Capitalism is the workers’ real enemy.

 Whining about the "poverty” of "debt-ridden” America or  Britain cuts no ice with the World Socialist Movement. The capitalists of of the world are not poor. Despite the pandemic they are still rich enough to allow their providers, the working-class, a higher standard of living and still have plenty left over for themselves. The swindle behind the "we-are-poor-now” story is known to every business CEO. The capitalist class as a whole form themselves into a limited company known as the State. Thus they can incur debts collectively whilst as individuals they remain the owners of vast wealth.

Politicians have used the natural desires of working people for a better life to win power for themselves and by their ghastly failure have destroyed the aspirations of millions who might have become the builders of world socialism. Instead, cynicism and frustration dominate the working class political scene. For this crime the parties responsible must eventually suffer. Already, all the signs point to further and more convulsive crises, political and economic. Only socialism can save the world from more devastating catastrophes.  

The position of the workers is unchanged. Denied access to the means of wealth production, except by the consent of the capitalist owners of those means of production, the workers suffer the misery arising from their enslaved condition. It is urgent that workers should not allow themselves to be ensnared in a trap that there seems no doubt will be spread by crafty rulers experienced in the art of converting mass emotion to their own uses. Capitalist ownership of the means of production is the real source of the workers’ poverty and misery. Capitalism, by whatever name it is called, is the workers’ real enemy.

Capitalism is not only the workers’ real enemy, but its periodical financial and industrial convulsions show how unstable it is and how incapable of running smoothly.  As socialists, we are bent on discovering by what means the position of our class may be advanced. Our class consists of all those people who, not being owners of property, must sell their mental and physical energies to those who are owners. This proposal must stand the general test—Is it or is it not one which is useful to the workers?

We are socialists, and do not ask you to seek salvation by reviving capitalist trade. We tell you there is only one solution to your problems. We say the alternative is SOCIALISM. This is the only remedy for present or future working-class ills, and one that can be applied as soon as the workers choose to apply it.

The common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, by, and in the interest of, the whole community.

 That is socialism, and anything based differently is not socialism. Government control or nationalisation of industries under the existing system does not comply with the demand of socialists, nothing short of the complete overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of the co-operative commonwealth will suffice. Never before in the whole history of the human race was knowledge so accessible to the multitude. What is it binds us in our present position? Fear? We have nothing to fear, nothing to lose but our chains. We have the weapon with which to free ourselves from economic serfdom and intellectual repression in the Socialist Party.

Myths on race, of racial differences and superiorities, are  rife. In its usual everyday acceptance the term “race" is loosely used to equate with “nationality." There is a widespread belief that there are inherent and immutable differences between “races" (meaning nationalities), and that one’s own is vastly preferable to all others. Such beliefs are dangerously reactionary. They very conveniently serve to conceal, to justify, or to help intensify the exploitation of one section of the world by another. The theory of inherent differences of temperament or outlook between racial groups is entirely baseless. It springs not from fact but from national prejudice. Nationalism exists and thrives on the entirely false belief that non-existent differences are innate and unalterable. Class distinctions are stronger and more apparent than national or racial ones. There is an infinitely greater resemblance between two workers of different race, than between a worker and a capitalist of the same race.

Race myths springs from and foments social prejudice. They assist political domination, that is, economic exploitation; they assist capitalist sections by encouraging jingoism and war-mongering; above all, they are invaluable in obscuring the class issue. By setting up barriers of superstition and prejudice among them, it prevents the workers all over the world from realising their common cause. The world is divided into two opposing classes, buyers and sellers of labour power, whose interests cannot be reconciled under capitalism. But the race case makes it appear that there are numbers of “races" (corresponding with political divisions) whose characteristics and whose interests are fundamentally and inherently at variance. That is mere nonsense; but the capitalists would rather the workers' heads were filled with such nonsense than with sense about the class struggle and how to end it. This particular nonsense is a useful spur to patriotism when national sections of the capitalist class come into conflict, and want the workers to do the fighting for them.

