Provincial Tour. (1907)

Party News from the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

D.V., W.P., etc., F. E. Dawkins, J. Kent and R. H. Kent will hold meetings as follows: August 18, Oxford; 19, Coventry; 20, Rugby; 21, Leicester; 22, Burton; 23, Derby; 24, Nottingham; 25, Manchester. Other comrades are invited to join.

The Proletariat (The Working Class). By Karl Kautsky. (1907)

From the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Specially translated for The Socialist Party of Great Britain and approved by the Author.

I.—The Proletarian and the Handicraftsman.

We have already seen in the previous chapter (See “From Handicraft to Capitalism.”) that capitalist production pre-supposes the divorce of the worker from the means of production. In large capitalist concerns we find on the one hand the capitalist who possesses the means of production but does not himself take part in production; and on the other hand the wage-workers, the Proletarians, who possess nothing but their labour-power, by the sale of which they live, and whose labour alone creates the products of the large concern.

In order to obtain the number of wage-workers necessary to satisfy the requirements of Capital, it was, as we observed, in the beginning essential to rely upon the aid of force. To-day such aid is no longer needed. The advantage the large concern has over the small enterprise suffices to expropriate and throw upon the labour market year by year a sufficient number of peasants and handicraftsmen, who together with the progeny of the already “freed” wage-workers more than satisfy the capitalist craving for “new human flesh” ; and this happens not only without infringing the laws of private property— but on the contrary by relying upon those laws.

That the number of Proletarians continually increases rapidly is so obvious that even those who would like to make us believe that Society is governed by the same conditions that prevailed a hundred and more years ago, and who are painting the future of small enterprise in the rosiest colours, do not venture to deny it.

Just as in production the large capitalist concern has become the dominant form of industrial enterprise, so in State and Society has the industrial wage-worker taken the most prominent place within the working class. This position was occupied four hundred years ago by the peasant, and a hundred years ago by the petty bourgeois.

The industrial wage-workers are already in all civilised countries the largest class ; it is their conditions and views, which increasingly determine the mode of life and thought of the other sections of labour. But that means a complete revolution in the prevailing conditions of life and forms of thought among the great mass of the population; for the conditions of the wage-workers, particularly of the industrial Proletarians (and under the capitalist mode of production agriculture becomes also an industry), differ totally from those of former categories of labour.

When the peasant or handicraftsman was the free owner of his means of production he commanded also the full product of his labour. The labour-product of the wage-worker, however, does not belong to him, but to the capitalist, the purchaser of labour-power, the owner of the necessary means of production. It is true that the wage-worker is aid for his labour-power by the capitalist, but the value contained in is wages by no means equals the value of his product.

When the industrial capitalist purchases the commodity labour-power, he naturally does so with the intention of utilising it in a profitable manner. We have seen that a certain amount of labour creates a certain amount of value. The more the worker labours, the greater (under otherwise equal conditions) will be the value he produces. If the industrial capitalist would let the wage-worker, whom he has hired, work only so long as to produce a value equal to the wages he receives, the employer would make no profit. But even if the capitalist would like to pose as a benefactor of suffering mankind, capital calls for profit, and the capitalist does not turn a deaf ear to this call. The longer the worker toils in the service of capital beyond the labour time necessary for producing the value of his wages—that is to say, the greater surplus there is left—from the total product created by him after the value equivalent to his wages is deducted, the greater is the surplus value (as this excess value is called) the greater is the exploitation of the worker, which finds a limit only in the exhaustion of the exploited and—in the possible resistance offered by him to the exploiter.

To the wage-worker private property in the instruments of production meant therefore from the outset something altogether different to what it signified to the handicraftsman or peasant; for while to these two it was originally the means of securing to them the complete ownership of their product; it has been for the wage-worker, and ever will be, nothing else but the means of exploiting him, of depriving him of the surplus value which he has created. The wage-worker from that standpoint is anything but a lover of “private property.” And in this connection he not only distinguishes himself from the property-owning peasant and handicraftsman, but also from the handicraftsman of precapitalist times.

