European capitalism or world socialism ?
In June millions of electors in 25 European countries are being called
upon to elect the European Parliament. We will be faced with an
apparently wide choice of candidates – conservatives, liberals, social
democrats, centre right, centre left, nationalists, racists, fascists,
ex-communists, trotskyists and other leftists claiming to be socialists
– but in fact all of them stand for keeping, in one form or another,
the capitalist system of private or state ownership and production for
profit.
Such differences as may exist between them are about how to administer
this system. Some want more state intervention, some want less; but
none want to go beyond the wages-prices-profits system. All want to
retain producing for the market, buying and selling, money and working
for wages. None of them – not even those who describe themselves as
“socialist” – stand for socialism in its original meaning of a society
of common ownership and democratic control with production for use not
profit and moneyless distribution in accordance with the principle
“from each according to their abilities, to each according to their
needs”.
What’s wrong with capitalism?
But, you 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 – the means 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 for a salary 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 World
Socialist Movement say workers should organise to end it, not to try
and reform it.
Socialism has not been tried
But hasn’t socialism been tried and failed? Certainly not. What
was tried and what failed in Russia and Eastern Europe was not
socialism, but state capitalism under the dictatorship of a single
political party. What happened in these countries proved, not that
socialism cannot work, but that not even the most ruthless political
dictatorship can make capitalism work in the interest of the majority –
since the economic system in Russia was always based on capitalist
principles: goods and services were produced for sale and people had to
sell their working skills for a wage in order to get money to buy the
things they needed to live. True, there was essentially only one big
employer, the state, but, as with private employers in the West, the
aim was to make a profit, out of which the privileged nomenklatura that
controlled the state maintained itself.
Real socialism, we repeat, is something quite different. It is a world
without frontiers, without armed states, without privileged classes,
where the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all
the people of the world and are used for the mutual benefit of all.
This is the only framework within which the problems facing humanity in
general and working people in particular – stress at work, inadequate
public services, war and the threat of war, ecological destruction,
world hunger, and the rest – can be solved. Which is why working
towards this goal is ultimately the only constructive and worthwhile
political activity.
How to vote?
It is not up to us to tell you how to vote. 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, as there are no socialist
candidates in this election – hopefully, there will be on some future
occasion – you can indicate this by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across
your ballot paper. But, more important, we would urge you to get in
touch with us at spgb@worldsocialism.org or at 52 Clapham High Street,
London, SW4 7UN, Great Britain, with a view to finding out more about
the alternative to capitalism. You can also find out more about us at:
www.worldsocialism.org .
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