Kent Miners’ Festival (26/8)
Betteshanger Community Park,
Circular Road,
Betteshanger, Deal,
Kent CT14 0LT
Bank Holiday Monday
August 26th
Our
global human family
Under
capitalism new technology leads to more unemployed, more worry, more
misery. With the rational system of socialism, this would mean more
things to enjoy more time for leisure. Fellow workers must come to
realise that unemployment and hunger will be abolished once and, for
all when production is carried on for use, and not for profit.
Therefore, working people has to acquire political wisdom and get on
the road to take us to socialism. The Socialist Party declares class
war, relentless war upon capitalism and its defenders until victory
to the workers shall be secured by the coming of socialism. Socialism
is not “making the rich poorer and the poor richer.” It is not
reducing the gap between riches and poverty. It is the abolition of
riches and therefore poverty.
Poverty
and plenty are the most vivid contrasts of capitalism. From every
part of the world comes news of a terrible food shortage. It is
estimated that millions will die owing to the deficiency amounting to
several millions of tons in staple foods. Politicians are not short
of reasons; the monsoon has flooded the fields and long, repeated
droughts have ruined the harvests. But it is not merely a natural
calamity. Disease is only one of the effects of the social conditions
of to-day, and the only real service to suffering humanity is
rendered by those who seek to establish a sane and healthy system in
place of capitalism with its multitude of disorders. Capitalism is a
social disease it would be advisable to eradicate it.
Socialism
will produce for use and without a thought for the odious notion of
profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain its
coercive State and global rivalry, socialist society will produce
abundance for all.
Today the bosses own. Tomorrow the workers will collectively. The
working class must make its stand against its own capitalist system –
whose lust for profits and interest, for investments, markets and
expanded capital, for raw materials and cheap exploitable labour, can
mean only exploitation. Workers
will have no
reason to exploit their fellow workers anywhere. Then all the peoples
of the world will indeed be free.
Capitalism
is a system of competition for private profit. All businesses, small
and large, compete with each other. All enterprises is out to produce
as much as it can, to grab as much of the market as it can, for it is
in sales that it realises its profits. Clearly the need for profits
stands uncompromisingly in the way of real planning of production.
Capitalism cannot reform itself; it cannot be reformed. It is only by
understanding how capitalism runs against the interests of working
people, of how capitalism must be fought by the working class and all
others who can be united behind it and when the, people can be armed
with an understanding of capitalism as the enemy–then we can
advance on the road to the socialist revolution. There’s no way by
gradual step by step that we can win. It’s only by getting rid of
the whole source of these problems, the complete system of
capitalism, that we can build a new society run by and for the
people. we will be able to make revolution, we will be able to go
forward to socialism. We have solved the problem of production. We
can produce all that is needed to supply the necessities of life, as
well as some of the comforts of life — education and the
opportunity for recreation — to all the people. And yet all but a
very few are not sure to feel secure. Tomorrow the factory gates may
be slammed in the face of the workers and they find themselves out
on the streets facing destitution and deprivation. This is not only
true of the factory workers. It applies to office staff, the skilled
qualified technicians. Even management is in equal danger with the
wage worker. The plain fact is that a numerically small group of
people, the capitalists, who own the machinery of production and the
natural resources of the country, and we are all at their mercy.
They are the industrial barons and we the industrial serfs. We are
controlled little differently from the past and our conditions of
employment can be described as industrial feudalism Reforms
do
not change these conditions. Workers have nothing to gain from
changes in our system which continues the arrangement through which
the wealth we produce. The opposite of low wages are big profits.
The result of our industrial system under is the workers will always
get get low wages and the capitalists big profits We all confront
general insecurity and a precarious life. We work long hours, we
sacrifice our health and strength in the work of producing wealth for
our employer. The ruling class would like the workers to forget these
things.
Are
the social ills inflicted upon us the result of something fundamental
wrong in our economic system or are they all separate unrelated
problems, each of which must be solved separately? Do insecurity, low
wages, and industrial strife grow out of some basic aberration of the
existing system of production or does each have a separate cause for
which we must find a separate remedy? These are the questions which
the Socialist Party has definitely answered many times before. We
challenge capitalism to prove its right to continue in existence. We
know that businesses do not exist for the purpose of supplying human
needs. Their purpose is primarily to make profits for their
shareholders. If they cannot make profits for their shareholders,
they shut down or are taken over by. They are interested in producing
wealth as a means of securing wealth for the limited number who share
in their profits. The motive which drives the vast capitalist
machine is the desire for profits. The work of supplying human needs
is merely incidental to the process of realising profits. The pains
and suffering of the present social order are the product of a
social system in which the supreme purpose is the taking of profits.
The ownership of the means of production and distribution is the
source of the power of the profit-seeking class. It gives them
control of the working people who strive for the necessities of
life. Men and women are dependent upon being wage-slaves. The power
to hire and fire the workers, to give and take away the opportunity
to earn a living, carries with it the power to compel the workers to
work for such wages as will leave the capitalists a profit from
their labour. We have not won the “inalienable right to life,
liberty, and happiness,” because the opportunity to acquire the
necessities of “life, liberty, and happiness” is taken from us by
the owners of industry, whenever the owners of industry calculate
that they are unable to make profits for themselves from the labour
of the workers. The capitalist system is a huge profit making
machine, which has no relation to the happiness and well-being
There
is no mystery about the source of profits. The capitalists do not
create wealth out of the air in juggling with industry. They make
profits because they purchase the labour-power of the workers for
less than the value of the goods the workers produce; that is, they
do not pay the workers the full value of their labour. There is no
other way of making profits. The lower the wages for which the
capitalists can purchase the labour-power of the workers and the
longer their hours of labour, the greater will be the capitalist’s
profits. The capitalists pay the lowest possible wages at which they
can induce the workers to work and can deny the workers employment if
the workers do not accept their terms. They are able to keep the
wages at a level close to subsistence. The capitalists resist.
Whenever see their profits jeopardised by workers’ demands.
This results in drawing away from the millions of producers the bulk
of the wealth they produce and in heaping this wealth in the laps of
the relatively small class which owns the machinery of production.
If
the work of socialists is to result in a better world, its aim must
be the abolition of the profit system. Merely to invest the
ownership and control of industry in the government and to administer
it through a ministerial bureaucracy is entirely compatible with the
continued existence of the profit system and the exploitation and
oppression of the workers. To solve our problem, it must come hand in
hand with not just political but also economic democracy and the
abolition of the rewards of private or state ownership — rent,
interest, and profit.
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