Our Message to Fellow-Workers

Whether Scotland remains part of the United Kingdom or becomes a separate sovereign state will make no difference whatsoever to the basic structure of society where a privileged class monopolises the means of production while the rest have to work for wages and where wealth is produced not to satisfy human needs but for sale with a view to profit. It won’t even make much difference to your present standard of living in terms of wage levels, housing, unemployment and the other problems you face. It is this class structure of society — which exists equally in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and in Scotland — that is the basic cause of the economic and social problems faced by the great majority of society, those who, whatever their religious background, depend for a living on earning a wage or salary. This is why a mere constitutional change will make no difference.

 Look at the Twenty-Six Counties of the Irish Republic which achieved “Independence” in 1921 after a bloody war against the British Army. What difference has this made to the position of wage and salary earners there? It has merely provided a different political framework within which they can suffer the problems of capitalism, governed by Irish, instead of British, politicians representing capitalist interests. Not of course that staying part of the United Kingdom is going to make any difference to these problems either.

The only change that will is a world-wide social revolution that would make all that is in and on the Earth the common heritage of all mankind to be used to provide an abundance of wealth to which all could have free access according to need. This essentially peaceful revolution can only occur when the great majority of wage and salary earners in all countries are in favour of it and organise democratically to carry it out. It involves a rejection of all nationalism and all attempts to solve problems on a national scale. In the context of Scotland it requires you to reject both nationalism and unionism.

The Socialist Party has no desire for social chaos, that vision of despair would drift into nothingness if people could only be brought to understand— to understand themselves and the social system under which they live and which makes them the unhappy beings that they are. We are endeavouring to give our non-socialist fellow-workers an exposition of life as it now is as it might soon be, and as, eventually it will be. What we desire is a sane and healthy system of society, to be created on the dead ashes of the system which is passing, wherein no man shall be called upon to sacrifice his ability and no woman her body in order to obtain the wherewithal to live; wherein the workman, the artist, the scientist (possibly a trinity in one person) may unite with and dovetail into one another in the production of wealth, which would be the property of an appreciative and enlightened humanity; not, as now, the property of a few unworthy and unappreciative parasites.

Capitalism, as a system geared to producing profits out of which those who own the means of production accumulate more and more capital, is quite incapable of serving human interests, mankind does have the technical knowledge to provide for much more than its present numbers. The problem is not overpopulation, but the underproduction and waste that are built-in to capitalism. The plundering and pollution of the world is not caused by modern technology but by its misuse in the service of profit. If the resources of the Earth, natural and man-made, belonged in common to all mankind they could be used in a conservationist and non-polluting way to provide for the needs of all. If overpopulation were ever to become a potential problem in a socialist world, then mankind also has the knowledge of how to control births.

The theory of The Socialist Party is Marxist in the sense that certain of our key ideas about society, economics and politics are derived from Karl Marx. Although our case rests entirely on its own merits and not on what Marx may or may not have said, we have always been ready to defend Marx’s views where we believe them to be correct against criticisms based on an ignorance of what he wrote.