Contradictions of Capitalism (1946)

From the August 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Indeed the contradictions of Capitalism are many and sometimes amusing to the Socialist. According to The People (May 26th, 1946), Scotland Yard is detailing specially qualified detectives with “an easy manner, Savile Row clothes, the ‘old school tie' and plenty of money in their pockets,” to destroy a network of fashionable gambling dens in London and the suburbs.

These gambling dens are not for the working class, but for the amusement of the idlers, and bright young things of the master class. Perhaps they are frequented by colliery owners, since, as Captain Peter Thorneycroft, Conservative M.P., said in the debate on the Coal Nationalisation Bill (29/1/46)

   ‘‘The coal owners can now go into honourable retirement. The burden of responsibility is lifted from their shoulders.
    “They can now sit back and draw State income from their inalienable Bonds.”

Perhaps they are sitting back in these gambling dens—thanks to the Labour Party.

And while one section of the capitalist class squanders its wealth, accumulated from the toil of the working class, the capitalist class as a whole maintains as an integral part of the State machine the Police Force, which concerns itself with protecting the capitalist class as a whole and also sections of it from their swindling neighbours.

Indeed, when our masters behave in such a manner one can well understand why the Christian soul-savers preach the Brotherhood of Man and the ten commandments.

This is but a simple example of the contradiction of a system of society whose fundamental contradiction is the ownership, by a small section of the community, of the wealth produced by the co-operative and associated effort of the overwhelming majority in that community.

This fundamental contradiction, source of many secondary ones, will be solved by socialism, which removes the fundamental contradiction by the revolutionary replacement of the present system of society by a new social order, wherein the wealth produced by the freely associated efforts of the whole community is owned by the producers and distributed according to needs of the individual members of the community. In short— Socialism.

D. A. Hawes