votes of workers and other sectors of the population thus find themselves nailed fairly tightly to a framework of nationalism which has to justify itself through an appeal to "proletarian internationalism" or something similar. Followers of Lenin and Trotsky. for example, advocate setting up a "workers’ state" which will liquidate the institutions and mechanisms by which private owners of the means of production perpetuated their legal monopoly over the output of goods and services. According to this scenario, the exploiting (capitalist) class continues in existence for a while but is sternly regimented by the party in control of the machinery of state and enjoying the well-informed support of the majority.

In State Capitalism Adam Buick and John Crump carefully dissect the concept of state ownership of the means of wealth production and lay bare the mass of rationalizations leading up to it. First they establish the general boundaries of discussion by defining what the term capitalism means, then they distinguish between two models of capitalism: the one traditionally accepted as such (private capitalism, the earliest form) and the other representing a number of historic adaptations or variants of capitalist monopoly over social production (in response to some structural failure on the part of the "private" model). Since this second type is characterized by the nationalization of enterprises--with or without a thoroughgoing state management of the system of production—it is of course best described as "state” capitalism.

This result can be accomplished in two ways. Either the state can bail out individual capitalists by taking over the legal proprietorship and control of their businesses without a major political upheaval occurring (as has become common in western Europe); or a revolutionary opposition can develop within the bosom of capitalist society and, with varying degrees of majority support, raze the preceding regime to the ground, totally reorganizing the system of exploitation (as in eastern Europe, Russia and China). In the second case, a new capitalist minority replaces the old, leaving the same or equivalent relations of production intact. Though from a narrowly legal angle the new minority renounces all private title to the system of production, they nevertheless retain monopoly control over it.

"Socialist” Profits?

In the fourth chapter, the authors deal with a question which everyone has sooner or later asked: What makes a state-capitalist economy different from a "classical" one? They tackle a couple of familiar old fallacies: namely, the belief that

"Socialist" profit is not capitalist profit because "all profits belong to the people" or, to put it another way, because "the state distributes profit for the benefit of the people. "Socialist" wages are not the mark of an exploited working class, but are the means by which social wealth is distributed according to each individual's contribution to production.

(Ch. 4, "The Capitalist Dynamic of State Capitalist Economies")

In the end, however, no matter on what ideological grounds wage exploitation is put into effect, the leopard cannot avoid keeping its spots. 

"Profit is pursued because, due to the competition which is inherent in world capitalism, state capital continually has to invest newly acquired surplus value in a compulsive effort to accumulate and hence expand itself." (p 101)

Before going on to socialism as the alternative to either state or private capitalism, they briefly outline some of the ideological underpinnings on which the justification for state capitalism rests, showing how the thinking of its advocates evolved out of "classical" socialist theory (as found in the writings of Marx or Engels) into its Leninist and post-Leninist forms.

Basic Features of Socialism

Having comprehensively sapped out the state-capitalist terrain, Buick and Crump have no difficulty elucidating the basic features of a socialist society: It must be worldwide; all goods and services will be produced for use only and distributed free; it will have no classes, states or national frontiers; no exchange of goods and services will take place—since there will no longer be any market to regulate consumption.

The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of "economic calculation" in the sense of calculation in units of "value" whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour time. (Ch. 6, "The Alternative to Capitalism")

The need for planning will be met by establishing "a rationalized network of planned links" occupying the successive phases through which the cycle of production/consumption passes. "Planning" in that context will mean only the coordinating of "a direct interaction between hunan beings and nature." (The authority of economists rests partly in fact on the working class’s uncritical acceptance of their doctrine of an inherent natural scarcity. )

If the language in the last chapter makes heavy use of the conditional tense, this does not imply any prediction of utopia. It only acknowledges that workers have so far failed to shake themselves out of the slumber of poverty. This is a process which necessarily must take place on a world scale (if not everywhere at precisely the sane time); for a whole society to make the changeover to production for use requires a conscious understanding of the stakes by enough of the world's population to constitute a political force greater than any that capital can muster in its own defense.

Such an intense concentration of well-informed opinion has not yet occurred nor will it ever—if workers (including both highly paid professionals and exploited agriculturalists) continue to limit their thought horizons to those of the national state into which their destiny as wage slaves has thrust then. The admirable thing about State Capitalism is that it provides a sorely needed theoretical framework for tearing loose of the deadly embrace of nationalism This framework (as noted in the book) has been slowly emerging within the world socialist movement in the decades since the Bolshevik revolution, most significantly in the propaganda of our companion party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The book itself makes a highly readable contribution to this ongoing effort to create a class-conscious, socialist majority—one that will finally get capitalism's funeral cortege rolling toward the cemetery.

Blogger's Note:

Buick and Crump's book was also reviewed in the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard.  

