Capitalism or Socialism? (1983)

From the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following speech was made by Clifford Slapper on behalf of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, in a debate against Richard Blausten, a prospective parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party. The debate look place on 2 December in Islington.

Earlier this year, Margaret Thatcher told a group of Conservatives at Cheltenham that "We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead found a new confidence, born of the economic battles at home, and tested and found true 8,000 miles away". Several months before, a 44-year old Birmingham woman with two children had reportedly killed herself after being caught shoplifting (Guardian, 10 September). She was just one casualty of the economic battle glorified by Margaret Thatcher. The official Coroner’s Statistics for 1981 reported nearly 5.000 suicides in Britain in that year — an average of one every other hour. Of those they leave behind, in the hour of Thatcher’s speech, sixty were made redundant in Britain alone, and in the world as a whole 3,500 people starved to death.

The subject of this debate is whether production is to be for the profit of a minority who possess wealth without having to work to produce it. or for the use of all, to satisfy human needs directly. Defenders of capitalism argue that present property relations, class rule by a privileged minority, and dependence on market forces can be made to run in the interests of all. The daily experiences faced by all of us prove otherwise. My opponent in this debate can defend capitalism only by distorting our experiences or by knocking down false and mythical images of “socialism". The Russian regime, for example, was opposed by the Socialist Party as part of the capitalist world before Mr. Blausten was born and yet he takes it as his model of socialism.

Throughout history, people have come together to produce and distribute wealth. Society moves through successive forms, and capitalism is just one stage which arose out of earlier conditions, and gives rise to new conditions. The present world-wide society of capitalism is based on the ownership of the means of wealth production by a minority class. Through private shares or through the state, the factories, farms, mines, newspapers and so on are in the hands of a minority. In Britain, for example, according to Inland Revenue statistics, only seven per cent of the adult population have any shares, one per cent have four-fifths of all privately-held shares, and the richest one per cent possess more accumulated wealth than the poorest eighty per cent of the whole population. The majority class of workers have little or no capital and are forced to work for wages or salaries, producing and distributing wealth. When goods and services are sold on the market, a surplus is accumulated by the owners of capital, arising out of the difference between the wealth produced and the wages paid as the minimum living costs of the workers involved. For example, in 1981, Whitbread made £66 million profit on a turnover of £782 million. With earnings per share of 23p a holder of a million shares would have received £230.000 unearned income. The “value added”, that is, the wealth created by each worker, was £12,082. and yet the average wage was less than half that amount. This is the legalised robbery on which capitalism is based; rent, interest and profit derive from the unpaid labour of the working class.

The class struggle between capitalist and worker carries on as an inevitable result of this conflict of interests. We are urged by our employers to produce more and consume less by absurdly illogical arguments, such as when Campbell Adamson, then director-general of the CBI, was quoted in 1976 as saying: "We believe that the lower the increase we can give ourselves as a nation next year, the better off we will all be". The people whose interests he was representing do not have to worry about bills and mortgages. Last July, Tiny Rowland's wealth increased by £7.5 million in one week. Earlier this year, the Bolivian tin magnate, Patino, died leaving a fortune said to be incalculable — as early as 1947 he had inherited one billion dollars from his father. Richard Northcott was recently paid £17 million by Woolworths for his DIY shop chain; he had inherited a chain of shops in 1974 from his father; 23-year old Dena Al-Fassi has filed a divorce action for three billion dollars against her husband. Sheik Muhammed Al-Fassi. State capitalism also allows a minority to profit. In 1981. British Telecom made £1 billion profit, over £550 million of which was paid as interest to capitalists investing in the business.

