The working class makes up a clear majority under capitalism. A member of the working class is someone who either has to sell their ability to work for a wage and a salary or is dependent on someone who does have to work for a living. And this class has one powerful political weapon: the vote.
However, workers are understandably unclear and confused about their own political interests. Generations of propaganda has led most to believe that there is no alternative to the profit driven social system of capitalism. They erroneously believe that in voting for any of the political parties standing in the forthcoming General Election, all of whom ardently support capitalism, that their quality of life and standard of living, will benefit from the future successes of the British capitalist class.
Workers do not have a shared interest with the capitalist class who actually own the earth’s resources. Instead, they have a diametrically opposite class interest of their own. And this distinct interest arises out of workers not owning the means of production. The means to life is privately owned by the capitalist class with a view to profit not to meet human need. As a class of non-owners, workers are forced into employment where they have to struggle, in or out of trade unions, for higher wages and better working conditions.
And in the productive process, workers create all the social wealth. As a consequence, capitalists are forever trying to increase the intensity and extent of exploitation. They can never leave the workers alone. Capitalists make their profits by exploiting the working class. Workers produce more wealth than they receive in wages and salaries. And the capitalists live off this surplus as the unearned income of rent, interest, and profit.
Cynicism and Satire Change Nothing
Workers are constantly being let down by politicians and this is hardly surprising. Politicians have to defend or pursue the interests of the capitalist class and not the interest of workers. As a result, a sizable minority of workers no longer bother to vote. Others use their vote as an act of revenge against the failed policies and promises of the present government. Others believe there is no alternative to the main parties but vote anyway under misplaced duty and abject resignation that nothing can be fundamentally changed.
For many workers, voting at elections is often their only involvement in politics. After the election, it is back to moaning or laughing at the antics of the government and the opposition through watching or reading programmes such as ‘Have I got News For You’, and ‘Private Eye’. Satire, though, changes nothing.
Some workers take part in protest politics. At the moment workers are wanting the Israeli genocide to stop in the Gaza Strip. Others take direct action against the Government’s environmental policies. All without success. Workers also, join organisations like Greenpeace and Oxfam and sign petitions to be ceremoniously handed into Downing Street all in the belief that pressure groups, demonstrations and petitions will change politics for the good of everyone. They do not. A million people, for example, marched against the War in Iraq but the war, based on the lies and deceit of the then Labour government, took place anyway. The mistake, made by workers, is to believe that politicians and governments are representatives of all society.
Political commentators like D J Taylor are worried about the cynicism that exists between the voters and MPs. He wants “some way of strengthening the mechanism that connects, or is supposed to connect, the average elector with the person who does (or doesn’t) represent them” (Independent on Sunday 27.12.09). However, no such mechanism exists because there can be no real connection between the working class and politicians. This should come as no surprise. Over 150 years ago Marx and Engels pointed out in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ that the State was merely “the Executive of the Bourgeoisie”. This fact has not changed despite the growth of State education, health provision, and social security.
Yet since the franchise was extended to the working class following the Representation of the People Act 1918 (men over 21 and women over 30) politicians have had to pander to the electorate promising everything just to get their vote. However, when in power decisions are constantly taken by government Ministers against the interest of the majority who voted them into power. This political contradiction is at the heart of capitalist politics.
As governments and politicians have increasingly failed to deliver their promises to the working class so they have become more evasive, dissembling and expert at keeping what they really believe below the water line, a disreputable iceberg of deceit. Information is controlled, spun, buried, or craftily packaged by politicians to mean something else. Contempt for politicians has never been higher yet a majority of the working class are still prepared to waste their vote against their own class interest by voting for the Labour Party.
Some workers, for example, vote for the Labour Party because they hate the Tories for the wealth and privilege they represent. “Anything is better than the Tories” they say. It is the politics of ignorance. Keir Starmer offers six pledges. What is a political pledge worth? Absolutely nothing. He claims in one of his pledges to improve productivity. He has no power to improve productivity as it is only when capitalists believe there is profit in investment that productivity will improve.
All the political parties; Labour, Greens, Liberal Democrats, the Tories and others, are the Parties of the rich. When in power or in opposition they seek to express the political interests of those who privately own the means of production to the exclusion of the rest of society, usually around questions of taxation, interest rates, subsidies, the budget, all issues of no interest to the working class. Is a Labour government going to war and using troops to break strikes “better” than the Tories following the same policies?
Failure of the Political Parties of Capitalism
What of the failure of the main political parties? Workers with long memories will recall why the Labour Party was elected in 1997. Then it was a result of the failed policies of the Tory government. Their “popular capitalism” had become very unpopular. Over 3 million workers had been made unemployed in the depression under John Major. It was not a society at ease with itself. Sid had lost his job and was forced to sell his shares. Workers who used their redundancy money to set up as the self-employed went bankrupt and lost their homes. There was no “property owning democracy”. The capitalist class still owned the means of production and the Tories had been corrupted by years of power, sleaze, and scandal.