Let Them Eat Glasnost (1987)

Editorial from Issue 4 of the World Socialist Review

Everyone knows the old joke about Russia's top-down brand of state capitalism: capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism is the opposite. In fact, of course, there are no socialist republics (socialism not being compatible with government), nor are any of the Soviet Union’s republics examples of socialism (which requires a classless, moneyless society functioning on a worldwide basis), nor are there even any soviets (councils acting as the workers' democratically elected delegates) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What's in the name, then? An immense majority who go to the market everyday to sell their only commodity—their ability to do work—to a small minority who. . . . roll up their shirtsleeves and plunge into the "work” of supervising and directing the country’s capital investments so as to make them yield a profit (someone' s got to do it, after all!).

And now that the USSR’s workers, women and men alike, have glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of ’’openness,” they will presumably become happier and more productive and, not least, more accessible to multinational penetration. For even the spectre of communism has at last been incorporated into the marketplace!

Common Ownership

It is no academic exercise to point out that the word ’’communism” means only common ownership of the means of producing wealth: the right to decide on the use of the mechanisms by which society recreates and reproduces itself. The state is designed, on the contrary, to enforce the will of a minority against the wishes of the majority (in modern times, perversely enough, through the use of "majority rule”). As "open” as the CPSU and its politburo may now be projecting themselves, all the glasnost in the world (though there isn’t that much of it floating around anyhow) will not make them communists.

Are We “Commies” ?

As communists (socialists) ourselves, our policy has often been confused with theirs. During the second world war, when the Allied Powers calculated it was to their advantage to court Russia’s ersatz ruling élite, a great deal of treacle and syrup poured forth from the US government about the heroic Soviet Union, led by that epic working-class genius, Joseph Stalin.

If you were too young during the days of world war II, or not yet born, there are books and articles readily available dealing with the cooperation and friendship between the bolshevik-style Communists on the one hand, and the professed champions of "democratic” capitalism on the other. (For starters, try The Pocket Book of the War, Quincy Howe, Ed., Pocket Books, Inc., Hew York, 1941.)

However, when the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain were wining, dining and dealing with Stalin in the Kremlin, the World Socialist Party and its Companion Parties in other countries were openly opposing the war as a carnage not worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood. When the secret police of the Soviet Union and the secret police of the United States (the forerunner of the present CIA) were acting in unison, we were speaking out and writing articles attacking the war.

When the Communist Party was recruiting for the war effort, selling Victory Bonds, waving the flag and singing the national anthem of America, as well as that of Russia, we of the World Socialist Party were speaking from the rostrum on Boston Common as our comrades in England spoke in Hyde Park; continuing to urge our fellow workers to organize for the abolition of capitalism everywhere—the basic cause of war.

Are They Communists?

Thus, we are not Communists in the popularly accepted meaning of that much-maligned word. We do not support or sympathize with Russian or Chinese or Cuban or any other state capitalism. We are communists, though, in the classical meaning of the term. We are scientific socialists who advocate the complete and immediate abolition of the buying and selling system in all its forms around the world and the immediate introduction of a system of production for use.

If the workers of the Soviet Union want an ’’opening” that is socially authentic, they would do well to press for the immediate elimination of the system that keeps them exploited in more or less the same way as it does everywhere else. Perhaps glasnost will inadvertently give them some space in which to think about organizing for a real socialist revolution.

Equal time for the capitalist view (1986)

From issue 2 of the World Socialist Review

With the heating up of the situation in Nicaragua, the bombing of Libya and the flood of Rambo-type films in the theatres, the subject of war is once again in the forefront of topics being discussed.

We of the WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT for over eighty years have put forth our views on the causes of war. We claim that war is nothing but the clashing of economic rivalries over such things as markets, private property issues, trade routes and spheres of influence. Of course, the capitalists of various nations are always quarrelling over such things, but once in a while these items cannot be resolved peacefully. When such a time comes, wars begin. We claim that wars are therefore fought for the capitalist class interests and do not, in any way, benefit the working class. Therefore, we oppose all wars during peacetime and wartime. We also claim that the only way to end wars is to end capitalism.

Now that we have presented a brief outline on our position to war, we would like to take this opportunity to give the capitalist class and its supporters a chance to present their views in our journal (something that they almost never grant us in their publications).

1. Rear Admiral French E. Chadwick, U.S.N.

"Navies and armies are insurance for capital owned abroad by the leisure class of a nation/ It is for them that empires and spheres of influence exist. The great war now waging is a culmination of efforts to maintain and extend these spheres." 

(NY Evening Post, Dec. 17, 1915)

2.  Lammot duPont

"War is caused by economic and political rivalries."

(NY Herald Tribune, Nov. 19, 1934)

3. National Hughes Alliance Declaration, issued in 1916, signed by two ex-Presidenta, T. Roosevelt and Wm. Howard Taft and 25 leading bankers and captains of industry.

"Our business is business. We are producers, manufacturers and traders, without sufficient home demands to absorb the full yield of fields and the output of factories, Year by year it becomes more apparent that the markets of the world must be kept open to American industries.