These journeymen formed the transition from the master handicraftsman to the Proletarian, just as the concerns in which they were employed in larger numbers form the transition from petty enterprise to large industrial concerns. Yet how different they were to the Proletarians !

They were treated as members of the master’s family and they had the prospect of becoming masters themselves. But the wage-worker is only a hireling and condemned to remain a wage-worker. In these two points is summed up the cause for the difference between a handicraftsman and a wage-worker.

As the journeyman belonged to the family, he ate at the same table and slept in the house of his master, and the question of shelter and food did not exist as far as he was concerned. His wages in money were only a part of what he received from his master for his labour-power. The wages served less the purpose of satisfying the most necessary wants (which, as has been pointed out, were supplied by living with the master) than for the purpose of obtaining comforts or of saving, of accumulating the means required for setting up as master on his own account,

The journeyman worked together with the master. When the latter extended the hours of labour unusually, he was himself as much affected thereby as his assistant. There was therefore no strong desire on the part of the master to extend the working hours to the point of exhaustion, and even where that was the case, such intention was very easily restrained. Whenever the master endeavoured to make his own conditions of labour as agreeable as possible, the journeyman too, benefited thereby.

The instruments of production, which the small master required, were so few and simple that the craftsman did not need considerable means to set up as master. Every handicraftsman consequently had the opportunity of becoming a master; in fact, he already anticipated that position, and as he had to save in order to obtain the means to this end, he was as decided a defender of private property as the master craftsman.

It is necessary to point out that here the conditions of handicraft are being considered as they originally arose in pre-capitalist times.

Let us now compare with them the conditions of the wage-worker.

In capitalist industrial concerns wage-workers and capitalists are not active together; and although, in the course of economic development the industrial capitalist has acquired a separate identity from the merchant proper, and although the capitalists of commerce and those of industry have become two distinct sections, the industrial capitalist, strictly speaking, still remains a merchant. His activity as capitalist— as far as he at all plays an active part in his undertaking—is limited, like that of the dealer, to the market. His duties are to purchase as suitably and cheaply as possible the necessary raw material, auxiliary materials, labour-power, etc., and to sell as dearly as possible the goods produced in his concern. In the sphere of production he has to do nothing else but to see that the workers perform the largest amount of work possible for the smallest wages possible; that the largest amount of surplus value be squeezed out of them. The longer they work, the better for him. He does not get tired if the working hours are too long, he does not perish if the mode of production becomes a murderous one.

The capitalist is therefore far less considerate concerning the life and limb of the worker than was the master handicraftsman. The prolonging of the working day, the abolition of holidays, the introduction of night-work, the compulsion to work in damp or over-heated workshops, or places filled with noxious gases, etc.: these are the “improvements” which capitalist industrialism has brought to the worker.

The introduction of machinery has still further increased the dangers to the health and life of the worker. He is now chained to a monster which seizes upon him with gigantic strength and maddening speed. Only the closest, never-faltering attention on the part of the worker attending such a machine prevents his being caught and crushed by it. Safety arrangements cost money, and the capitalist does not introduce them, unless he is compelled to do so. Economy is above all the main virtue of the capitalist; and that demands his limiting the space in his factory and finding room in it for as many machines as possible. What does it matter to him, if by so doing he endangers the workers’ safety. Workmen are cheap ; but large, commodious premises are dear.

But the capitalist method of applying machinery changes the conditions of the workers in yet another manner for the worse.

