What's the use of politicians? (2022)

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

What's the use of politicians?

We live in the world of capitalism, and everybody knows that capitalism is not perfect, that it has problems. Many of us don’t have jobs, or careers, or prospects. Those of us who do work are forced into the regimentation of the workplace, of bosses, of timesheets and production quotas, reports, key performance indicators, the nine to five, the bills, the mortgage, the stress.

Politicians tell us that what we have to do is to try to fix the problems with reforms. That’s why they ask us to vote for them. They’re supposed to be fixing it for us.

Capitalism is like a car that’s permanently on blocks, with some politician underneath it and another one in the bonnet, shaking their head saying ‘Oh dear oh dear, that looks bad, that does.’ You keep paying the bills but the car never gets fixed. You begin to think the politicians don’t really know what they’re doing.

But what can you do? Capitalism may not be perfect but it’s the only thing we have and after all it does work, sort of.

‘Sort of’? We have the most technologically advanced society that’s ever existed. But when it comes to doing something useful like feeding the people in it, or limiting pollution and global warming, we can only manage ‘sort of.’

Does anybody at all ever watch Party Political Broadcasts anymore? The problem is that they’re boring and you don’t believe a word of what they’re saying. They’re like soap powder adverts, each citing dubious evidence to show they’re better.

Politicians talk about this problem or that issue – within capitalism. The real reason why politicians all sound the same, and why people find it so hard to be interested in politics, is that they all have this same frame of reference.

If you question capitalism itself you automatically put yourself outside that frame of reference, and that’s when the politics of capitalism suddenly becomes meaningless to you.

Politicians make it all sound incredibly complicated, so complicated in fact that you need them to work it all out for you. You have a vote every five years, that ought to be enough, what more do you want? You don’t really understand, you don’t know enough, you’re not smart enough, you couldn’t really make the decisions.

Well, medicine’s complicated. It takes 11 years to train a doctor. We couldn’t all be doctors. But who ever heard of Politician College? What qualification do politicians have to have which is beyond the rest of us? There isn’t one, is there? Anybody could go into politics, as surely Boris Johnson has proved. The experts in charge of decision-making are not ‘expert’ at all. No more than any of us are.

We don’t need them. What we need is to question the basis of modern society ourselves, think about it, and then think what to do about it.

What is the way-out?

In  capitalism, what we need is produced to make a profit for those with money to invest. The rest of us depend on the pay we get from working for some employer. We have nothing in common with them. They live off profits. We depend on wages. A faster than usual rise in the cost of living is not a crisis for them. It is for us because unless our pay goes up too we are worse off. Money problems dominate our life.

Making profits is what capitalism is all about. It is what drives the economy and why profits always come before needs. It is why not enough resources are devoted to essential public services like health care, education and transport. Competition to secure export markets, cheaper sources of raw materials and trade routes leads to international tensions and to resources being used in armed forces. Despite warnings about the effect on the climate, the burning of coal, oil and gas has continued because it has been cheaper.

This is how the system works and it can’t be changed and is why parties and governments, in spite of their promises, always fail to solve these problems.

There is a solution. But it means getting rid of capitalism. The resources exist to provide everyone with what they need as well as good public services and amenities. For these to be used for this they must stop being owned by a small minority of rich people and become instead the common property of all the people. Production for profit can then be replaced by production to directly meet people’s needs.