We cannot extend our trade further than we are able to defend it. The rivalries that begin in commerce end on the battlefields. The history of war is green with international jealousies. Whatever the diplomatic excuse, every conflict in modern times had its origin in the question of property rights."

4.  Institutions magazine

"This is more than war of mechanical monsters clashing in the night . . .  more than a war of production. It is a war for markets—YOUR markets! The Axis wants your business—wants to destroy it once and for all."

(Quoted from a Treasury Department Ad placed in Institutions magazine, April 1943. Ad was captioned, "The Axis Wants Your Business")

5. Bernard M. Baruch

"Before I go any further in this expression of my views, I think it wise to remind you gentlemen of the fact that wars are not fought merely for immediate results. Each participant makes an effort to impose his will upon his enemies by military and economic destruction. But at the same time he keeps in mind the after results—new markets, new trade and new intercourse, always at the expense of the defeated and neutrals."

(Senate Comm., NY Times, April 7, 1939)

6. David Lawrence

"It makes one shudder to think what the sudden outbreak of peace might mean to the American economy."

(NY Sun, April 5, 1949)

7. George F. Taubeneck

"If you are one of those domestic-minded businessmen who are unimpressed with this view (that prosperity hinges on foreign trade) ponder for a bit the thinking of a gentleman who ought to know about such things. . . .  He is R.W. Gifford, vice-president and assistant general manager of Norge Division, Borg-Warner Corp., and chairman of the board of Borg-Warner International Corp.

He'll tell you in just ten words why he considers foreign trade important to this country: Because "all wars are basically economic" and because "we actually need the business."

(from 'Inside Dope' from Air Conditioning and Refrigeration News, Dec. 9, 1946.)

8. Woodrow Wilson

"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused."

(as quoted in The Forging of the American Empire by S. Lens, 1971)

9. U.S. NAVY

"Realistically, all wars have been for economic reasons. To make them politically palatable, idealogical issues have always been provoked.

Any possible future war will undoubtedly conform to historical precedent.

Present differences with our world neighbors, naow in the diplomatic stage, we can hope can be kept there. But after all, war is merely diplomacy by force of arms."

(official document distributed by Office of Naval Intell. to U.S. Senate Comm, on Armed Services-April 15, 1947)

So, there you have it. The real causes of war, straight from the capitalist class and its supporters. Remember, the next time we have a war for "making the world safe for democracy" or for "to end all wars," that the real reason is not these idealogical phrases, but instead conflicts for the benefit of the capitalists and their markets.

Let's end wars by ending the system that creates wars. Join the World Socialist Party, Now!

Why you need a Socialist Party (1992)

From issue 9 of the World Socialist Review

Presently, everything we humans need to live is locked up tightly under the control of investors who accumulate capital (capitalists)—people who can deny everyone else access to “survival goods.” Because they have this power, they can force as many people as market conditions will allow to work for them, at rates they set low enough to allow them a profit on their investments. If the state does the investing and controls the capital, then the state is the capitalist; it all comes to the same thing. The owners and controllers of capital monopolize the production of virtually everything useful or enjoyable (wealth), which economists facelessly describe as “goods and services.”

This monopolization creates two classes of people—capitalists and workers. Anyone who works for a living—blue-collar, white-collar or professional—is a worker (whether this fits the currently fashionable image or not). Although not all workers produce wealth, the conditions prevailing in the factories, on the land, in transportation, set the standard for conditions elsewhere in the system. Workers alone produce wealth, and employment is just an evolved form of slavery.

Capitalists have to stay in business. This means they need to keep their costs down and their profit opportunities maximal. They must pay their employees the least amount they calculate will keep them alive; and their system allows the use of a "sliding scale" of valuation which gives them the right to pay employees as close to nothing as they can get away with, providing this is compatible with the maintenance of a profit-producing workforce.

Workers have to stay alive. This means they need to keep their earnings as high as they can and to maximize their purchasing power as consumers. If they don’t bother to draw their own conclusions about being forced into such a position, they will at least manage to respond to the initiatives taken by their employers; by organizing into unions, they can, when the economy is expanding, enforce the terms of their maintenance that capitalism normally requires in the abstract.

The attempt by employers to drive wages or salaries down below the survival minimum is part of a process we call “exploitation.” The driving mechanism of the process is the quest for profit, which requires producing the greatest possible surplus over workers’ needs at any given time. We say “producing” because it is in the sector of wealth production that the most direct and explicit form of exploitation occurs. But employment in general is exploitation, even where workers produce no direct wealth themselves.

The result of a system based on these two all-inclusive sets of conflicting needs is an unending and often vicious struggle between the two classes (the class struggle). All political conflicts, based on this premise, form part of the same evil tree— all of them ultimately generated by the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Ownership of the means of producing wealth requires no work, and work—in any sector of the economy—implies no control over the system in any of its parts.

What is the solution?