There is only one way to end all this confusion of thought, this muddle of prejudices and it is to remove the ignorance on which the exploiters trade upon. Do not allow the real nature of present-day society to be shrouded by these veils of misconception and falsification. By clearing away such false beliefs, we lay bare the class issue which is the crux of the world problem. The workers must understand, plainly and unequivocally, that society to-day stands on a basis, not of nationality or of race, but of private ownership of the means of life; that it is organised not for “progress" or for "enlightenment," but simply and only for profit.

 The sooner the workers grasp these simple facts and their implications, the sooner will they sweep away the present organisation of society and all its superstitions, and bring into being a state of things organised to produce not for profit but only for use. Not until the means of production are collectively owned and controlled by the whole community can class distinctions vanish. Not until then will the idea of race be wholly freed from these false associations that are bound to cling to it in capitalist society, which depends for its very existence on the exploitation of man by man.

The future is ours to build or ours to ruin

 

A just society is one that makes available for all the means for the full development of the human person, a better, more dignified existence for the individual. Workers can toil away all their lives, but no matter how hard-working and they will never achieve a good outcome more than in the luckiest circumstances. Socialism is the unloading the heavy burden of wage-slavery, making production the common property of the whole society for a more just distribution of goods  to which we all have the same rights. Therefore, fellow-workers, join the World Socialist Movement. You have nothing to lose, but everything to win. Join together under the red flag of socialism.

The aim of the World Socialist Movement is the establishment  by democratic means of a cooperative commonwealth in which the supplying of human needs and enrichment of human life shall be the primary purpose of society. Socialism builds relationships based on mutual respect where everyone will have a sense of worth and belonging, and will be enabled to develop one’s capacities to the full. Capitalist social and economic conditions stunt human growth. In spite of great technological expansion, large sections of people do not benefit from the increased wealth produced. The wealth and economic power continue to be concentrated in the hands of the relatively few. Billions still live in want and insecurity condemned to a cheerless and joyless life, suffering ill-health and enduring a lack of dignity. This world is characterised by stark inequalities and by the domination of one group over another for the benefit of the few. The mad scramble for profit has wasted and despoiled our rich resources of soil, water, forest and minerals, devastating the planet. 

The climate crisis is accelerating much faster than most scientists anticipated. People tend to forget that the Paris Agreement target for limiting warming to 1.5–2.0C was supposed to be a starting point, not the end goal. Already significant climatic influences are already occurring now at about 1C warming. There is evidence that indicates 2050 to be an inadequate target for reaching net zero carbon emissions. Society risks large-scale, irreversible changes to the planet’s environment and our lives as part of it depends upon the choices and decisions we make, for the sake of all people in the future.

Industry and manufacturing can and should be run as to enable working people to use fully their talents and skills, to yield the maximum opportunities for individual development and the maximum of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs. Unprecedented scientific and technological advances have brought us the potential for enriching the standard of life yet unless there is rational planning is applied to their, the evils of the past will be multiplied in the future. The technological changes will produce even greater concentrations of wealth and power and will cause widespread distress through unemployment.

 The challenge facing workers today is whether future development will continue to perpetuate the inequalities of history or whether it will be based on principles of social justice. A society motivated by the drive for private gain and special privilege is basically unjust. The WSM will not rest content until every person in all lands is able to enjoy equality and freedom, a sense of human dignity, and a meaningful life as a global citizen of a free and peaceful world. This is the cooperative commonwealth which the WSM invites people to build.  

Humanity is sleep-walking into calamity and socialists offer a wake-up call for our fellow-workers to stir from their slumber.

 

“Vive l’Internationale.”

 

To the World Socialist Movement (WSM), Europeans, Americans Africans, Asians or any other foreigner, are fellow-workers. We greet all with “Vive l’Internationale.” 

