Abolish the wages system
Capitalism is based on minority ownership and control of the means of production (land, railways, factories, food distribution, etc), that is, the means to produce what we need to survive and flourish. Production is for profit not human need. If something isn’t profitable it isn’t produced. Work is done by people who are forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work for a wage.
How did the wages system come about? Well, it depends on who you ask, and whereabouts in the world you go to ask the question. If you ask the capitalist propagandists they will say it is because human beings decided to trade with one another and money was a way of doing this more efficiently. This is a lie that ignores the numerous indigenous communities from America to Africa to Australia whose land was forcibly and violently taken.
America is a land stolen from a people and built with the labour of other people whose land was stolen from them. In Britain, we had the Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries in which roughly 5.5 million acres of common land was forcibly taken and placed into private hands, with mass evictions of agricultural communities. In Scotland in the Highland Clearances between 1750 and 1830 roughly 70,000 to over 150,000 people were ‘cleared’ from the land.
This story of enclosure and clearances was a win-win for the ruling class: communal land was turned into profit, specifically sheep farming in Scotland, and a mass of dispossessed people was created who owned nothing but their ability to labour, which they were forced to sell to survive. In 1750 Glasgow’s population was 32,000. By 1851 it was over 300,000. That’s the scale of the operation.
Marx wrote that capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. That is the real story of how the wages system came into existence.
Why abolish the wages system? Because it is exploitative. The surplus value of our labour is taken from us by the capitalist parasites in the form of profit. It is also alienating in a number of ways.
Alienation from the product: we don’t own or control what we make; it ends up feeling like something outside us — even something used against us. We’re forced to buy back the products of our labour from the capitalists.
Alienation from the labour process: we don’t shape how we work; the pace, purpose, and methods are set by others, so our work is disconnected from who we are.
Alienation from other people: we’re pushed into competition and treated as commodities, which strains our relationships and weakens solidarity.
Alienation from nature: we’re cut off from the natural world; nature is reduced to a resource for profit, creating a rupture between how we live and the environment we depend on.
Alienation from our species-being: we lose the chance to express our creativity and human potential; work becomes just survival, not self-realisation.
Endless economic growth on a finite planet threatens ecological disaster. In 2024 alone, about 8.1 million hectares of forest were lost globally — roughly an area the size of England. Over 47,000 species are currently threatened with extinction. Wildlife populations have plummeted over recent decades: on average, global wildlife populations have dropped by about 73 percent over the last 50 years — a collapse driven by habitat destruction, pollution, deforestation, and industrial exploitation of nature.
War is an extension of the war of the market place involving different gangs of capitalists. Socialists were among the brave class-conscious workers who refused to murder their fellow workers in the first and second world wars, declaring instead the socialist mantra: ‘a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends’.
The Socialist Party was formed in 1904 as a breakaway from the reformist and authoritarian Social Democratic Federation. We are a leaderless organisation that holds, like Marx, that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself’. We, also like Marx, define socialism as a stateless, moneyless society based on production for human need (as opposed to sale on the market) in which people will no longer have to work for wages.
Left-wingers don’t offer a real alternative. Lenin combined the state and the wages system into one tyrannical regime. Corbyn and Zarah Sultana claim to be socialists but what they’re actually advocating for is an impossibly humanised capitalism.
The only viable and practical solution to the world’s problems is socialism, a moneyless stateless society based on production for human need. Apologists for capitalism tell us that we’re greedy, selfish, bloodthirsty. Let the parasite class speak for themselves! Workers demonstrate their moral character every day through small acts of workplace solidarity. We can and will organise ourselves into a leaderless organisation of the working class for the working class when, as Marx put it, we take off our banners the conservative motto ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ and inscribe instead the revolutionary watchword ‘abolish the wages system’.
JOHNNY MERCER