The tools of the handicraftsman were inexpensive, and seldom required such considerable alterations as would have caused them to become altogether useless. It is different with the machine. That costs money, much money. If it becomes prematurely useless, or is not worked to its full capacity, it will bring the capitalist loss instead of profit. But the machine wears out not only in use, but also when standing still. On the other hand the increasing application of science upon the economic domain, resulting as it did, in the invention of the machine, has the effect of continually producing new inventions and discoveries, sometimes of greater, sometimes of less significance, and constantly causing, now one, now another kind of machine, at times even the entire plant of a factory, to become incapable of keeping up with competition, and thus to lose their value before having been completely used up. Owing to this uninterrupted evolution in the technical aspect of machines, every one is in danger of becoming valueless before being used up. This circumstance affords the capitalist sufficient ground for using up every machine from the moment he purchases it as speedily as possible. That is to say, the application of machinery in production is a spur to the capitalist to extend the hours of labour, to carry on if possible, an uninterrupted production, and to introduce the succession of day-and night-shifts, which means that the abominable practice of night-work becomes a permanent institution.

When the application of machinery first began, some idealists declared that the millenium had come, that the machine would relieve the worker from his labour and make him a free man. But in the hand of the capitalist the machine has become the most powerful lever for the purpose of making the labour-burden of the proletarian a crushing one, and his servitude unbearable and murderous.

But it is not only in respect of the hours of labour that the wage-worker under the capitalist mode of production is worse off than the handicraftsman. The wage-worker does not eat at the table of the capitalist nor live at his dwelling-house. He may dwell in most miserable quarters, feed upon refuse, why, even be in a starving condition, yet the comfort of the capitalist is not in the least disturbed thereby.

The meaning of the terms “starvation” and “wages” used to exclude one another. Then the free worker could only fall a victim to starvation if he was unable to find work. Everybody who worked had also to eat. The capitalist mode of production merits the distinction of having reconciled the two contradictions,—”starvation” and “wages”—and of having made “starvation-wages” a permanent institution, and even a mainstay of present society.

Blogger's Note:

It was the German SPGBer, Hans Neumann, who translated Kautsky's writings from the German into English for the SPGB.

Art, Labour and Socialism. By Wm. Morris. (1907)

From the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reprinted from "To-day."

I am “one of the people called Socialists'; therefore I am certain that evolution in the economic conditions of life will go on, whatever shadowy barriers may be drawn across its path by men whose apparent self-interest binds them, consciously or unconsciously, to the present, and who are therefore hopeless for the future.

I hold that the condition of competition between man and man is bestial only, and that of association human: I think that the change from the undeveloped competition of the Middle Ages, trammelled as it was by the personal relations of feudality, and the attempts at association of the guild-craftsmen into the full-blown laissez-faire competition of the nineteenth century, is bringing to birth out of its own anarchy, and by the very means by which it seeks to perpetuate that anarchy, a spirit of association founded on that antagonism which has produced all former changes in the condition of men, and which will one day abolish all classes and take definite and practical form, and substitute Socialism for competition in all that relates to the production and exchange of the means of life. I further believe that as that change will be beneficent in many ways, so especially will it give an opportunity for the new birth of art, which is now being crushed to death by the money-bags of competitive commerce.

My reason for this hope for art is founded on what I feel quite sure is a truth, and an important one, namely that all art, even the highest, is influenced by the conditions of labour of the mass of mankind, and that any pretensions which may be made for even the highest intellectual art to be independent of these general conditions are futile and vain; that is to say, that any art which professes to be founded on the special education or refinement of a limited body or class must of necessity be unreal and short-lived.

“Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour.” If those are not Professor Ruskin’s words they embody at least his teaching on this subject. Nor has any truth more important ever been stated; for if pleasure in labour be generally possible, what a strange folly it must be for men to consent to labour without pleasure; and what a hideous injustice it must be for society to compel most men to labour without pleasure! For since all men not dishonest must labour, it becomes a question either of forcing them to lead unhappy lives or allowing them to live happily.

Now the chief accusation I have to bring against the modern state of society is that it is founded on the art-lacking or unhappy labour of the greater part of men, and all that external degradation of the face of the country of which I have spoken is hateful to me not only because it is a cause of unhappiness to some few of us who still love art, but also and chiefly because it is a token of the unhappy life forced on the great mass of the population by the system of competitive commerce.

