Dissolve all governments and elect yourselves

The first in a series of compilations of comments placed in the Guardian by Wee Matt of Edinburgh branch.

"Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many—they are few!"

Shelley

Social systems do not 'naturally' arise, but are a consequence of technology and class struggle. All previous revolutions have been minority led ones thus, establishing new ruling elites. The post capitalist revolution will be the work of the immense majority, the abolition of waged slavery and the ending of elites and privilege, with the establishment of common ownership and free access to the wealth created under conditions of democratic control over resources by all.

 Nothing is forever, including capitalism. It is an obsolete and outmoded method of production. It can never satisfy human needs while retaining private, corporate or state ownership of resources and the means and instruments for producing wealth as its mode of production, can only satisfy market requirements and not human needs. The ideas of capitalism, overthrowing feudal relations and the Divine Right of Kings, would have seemed a fantasy in feudal times.

 The bourgeois democracy brought in by capitalism, is its own Achilles heel. The educated working class who presently produce all of the wealth, but do not own it, who run capitalism from top to bottom, yet it is not in their own interests, but the interests of a privileged minority, will dig the grave of capitalism. The wealth producers 99%, are compelled to wage-enslaved production (for sale) of wealth for the 1% capitalist parasitic class. The interests of the 99% lies in removing ownership and control from the 1% and establishing a commonly owned society. Nothing will stop an idea which time has come.

 Our present system of society is fraught with contradictions. We have the technological potential to adequately feed, clothe, house and provide a decent life for every man, woman and child on Earth, yet instead of abundance for all there exists poverty, insecurity and misery for the vast majority.

At the heart of all these social problems is the conflict between the need to accumulate and reproduce capital on one hand and the need to fulfill human want on the other. Productive activity is mediated through the mechanism of market exchange, so production ceases when profit fails to be realised, not when human need is satisfied. Instead of directly co-ordinating to fulfil its needs, humanity is dominated by the blind imperatives of an economic system. If humanity as a whole were to democratically take control of the productive apparatus of society and free its operations from the constraints of the profit motive, an already existing, but as yet untapped potential for abundance could be realised.

This would of course entail a complete transformation in property relations. Instead of a society based on minority control, production for profit, and market exchange, we would have one based on common ownership and production for need. Instead of being mediated through the market system, production decisions would be co-ordinated directly according to the self-defined needs of global society, and the means of production belong to everybody.

The capitalist system deliberately depresses wages in an economic downturn. Damn all to do with our fellow workers from other lands. Instead of slavishly scapegoating fellow workers, we should get up off our knees, be making common cause with workers of all lands and none, to remove this iniquitous system of capitalism with its 'production for sale to profit a minority owning parasite class. There is no such thing as middle class. Even if you have a huge mortgage almost paid and send young Dimkins to a private school. If you have to work for a wage or salary you are working class. Wages/salaries (rations) are just so much food, clothing, shelter, and enough if you have any kids to bring them up to be the next generation of wage slaves. They are set at a rate which ensure you show up of more exploitation in order to survive while you employer gets rich from selling off the (unpaid) surplus value you produce. Tax is not our problem. You only ever get the bottom line in your pay cheque. Taxation is a burden upon the employing class, so sod 'em. If by some stroke the nominal tax (the top line) paid by your employer was reduced, so too would your wages. Wages are subsistence payments.

 Meanwhile the parasite class are creaming off all of the surplus wealth which is created by the working class. We need to take the ownership of the wealth producing and distribution capacity from the hands of the parasite class, whether individuals, combinations, states or corporations and make them owned by us all in common, within a democratic, classless, post-capitalist framework of production for use instead of for sale with free access by all to the collective wealth.

We have been able to do this since the start of the 20th century, but settled for reforms instead or state capitalist solutions. State provision has damn all to do with 'socialism'. Most people think it means some kind of reformist capitalism with a vague 'fair do's' for the worker, or if they are on the 'Left' some kind of state ownership of resources.