In April 1981 the government issued guidelines for officials searching for social security frauds, advising them to investigate those with a "suspiciously high" standard of living. This did not refer to Tiny Rowland, but to those in the impoverished and subordinate class which produces all wealth. The Dl ISS has recorded nearly one thousand deaths from hypothermia each year recently. Norman Fowler has referred to NHS strikers as "cruelly irresponsible" but in July, thirty-four children, most of them dying, were turned away from Guy’s Hospital. London, because the hospital could not "afford" enough nurses to care for them. Increasing poverty leads to frustration, domestic violence, racism and drug addiction. A recent report has estimated that there are now 40,000 drug addicts in Britain.

The anarchy of market competition means that capitalism can only expand by fits and starts, with periodic crises which cut production back. This leads to the waste and the misery of mass unemployment. Unemployment benefit has been cut by about five per cent in real terms for each of the last three years. Instead of pooling resources in order to satisfy needs, we are regimented into the separate productive armies of companies and states competing for profits in the world market. At the moment, on average, one person dies of starvation each second. That is. one "Hiroshima" (120.000 dead) every other day. This is not because of any natural or inevitable scarcity. Farmers in America are being paid by the government not to grow wheat. A feature article in the Financial Times refers to “this paradox of rising malnutrition amid rising output in agriculture" and states that "gifts of free food, which can undermine local markets, can disrupt the process" (7 August 1979). The process referred to is the accumulation of capital by a minority through the market system. This is the warped logic of an anti-human system. Reports from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Bank show that there is no absolute scarcity of resources which would prevent us from producing enough for all.

In every field of life, capitalism has to place profit before human need. There are now 50,000 homeless families in Britain, but fewer houses are being built than at any time since the Second World War. Indeed, there are 600,000 empty houses in Britain, and plenty of adverts for houses each week in the Sunday Times — for hundreds of thousands of pounds each. Thousands of unemployed building workers are told that it is not profitable for houses to be built at the moment. Then there is the threat of final destruction. on which the government’s advice has become very well known: “If a death occurs while you are confined in the fall-out room, place the body in another room and confine it as securely as possible. Attach an identification" {Protect and Survive). The governments of the world are spending one million dollars a minute on armaments, and not a day has gone by since 1945 without a major war taking place somewhere in the world. Why have millions of people been slaughtered in this way? Those governments themselves admit that they have to compete over trade routes, mineral resources, territories and markets: all sources of profit for the owners of capital within a particular nation. Such are the priorities of capitalism.

Produce for use

What. then, is the alternative to all this? Socialism would be a democratic system of production purely for use, not for profit. It can be established by a political, democratic and conscious movement of the world's workers, organised without distinction of age, race, sex or occupation. The present capitalist states of the world must be taken over democratically and dismantled, in order to create the alternative which has been historically produced by capitalism itself. Socialist society, being based on the common ownership of resources, would have no need for police or armed forces, national boundaries, wages, profits or any monetary system. In place of the exchange of property there would be free access for all to the wealth we produce. We can save on the waste of the advertising industry which tells people what they need, by deciding democratically what we wish to produce and consume. The duplication of the market, where rows of shops compete to sell the same shoddy items, and in which nuclear bombs and thalidomide can be produced because they sell, while 3,000 die for the lack of a kidney machine in Britain alone each year; all this can become a thing of the past.

If wealth is produced freely to satisfy needs without any buying, selling or “barter”, a whole range of coercive and commercial jobs essential to the present system would become unnecessary. Ticket collectors, security officers, accountants, bank staff and many others could enter useful, productive occupations. All of the present talk about “work-sharing" as the answer to unemployment cannot be implemented under capitalism, since the interests of profitability demand that a weekly "living wage" be paid to the minimum number of people, to work the longest possible hours, and produce the maximum amount of wealth within that week.