In short, the Tory Party had failed to meet the interest of the working class just as the Labour government did when they were last in power. All capitalist politicians fail to deliver its promises. They came into power with the pop anthem “Things can only get better” It didn’t. Take Labour’s empty boast of ending boom and bust. It was a myth. 2.5 million workers were made unemployed and other workers were forced to take pay cuts, forced into part-time working, or forced to take long periods of “leave”. Capitalist governments cannot prevent the economic destruction and the subsequent social pain of the trade cycle. Unemployment exists while capitalism exists.
Then there is war. Workers are now well aware that the Labour Party will prosecute wars to defend or further the interest of the capitalist class just as ruthlessly as the Tories did when they were in power. The Labour Party has a history of supporting capitalism’s wars; wars which are never for “democracy and freedom” but, instead, for the protection of trade routes, securing raw resources like oil and protecting spheres of strategic influence. It is the working class who do the killing and the dying not the politicians and the capitalists they serve.
And then there are Labour’s failed reform policies. Labour said they were going to abolish child poverty but it did not happen. The elderly remained vulnerable; many cold, living in poor housing and cut off from the wider society often living in lonely, degrading, and debilitating circumstances. Labour supported the interests of the rich. If elected they will do so again.
At a recent Business meeting Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer gave fulsome praise to the interests of capitalism. The in-line business magazine, ‘Business Matters’ said:
“Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, has pledged that a future Labour government will adopt a more pro-business stance than Tony Blair’s administration” (Business Matters 24 April 2024).
And this is what Reeves said in her speech:
‘What Labour offers is a genuinely pro-business tax plan, founded on a fair contract between a pro-business government and great British business’.
And
‘We’ll be the most pro-business government ever, vows Reeves” (‘Times’ 24 April 2024)
That is who the Labour Party identify with: the capitalist class.
Labour could never solve the problem of poverty because it is a problem that flows from the private ownership of the means of production. And the Labour Party, despite its rhetoric about “social justice” has to support the private ownership of the means of production – the cause of poverty. Labour is faced with the insurmountable contradiction of wanting to solve the problems of capitalism while retaining, supporting, and pursuing the capitalist cause of these social problems.
What of the Liberal Democrats and Greens? They are also political parties who represent the interests of the capitalist class. They are the recipients of the protest vote and a lack of political imagination of those voting for them. They exist to continue the system of profit and private of the means of production. Their pet policies will go the way of all idealistic reforms once they get elected or share power in a hung parliament. They can never solve the problems of unemployment, poverty and war facing the working class. The protest vote is a lost vote; a lost opportunity of making a real political difference by changing society in a revolutionary way from one producing for profit to one producing to meet human need.
And then there is the bogyman: the extreme right like ‘Britain First’. The creation of the failed policies of the Labour and Tory parties many of which the extreme right have embraced to mask their racism. Pauk Golding is no Adolph Hitler; more of a Roderick Spode, who, from the pen of P. G. Wodehouse, drilled his Black Shorts and pursued a barmy policy of nationalistic root vegetables and knee measurements. But Golding is needed by the capitalist Left to justify their failed politics. When the capitalist Left and Right violently clash on the streets it is difficult to tell them apart. And a SWP leadership in power is just as frightening a prospect as the ‘Britain First’ in power. One politics leads to gulags the other to concentration camps.
The Socialist Alternative
What of the real political alternative to the parties of capitalism? What of the socialist alternative? The Socialist Party of Great Britain established in 1904 and reconstituted in June 1991 has a revolutionary view of politics completely different from the Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour Party. We state that capitalism can only be run in the interest of the capitalist class.
The social and economic problems which the working-class face, first require capitalism being replaced with Socialism. Workers have to take conscious and political action without leaders to establish common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. World capitalism has to be replaced with World Socialism. That is the Socialist message to the working class at this election. Social reforms cannot prevent war, unemployment, and end poverty. Social reformers have been passing social reform legislation for over two hundred years and the problems facing the working class still remain.
Socialists mean what we say. Until capitalism is abolished by the world’s working class social, problems will persist. There is no hidden agenda. We do not hide our political programme and Socialist objective We say that a class majority of workers must organise consciously and politically to replace the profit system with one based on production for use. And this political act must be through the ballot, using the vote for Socialist ends.
The working class, in order to establish Socialism, must conquer the powers of government. Socialist delegates have to be sent to Parliament so that the machinery of government “…may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation…” (Clause 6 of the SPGB’s Declaration of Principles). With the Socialist Party of Great Britain what you see is what you get; a political party organised to pursue the class struggle with a singular Socialist object; Socialism and only Socialism.
Socialists view the revolutionary use of the vote as being of the utmost importance to the working class. The vote is like a sharp razor blade; it can either be used to cut through the dense political forest of capitalist politics, privilege and power and establish Socialism or, as it has been used by workers in the past; to cut their own throats. Socialists are currently very few on the ground. But we have a sound and valid Socialist case against capitalism. From the failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the majority of society come questioning, dissent, political understanding, and Socialists. This is the future; one where enlightened workers begin to read our literature, discuss with us Socialist ideas and by becoming Socialists in order to create a Socialist revolution and a classless society.