The pleasure which ought to go with the making of every piece of handicraft has for its basis the keen interest which every healthy man takes in healthy life, and is compounded, it seems to me, chiefly of three elements—variety, hope of creation, and the self-respect which comes of a sense of usefulness, to which must be added that mysterious bodily pleasure which goes with the deft exercise of the bodily powers. I do not think I need spend many words in trying to prove that these things, if they really and fully accompanied labour, would do much to make it pleasant. As to the pleasure of variety, any of you who have ever made anything—I don’t care what—will well remember the pleasure that went with the turning out of the first specimen. What would have become of that pleasure if you had been compelled to go on making it exactly the same for ever?

As to the hope of creation, the hope of producing some worthy or even excellent work, which, without you, the craftsmen, would not have existed at all, a thing which needs you and can have no substitute for you in the making of it, can we any of us fail to understand the pleasure of this?

No less easy, surely, is it to see how much the self-respect born of the consciousness of usefulness must sweeten labour. To feel that you have to do a thing not to satisfy the whim of a fool or a set of fools, but because it is really good in itself, that is useful, would surely be a good help to getting through the day’s work.

As to the unreasoning, sensuous pleasure in handiwork, I believe in good sooth that it has more power of getting rough and strenuous work out of men, even as things go, than most people imagine. At any rate it lies at the bottom of the production of all art, which cannot exist without it even in its feeblest and rudest form.

Now this compound pleasure in handiwork I claim as the birth right of all workmen. I say that if they lack any part of it they will be so far degraded, but that if they lack it altogether they are, as far as their work goes, I will not say slaves, the word would not be strong enough, but machines more or less conscious of their own unhappiness.

* * * * *

The craftsman of the Middle Ages no doubt often suffered grievous material oppression, yet in spite of the rigid line of separation drawn by the hierarchical system under which he lived between him and his feudal superior, the difference between them was arbitrary rather than real; there was no such gulf in language, manners, and ideas as divides a cultivated middle-class person of to-day, a “gentleman,” from even a respectable lower-class man; the mental qualities necessary to an artist—intelligence, fancy, imagination—had not then to go through the mill of the competitive market, nor had the rich (or successful competitors) made good their claim to be the sole possessors of mental refinement.

As to the conditions of handiwork in those days, the crafts were drawn together into guilds which indeed divided the occupations of men rigidly enough, and guarded the door to those occupations jealously; but as outside among the guilds there was little competition in the markets, wares being made in the first instance for domestic consumption, and only the overplus of what was wanted at home close to the place of production ever coming into the market or requiring any one to come and go between the producer and consumer, so inside the guilds there was but little division of labour; a man or youth once accepted as an apprentice to a craft learned it from end to end, and became as a matter of course the master of it; and in the earlier days of the guilds, when the masters were scarcely even small capitalists, there was no grade in the craft save this temporary one. Later on, when the masters became capitalists of a sort, and the apprentices were, like the masters, privileged, the class of journeyman craftsman came into existence; but it does not seem that the difference between them and the aristocracy of the guild was anything more than an arbitrary one. In short, during all this period the unit of labour was an intelligent man.

Under this system of handiwork no great pressure of speed was put on a man’s work, but he was allowed to carry it through leisurely and thoughtfully; it used the whole of a man for the production of a piece of goods, and not small portions of many men; it developed the workman’s whole intelligence according to his capacity, instead of concentrating his energy on one-sided dealing with a trifling piece of work; in short, it did not submit the hand and soul of the workman to the necessities of the competitive market, but allowed them freedom for due human development.

It was this system, which had not learned the lesson that man was made for commerce, but supposed in its simplicity that commerce was made for man, which produced the art of the Middle Ages, wherein the harmonious co-operation of free intelligence was carried to the furthest point which has yet been attained, and which alone of all art can claim to be called Free.