Obviously, this state of affairs could go on forever—conditions permitting, which is arguable all by itself—if workers (a) either tamely submitted to their enslavement or (b) actively "improved” its quality

by organizing against their employers. The only way out of the whole vicious cycle is to eliminate its basis, the use of capital.

How do you do that? Abstractly speaking, on the one hand, by transferring ownership and control of the means of wealth production to the community at large, so that all who ask for what they need can give it directly to themselves. (This implies a democratically controlled administration, naturally; see below.)

More concretely, enough workers to constitute a majority of the population remove the obligation of obtaining money for the things they need, based on the work they perform. They abolish the wages system. If everyone, as the community, disposes of a common ownership over the means of creating useful and/or enjoyable effects, no one can have power over others in that community.

Why the working class?

Because capitalism has triumphed worldwide, eliminating all competing systems of wealth production, it has consequently consolidated the struggles between exploiters and exploited into one between capitalists and workers. No other social classes are left anymore. Workers are almost all the people there are in the world. Businessmen constitute the remainder. By eliminating capital altogether—which rests squarely on the payment of wages, salaries and other types of payment for services rendered—workers in effect constitute a new form of society. Only they can do this; to their employers (and anyone using employer-logic) the whole idea sounds perfectly insane.

Getting there

The working class needs first of all—schematically speaking—to gain control of both the machinery of state and the world of work. A socialist party cannot help it do the latter, but— once workers realize the need to carry out this purpose—such a party is the best vehicle available for accomplishing the former.

Why gain control of the state? Because it is a command center for the economy, easily converted into a “war machine” for defeating working class initiatives aimed at wresting control from the capitalist class. It is a strategic line of retreat that can otherwise save the day for the capitalist class when all else seems lost. Capitalism is replete with instances of the military taking control of the state to tide over the system for indefinite “emergencies,” when workers get too close. Workers do, however, operate the system to a degree that has become virtually total. Economically they are already dominant within the capitalist system, but of course the capital-accumulating class denies them the political control that should go with that.

Workers need to pursue this goal very single-mindedly. Less than the system itself will not suffice: leaving “parts” of it intact will only force it to adapt itself to the change of rules imposed on it, largely at working class insistence. Basing an economy on payment for goods and services— specifically, on the payment of wages and salaries—itself must go, or we will never be rid of the beast.

Any organization failing to recognize this will never enjoy real or lasting success in seeking to promote goals it sees as opposed to the effects or the operations of capitalism. A socialist party cannot therefore allow itself to pursue other objectives than the replacement of restricted access to goods and services with the objective of free access, which means it can only seek the abolition of the wages system. It must oppose all other goals and those who espouse them; the logic of its very existence requires this.

Why a socialist party?

What people in different countries around the globe should seek to accomplish through their respective socialist parties, as an immediate goal, is to place everything related to the production of anything useful or enjoyable—wealth—in the hands of the community—not the state. This includes distribution from the places where wealth is created to the places where it is used, with the community being made up of everyone without distinction of race or sex: each person having the same right to decide and procure what he or she needs. This arrangement implies the lack of necessity for money or for any other sort of bartering device, and the consequent lack of a basis for the institutions related to exchange—banks, insurance companies, governments and states; of everything, including legislation, designed to force people to do things.

Making it happen

We live under a pernicious system that denies and punishes our best instincts as community animals. Either we can all wait until crisis conditions get so terrible that a confused collision (and possibly an explosively destructive one) between capitalism and reality forces everybody to recognize the benefits of common ownership; or we can do things as befits our human intelligence and organize to secure these benefits, restricting the pain of an enforced transition to our thought processes. We could all permit ourselves the luxury of betting on the luck of posterity, or we could make the change now ourselves while our chances of success remain optimal.

One cannot expect parties and groups committed to partial solutions (reforms) or indirect expedients (workers' states, minority led revolutions and the like) to know how to deal with the problem. As a socialist, you can work for an outcome that is a real possibility—although in the process you will find yourself opposed to these other promotions (and if you don’t realize it at the outset, the other parties and groups will waste no time in disabusing you).

Organizing for socialism—joining the World Socialist Party in this country—therefore implies your understanding of what socialism is and of what is required to achieve it, as well as a firm commitment to avoid embracing or endorsing any partial solutions to the crises of capitalism. While this is certainly not to everyone’s taste, adopting this rule is the only way to build a movement that really will have the eventual ability to act at the critical moment: when the working class, in a mood of historic revulsion, will finally move to end a system that only causes it pain, that trades it poverty for comfort, privileges for equality and slavery for freedom. 

Propaganda War (1992)

From issue 9 of the World Socialist Review

On second thought: From the Western Socialist (1994)

From issue 11 of the World Socialist Review

The main flaw in the industrial union as a means of emancipation is the fact that a labor union, in order to gain any sort of recognition, must open its doors, even to the point of compulsion, to any and all workers in the industry it seeks to control. If it does not do so it will not be in a position to control anything. If it does its membership must be dominantly made of workers who are not socialists.

