Dear Editors,
I would be interested in your answers to the following points:
(1) Massive social improvements have been achieved since WW2 by modifying capitalism. This is a proven strategy for improving the lives of working people. Abolishing capitalism is unproven and so ambitious and unlikely that most people can’t even imagine it. Better to play the percentage game and stick with a socially modified form of capitalism along Scandinavian lines.
(2) I work for a company owned by capitalists so why don’t I feel oppressed? I make as much money as I want doing a job I enjoy without being an owner or shareholder.
(3) People need a contrast between work and leisure in order to appreciate and enjoy their leisure time. This would be lost if paid work was abolished.
(4) Are NHS workers also wage slaves? If so, why? Since they work for the good of the whole of society not a capitalist’s profit.
N. B.,
Maccesfield.
Reply:
(1) It is true that, compared with their equivalents in 1945, most people in Britain today are better off in terms of what they consume. But this hasn’t been the result of Scandinavian-type “social modification” of capitalism since it has also happened in other countries, such as the US, which have not adopted such a policy. It will have been the result partly of workers working more intensively than they did in 1945 and so needing to consume more to regenerate their mental and physical energies and partly also of their increased productiveness allowing the capitalists – under trade union pressure – to pay higher wages while still extracting more profit. Even so, most people do probably see things like you do, which will be one of the reasons why they have not been interested in socialist ideas. But they still have money problems and they are also affected by wider social problems – wars and the threat of war, pollution, crime – which can only be solved in the context of a socialist society. On the world scale of course it’s a different story with record numbers living in absolute poverty.
As to Socialism being ambitious – what worthwhile goal isn’t? 99 percent of the socialist revolution consists of imbuing our class with the confidence and ambition to succeed, and a revulsion of living as wage slaves whether pampered or ill-fed: once we have this our numbers will carry the day.
(2) Just because you don’t feel oppressed doesn’t mean you are not being exploited. Why do you think your capitalist company employs you if not because it is getting more money from what you do than what it pays you? It’s certainly not doing this just to give you money to live on. Wait and see what will happen if the company ever runs into financial difficulties or is taken over.
(3) All that those socialists who have speculated about the disappearance of the distinction between work and leisure in socialism mean is that work, like leisure activities today, could become something people like doing – not an impossibility since even under capitalism today you yourself say you like the job you’re doing. Of course, there will still be a distinction in socialism between organised work to be done during set hours, even if enjoyable, and recreational activities carried out at the individual’s discretion.
(4) Yes, NHS workers are wage-slaves in the sense that, not having any large unearned income from owning property, to get the money to buy the things they need to live, they have to sell themselves – or more accurately, their working abilities – on the labour market for a wage. They may be employed by a governmental body and be doing a useful job (at least some of them, not those working in accounts) rather than for a profit-seeking capitalist firm, but they are still exploited in the sense of working for a longer time than the value of the working skills they sell and are paid for.
–Editors.
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