It is time to draw some lessons from the past and apply them
now. One of the most important lessons concerns class and how many workers fail
to act in their own interest. People increasingly appreciate that capitalism is
the key problem of our time, but they see no solution that can overcome the
limits of the present political discourse.
Ed Miliband not our friend. He is not our ally. He is not
fighting for us. If there are two people and the first one of them is openly
hostile, abuses you at every turn and is obviously working for interests
diametrically opposed to your own, you would have to be crazy to consider them
a friend. But if the other person keeps telling you that they are on your side,
sympathises about how awful the first person is being, and says you should
trust them instead – while all the while they are pursuing interests just as
opposed to yours and will proceed to stab you in the back at the first
opportunity – then who is your real friend? Neither of them is the answer, of
course, though we can say that you are less likely to be deceived by the openly
hostile one. The function performed by the Labour Party is always to appear as
the benign friend to the workers in distinction to the “wicked” Tories. Hoping
that the Labour Party will behave differently is an unrealistic – indeed
utopian – expectation.
If our goal is the eradication of capitalism, then
supporting the Labour Party is just completely delusional. The object of
socialists is to assist in the emancipation of the workers from its enslavement
to the capitalist class. To those who support the Labour Party we would appeal
to reconsider their position. What does its boasted achievements amount to
after all? With many on the Left calling for the re-formation of a Labour
party, members of the Socialist Party ask "why bother?" In office and out, Labour is a party for
capitalism. It is a party that has regularly and routinely acted against the
working class. Yet we are constantly told not to give up hope. Every time an
election comes round the different left wing groups tell us to vote Labour. Can
Labour be changed? We think that its history proves the impossibility of
changing Labour. Labour long ago gave up any pretence at wanting to get rid of
capitalism.
The Labour Party has always tried to make capitalism work
for the people. And every time that it has been in office, it has failed
miserably to do so. The reason Labour – and indeed the Tories who also talk of
a “people’s capitalism” – fail to make capitalism work for the people is that
this is an impossible mission. Capitalism just cannot be made to work in the
interest of all. It is a profit-making system that can only work as such, in
the interest of those who live off profits.
The Labour Party has failed, so let’s start a new one.
That’s what some trade unionists and lef-twingers are saying. But why? Surely
one of the lessons we have learned has been that Labourism is a dead end. It
can’t succeed. Not because its leaders are insincere or incompetent or corrupt
or not resolute enough. It fails because it sets itself the impossible mission
of trying to gradually reform capitalism into socialism. This can’t be done, as
experience, not just theoretical understanding, has confirmed. The last thing
that is needed today is a non-socialist, trade-union based “Labour” party. We
have seen the past and it doesn’t work.
The Labour Party are simply a party of capitalist
maintenance, with objectives of some form of new society being not just shunted
into the background but completely out of existence. They are now more
dedicated than ever to running with optimal efficiency the very system that
creates poverty, misery, homelessness and war. As for those old Labourites who
blame all on the mistakes of the past and present on certain leaders, this
simply adds to the argument against leadership. In any case, the leader as a
individual is irrelevant. Knocking one leader out of office and replacing them
with another won’t change the system, and it’s the system that all attention
should be focused on if we desire a radical change in the way we live. Trading
one group of pro-capitalist apologists and careerist politicians for another
can never be the answer. Changing society’s economic structure is the answer.
Labour Party reformists prefer to define class in terms of
the unequal social distributions of wealth (rich versus poor) and/or power
(rulers versus ruled) so they devote their efforts to equalise wealth disparity
and democratise power. But they are blind to the most important aspect of class.
This definition focuses precisely on production, on who produces and who gets
the surplus, that is, the inequality separating those who produce the surplus
value in society from those who take and live off the surplus value they did
not help to produce. In slave systems of production, masters exploit slaves. In
feudalism, lords exploit serfs. In capitalism, employers exploit workers. In
the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, state officials or party
functionaries displaced private individuals (boards of directors elected by
shareholders) as corporate employers. Yet by occupying precisely that position,
state officials likewise exploit workers, hence the term, "state
capitalism." Ending exploitation means changing and transforming social
relations.
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