Even if the “political arm" were 100 percent socialist, how could they hope to be backed by a union whose membership were predominantly non and anti-socialist? And if it is argued that the socialists of the “political arm” would educate the union members to socialism, this merely knocks De Leon’s theories for another cocked hat. This would certainly demonstrate once more that the political party does not arise from the industrial union.

The truth of the matter is that unions of any kind, whether craft or industrial, arise out of the relations of wage-labor and capital. They can only be used as weapons by the workers in resisting the pressure against their living standards by the capitalist class. They are the means the working class must use under this system to sell labor-power at its value. It may be argued that industrial organization is superior to craft unionization, but even if this is so it only applies in so far as it concerns a capitalist society, for no union could possibly be carried over into socialism. The material conditions for their existence will be absent in a society devoid of economic classes.

“The Socialist Labor Party” HARMO, July-August 1948

Git along, li'l flunky (1993)

From issue 10 of the World Socialist Review

Have you ever found yourself stuck in rush-hour traffic and wondering if the light—much less your life—would ever change? When you think about it, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the driver’s seat, since you’re always being told where to go. The Ross Perots of life literally bank on us acting like their societal chauffeurs or some other kind of admiring flunkies. Always mimicking their dreams and aspirations, trying to follow their lifestyles and goals; never conceiving our own.

In the same hot pursuit of the all-encompassing dollar, a neo-traditional ritual has grown up that runs roughshod over the grand cattle roundups of yesteryear’s golden days on the ranges. It’s euphemistically called morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic. In the cowboy days, otherwise unthinking and unmanageable beasts were herded up and driven long distances to self-destruction in slaughterhouses to make money for the well-to-do barons of old—leaving a hazy cloud of dust in their wake on the stampede to oblivion.

Today the money-making prize meat is much more mobile, intelligent and normally just two-legged! For miles around we herd ourselves on asphalt trails cramming into towering marketplaces of concrete and glass. Like the cattle barons of old, today’s bosses require our simultaneous presence in workplaces to chum out bewildering profits for their benefit—leaving a hazy cloud of smog in our wake as we come and go...

Humanoid cattle

Yesteryear’s slaughter produced a one-shot profit for the cattle barons. Today’s employment produces profit hundreds of times a year from the same humanoid herd member. On a relentless death-march of hypertension, heart failure, cancer, even AIDS; but for a reason no different from the grand slaughters that made America “great.” And at six feet under, evolution stops. All species are the same—dead meat.

Sitting for hours, day in and day out, in nauseating traffic jams isn’t a mass expression of individual free will, nor is it just a coincidence. It is a compulsion of capital that degrades us into high-tech cattle. Unlike cattle, though, we each have an advanced brain with which to think: and thus the ability to break out of this more sophisticated, but nonetheless induced, herd mentality at any point.

Today’s maverick entrepreneur cowboy-types just don’t know what’s on the other end of the rope. When they do find out, they will drop everything and run for cover (as Ross Perot did in his attempt to lasso the public, on getting what was for him a frightening glimpse, when he said, “.. .1 didn’t want to wreck the political process”). When we move en masse, there will be no stopping us. Not only in the driver’s seat, we will decide where we go and when, at our convenience—also, what we will do when we get there: something no cow ever dreamt of! With democratic control of the earth’s resources replacing control by capital, we can all tell the cowboy bosses to get lost so we can go about our business.

W.J. Lawrimore

Obituary: Len Fenton (1917-2006)

Len Fenton and Ann Rab

Obituary from issue number 21 of the World Socialist Review

Last October 26th, the World Socialist Party lost one of its most energetic and committed spokesmen—a "stalwart" in the old sense—Comrade Len Fenton. Surviving the death of his wife Ann Rab by four years, he retired gradually from party functions till his last remaining activity was keeping a monthly log of postal mail received.

Fenton's first contact with the organization was in 1936, during a lunch break on Boston Common, where the party speakers frequently and forcefully argued the case for socialism. He was soon deeply impressed; he joined the party in December 1936 and became an official speaker himself in 1938, joining Comrades Rab and Gloss on the stand at outdoor meetings.

Developing his talent for public speaking of all kinds, Fenton was Boston Local's most effective speaker over a long span of years. From 1947 through the 1970s, he frequently represented the WSP at debates with other organizations and at various colleges and universities in the Boston/Cambridge area.

He recruited several other members of his family into the movement. He served on the Editorial Committee of The Western Socialist (the predecessor of the World Socialist Review) from 1939 until its last issue in 1980. [1]

Although Fenton's forte was as a speaker and debater rather than as a writer, he was very active on the Circulation Committee of the WS, and in 1955 he initiated a campaign to get the journal into libraries, which succeeded in boosting its circulation significantly over the next few years (a period in which many radical journals were losing readership). He was also active on the National Administrative Committee, occasionally serving as National Secretary or Treasurer.

