Presently, everything we humans need to live is locked up tightly under the control of investors who accumulate capital (capitalists)—people who can deny everyone else access to “survival goods.” Because they have this power, they can force as many people as market conditions will allow to work for them, at rates they set low enough to allow them a profit on their investments. If the state does the investing and controls the capital, then the state is the capitalist; it all comes to the same thing. The owners and controllers of capital monopolize the production of virtually everything useful or enjoyable (wealth), which economists facelessly describe as “goods and services.”
This monopolization creates two classes of people—capitalists and workers. Anyone who works for a living—blue-collar, white-collar or professional—is a worker (whether this fits the currently fashionable image or not). Although not all workers produce wealth, the conditions prevailing in the factories, on the land, in transportation, set the standard for conditions elsewhere in the system. Workers alone produce wealth, and employment is just an evolved form of slavery.
Capitalists have to stay in business. This means they need to keep their costs down and their profit opportunities maximal. They must pay their employees the least amount they calculate will keep them alive; and their system allows the use of a "sliding scale" of valuation which gives them the right to pay employees as close to nothing as they can get away with, providing this is compatible with the maintenance of a profit-producing workforce.
Workers have to stay alive. This means they need to keep their earnings as high as they can and to maximize their purchasing power as consumers. If they don’t bother to draw their own conclusions about being forced into such a position, they will at least manage to respond to the initiatives taken by their employers; by organizing into unions, they can, when the economy is expanding, enforce the terms of their maintenance that capitalism normally requires in the abstract.
The attempt by employers to drive wages or salaries down below the survival minimum is part of a process we call “exploitation.” The driving mechanism of the process is the quest for profit, which requires producing the greatest possible surplus over workers’ needs at any given time. We say “producing” because it is in the sector of wealth production that the most direct and explicit form of exploitation occurs. But employment in general is exploitation, even where workers produce no direct wealth themselves.
The result of a system based on these two all-inclusive sets of conflicting needs is an unending and often vicious struggle between the two classes (the class struggle). All political conflicts, based on this premise, form part of the same evil tree— all of them ultimately generated by the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Ownership of the means of producing wealth requires no work, and work—in any sector of the economy—implies no control over the system in any of its parts.
What is the solution?
Obviously, this state of affairs could go on forever—conditions permitting, which is arguable all by itself—if workers (a) either tamely submitted to their enslavement or (b) actively "improved” its quality
by organizing against their employers. The only way out of the whole vicious cycle is to eliminate its basis, the use of capital.
How do you do that? Abstractly speaking, on the one hand, by transferring ownership and control of the means of wealth production to the community at large, so that all who ask for what they need can give it directly to themselves. (This implies a democratically controlled administration, naturally; see below.)
More concretely, enough workers to constitute a majority of the population remove the obligation of obtaining money for the things they need, based on the work they perform. They abolish the wages system. If everyone, as the community, disposes of a common ownership over the means of creating useful and/or enjoyable effects, no one can have power over others in that community.
Why the working class?
Because capitalism has triumphed worldwide, eliminating all competing systems of wealth production, it has consequently consolidated the struggles between exploiters and exploited into one between capitalists and workers. No other social classes are left anymore. Workers are almost all the people there are in the world. Businessmen constitute the remainder. By eliminating capital altogether—which rests squarely on the payment of wages, salaries and other types of payment for services rendered—workers in effect constitute a new form of society. Only they can do this; to their employers (and anyone using employer-logic) the whole idea sounds perfectly insane.
Getting there
The working class needs first of all—schematically speaking—to gain control of both the machinery of state and the world of work. A socialist party cannot help it do the latter, but— once workers realize the need to carry out this purpose—such a party is the best vehicle available for accomplishing the former.
Why gain control of the state? Because it is a command center for the economy, easily converted into a “war machine” for defeating working class initiatives aimed at wresting control from the capitalist class. It is a strategic line of retreat that can otherwise save the day for the capitalist class when all else seems lost. Capitalism is replete with instances of the military taking control of the state to tide over the system for indefinite “emergencies,” when workers get too close. Workers do, however, operate the system to a degree that has become virtually total. Economically they are already dominant within the capitalist system, but of course the capital-accumulating class denies them the political control that should go with that.
Workers need to pursue this goal very single-mindedly. Less than the system itself will not suffice: leaving “parts” of it intact will only force it to adapt itself to the change of rules imposed on it, largely at working class insistence. Basing an economy on payment for goods and services— specifically, on the payment of wages and salaries—itself must go, or we will never be rid of the beast.
Any organization failing to recognize this will never enjoy real or lasting success in seeking to promote goals it sees as opposed to the effects or the operations of capitalism. A socialist party cannot therefore allow itself to pursue other objectives than the replacement of restricted access to goods and services with the objective of free access, which means it can only seek the abolition of the wages system. It must oppose all other goals and those who espouse them; the logic of its very existence requires this.
Why a socialist party?
What people in different countries around the globe should seek to accomplish through their respective socialist parties, as an immediate goal, is to place everything related to the production of anything useful or enjoyable—wealth—in the hands of the community—not the state. This includes distribution from the places where wealth is created to the places where it is used, with the community being made up of everyone without distinction of race or sex: each person having the same right to decide and procure what he or she needs. This arrangement implies the lack of necessity for money or for any other sort of bartering device, and the consequent lack of a basis for the institutions related to exchange—banks, insurance companies, governments and states; of everything, including legislation, designed to force people to do things.
Making it happen
We live under a pernicious system that denies and punishes our best instincts as community animals. Either we can all wait until crisis conditions get so terrible that a confused collision (and possibly an explosively destructive one) between capitalism and reality forces everybody to recognize the benefits of common ownership; or we can do things as befits our human intelligence and organize to secure these benefits, restricting the pain of an enforced transition to our thought processes. We could all permit ourselves the luxury of betting on the luck of posterity, or we could make the change now ourselves while our chances of success remain optimal.
One cannot expect parties and groups committed to partial solutions (reforms) or indirect expedients (workers' states, minority led revolutions and the like) to know how to deal with the problem. As a socialist, you can work for an outcome that is a real possibility—although in the process you will find yourself opposed to these other promotions (and if you don’t realize it at the outset, the other parties and groups will waste no time in disabusing you).
Organizing for socialism—joining the World Socialist Party in this country—therefore implies your understanding of what socialism is and of what is required to achieve it, as well as a firm commitment to avoid embracing or endorsing any partial solutions to the crises of capitalism. While this is certainly not to everyone’s taste, adopting this rule is the only way to build a movement that really will have the eventual ability to act at the critical moment: when the working class, in a mood of historic revulsion, will finally move to end a system that only causes it pain, that trades it poverty for comfort, privileges for equality and slavery for freedom.
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