A correspondent asks us: “Why do you call yourselves World Socialists?” A good question and one deserving of a serious answer. To begin with, the pioneers of scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, called upon the workers of the world to unite, rather than just the workers of England or France or Germany or America. And there was a sound reason for this, a reason based upon an understanding of capitalism both from an historical perspective and the economics of the system.
For the first time in history a social system was making possible a world that would sweep away existing national. religious and ethnic differences; making the antagonisms among mankind, the wars and the poverty, all things of the past. Making all this possible, yes, but only after working people everywhere organized to abolish the existing relationships between capital and labor, the relationships that were stymying the very thing that was becoming possible. On the one hand, capitalism had introduced a mode of production that was social in scope while, on the other hand, ownership was vested in private, corporate or state institutions—a serious contradiction, indeed.
Let us look at production under capitalism. In the first place just about everything — whether goods or services — are produced for the purpose of sale on the market. There was this sort of thing during the times of feudalism and chattel slavery, too, but to a limited degree. The systems in those times were based, primarily, on agrarianism and on production for use — plenty for the use of the feudal aristocracy and Church or the various ruling classes within chattel slave society; scarcity for the serfs and the slaves. Commodity production, to the extent it existed prior to capitalism, was by no means social in the sense it is today. A cobbler made a pair of shoes largely by his own efforts. The same was true of the suit of clothes made by the tailor. And so on. Industry was. to a considerable extent a family affair even in the Infancy of capitalism.
Developing capitalism transformed the primitive handicraft methods of feudalism into a system of production In which thousands — and tens and hundreds of thousands of workers in our times — in many parts of the world, contribute their labor power to the production and distribution of commodities.
Think of a common needle. It requires steel. Steel is made in the United States but one of its essential ingredients, ferro-manganese, is not obtainable here. Furthermore, the machinery, the transportation, the electrification, the plant erection, that is required to produce needles in the era of capitalism requires the cooperative labor of a multitude of workers. The same is true of all other commodities, from the smallest to the largest. All of production, under capitalism, is socialized production. The rub is that ownership is vested in a class, a small percentage of the population, and the rest of us work for them.
So what does the World Socialist Party plan on doing about this? Expropriate the capitalists? Just take their property away from them? We hear you and we would remind you that class ownership of the means of production is based, historically, upon expropriation There isn’t a country in the world where land and resources were not usurped from the original occupiers or users, violently expropriated in many cases. As Marx so eloquently put It: "Capital came into the world with blood dripping from every pore.” And how do we suppose that capital will go out of the world? We are convinced that the revolution that will transform the means of production and distribution into the common property of all mankind will be relatively peaceful. When compared with the blood-letting that has punctuated the history of capitalism to this day it will be serene. Why not investigate?
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