Len combined a lucky gene with financial acumen to rise to the status of "cockroach capitalist," a term applied to members who went into business and did well. This phenomenon has sometimes caused critics to wonder how a party of the working class, committed to abolishing capital and wages, can harbor members of the capitalist class in its ranks. But just a little reflection will show that a socialist revolution aims to abolish the function of capital and the necessity of working for a living; the capitalists themselves only personify their capital.

His business allowed him the opportunity to travel abroad, and from 1965 on he and Ann made several trips to England, where they were hosted by comrades in the SPGB. Often they reciprocated the hospitality when some of these comrades would cross the Atlantic and stop in Boston. They formed lifelong friendships with SPGBers like Gilbert McClatchie (Gilmac), Cyril May, Jim D'Arcy and many others. In that bigger, less connected world, mutual contacts among socialists scattered widely across the globe had an intensity borne of a common sense of purpose.

Len Fenton never lost sight of the big picture. All through his long involvement in the world socialist movement, he maintained a contagious upbeat philosophy. Any success the party has in organizing for socialism will rest partly on the foundations he laid. In that sense, he is with us still. 

[1] In 1939 the Socialist Party of Canada, dodging the wartime censors, asked the WSP to take over its publication for the time being as a joint venture — a relationship that ended after 1968, when the SPC launched an independent journal.

Socialist Principles: An Overview (1989)

From issue 6 of the World Socialist Review

Membership in the World Socialist Party of the United States requires an understanding of and agreement with what we consider to be the basics of scientific socialism. We have always been convinced that a worldwide system based upon production for use, rather than for sale on a market, requires that a majority of the population be socialist in attitude. Events since the establishment of the World Socialist Movement have, we maintain, proved the validity of this judgment. In our opinion, if you agree, generally, with the following statements, you are a socialist and belong with us.

1. Capitalism, even with reforms, cannot function in the interests of the working class. Capitalism, by its very nature, requires continual “reforms”; yet reforms cannot alter the basic relationship of wage-labor and capital and would not be considered, to begin with, if their legislation would lead to disturbing this relationship. Reforms, in other words, are designed to make capitalism more palatable to the working class by holding out the false hope of an improvement in their condition. To whatever extent they afford improvement, reforms benefit the capitalist class, not the working class.

2. To establish socialism the working class must must gain control of the powers of government through their political organization. It is by virtue of its control of state power that the capitalist class is able to perpetuate its system. State power gives control of the main avenues of education and propaganda—either directly or indirectly—and of the armed forces that frequently and efficiently crush ill-conceived working class attempts at violent opposition. The one way it is possible in a highly developed capitalism to oust the capitalist class from its ownership and control over the means of production and distribution is to first strip it of its control over the state. Once this is accomplished the state will be converted from a government over people to administration of the affairs of man. The World Socialist Party of the United States advocates the ballot, and no other method, as a means of abolishing capitalism.

3. Members of the World Socialist Party do not support—either directly or indirectly—members of any other political party. It is always possible, even if difficult in some instances, to vote for world socialism by writing in the name of the Party and a member for a particular legislative office. Our main task, however, is to make socialists and not to advocate use of the ballot for anything short of socialism.

4. The World Socialist Party rejects the theory of leadership. Neither individual “great” personalities nor “revolutionary vanguards” can bring the world one day closer to socialism. The emancipation of the working class “must be the work of the working class itself.” Educators to explain socialism, yes! Administrators to carry out the will of the majority of the membership, yes! But leaders or ‘Vanguards,” never!

5. There is an irreconcilable conflict between scientific socialism and religion. Socialists reject religion for two main reasons: (a) Religion divides the universe into spiritual and physical realms and all religions offer their adherents relief from their earthly problems through some form of appeal to the spiritual. Socialists see the cause of the problems that wrack mankind as material and political. We see the solution as one involving material and political, not spiritual, means, (b) Religions ally themselves with the institutions of class society. Particular religious organizations and leaders may, and frequently do, rebel against what they deem injustice, even suffering imprisonment and worse for their efforts. But they seek their solutions within the framework of the system socialists aim to abolish. One cannot understand the development of social evolution by resorting to religious ideas.

6. The system of society in Russia, China and in all of the other so-called socialist or communist countries is state capitalism. Goods and services, in those countries, as in avowedly capitalist lands, are produced for sale on a market with a view to profit and not, primarily, for use. The placing of industry under the control of the state in no way alters the basic relationships of wage labor and capital. The working class remains a class of wage slaves. The class that controls the state remains a parasitical, surplus-value eating class.

7. Trade unionism is the means by which wage workers organize to “bargain collectively” in order that they might sell their labor power at the best possible price, and to try to improve working conditions. The unorganized have no economic weapon with which to resist the attempts of capital to beat down their standards. But unions must work within the framework of capitalism. They are useful, then, to but a limited extent. They can do nothing toward lessening unemployment for example. In fact, they encourage employers to introduce more efficient methods in order to overcome added costs of higher wages and thereby hasten and increase unemployment. More and more the tendency of industry is toward a greater mass of production with fewer employees. Unions must by their very nature, encourage such development although they are also known, occasionally, to resist this natural trend through what employers like to call “featherbedding.” As Marx put it: instead of the conservative motto, “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,” the workers ought to inscribe upon their banner “abolition of the wages system.” 