The effect of this freedom, and the widespread or rather universal sense of beauty to which it gave birth, became obvious enough in the outburst of the expression of splendid and copious genius which marks the Italian Renaissance. Nor can it be doubted that this glorious art was the fruit of the five centuries of free popular art which preceded it, and not of the rise of commercialism which was contemporaneous with it; for the glory of the Renaissance faded out with strange rapidity as commercial competition developed, so that about the end of the seventeenth century, both in the Intellectual and the Decorative arts the commonplace or body still existed, but the romance or soul of them was gone. Step by step they had faded and sickened before the advance of commercialism, now speedily gathering force throughout civilisation. The domestic or architectural arts were becoming (or become) mere toys for the competitive market through which all material wares used by civilised men now had to pass.

Commercialism had by this time well-nigh destroyed the craft-system of labour, in which, as aforesaid, the unit of labour is a fully-instructed craftsman, and had supplanted it by what I will ask leave to call the workshop system, wherein, when complete, division of labour in handiwork is carried to the highest point possible, and the unit of manufacture is no longer a man, but a group of men, each member of which is dependent on his fellows, and is utterly useless by himself. This system of the workshop division of labour was perfected during the eighteenth century by the efforts of the manufacturing classes, stimulated by the demands of the ever-widening markets; it is still the system in some of the smaller and more domestic kinds of manufacture, holding much the same place amongst us as the remains of the craft-system did in the days when that of the workshop was still young. Under this system, as I have said, all the romance of the arts died out, but the commonplace of them flourished still; for the idea that the essential aim of manufacture is the making of goods still struggled with a newer idea which has since obtained complete victory, namely, that it is carried on for the sake of making a profit for the manufacturer on the one hand, and on the other for the employment of the working class.

This idea of commerce being an end in itself and not a means merely, being but half developed in the eighteenth century, the special period of the workshop system, some interest could still be taken in those days in the making of wares. The capitalist manufacturer of the period had some pride in turning out goods which would do him credit, as the phrase went; he was not willing wholly to sacrifice his pleasure in this kind to the imperious demands of commerce; even his workman, though no longer an artist, that is a free workman, was bound to have skill in his craft, limited though it was to the small fragment of it which he had to toil at day by day for his whole life.

But commerce went on growing, stimulated still more by the opening up of new markets, and pushed on the invention of men, till their ingenuity produced the machines which we have now got to look upon as necessities of manufacture, and which have brought about a system the very opposite to the ancient craft-system; that system was fixed and conservative of methods; there was no real difference in the method of making a piece of goods between the time of Pliny and the time of Sir Thomas More; the method of manufacture, on the contrary, in the present time, alters not merely from decade to decade, but from year to year; this fact has naturally helped the victory of this machine system, the system of the Factory, where the machine-like workmen of the workshop period are supplanted by actual machines, of which the operatives as they are now called are but a portion, and a portion gradually diminishing both in importance and numbers.

This system is still short of its full development, therefore to a certain extent the workshop system is being carried on side by side with it, but it is being speedily and steadily crushed out by it; and when the process is complete, the skilled workman will no longer exist, and his place will be filled by machines directed by a few highly trained and very intelligent experts, and tended by a multitude of people, men, women, and children, of whom neither skill nor intelligence is required.

This system, I repeat, is as near as may be the opposite of that which produced the popular art which led up to that splendid outburst of art in the days of the Italian Renaissance which even cultivated men will sometimes deign to notice now-a-days; it has therefore produced the opposite of what the old craft-system produced, the death of art and not its birth; in other words the degradation of the external surroundings of life—or simply and plainly unhappiness. Through all society spreads that curse of unhappiness: from the poor wretches, the news of whom we middle-class people are just now receiving with such naive wonder and horror: from those poor people whom nature forces to strive against hope, and to expend all the divine energy of man in competing for something less than a dog’s lodging and a dog’s food, from them up to the cultivated and refined person, well lodged, well fed, well clothed, expensively educated, but lacking all interest in life except, it may be, the cultivation of unhappiness as a fine art.

