Reply To: Review of book about the CNT’s integration into the State

To return to the your point, just because those who vote for parties that support capitalism doesn’t mean that they therefore consider capitalism to be in their interest.

They could (and some will) just be accepting that capitalism is the only game in town and voting for one or other of the capitalist parties in the hope of getting a slightly better deal under capitalism; making the best of a bad deal. I would hazard a guess that up to as much as 20 percent think that the profit system is not in their best interest. It’s only a guess but I don’t think that those who vote for a non-socialist candidate can all be said to think that the present system is in their interest.

And then there are those who don’t vote — 70 percent in local elections as in Folkestone, some 1 in 3 in national elections. They have come to realise that “changing governments changes nothing”. How can they be counted as people who consider the profit system to be in their interest?

When I said that capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the working class, I was using “interest” to mean their interest is solving the problems they face — as over wages, pensions, benefits, housing, health care, transport, education, etc, etc — and which the vote-catching politicians are always promising to solve; that capitalism cannot satisfy their material needs properly. I was not talking about their interest in getting rid of capitalism as it’s a system based on their exploitation for profit and replacing it by socialism and production directly for use not profit.

I would say that our view that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work for the benefit of the wage-working majority was the strongest and most irrefutable part of our case. It’s been confirmed time and time again as even reformist government have been forced by the economic laws of capitalism to put profits first, to the detriment of the majority of wage workers and their dependents.

Capitalism is a system that runs in profits; which is why making profits always comes first, before meeting people’s needs properly. It is the cause of the problem wage workers face that the politicians try in vain to solve.