If you’re studying history, there’s one thing you have to be always cautious of – it’s the victors that get to write the damned history. It is the duty, therefore, of every revolutionary to tell it like it was, and is, at every opportunity.
As Orwell said: “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future”
In the battle of ideas, the real war we wage against the master class, we must not concede them one inch in interpreting the past – they have so much to lose and we have so much to gain.
When elections approach, the media are hyping it all up as if some sort of real change is about to be in the offing, and the political party apparatchiks are out and about trying to convince the cynical and sceptical public to vote for their same old tried and tired solutions and policies.
We in the World Socialist Movement (WSM) offer something a lot different.
The world can now easily produce wealth sufficient to adequately house, feed, care for and educate the global population. Instead, we see hunger, disease and homelessness around the world despite the concerns of governments, charities and popstars. Capitalism is failing: it now acts as a barrier, preventing production from being geared to human needs. Rather than constantly tinkering with this system we should start looking beyond it to an alternative: a class-free world community based on production for human need, not profit.
The mainstream political candidates (whether openly pro-capitalist or supposedly socialist) are asking you to believe that they can run this society a little bit better. I’d argue that history shows that the money system actually ends up running them. Their manifesto promises usually amount to nothing. So don’t vote for them – it only encourages the idea that capitalism can be made better. A vote for the WSM in contrast is a statement that you don’t want to live this way and that you think another world is possible.
What is apparent so far in this election is the extent to which all the parties try to manage the agenda for the election. They all want to encourage the debate to be around the handful of high-profile “flagship” issues where they feel they are on strong ground.
But it’s always phrased along the lines of “knocking on doors, we keep hearing that XXX is the real issue of the day”. Funnily enough, we don’t hear the political parties, for example, say “recent canvassing returns indicate that voters actually don’t give a damn about our policies one way or the other”.
The assumption is that voters are stupid and can only remember a couple of things at one time, so why give them more than that to consider? Indeed, a cursory glance at the policies of the mainstream parties suggests they premise their case on the assumption that the average person on the street is an imbecile.
What it all means is that the campaign may centre around a handful of issues only. That may appear to appeal to the World Socialist Movement. After all, we are the ultimate single-issue organisation – Abolish Capitalism. But while this is a single issue no-one is pretending that it is a simple case. Sure it’s not complicated, the case for putting human needs ahead of profit, but soundbites don’t do our case justice.
We are also handicapped in the eyes of the modern voter by the fact that we are not in a position to make promises, and what’s more, we aren’t going to “do anything” for anyone. The other parties are falling over each other to be seen to be offering some immediate palliative
PEOPLE OR PROFIT
That’s the real issue in any election. You will have your occasional ration of democracy with the opportunity to vote for a member of Parliament. It’s all very well having a vote-but are you normally given any real choice?
Let’s face it, if it wasn’t for the politician’s head on the front of the election leaflet, could you tell which party was which? It’s tempting, in the absence of any real alternative, to get drawn into the phoney war that is political debate today.
Whether Labour, Tory, Lib-Dem or nationalist they all spout the same promises. But it always amounts to the same thing – they offer no alternative to the present way of running society.
Do you really think who wins an election makes any difference to how you live?
And do politicians (whether left-wing, nationalist or right-wing) actually have much real power anyway?
OK, they get to open supermarkets and factories, but it’s capitalism and the market system which closes them down.
We have endless problems of poverty, poor services and all the issues politicians love to spend time telling you they can solve if only given the chance.
Socialists don’t believe any politician can solve these problems, as long as the flawed basis of our society remains intact. In fact, we believe only you and your fellow workers can solve these problems. In truth, there is nothing the WSM can do for the working class that it is not already capable of doing for itself.
We believe that it will take a revolution in how we organise our lives, a fundamental change. We want to see a society based on the fact that you know how to run your lives, know your needs and have the skills and capacity to organise with your fellows to satisfy them.
You know yourselves and your lives better than a handful of bosses ever can. With democratic control of production, we can ensure that looking after our communities becomes a priority, rather than something we do in our spare time.
We all share fundamental needs, for food, clothing, housing and culture, and we have the capacity to ensure access to these for all, without exception.
If you agree with this aim, then we ask you to get in touch with us, get involved and join our campaign to bring about this change in society. Together, we have the capacity to run our world for ourselves. We need to build a movement to effect that change, by organising deliberately to take control of the political offices which rule our lives and bring them into our collective democratic control.
The World Socialist Movement makes no promises, and offers no pat solutions, only to be the means by which you can remake society for the common good.
The crumbs or the bakery?
Politics today is a game of Ins and Outs in which gangs of professional politicians compete with each other to attract votes, the gang securing a majority of seats in parliament and assuming responsibility for running the political side of the profit system. To win votes the politicians have to promise – and be believed – to improve things both for the population in general, by managing the economy so as to avoid slumps and crises, and for particular groups within the population.
When the economy is expanding or even just ticking over the Ins have the advantage. They can claim that this is due to their wise statesmanship and prudent management. Such claims are false as the economy goes its own way – expanding or contracting as the prospect of profits rises or falls – irrespective of which gang of politicians are in office. But making such claims can backfire as when the economy falters, the Outs can blame this on the incompetence and mismanagement of the Ins. But that’s not true either since politicians don’t control the way the economy works.
But throwing crumbs to the people (or to carefully targeted sections of the people whose votes could swing things) is not the main purpose of government. Marx once wrote that the government is “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. And it’s still true. The function of any government is to manage the common affairs of the capitalist class as a whole.
This involves a number of things. Sustaining a context in which profit-making can continue. Spending the money raised from taxes (that are ultimately a burden on the capitalist class) in a prudent way on things that will benefit the capitalist class as a whole, such as providing them with an educated, relatively healthy and so productive workforce. Maintaining – and if need be using – armed forces to protect sources of raw materials, trade routes, investment outlets and markets abroad. That’s what most government spending goes on, and balancing this against income from taxes is what budgets are essentially about. It is only because wage and salary workers, active or retired, have the vote that, occasionally if there’s a small margin of money spare, a few crumbs are offered to some section or other of the electorate. No doubt, the pensioners, the home buyers and the families offered a few hundred extra pounds a year will accept these crumbs cast before them. Hopefully, they won’t accept them as bribes to vote for his particular gang of politicians, but simply because it would be stupid not to pick them up.
Nowadays most people have learned by experience and are, rightly, just as cynical about the politicians and their promises – and crumbs – as are politicians about how they get people to vote for them. But cynicism is not enough. This should be turned into rejection. The game of Ins and Outs, to decide which gang of professional politicians should manage the common affairs of the capitalist class, only continues because most of us agree to take part in it. But by voting for them we in effect give them the power to keep the capitalist system going. And that, not which particular gang of politicians happens to be in office, is the cause of today’s problems since built-in to capitalism is putting making profits before satisfying people’s needs.
Socialists are only too well aware that most people put up with capitalism, and go along with its political game of Ins and Outs in the hope of getting a few crumbs out of it because they see no practicable alternative. But there is an alternative! Politics should be more than individuals deciding which politicians to trust to deliver some crumbs that they think will benefit them individually. It should be about collective action to change society. About taking over the whole bakery.
John Bisset
