European capitalism or world socialism ? (2004)

From the May 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our manifesto for the European Parliament elections

In June millions of electors in 25 European countries are being called upon to elect the European Parliament. We will be faced with an apparently wide choice of candidates – conservatives, liberals, social democrats, centre right, centre left, nationalists, racists, fascists, ex-communists, trotskyists and other leftists claiming to be socialists – but in fact all of them stand for keeping, in one form or another, the capitalist system of private or state ownership and production for profit.

Such differences as may exist between them are about how to administer this system. Some want more state intervention, some want less; but none want to go beyond the wages-prices-profits system. All want to retain producing for the market, buying and selling, money and working for wages. None of them – not even those who describe themselves as “socialist” – stand for socialism in its original meaning of a society of common ownership and democratic control with production for use not profit and moneyless distribution in accordance with the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.

What’s wrong with capitalism?

But, you may ask, what’s wrong with capitalism? What’s wrong with capitalism is that it is based on class privilege and exploitation. The means of wealth production – the means by which society survives – are monopolised by a tiny minority of the population, either directly or indirectly via the state, with the result that the rest of us have to sell our working skills to them for a wage for a salary which can never be equal to the value of what we produce – otherwise there would be no profit, the source of their privileged income and the overriding aim of production under capitalism.

What’s wrong with capitalism is that its competitive struggle for profits leads to speed-up, stress and insecurity at work, to damage to the environment, to wars and the waste of preparations for war that arms spending represents.

Capitalism can only work in the way that it does work – as a profit-making system putting profits before everything else – and cannot be reformed to work in any other way. This is why changing governments changes nothing. Governments, whatever their political colour, cannot alter the economic laws of capitalism. Just the opposite in fact. They have to apply these laws, as we have seen many times when governments elected on a promise to reform capitalism to make it work in the interest of all have ended up squeezing wages, state benefits and public services in order to protect profits. No doubt in some cases the members of these governments – like some of the candidates in this election – were perfectly sincere. But that’s not the point. It’s not a question of what they want to do, but of what they can do – or rather cannot do – within the framework of the profit system.

Capitalism simply cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. Which is why we in the World Socialist Movement say workers should organise to end it, not to try and reform it.

Socialism has not been tried

But hasn’t socialism been tried and failed? Certainly not. What was tried and what failed in Russia and Eastern Europe was not socialism, but state capitalism under the dictatorship of a single political party. What happened in these countries proved, not that socialism cannot work, but that not even the most ruthless political dictatorship can make capitalism work in the interest of the majority – since the economic system in Russia was always based on capitalist principles: goods and services were produced for sale and people had to sell their working skills for a wage in order to get money to buy the things they needed to live. True, there was essentially only one big employer, the state, but, as with private employers in the West, the aim was to make a profit, out of which the privileged nomenklatura that controlled the state maintained itself.

Real socialism, we repeat, is something quite different. It is a world without frontiers, without armed states, without privileged classes, where the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all the people of the world and are used for the mutual benefit of all. This is the only framework within which the problems facing humanity in general and working people in particular – stress at work, inadequate public services, war and the threat of war, ecological destruction, world hunger, and the rest – can be solved. Which is why working towards this goal is ultimately the only constructive and worthwhile political activity.

How to vote?

It is not up to us to tell you how to vote. If you see no alternative to capitalism no doubt you will vote for one or other of the capitalist politicians on offer. If you want socialism, as there are no socialist candidates in this election – hopefully, there will be on some future occasion – you can indicate this by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across your ballot paper. But, more important, we would urge you to get in touch with us at spgb@worldsocialism.org or at 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN, Great Britain, with a view to finding out more about the alternative to capitalism. You can also find out more about us at: www.worldsocialism.org .

Editorial: Going it alone? (2004)

Editorial from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the results of June’s European elections are anything to go by, more people in Britain like the approach of the “United Kingdom Independence Party” than they do that of the Liberal-Democrats.

UKIP is basically a know-nothing, anti-foreigner party. It is a sad sign of the currently low level of working class political understanding that 16 percent of those who voted in these elections (even if only about 6 percent of the electorate) should have given their votes to such a party, with another 5.7 percent (2 percent of the electorate) going to the even more explicitly anti-foreigner BNP. Not that that means that those who voted for the other parties showed much political intelligence either. No party of capitalism can solve the problems faced by the wage and salary working class and so none of them are worth voting for.

Independence in the sense UKIP means is just not possible within the context of globalized capitalism. Certainly, formal political independence, or sovereignty, is possible, where states have the full power to make decisions without reference to any supra-national rules or decision-making procedures. But there’s a difference between the mere legal power to do something and what can be done in practice. In practice all states, when exercising their sovereign power to make decisions, have to take into account the economic reality that there exists a single world market economy on which they are dependent.

A state can exercise some degree of influence on how the world market operates in relation to it - it erect tariff walls, subsidise exports, devalue its currency - but this depends on its economic clout (such as the productivity and size of its industry and the extent of its internal market). Nearly fifty years ago the leading states of continental Europe calculated that they could better face the world market if they formed a single economic unit. They realised that this meant giving up some of their sovereignty to a supra-national body into whose decisions, however, they would have some input, but anticipated that what they were giving up in terms of national political sovereignty would be more than compensated by the gains brought about by being part of a wider economic unit, exercising collective political sovereignty on trade matters. Thus was born what is now the EU.

Twenty-five years later the dominant section of the British capitalist class made the same calculation as had Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries, and, from 1973, joined the economic union they had formed. The advantages of this, for British capitalism, were access to a wider internal market and a greater, even if shared, economic clout on the world market than they would have had on their own.

UKIP tacitly admits, in the small print, that Britain couldn’t go it alone economically when they argue that, after withdrawal from the EU, Britain should still form part of a free trade area with the rest of Europe. But this is how the EU started, and it still involves a sacrifice of sovereignty in the form of a surrender of the right to erect tariff walls against goods coming from the EU or to subsidise exports to it. And there would still need to be negotiations over the rules, their interpretation and on whether or not they had been infringed, negotiations in which the British capitalist class would be weakened by having to face on its own a bigger unit with a common position.

This of course is where the mainstream parties, which better reflect the current interest of the capitalist class, will be able to fault UKIP if ever things got serious, by arguing that if British capitalism is going to form part of some European economic unit then its interests would be better served by being a full member, with full rights to have a say in determining the unit’s common policies.

But this is to assume that UKIP’s case is a rational one whereas it isn‘t. It is based on xenophobia, with its slogans “No to the EU” and “Keep the Pound for Ever” meaning “No to foreigners” and “Britain über Alles”. It is based on the irrational view that “foreigners” of one sort or another represent a threat to the supposed community with a common interest made up of the “native” population of the UK. But there is no such community, no such common interest. Britain, like every other country in the world, is a class-divided country where the two classes - those who own and class and those who work and produce - have diametrically opposed interests.

The view that all who live in the same country have a common interest against all those who live in other states is part of a political ideology that seeks to mobilise the producing class to line up behind the owning class in its contest with the owning classes of other countries. But the interest of the wage and salary working class in all countries is to reject all nationalism, to reject in fact the very idea of “foreigner”, and to recognise that they have a common interest with people in other countries in the same economic situation of being obliged to sell their mental and physical energies in order to get a living. That interest lies in working together to establish a world-wide society of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit.