Political Power is What We Want

When it comes to elections there is no principle that is inviolate, none that cannot be overthrown: being in power is an end in itself. Their motto throughout continues to be: “All power to myself.” The misinformed workers who fall for the politicians patter are the victims of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking they have solutions to social problems, their minds numbed by the media they have fallen for the scam. At the end of the day the victors at the polling stations simply put together a better package of lies. Politicians are conscious liars—often proudly so. Indeed, that’s their job, to persuade people to support them regardless of their merits rather than because of them, and to justify the actions that the economy demands they make. Politicians confront journalists, grinning from ear-to-ear, knowing their interlocutor knows that they are lying, as they dance through the empty ritual of the media interview. This very fact makes it difficult to estimate what politicians are going to do, and means that they can only be fully understood in retrospect.

Many 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 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 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 Socialist Party say workers should organise to end it, not to try and reform it.

We are not demanding the impossible. Our case is simple: our world would be a much better place to live in if we had a real democratic say in the decisions that effect us and real control over the means and instruments for producing and distributing the things we need to live in comfort.

We are not demanding the impossible. Our case is simple: our world would be a much better place to live in if we had a real democratic say in the decisions that effect us and real control over the means and instruments for producing and distributing the things we need to live in comfort.

Working class politics is in a state of great confusion. There is uncertainty, disillusion, a prevailing sense of failure and, above all, a lack of clear direction.

We have poverty and homelessness. We have the obscene waste where vast resources are allocated to the military when people are starving and then the human priorities should be demanding that we build houses, improve our medical services, clean up our environment, and undertake many other lines of social action to serve needs.

We are not the only group calling ourselves socialist. Anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with present-day society will come across others, all having some such word in their names as “socialist”, “workers”, “revolutionary” or “communist”. Most have aims, theories and methods which have nothing in common with ours.

To publicise the alternative to capitalism of a world socialist society is why we are contesting the Cardiff Central and Folkestone & Hythe constituencies in the coming General Elections next  month. 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, and if there are no socialist candidates in your constituency – hopefully, there will be a lot more on future occasions – you can indicate this by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across your ballot paper.