Sunday, February 28, 2021

The Role of the Socialist Party

The Socialist Party points clearly to the class enemy, the handful of rich capitalists and their friends in government who run this system of profits. We offer analysis that reveals the real causes of crime, unemployment, mental illness, the housing crisis, and the million and one social issues working people  have to face everyday. The roots of those problems are not to be found among the millions of working people who slave to build this society and survive despite the daily oppression and exploitation they face. The real cause is to be found in the capitalist system itself. We point out the real enemy we must fight, and the stand we must take for our own future and futures of our children.


Capitalism means that all goods and services are produced for profit.  Human labour is a commodity for sale.  Property-less labourers, who create profit for those who purchase their labour. Competition and profit maximization are fundamental to capitalism. The basic objective of capitalism is production and expansion of capital. Cyclical recessions are built-into the operation of capitalism. There is a conflict between the needs of people and the requirement of profit. Capitalism recovers from recurrent crises at the cost of suffering of hundreds of millions of people. Yet the conviction that there can be no alternative to capitalism and the system is the destination of history, is deeply rooted in the minds of working people.


 The only future the working class under the present capitalist system is only more misery and exploitation for the millions of working people around the world. We stand for revolution, the doing away with that system, and the building of socialism, where workers create a society where they control and can produce for their own benefit. For us, socialism equals workers’ power. Workers’ power means workers democratically running society through their own elected organisations. Capitalism is based on the exploitation of working people. No attempts to reform the system can do away with this exploitation. The only way workers can come to control society and create a society based on freedom and a decent life for all is through revolution. The state is an instrument of capitalist class rule. The present parliament, army, police and courts serve the interests of the capitalists. The working class cannot use the state to build socialism. The working class is an international class and socialism must be an worldwide system. We fight for solidarity with fellow-workers of all countries. Capitalism pits sections of the working class against one another. We oppose everything which turns workers of one country against those of another. We stand for peace and for the only system that makes peace possible. Those, who support a system that breeds war cannot consistently say they are for peace


Workers create all the wealth under capitalism. A socialist society can only be constructed when workers collectively seize control of that wealth and plan its production and distribution according to human need instead of profit. The liberation of the working class can only be won by the struggles of workers themselves. Capitalism cannot be patched up or reformed. The present system is based on the exploitation of working men and women. No attempts to reform the system can do away with this exploitation. The only way workers can come to control society and create a system based on freedom and a decent life for all is by overthrowing capitalism.


Let us take the offensive in the battle of ideas, which is part of the daily struggle against capitalism. For there must be no mistake—our class enemies do not neglect the weapon of propaganda. They press every kind of charlatan into service to exploit the fears and worries of working people. The issue is socialism and the abolition of poverty.  There is no room for compromise.


The Socialist Party is fundamentally different from all other parties. It expresses in political terms the aspiration of the working class to freedomThe world’s workers have always been and still are the world’s slaves. They are still the subject class in every nation on earth and the chief function of every government is to keep them at the mercy of their masters. The Socialist Party is the one party which stands squarely and uncompromisingly for the abolition of wage slavery; the one party pledged to the economic freedom and the industrial democracy of all people.



Saturday, February 27, 2021

The Anarchy of Capitalism

 


Socialism is on the agenda — and right now. But it will not come by people putting their trust in leaders. It will be established when the vast majority of workers understand it, want it and democratically organise for it in a party which is not out to mend capitalism but to end it.

Socialism means the total abolition of capitalism. An end to private and state ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. Production will be solely for use, with all people having free access to the common store of goods and services, instead of production for sale with a view to profit.

To win workers to organise for socialism is no small task and it is easy to be demoralised or to deceive yourself that there is an easier way to initiate the new system. But there is no alternative to the hard work being carried out by the Socialist Party — whose sole aim is socialism — and the sooner those who want socialism join us, the sooner it will be achieved.

The immediate aim of the Socialist Party is the creation of a class-free and state-free society in which the guiding principle will be From each according to ability, to each according to need". Socialism is about freedom, the freedom of people in their everyday lives and activities to decide collectively how much to produce, how much to consume, how much to work and how much to rest. Freedom to decide, collectively and individually, what to consume, how to produce and how to work. Freedom to participate in determining the running of society.  

Capitalism is set up with one thing in mind – to make the most profits possible for a handful of people. It is the system under which we, and our parents and grandparents before us, did all the toil. We sweated in the factories, went down the mines, built the cities to receive only enough to exist upon and only if we fought hard enough for it. The small number of capitalists made huge fortunes off of our labour. The Socialist Party stands for the complete overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of  a socialist system where it is no longer possible to make a profit from the general misery of peopleThere are several parties around calling themselves “communist” or “socialist" and  they dress themselves up with high-sounding revolutionary phrases, but underneath they are defenders of state-capitalism. We stand for socialism: a system in which the people own and control the  economy. Capitalism is an outlived system of  private profit , whether or not represented as the “welfare state” and whether or not its government is administered by self-styled “socialists.” It perpetuates poverty, unemployment, racism, environmental destruction and wars. The so-called Communist Party regimes of the past had nothing in common with socialism.