 Communism/Socialism, (the terms are interchangeably), is a democratic, commonly owned, production for use, money-free, post- capitalist society which has yet to arrive and not to be confused, with the post-feudal state capitalist regime of the Soviets era, or the reform capitalism of the Labour Party or Social-Democratic parties of Europe. The NHS is a product of capitalism, designed to be cheaper for the capitalist class, employers etc. than private healthcare insurance options. Realistically within capitalism, we could have massive council house building projects, but there would be screams of rage from those whose profit was affected, the same parasite capitalist builders who prosecuted the Shrewsbury workers, also from those whose house values were eroded and yet another government would eventually try to rein this in. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Profit is paramount.

 The Socialist Party does not advocating a ‘citizens wage’, indeed, it wishes to abolish the wages system in its entirety and establish a commonly owned world. If wage or salary earners are paid £100 a week by the government, they can use this income to maintain themselves; which means that the employer will be relieved of having to include an amount to cover this expenditure in the wage packet or salary cheque. Economic forces will therefore tend to ensure that wages and salaries fall to a level which, when added to Basic Income, will allow the employee to maintain him or herself. In other words, wages or salaries would become sufficient only to top up Basic Income to the economically determined level. Or, put the other way round, Basic Income (like Family Allowances today) would be a subsidy to employers, and a massive one at that.

 Free access would be a much more direct way of ensuring that people were freed from material insecurity than the impractical Basic Income Scheme proposed by the reformist parties. It would also involve, as a corollary, the transformation of work. Instead of working for wages to produce profits for an employer, people will be able to co-operate to produce what they really needed. In fact such direct production for use, replacing production for sale and the profit motive, is the only possible framework within which we can satisfy our needs in an ecologically acceptable way. For, with the end of production for sale will go also the pressure for blind economic growth generated by the competitive struggle for profits.

“The watchword of Capital Accumulate! Accumulate!”- Marx

The socialist answer would be to allow people free access to the common store of wealth set aside for personal consumption, according to what they themselves judged to be their reasonable needs. Other needs would be satisfied on the same basis. Houses and flats would be rent-free, with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, communications, health care and education would be organised as free public services. There need be no admission charges to museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation. Socialism has NEVER existed anywhere, to have had its time. 

Even Tony Benn acknowledged that “The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it – a bit like Christians in the Church of England.” 

The Labour Party has never been a socialist party but reformist capitalist one. Socialism has never been tried or existed. All you have ever had were attempts to tame capitalism's worst excesses and those failed because capitalism cannot be reformed. 

The Russian revolution was a post-feudal one, not a post-capitalist one.

"State capitalism would be a step forward for us." - Lenin

"What you have is state capitalism." John Foster Dulles to Nikita Khruschev

 Engels and Marx would have no problem seeing that as a bourgeois revolution without a huge emerging bourgeois capitalist class, the intelligentsia and the State stepping into the breach. Real Marxists in the UK, the S.P.G.B., called it state capitalism in 1918.

 If production were geared directly to supplying needs, it would eventually tend to platform off at a level sufficient to provide for current needs and repairing and maintaining the existing stock of means of production. Abolish the wages system, we have a commonly-owned world to win. If there are wages and salaries, it is not socialism. State ownership is not socialism. Social programmes are not socialism. Socialism means democracy at all levels of society, including the workplace. Socialism means a wage-free, money-free society. Socialism means voluntary labour. Socialism means free access to the goods produced by society. Millions already engage in voluntary work. In any case, with production for use, we can accelerate the production of necessities and so have free access to all we need and require. It would be no problem. Food to eat, houses to live in, medicine for the sick, rather than for sale for the profit of a minority with access rationed via wages, as presently. What are waiting for? Another capitalist fallout leading to World War 3 and more war-science on civilians such as Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the ‘good’ guys?

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor" - Voltaire

"..capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt"  - Marx