(To be continued)

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For August. (1907)

Party News from the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Voice From The Back: The Seeds of War (2011)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Seeds of War

Many reasons are put forward for the conflict in Afghanistan. Some would argue it is a conflict over religion, others that it is a struggle for democracy. The following piece of information seems a more likely cause for the hostilities. “Afghanistan and Central Asia are abundant with natural resources worth billions. So far, they are largely untapped but the battle is raging for who will be able to exploit them in the 21st century. In the 19th century it was the Russians and the British who wrestled for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia in a highly-explosive endeavour known as the Great Game. Today, Afghanistan’s natural resources are estimated to be worth billions of dollars. The resources in the neighbouring Central Asian states are thought to be worth even more – the cake is huge and as yet largely untouched.” (Deutche Welle, 15 July) The seeds of all modern wars has been the rivalries over sources of raw materials, markets and political spheres of interest.

Premature Celebrations                            

The abolition of the hateful system of Apartheid in 1994 was correctly celebrated throughout the world, but capitalism remained intact and as long as capitalism survives it will throw up problems of exploitation and inequality. “South Africa celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday on Monday with songs by millions of children and calls for public service, but the nation he led out of apartheid is divided by poverty and his ANC movement seems to many to be losing its moral compass. … Mandela’s calls for greater access to the economy for the poor black majority have been dealt blows by corruption eating into welfare programmes and entitlements that benefit a sliver of the black elite with close ties to the ANC.” (Reuters, 18 July) .

The Future is Bleak

                              

The illusion that many workers share is that as they reach retirement age they will be able to live in a sort of rocking-chair contentment.  In reality most of us will live even more parsimonious existences than we do at present whilst we are surviving from pay-day to pay-day. “Millions of people face a ‘bleak old age’ because they are falling through the cracks of private sector pension provision, a review suggests. The Workplace Retirement Income Commission says 14 million people are not saving into a workplace pension scheme at all.” (BBC News, 1 August) Working for a wage or a salary as we all have to do is a precarious existence but when we are finally thrown on the industrial and commercial scrapheap the future for most workers according to the Commission is apparently even more awful.

The Perfect Worker                          

Newspaper editors have a difficult task every day – what should be their front page headline? Millions starving in a famine in East Africa? Demonstrators gunned down in Syria? A difficult choice perhaps but the editor of The Times led with a really important headline. “Welfare in chaos as thousands live to 100” (Times, 4 August). In any sane society the news that human beings are managing to live a little longer would be the cause for celebration, but this is capitalism and there will be no dancing in the street at the news. The news that the working class who produce all the wealth of the world are tending to live longer is bad news for the capitalist class who live on the surplus value that the workers produce. To the owning class the perfect worker is one who goes to work after they leave school, works two nights overtime and a Sunday and on the day he retires goes to the Post Office to collect his state pension and drops dead at the counter. No pension, no drain on the owning class’s surplus value. Perfect!

Who Are The "Primitives"?                       

For thousands of years small tribal groups have lived in the forests between what is now Brazil and Peru. They are looked upon by many as “backward” or “primitive”, but nevertheless they have survived in isolation and relative security. The advent of capitalism has changed all that. “The head of Brazil’s indigenous protection service is to make an emergency visit to a remote jungle outpost amid fears that members of an isolated Amazon tribe may have been ‘massacred’ by drug traffickers. …. On 5 August Brazilian federal police launched an operation in the region, arresting Joaquim Antonio Custodio Fadista, a Portuguese man alleged to have been operating as a cocaine trafficker. But after the police pulled out, officers with the indigenous protection service (Funai) decided to return fearing a ‘massacre’. They claimed that groups of men with rifles and machine guns were still at large in the rainforest. Reports suggest the traffickers may have been attempting to set up new smuggling routes, running through the tribe’s land.” (Guardian, 9 August)