Socialist Scholars Conference (1989)

From issue 6 of the World Socialist Review

Held at the City University of New York at the beginning of April (which this writer attended), it was impressive enough in terms of the range of subjects it covered, the number of persons attending it and the breadth of representation of the sponsors and participants. The closest thing to it I can think of (and which I have never been to) is an annual event in France sponsored by the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvridro (Workers’Struggle), in which everyone who’s anyone on the left shows up.

It was, on the face of it, a welcome opportunity to discuss ideas and events in a relatively open atmosphere, though in practice, it frequently turned into a war of fixed positions between competing points of view. It also represented an occasion for networking (establishing contacts with other organizations) and generally a pretty good place to find source materials.

Organized by the CUNY Democratic Socialists’ Club and centered nominally on the theme, “Two Centuries of Revolution: 1789-1989," the Conference was used regularly and methodically by the DSs to get in some Marx-bashing; I couldn't be sure how well attended those workshops were, since they were all the same dreary variations on the topic, "Isn’t Marxism dead yet?" which did not help them to seem any more interesting.

Two panels which I did attend—one called “Is Capitalism Entering a New Stage?” sponsored by Monthly Review, featuring Paul Sweezy, Samir Amin and Beatrix Campbell, and the other on “Black Workers and Class Consciousness"—were at least on more provocative subjects. (Sweezy believes the answer to the question is "no”: capitalism is locked on a course of continued stagnation.) The panel on class consciousness among black workers brought forth the usual round of analyses and ended by leaving the impression that black workers are neither more nor less class conscious than any other sectors of the working class in the United States—though racism and systematic underemployment can generate extra obstacles to socialist understanding for blacks.

Had we (the Boston group) made inquiries early enough, we could at least have had adequate time to decide whether or not we wanted to pay for and man a literature booth at the Conference. We should definitely set up a booth there next year; it would give some very good exposure to socialist ideas. If we can demonstrate expertise in some field, it is even possible we could sponsor a panel or workshop of our own at future conferences, assuming there is a show of interest in it from comrades.

Ron Elbert

Burned out and six feet under (1992)

From issue 8 of the World Socialist Review

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) discovered a while back that homicide tops the list of occupational hazards causing job-related deaths among women in the U.S. “Violence is a contagious disease,” as H.G. Wells once said. On average, 158 female wage-slaves in the U.S. lose their lives each year serving the capitalist class. The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health division chalks up this phenomenon to women working in retail sector jobs and to a lack of safety precautions like better lighting, safer cash handling, bulletproof barricades and the like. Despite their medical expertise, they are being most unscientific in distinguishing symptoms from causes in this morbidity. Even Mahatma Gandhi had a better grasp of cause and effect, as we can see from his diagnosis: “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

So long as we live in a society where one must buy life’s necessities, there will always be a desperate compulsion to acquire money by any means possible. Why are women in this dangerous position of confronting desperate robbers to begin with? The same reason. Like their killers, they too must make the acquisition of money a top priority to live in this capitalist set-up. For the ruling (capitalist) class will have it no other way. No reform or precaution will change this objective fact of competitive society. It can’t help but breed violence and death.

Dr. Catherine Bell, an epidemiologist with the CDC, alluded to the trends in the sexual division of labor as a contributing factor. She inadvertently indicted the conditions of labor in general as a systematic killer of the working class. “Part of it may be that women tend to be employed in places where the risk of homicide is elevated instead of places where they are likely to be electrocuted or crushed or killed in traffic accidents.”

Right to self-obliteration

Life’s little career trade-offs! You can risk being murdered at the cash register, or you can utilize your “right” to equal employment and increase your chances of being electrocuted, crushed or wiped out in a traffic accident! Only in a free (to exploit) society can such challenging choices of self-obliteration be put before us. The CDC report finds that most on-the-job fatalities involve male workers dying from the above-mentioned non-homicidal causes. Whether from a robber’s gun or a boss’s job requirement, the end result is the same.

Violence at the workplace is clearly a problem symptomatic of the class oppression of both sexes in general. It is the quest for profits that makes production (and work generally) a life-threatening activity. It is the artificially imposed poverty that compels the working class to run the gauntlet daily. Each day many are struck down. The hazardous conditions in which this takes place are only symptomatic of the disease, not the cause of it. The disease is capitalism.

Capitalism, with its parasitic ruling class that owns and controls the means and instruments of production: subjecting the overwhelming majority to inhuman conditions like violent competition, pay-as-you-go insecure housing, second-rate food, dangerous daily amounts of stress. The list of these symptoms could go on and on; capitalism creates countless avenues of misery for the human condition.

