Capitalism and socialism (2002)

From the April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism has been defined as a market economy based upon the production and exchange of commodities. Because the economic motives that determine commodity production originate from the desire to earn surplus value, we can infer that economic interests under capitalism will always remain antagonistic. The anomalies inherent in the distribution and accumulation of income and wealth arise from within these antagonistic economic interests. The obvious character of working class enslavement to private capital needs no further analysis other than as the need to earn money-wages.

The working class are the mere custodians of private wealth owned by the capitalist class. Commodity production under the division of labour alienates the worker from all other economic and social activities and becomes the only essential link between the capitalist and working classes.

Socialism aims to realise a classless, moneyless and egalitarian society. Like every scientific discipline socialism has its own scientific terms in which to describe, analyse and interpret the world. The dialectical premises of scientific socialism are derived from the historical development of capitalism and postulate the intensification of the class struggle between the capitalist class and the working class. Thus socialism is historical and is embryonic within the political and economic evolution of capitalism.

Capitalism is the product of humanity’s economic development, and not the culmination of blind historical chances. Thus the criticism of capitalism begins with the criticism of humanity. The illusory projection of human social and political freedoms into abstract and superstitious laws has led to the blind acceptance of the political state as the custodian of freedom and liberty. Human social consciousness becomes reified into abstract and arbitrary civic laws divorced from the social contradictions taking place in the real world.

Political freedom comes to depend upon the whims and fancies of political charlatans. Herein consists the fallacy and mystery of democracy conceived under a classic capitalist state. The achievement of universalised political and social freedoms is a political chimera under capitalism. Political and social freedoms under antagonistic class conditions cannot exist. They do not exist under capitalism.

The division of labour under commodity production, and specialisation, confirms the workers’ physical and intellectual potentialities within the limiting conditions of the commodity market. Future human development becomes stifled by the very economic and social relations grounded upon economic impoverishment and class domination.

Capitalism is a money economy. It is only in socialism where money and trade will not exist that humans will at last recognise the objective world as the outcome of his mental and physical exertions and . . . claim back the political and economic freedoms from the state. The abstract idealisation of intrinsic and subjective human moral virtues are detached from the fetters of superstition and resolved into working class political consciousness. Socialism must succeed in finishing the process towards democracy stifled under capitalism.

The demystification of democracy can only begin through the complete eradication of the political apparatus – the state. The only class or people who can execute this task remains the working class. The eradication of capitalism will lead to the liberation of the working class from its restricted social and political conditions. Social relations will become deprived of contractual obligations. Employment as conceived under the division of labour will be done away with. A classless, moneyless and stateless society can only have one culture – and that can have only one over-riding moral duty: cooperation.

In the context of the class struggle the working class is the last class that lives in need of redemption. It does not possess any class interests to defend other than to free itself from class domination, economic impoverishment and political marginalisation.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed and formulated their dialectical methodology during the 19th century. Their critical analysis of bourgeois social and political history was derived from within the actual political and economic contradictions taking place in that century. But we are not to restrict our analysis and refutation of capitalism within the realms of the 19th century. It is our duty to subject these dialectical methodology to the actual political and economic contradictions taking place in the 21st century.

We advocate world socialism, a socialism not restricted to a particular country. We encourage the class struggle in order to enhance our uncompromising and revolutionary political objectives. Because we can assume that political consciousness is immanent within the working class struggles we disseminate Marxist political ideas to the working class wherever they happen to live.

Kephas Mulenga