Kent and Sussex Branch Meeting

MINIMUM AND MAXIMUM PROGRAMMES

2pm, Sunday, 10th February
The Muggleton Inn (Wetherspoon),
8 High Street, 
Maidstone ME14 1HJ

For years the battle between the working class and the capitalist class, has raged. It has ebbed and flowed according to the strength between these two classes. The working class never ceasing and never surrendering. Between them there is already a struggle going on; the struggle by the capitalist class to maintain its system of exploitation, and the struggle by the working class to overthrow it. All over the world the struggle continues in many forms. We are not alone, the world of workers is rising and fighting back. How can profit be made by the capitalist? Only in one way. Only by compelling the worker to produce, in the course of the production process, more values than those s/he receives in the form of wages. The worker is compelled to produce surplus value for the capitalist; which is only another way of saying that s/he is compelled to do a certain proportion of unpaid labour for the capitalist. The capitalist relation is thus an exploitative relation.

What is plain is that what enables the capitalist to exploit the worker is precisely private ownership of the means of production. The only way to abolish capitalist exploitation is to abolish capitalist private property. capitalist private property is but the capitalist means to private profit. No profits; no production: that is the capitalist law. For, the whole purpose of the capitalist production process is – private profit, which is but another name for the self-expansion of capital. The capitalist throws into the productive process a certain quantity of capital as a means to expanding it. That is the whole point in the process – for the capitalist. If at the end of the process the capital thus thrown in has not expanded, i.e. increased in quantity, the whole process is, from his point of view, useless. Which is why we say that capitalist production is but a means to capitalist profit. Production, which is essential to society, is only incidental to the process; profit is its motive, and profit its purpose.

The basic contradiction of the capitalist system is that between the associated labor process and the individual appropriation of the product. The former was the secret of the increase in the productivity of labour which capitalism has witnessed; the latter the snag that stall and chokes production. This contradiction itself flowed from the divorce of the actual producer, the worker, from the means of production; that is from the capitalist property relation – private property. The solution of the problem obviously lay in the restoration to the producer of free access to the means of production i.e. in the abolition of the capitalist property relation - capitalist private property. It should be clear why Marxists say socialism is the only progressive alternative to capitalism, the only solution of the contradictions of capitalism which can carry mankind to a higher stage of social organisation. For, this solution alone preserves the technical gains of capitalism and enables them to be used as a basis for further development of the productive forces in the service of mankind. Socialism is  the road forward from capitalism, the next stage of social evolution. 

FORWARD TO SOCIALISM!