 

The World Socialist Movement has its declaration of principles as its platform which clearly sets out the aims and objects of the movement and the means whereby these are to be accomplished. The Socialist Party admits to its membership on terms of equality men and women of all races and nationalities. There can be no misunderstanding for what it stands for. It is the only real democratic party in which the organisation’s office-holders take their orders from the membership and not the other way around. The Socialist Party is composed of men and women who speak and act for themselves and not a flock of sheep to be herded and fleeced by party-leaders.

 

Socialists are not opposed to “private property” other than in the means of life. We hold no agenda to take away your personal belongings. Socialism, which means industrial democracy, proposes that the producers of wealth shall collectively share in the social wealth, instead of idle parasites who presently benefit from owing the stocks and shares in factories and mines. Socialists are socialists because they observe the poverty and misery of the aged and infirm, despairing fathers and the weeping mothers of hungry babies and conclude that these frightful crimes and cruelties should cease forever. We in the WSM stand for social revolution; for the overthrow of capitalist despotism and the rearing in its place of an industrial democracy, in which the people shall own and control the means of life, and in which there shall be work for all, abundance for all.

 

It is to this the World Socialist Movement is irrevocably committed, nor will it cease its agitation until we triumph. Socialists are not hero worshippers because the very essence of socialism is the idea that the emancipation of the working class can only be the job of the working people themselves. As long as workers sit back, passively trusting in some leader or saviour or a party to fix things  for them, they will never progress an inch nearer to the goal of freedom.

 

The modern wage-slave is nominally free and possesses certain illusory political rights which the chattel slave or feudal serf did not enjoy. But this freedom and these rights have not yet sufficed to emancipate the wage-slave class from economic servitude. The worker is no longer at the command of a single master; but instead completely dominated by the employing class. Wage-slaves have no claims whatever upon their masters. If times are bad and there is no profit to be made there is no need for their  labour-power, so they are laid off and put out to the street.

 

The fact that some workers receive good wages, in comparison with others who are paid less, makes no difference to the system. In Greece and Rome highly-educated slaves received considerable rewards from their owners, and some even became rich, but this did not affect the lot of the mass of over-worked and ill-fed slaves of the same owners toiling in their mines or on their fields.

 

 Whether they like it or not, the capitalists are what they are and capitalists are what they are because, so long as their business is to make profits, they cannot avoid doing what they do. The capitalists must buy the workers’ sole commodity labour-power. Out of that, the capitalists make their profit, because the wages paid are of much less value than the total value of the product. The workers must sell his or her labour power for the wages of the day, calculated on the average by the cost of subsistence, or else they must go on state benefits, modern-day alms. This is the never-ending class war  between the owners of the property to produce wealth  and the owners of the labour-power, their brains and brawn. Even with government ownership and control, the wages system is maintained  and will remain so until the wage-workers themselves are prepared to undertake administration and distribution, on communal lines, for the benefit of the entire population.

 

All this was clearly  pointed out to the working class long before Karl Marx by the Chartists in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Chartists taught that so long as the payment of wages by one class to another class continued, and production for profit under a competitive system consequently remained the dominant form of employment, it was quite impossible for the propertyless majority to emancipate themselves from the control of the rich. Ernest Jones, for example, dismissed the demand for "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work", which was to ask for:

"...a golden slavery instead of an iron one. But that golden chain would soon be turned to iron again, for if you still allow the system of wages slavery to exist, labour must be still subject to capital, and if so, capital being its master, will possess the power and never lack the will to reduce the slave from his fat diet down to fast-day fare!"

The better paid wage-earners in some privileged  trades might  gain strength, reach certain agreements with the employers for improved benefits and advantages. But the less secure labourers were in no case able to make even this little headway against the economic forces above them. We see this repeated in modern times with the precariat, uber-workers in the gig-economy.

 

The only possible remedy for this state of affairs is to establish the co-operative commonwealth where the entire community collectively own and control all the means of making and distributing wealth. Socialists are all at one upon co-operation instead of competition, production for use instead of production for profit. Humanity will never be secure until the wage-system has been abolished and the money fetish has been swept away. Socialism is attainable.