This country is not ours. It is the country of our masters. It belongs to them. Therefore its defence may very well be left to them. We have no other interest in the matter. We are not nationalists or patriots but wage-slaves and we are not ready to sacrifice our lives for our masters. Job security, a comfortable home, good healthcare and excellent education for our children are not possible under the present system where all production is limited to what will pass through the bottle-neck called “profit.” It requires a system of planned production for use. We say that capital and labour have no interests in common. 

The capitalist class tries to convince workers that socialists have nothing to offer them. They project an image of socialism as a bureaucratic world full of regimented people. Socialists are depicted as subversives, out to rob the people of their freedoms. The reality is very different. The Socialist Party wants to replace the rule of a handful of exploiters, the monopoly of capitalists, with the rule of the working class, the producers of the wealth of society. We seek to replace the anarchy of capitalist production, with its recessions and unemployment, with a planned  economy, based on the needs of the people. We stand for the fullest democracy for the many  over the few, that handful of parasitic Robber Barons who rule the today.



Friday, February 26, 2021

What Do We Stand For?

 


Socialists advocate state ownership and state control, don't they?

 

No. The word "socialist" has been badly distorted in the last 103 years. The main culprit was Lenin — followed by the Bolsheviks and their admirers all over the world. The Socialist Party pointed out from 1917 onwards that Russia wasn't socialist and could not be at that stage of its development. The other main advocates of state control in this country are, of course, the Labour Party.

 

When it suits them, they call themselves socialist; when they think it will lose them votes, they don't. One of their politicians in the past defined socialism as "whatever the Labour Party happens to be doing at the moment". In fact, there is nothing socialist about what they do.

 

 

What do socialists like yourself stand for, then?

 

Socialism for us is the next stage in social evolution — a far more free and ecologically responsible society which will succeed this one — if we are quick enough. Our present political/economic system threatens to ruin the planet in lire way it is going at present.

 

The majority of the world's population need to bring about radical democratic change without delay if we are to meet human needs, preserve the Earth's ecological balance and avoid the large-scale use of nuclear and biological weapons.

 

 

What is it that you think needs changing?

 

We contend that it is urgently necessary to move on to a more advanced way of organising production and distribution in society: one in keeping with the tremendous strides made by science and technology. At the moment we tend to regard "the economy" rather in the way we regard the weather; as beyond control, with its booms and slumps like summers and winters. And. as long as we leave things as they are, that’s how it operates — out of control. But it is a human-made system, a social construct. And it is now far too crude and erratic to serve a modern society's needs.

 

 

What makes you say that the economic system is crude?

 

Its price structure is a poor, one-dimensional tally system which ought long ago to have been superseded by much more complex and sensitive social control. Modern information systems and computing power make it feasible for anyone, anywhere in the world, to know far more about any aspect of the world's production and distribution than was even imaginable fifty years ago — and to find it out within a few minutes. This makes possible a highly sensitive and complex global network of all the production and distribution processes. And it would mean that, in place of the enormous financial structure of present society, we should have a much more qualitatively rich and socially widespread system of information and control. Everyone in a socialist society would be involved in the control, as they would in the supplying and receiving of information.

 

 

But why should you want to change an economic system that has proved itself, and been refined over two hundred years or more?

 

The system we live under is not simply a way of organising society's production and distribution. It is a system of accumulating wealth — in the form of land, roads, bridges, tunnels, mines, oil refineries, factories, farms, office blocks, ships — all the paraphernalia of modern high-tech society.

 

The significant social fact about this wealth is that it is not owned by the great majority of the population. The result is that they have little or no say in how all this wealth is used, either from a human or an ecological point of view.

 

One of the most worrying things is that there is little deliberate human control at all. because the accumulation of wealth — its expansion through profit and reinvestment — is the overriding force driving society. Those who try to divert it or go against it get swept aside. Most people, about 90 per cent of the population, have no means of living of their own. They have no choice but to offer themselves for work to those who do own the factories, farms, offices and so on. for wages or salaries. For about fifty of the best years of their lives this work, under someone else's control, takes the bulk of their waking hours, with perhaps another hour or two commuting to and from work. This is not freedom, but economic bondage, and cannot be anything else under the ruthless drive for profit.

 

Freedom to stop doing a boss's bidding and become destitute and a social outcast is not freedom at all. It is compulsion. Moreover, the fact they we offer ourselves for jobs does not mean that we shall always get them or keep them. We live the whole of our adult lives under this pressure, this insecurity.

 

 

But surely the present system provides steadily rising living standards for most people?

 

This ignores that the insecurity is made far worse by the fact that, periodically and inevitably, the spiral process of reinvesting profits to make yet more profits overreaches itself — the productivity of factories and farms cannot be increased fast enough to keep ahead of the increased demand for profit.