The cure for this ailment is socialism, and it begins with socialist consciousness. The administration of this cure includes you. Your clinic is the World Socialist movement. With enough house calls and mass innoculations, we can witness the eradication of this morbid scourge in our lifetimes!

W. J. Lawrimore

They're all Utopians now (1991)

Editorial from issue 7 of the World Socialist Review

The “failure of communism” has come to be peddled as the latest version of the usual ideological hamburger on the mass media’s instant menu. What has happened, however, is not that communism has failed but only that Leninism has collapsed. Right from the very beginning, in What is to be Done? Lenin had expressed the view that the working class was “exclusively by its own effort . . . able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc.” [1] This was the view adopted by the Bolshevik majority within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (“the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy”). Buttressing that, Lenin’s thesis on the origins of the theory of socialism was accepted as a good replacement for the Gospel: it “grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals.” [2]

For a very long time, this belief that revolutionary theory could arise “altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement” jammed the only channel by which workers could in fact formulate their protests against the ravages of capitalism. It made Bolshevism, as a chrysalis stage of Social Democracy, reinforced by the authority of the Soviet state, the dominant vehicle of working-class aspirations around the world. Any attempts at directly conceptualizing an alternative to capitalism out of the experience of the class struggle were thereby sentenced to exile. A smothering blanket of pseudo-communist legitimacy helped to choke off a burgeoning trend toward “raising hell” in the workplace.

Capitalist butterfly

With the opening movement of a Solidarity government in Poland, followed by a chain reaction of similar upsets throughout the Leninist countries, the Bolshevik chrysalis has at long last given way to a dazzling (capitalist) butterfly. The market system has made an ideological comeback in the state-capitalist countries in a big way—although, as socialists have been pointing out assiduously ever since the November Revolution, there never ceased to be a market system operating in those countries; it had simply transformed itself into a “central plan”. Thanks to the nomenklatura system (a system of patronage which assured the respective “Communist” parties a vice grip on the strategic economic and political positions), the well-protected capitalists who spent decades consolidating their vulnerable position behind the “iron curtain” now feel confident enough to “rise to full stature in all their giant strength,” to use Lenin’s phrase.

And now that the spectre of communism has finally melted away, some space has again opened up for the real thing to resume its interrupted trajectory. But it can always be interrupted again if we let our thoughts remain centered on the main institutions of class division—profits and wages—rather than on its replacement. For purely business reasons alone, a capitalist will always tend to be incapable of understanding socialism as a concept (as a system of society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production); doing so would require stepping outside the market frame of reference and looking at the world from the vantage point of a human being. This is not impossible; but it can obviously happen only rarely. Then there are, of course, the numerous supporting ideological arguments generated by the world of business as a secondary form of self-defense.

Alternatives to the system

Less obvious is the case of the worker/ professional who fails to grasp even the basics of socialism. What we fill our minds with forms a pattern of energy use which precludes the development of other patterns of thought, and filling our minds with thoughts of struggling to get by in the market leaves little room for choosing alternatives to the market system. Without being steeped in any direct form of pro-capitalist ideology—even being against capitalism in general but not specifically against the market system—millions of people can go on, year in and year out, remaining indifferent to the real possibilities life could hold for them in a system of wealth production which didn’t require them to be poor so it could function.

The “spark” of consciousness is always present, because the poverty enforced by capital is endlessly generating new discontents (and leaving old ones to fester). Capitalists have a built-in incentive to deny the very possibility of eliminating capital; wage-earners (including salaried professional workers), on the other hand, have a devil by the tail and are constantly compelled to find new ways to rationalize their exploitation. The mass media are there to help them in this—but even these are only a band-aid solution, and other machineries of repression either have already been deployed or are being researched. (The idea that wealth is something to be enjoyed simply as the outcome of human labor and that a whole system of society could operate worldwide without the use of money is in any case airily dismissed by the information commandos.)

Utopia now

Capitalists see no need for any system beyond capitalism because their utopia is already an historical fact. The abundance promised (eventually) by capitalism is everywhere; its delivery is nowhere in sight. Life in this utopia is so beautiful and so perfect that the happy workers could not rationally entertain thoughts of doing wealth production differently than on a profit basis—and now, even that paragon of communism, the international group of Leninist parties, has “failed” in its historic mission to take over the world and impoverish everyone. Yet people are starving on a scale as never before in world history while food surpluses are stockpiled or destroyed because their existence threatens profits; poverty is the lot of more human beings now than in any previous period; and even the environmental basis for conducting exploitation is in the process of breaking down under the pressure of continuing systematic abuse.

The time has never been better for junking a system that only works in the eyes of its advocates. Now that it has been shown that Leninism could be scrapped with impunity, why not take a much more productive step and move on to replacing capitalism itself? 

Footnotes:

[1] What is to be Done?, "The Beginning of the Spontaneous Upsurge".

[2] What is to be Done?, "Primitiveness and Economism".