Some Theory

CAPITAL

Capital is a product of human labour turned into a social power. The social character of labour assumes an objective character in the products themselves, the abstract relationship between commodities and human beings.

The social relationship between capital and labour translates itself into a class conflict - the class struggle. The increase in capital presupposes an increase in private luxury and wealth that any increase in wages cannot compensate.

Capitalism has resolved human sympathy into exchange value and reduced social relations into a mere monetary relation. Capitalism is the last antagonistic form of social production and the disparities between labour and capital create conditions for the solution of this antagonism.

The working class cannot become the masters of the social forces of production unless they have abolished the previous mode of appropriation, wage slavery. We may infer that class consciousness is the product of man’s political consciousness. Socialism is the intensification of man’s political consciousness within the political and social antagonism between the state and civil society.

We advocate international working class solidarity.

DEMOCRACY

Democracy defines a type of society in which every person has the freedom to exercise his political privileges regardless of whether he has enough income and wealth to live on.
But political freedom has a limit and hence the need for law and order. Every law is an expression of social control . . . Political freedom must encompass an understanding of how social control is exercised by certain groups in society.

More or less it is income and wealth that determine political freedom in the sense that the distribution of income and wealth is linked to the distribution of power and life chances.
The various social categories of social classes have themselves become meaningful moral categories -- the poor have an abstract meaning of being immoral whereas the affluent regard themselves to be benevolent.

Every society creates morality by making rules and sanctions whose infraction denotes a crime.
Thus immorality can only be conceived in terms of articulated non-conformity to social rules and sanctions and is not a case of mental pathology as such.

It may come to pass that a person who is unbound by the most intellectual and academic conventions is not only considered an outsider but is also assumed to be unpredictable and unreliable in his actions. Mental pathology is defined by impropriety.

We may presuppose that there will be regulations in socialist society but such regulations will be an expression of free play otherwise than a sanction of a dominant regulating authority.

It may seem that the word democracy is a familiar political jargon that is indiscriminately used to defend a social system in which a person can exercise his political freedom only when he has enough income and wealth to live on.

The power to vote is a political weapon in the hands of the working classes. The working class political franchise has been achieved at the cost of its economic disenfranchisement.

The political revolution of capitalism was the culmination of its social and economic evolution -- and the fundamental economic and production relations have remained the same, viz. the exploitation of man by man.

It is the case socialist society will have less social problems to resolve in the sense that the causes of these social problems will not exist to any degree.

It makes me to think that a working class person who is ignorant of scientific socialism and its role in working class political struggles is rather dead than ignorant.

K. Mulenga, Kitwe, Zambia.

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