Totalitarianism and Capitalism

Free market fundamentalists often cite George Orwell’s 1984 as a critique of the state and its interference in people’s lives. Totalitarianism is associated with the state not capitalism.

Big Brother is Watching You” is always about the watchful eye of the government ministry not the capitalist firm. Conservative so-called libertarians do not consider it their business to question the arrangements of supposedly freely consenting adults in contracts between employers and employees.

So there is silence when companies are fitting thousands of their workers with body-worn tracker devices that monitor how much sleep they have, how well they work with colleagues, and even track their body language, tone of voice or emotions.

The aim is to increase productivity, to extend the rate of exploitation and to control the workforce electronically.

According to THE SUNDAY TIMES (January 15th 2017):

“Among the potentially most controversial technologies are “sociometric badges” which are being tested by at least four British companies, including a high street bank”.

The credit card-sized devices are worn around the worker’s neck, analyse employers’ voices, and track movement and physical activity. This is as degrading as having to clock in-and-off work each day or having to as a supervisor for permission to go to the toilet.

And it is all to do with profit. Data from the badges is combined with monitoring the workers’ telephone calls and emails to assess their productivity and to work out how teams in the same factory or office can interact better and produce more efficiently.

Such is the dehumanization of contemporary capitalism. That is why workers should be consciously and politically becoming socialists to end the profit system and establish a socialist society where work is creative and free from the coercion of the employers and their drive for profit and more profit.

Object and Declaration of Principles

Object

The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

Declaration of Principles

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN HOLDS:

1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (ie land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.

2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.

3.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.

4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.

5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.

6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.

7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.

8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.