It is 1981, although it may as well be 1881 People are still living in slums, starvation still afflicts millions of the earth's inhabitants, children still cry out for the good things in life which their parents' poverty denies them; old people still die of the cold n winter; tramps still sleep on the Embankment, squalor and insecurity are still a daily reality for many. The times may be changing, but the stench of decay still contaminates our society as much as it did any Victorian city. The sickness of capitalism has shown no signs of responding to any miracle cures.
The cause of social problems is class division. Our message is directed solely at the majority class: those who own little more than their labour power, which they must sell for a price called a wage or salary in order to live. The working class runs society from top to bottom. but they do not receive the benefits of their labour. The means of wealth production and distribution — the land, factories, mines, offices, newspapers — are owned by a minority, the capitalist class, who receive rent, interest and profit as a result. The two classes have no interests in common — the gain of one is the loss of the other. The political aim of the capitalist class, and all the parties which stand for capitalism, is to ensure that the workers are prepared to lose so that the capitalists may gain. “Don’t go on strike" they tell us. "Fight in our wars to defend our markets, obey our laws, follow our morals and, above all, don’t listen to those socialists because they want to steal our wealth." Millions of workers are taken in by this propaganda. They make profits for the capitalists. they build palaces and mansions for them, they sing their national anthems, they even fight and die in their armies.
Socialists stand for a system of society it which the means of wealth production and distribution are owned and controlled by the whole community. Instead of producing wealth for the profit of the few, wealth in socialism will be produced solely for human use. There will be no buying and selling, but free access for all people to the abundant wealth which society can produce. In a socialist society food will be produced to eat. houses to live in. clothes to wear.
In advocating this sane alternative to the economic anarchy of capitalism, socialists are accused of all sorts of sins. We are called Utopians because we want what has never before happened. Human history is an unceasing record of changes which have never before happened, but those with a conservative outlook (both of the Right and Left) imagine that society has reached its final stage and that we must be stuck with capitalism for evermore. We are called extremists because we dare to advocate real social democracy, rather than the dictatorship of the rich and the powerful. We are told that we are merely envious of the wealth of others because we object to a system where the wealth producers are impoverished while privileged scroungers sit in their country estates and moan about how lazy the workers are. We are said to be attempting to steal from the capitalists rewards and wealth that which we are not entitled to, when the truth is the reverse: it is the capitalists who are a robber class, living off the legally stolen profits which they obtain by exploiting the workers. We are accused of all these things by the capitalists and their gullible or bribed defenders. But we still continue to wholly oppose the profit system and still we urge workers everywhere to organise politically for the establishment of a social system that will cater for their needs.
Millions of workers are taken in by their masters' propaganda. They learn it at school. They read it in the press. They see it on TV. They sing about it in the churches. They are lectured on it by the politicians. Those who have seen through the capitalist con trick are still very few. But our numbers will grow, for we are aided in our propaganda by capitalism, which throws up endless contradictions for workers to face. Experience of capitalism drags workers out of the fog of acquiescence into the movement of resistance. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is fuelled by capitalism. The system is an ungrateful ally: you may he loyal to it. but it will not bother about you if the needs of profit so dictate. Under capitalism, needs come a poor second to profits. It is this antagonism of class interests, between capitalists and workers, robbers and robbed, which makes socialism an urgent necessity.
It is 1981, and we are still stuck with the same system and many of the same problems as in 1881. In the intervening period, millions have starved to the death. Millions have been sacrificed to the god of profit on the battlefields of the world. Our environment has become dangerously polluted. Millions have faced, and do still face, the poverty of the dole queue. Machinery of destruction has been invented which would have been unthinkable in 1881. Some call this progress.
Yet progress has happened. In 1981 we do possess the technological knowhow to create enough wealth to provide for the needs of the entire world population. Even in 1881 this was possible, but today the immensity of technological knowledge is such that human labour could be made pleasurable and efficient by the use of new technology. In 1881 there was no Socialist Party in Britain. Today there is. Our message is a simple one: Join Us.
1 comment:
That's the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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