Outrage is Not Enough (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism has shown that it cannot meet people’s needs properly, not even in the developed countries of the West, let alone in the rest of the world. In a world capable of providing enough for all, austerity is being tightened on people everywhere. Political democracy, despite its advantages, has become an empty shell, with popular participation limited to giving the thumbs up or the thumbs down every few years to rival bands of professional politicians and with fewer and fewer people bothering to do even this. Social disintegration is gradually spreading, with increasing mental ill-health, drug addiction, crime and anti-social behaviour.

Most people are aware of this, but don’t think they can do anything about it. They don’t like it, but accept it as something they have to put up with as they try to make the best of their life and that of their family. This has been called apathy, but it’s really more resignation or fatalism.

Socialists find this frustrating as we know that, if people chose to, they could get rid of capitalism and establish a different world in which not only could people’s material needs be met as a matter of course but where a genuine community would exist. This is why we can only welcome any sign of people beginning to realise that present-day society has nothing to offer them and to think about doing something about it. The latest example of this is the Real Democracy Now! movement that started in Spain in May with the slogan ‘We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers’ and who call themselves the ‘Indignados’ (the outraged). See their manifesto opposite.  A similar movement has arisen in Greece.

Regular readers of this journal will be able to see the manifesto’s limitations, but what is significant is that here are some people who are beginning to see through capitalism, even if they haven’t worked out what going beyond it has to involve. A welcome feature of the movement has been the democratic, non-violent nature of the public meetings, indoor and outdoor, that they have organised, at which all points of view, including the socialist, can be expressed.

The manifesto is intended to be an appeal to ‘ordinary people’ by other ‘ordinary people’ who consider themselves (and in fact are) the victims of the present system without a say in how things are decided. Some of its points are clearly true:

‘The will and purpose of the current system is the accumulation of money, not regarding efficiency and the welfare of society. Wasting resources, destroying the planet, creating unemployment and unhappy consumers.

Citizens are the gears of a machine designed to enrich a minority which does not regard our needs. We are anonymous, but without us none of this would exist, because we move the world.’

In view of our tradition, we prefer to talk of ‘workers’ rather than ‘citizens’ but we are not going to quibble over a word because it is true that, whether we are called or call ourselves citizens or workers, we run society from top to bottom but for the benefit of a privileged minority.

When it comes to describing the outlines of an alternative society, we wouldn’t employ the language of ‘rights’. We agree of course that everybody should be able to automatically satisfy their need for housing, education, health-care and culture (entertainment) and should also be able to have enjoyable work and a say in the way things are run.  But to describe these are ‘rights’ is to give credence to the illusion that there are ‘inalienable truths’.

In any event, there is no ‘inalienable’ right to ‘employment’ or ‘consumer protection’ as these would only be applicable in a capitalist society, where work takes the form of paid employment and where people have to buy what they need. But, given capitalist society, they are not achievable as both a reserve pool of labour and an underclass of unemployables are necessary, endemic features of capitalism. As long as there is buying and selling, some sellers will always try to swindle buyers, as the Romans understood when they coined the phrase ‘Buyer, beware’.

This brings us to our fundamental criticism of the proposed alternative. There the manifesto states ‘instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service’. In other words, it proposes to retain money and all that implies, and to try to make the system serve human needs and interests. The full implications of this become clear when the practical proposals published elsewhere on their site (www.democraciarealya.es) are examined (our translation).

• ‘Reduction of working time and a better balance between work and family life, so as to eliminate structural unemployment (i.e. until unemployment falls below 5 percent).’
• ‘Retirement at 65 and no further increase in the retirement age, so as to eliminate youth unemployment.’
• ‘Security of employment: prohibition of collective redundancies for large corporations that are making profits.’
• ‘Banks in difficulty must be allowed to fail or be nationalised to create a public bank under social control.’
• ‘Increase in the rate of tax on wealth and the banks.’

