Kent Miners’ Festival (26/8)

Betteshanger Community Park, 
Circular Road, 
Betteshanger, Deal, 
Kent CT14 0LT




Bank Holiday Monday
August 26th 

9:30 am to 5:00 pm 

With Socialist Party gazebo, display and literature stall.

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.