In a socialist society only the best would be produced for all. Without class, there would be no point in “lower price”, second-rate goods for people who cannot “afford” any better. The only limitation lies in the natural and human resources available to us, and the problem to be faced by socialist society will be how best to produce and distribute goods and services in accordance with freely expressed human needs, on a world scale. Without commercial competition and restraint, we need not be artificially hindered in our efforts to care for those who might be too young, old, sick or weak to care for themselves. In socialist society, work becomes voluntary and cooperative and the foundation of social organisation is a harmony between individual and social self-interest. Communications can be organised on a democratic basis, using the technology which is already developed. People can participate in production initiatives on a local and regional basis. The end of property society will be the beginning of consciously made human history. Cultural diversity can flourish in a world of harmonised aims without the arbitrary divisions of national policing boundaries. The economic dependency of children on parents, wives on husbands and elderly parents on children would be replaced by a social dependency of mutual aid, in which security can be based on the stability of society itself.

What is the reaction of the social conservative to this prospect of liberating the productive forces of society from the fetters of profit? The present round of pollution, waste, poverty and war, it seems, is preferable. People may want houses to live in, clothes to wear, but why should investors allow us to build and make them if it is not profitable to them? “Market forces deliver the goods"? Four tons of explosives for every person on earth, while thirty million starve to death each year. “Individual enterprise”? In 1980, twenty small businesses went broke each day. If a worker were to save £5 each week to buy the Duke of Westminster’s London property alone, it would take 7.5 million years. “Freedom”? For those who monopolise wealth to continue to do so.

What is the lory, monetarist Utopia? Let the crisis run its course, they say, to restore profitability. There should be no inflation, little state intervention, weak trade unions, they say. Just like during the nineteenth century, which culminated in the Great Depression, mass unemployment and the First World War. Capitalism cannot be made harmonious, humane or even efficient. Unemployment is at three million and rising in Britain (and twelve million in the USA) because of world capitalism's inevitable periodic recession. Labour and Tory defenders of this system engage in futile arguments over whether private or state spending is most capable of regenerating the wage-slavery of employment. The Left neglect a key point of Marx's economic work, that the trade cycle of booms and slumps is inherent to world capitalism.

The present system is incompatible with genuine democracy or serving human needs. When faced with the alternative of socialism, defenders of capitalism dismiss genuine social democracy as impossible. As one famous statesman put it: “history has demonstrated that throughout time and space . . . there have forever been two classes of persons . . . one dominating and the other dominated . . . has it not always been a minority, through the machinery of government, that imposes its will on the great mass?” These were the words of Mussolini, the founder of Fascism. This argument, borrowed from religious mythology, that people are innately evil, unco-operative and incapable of organising themselves democratically is disproved by the course of human history.

Human supremacy over the earth was achieved by mutual co-operation, not competition. The classless, primitive communism of hunter-gatherers existed until just the most recent 15.000 years of human life. Capitalism over the last few centuries has been the culmination of this period of society, in which the institution of private property has been used to increase production to a level which makes world socialism a practical alternative. Capitalism has developed technology rapidly, but unevenly and with waves of waste and destruction. It has united the world through international trade, but divided it through economic and military conflict between rival nation states. It has produced two final, universal classes of capital and labour, and the potential for producing enough for all, which is constantly frustrated by the law that without profit, there must be no production. There are brutal state dictatorships across two-thirds of the world and a dictatorship of the boardroom in the remaining third. There is a constant danger of frustration leading to fascist responses, for example in the frightening rise of physical attacks on Asians in Coventry and other places over the last few years.

There is an increasingly urgent choice between the continuation of hunger while food is destroyed or not produced at all, and of escalating militarism alongside the almost universal desire for peace, and the alternative of socialism. What is needed to harmonise society is a social revolution based on the desire to direct change in our own material interests, rather than letting it direct us.

An employer, writing in the Chicago Daily News on 16 June 1906. justified his policy of providing benefits for his workers as follows: “When I keep a horse and I find him a clean stable and good food, I am not doing anything philanthropic for my horse". Since then, class consciousness and understanding among workers has forced the ruling class to become more discreet. But the moulding of millions of human beings into units of profitable production, our consumption of wealth minimised as "labour costs", will continue until we change the basis of production. Defenders of capitalism tell us that we are incapable of organising democratically to change society. In conclusion, we urge you to join with us in proving them wrong.