This is very disappointing as it is the sort of thing that reformist politicians have long promised. They have never delivered. Why? The suggestion of the Indignatos seems to be that it’s because these politicians seek to enrich themselves as they are not subject to democratic pressure from below. The evidence, however, points to another reason – because they could not deliver even if they were sincere or subject to outside democratic pressure as capitalism is inherently incapable of being made to serve the interests of all the people.

Capitalism is a class-based society which can only operate for the benefit of the minority who own and control productive resources, as rich individuals or through private corporations or the state. This is the reason for the failure of all reformists politicians and governments in all countries. In Spain it is the reason for the failure of the PSOE (literally the Spanish Socialist Workers Party) which started out with a much more radical programme than above.

Things would not be any different if members of parliament were elected by and were responsible to democratic assemblies, as Real Democracy Now! wants. Capitalism just cannot be reformed to work in the interests of workers and their families (or ‘citizens’ if you prefer). If Real Democracy Now! goes down this road they are doomed to failure and disillusionment. A genuine, participatory democracy is part of the solution but is not the solution on its own.

As they state in their manifesto, ‘the will and purpose of the current system is the accumulation of money, not regarding efficiency or the welfare of society.’ Precisely. Capitalism is a system of capital accumulation out of monetary profits extracted from the labour of those who ‘move the world’. This gives rise to economic laws which impose that priority be given to profits and profit-making rather than to satisfying people’s needs. No government, no pressure from the street, no riots, can change this. Any government, however democratically elected and accountable, that takes on responsibility for governing within the framework of capitalism is obliged to respect these economic laws or make things worse by provoking an economic crisis.

What is required is a revolution but not an ‘ethical revolution’. It is a revolution in the basis of society, to be carried out, yes, by democratic means and more or less peacefully, that will make productive resources the common heritage of all under democratic control. Within this framework alone can production be re-oriented towards satisfying people’s needs while at the same time respecting their welfare at work and the welfare of the rest of nature. This involves the end not just of the accumulation of money by a minority, but the disappearance of money altogether.

Adam Buick

Democracia real YA! Manifesto

We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.

Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.

This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But if we join forces, we can change it. It’s time to change things, time to build a better society together. Therefore, we strongly argue that:

• The priorities of any advanced society must be equality, progress, solidarity, freedom of culture, sustainability and development, welfare and people’s happiness.
• These are inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development, and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.
• The current status of our government and economic system does not take care of these rights, and in many ways is an obstacle to human progress.
• Democracy belongs to the people (demos = people, krátos = government) which means that government is made of every one of us. However, in Spain most of the political class does not even listen to us. Politicians should be bringing our voice to the institutions, facilitating the political participation of citizens through direct channels that provide the greatest benefit to the wider society, not to get rich and prosper at our expense, attending only to the dictatorship of major economic powers and holding them in power through a bipartidism headed by the immovable acronym PP & PSOE.
• Lust for power and its accumulation in only a few; create inequality, tension and injustice, which leads to violence, which we reject. The obsolete and unnatural economic model fuels the social machinery in a growing spiral that consumes itself by enriching a few and sends into poverty the rest. Until the collapse.
• The will and purpose of the current system is the accumulation of money, not regarding efficiency and the welfare of society. Wasting resources, destroying the planet, creating unemployment and unhappy consumers.
• Citizens are the gears of a machine designed to enrich a minority which does not regard our needs. We are anonymous, but without us none of this would exist, because we move the world.
• If as a society we learn to not trust our future to an abstract economy, which never returns benefits for the most, we can eliminate the abuse that we are all suffering.
• We need an ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.

For all of the above, I am outraged.

I think I can change it.

I think I can help.

I know that together we can. I think I can help.

I know that together we can.