 

Throughout the economy, profit ceases to be sufficient to expand production and then, as has happened throughout the last two centuries and is happening now, we have what is called a recession /slump /depression/ crisis. Then wage and salary earners are thrown out of work, production is cut back; companies and individuals go bankrupt in their thousands; many of those with mortgage or hire purchase debts are unable to maintain their payments and have their homes and belongings repossessed.

 

Millions are prevented from working at all, while those still in work are often driven to the point of exhaustion every day. If production were cut back because people did not want or need the goods and services, that would make some sense, but that is far from being the ease. Production is cut (and must be cut in this economic system, regardless of whether people need the food or medicines or whatever) because production has ceased to be profitable.

 

 

But if state control of the economy is not the answer, what is?

 

We agree that attempts at state control or interference in this process usually makes it worse, as  happened in Russia and the Eastern Bloc. But, left to itself, the economic system has become hopelessly inadequate for what should be a modern, highly developed, global society.

 

It's like an old steam tram carried over into the age of supersonic flight. People still resist the increasing pressure to make a radical change in society, but socialists believe that until that change is made, symptoms of the incongruity will get worse; the increase in crime, the decay of inner cities, the degradation of the environment, the impoverishment of Third World countries, the recurrence of famines and disease outbreaks, the outbreaks of armed conflicts around the world, the increase in the power of states and the harshness of their regimes.

 

Although there is nearly always state involvement, underlying all these are economic causes. They can only be improved when we decide to dispense with economics altogether and take full social control of our production and distribution. And that will be socialism.

 



Thursday, February 25, 2021

This world needs change 


 Capitalism is a system is designed to profit from emergencies and disasters, not provide for people’s needs. National and local authorities  scramble to put in place what was needed and engaged in bidding wars with each other for basic supplies and equipment. When the government fails to provide needed support such as housing, health care and food, people who need care delay seeking it out of fear of the cost. 

Thanks to Covid-19 festering social issues and inequalities have been highlighted, intensifying the need for a new approach. Change is now in the air. There is talk of environmental action and re-imagining how we live. The Great Re-Set. People want to re-build better. Interconnected crises confronts humanity and  ‘peace’, ‘fraternity’, ‘equality’ are on the lips of many.

Malnutrition spoil the lives of almost a billion people and billions suffer economic insecurity. The natural world has been  poisoned. Around our divided world there’s armed conflict, modern-day slavery and displacement of persons. Anxiety and despair are everywhere. Now people throughout the world are desperate for change, for freedom, social justice, greater democracy and a healthy environment. Some commentators say it is a is a collective re-awakening of social consciousness - People Power.

 The Socialist Party advocates abolishing the cause of the slavery and poverty in the working class. The Socialist Party stands for abolishing state and private ownership, and replacing them by common ownership by the whole working community in the interest of the community of workers.  We do not offer an alternative programme of scores of reforms. Our platform is simply socialism—which makes all reforms of capitalism fade into irrelevancy and insignificance. Are you satisfied that the present organisation of society is satisfactory? Can you think of anything worth while that you are likely to lose (except poverty and insecurity!) by abolishing private property in the means of production and substitution for it the common ownership of these means of production? This insane and irrational system can be ended when politically enlightened working people break the capitalist fetters of ownership in order to establish common ownership, by which means that class can at once win emancipation and abolish poverty by the ease with which they can now produce wealth.

 No change in the administration of capitalism will raise workers from their abject and subject position in society. The ruling class do not rule the workers simply because they are owners, but they are able to continue their rule and domination because they control the political machinery which gives them the protection necessary to maintain their position. The working-class, therefore, must get control of this same political machinery. When the working-class have become predominantly Socialist, and are organised politically and economically on class lines, they will be easily able to obstruct the normal working of capitalism. The majority of the capitalist class, faced with the alternative of yielding to the wishes of the majority of society, or of entering into a period of continued industrial and administrative chaos, will certainly choose the former.  In socialism there will be no wages system, no profit, and consequently no capital. The means of production, no longer capital, will be communally owned. 

The Socialist Party is hostile to other political parties in this country because it holds

(a) that only the abolition of capitalist private ownership will solve the poverty problem of the workers, and

(b) that the use of the vote by the organised workers for the conquest of the political machinery, is the method.

No other party believes these two things necessary. As a socialist organisation, we cannot permit non-Socialists to become members. It does, however freely open its meetings and its media to expressions of opinion by all opponents. The Socialist Party aims at changing the foundation of society, at replacing the private ownership of the means of production by common ownership. It is therefore a revolutionary party. Conversely, the use of violent methods to secure minor reforms does not turn a reformist party into a revolutionary one.


 

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Everything is Possible

 


The task of the Socialist Party is to help to turn  socialist dreams into socialist reality. We are living on a planet that has a lot of resources, but the men who control wealth make sure that everyone else works for them. They use their schools, their factories, their media, and their law courts to make sure everyone else is powerless. Under the present system nearly everybody loses. While some people get cheated worse than others, they all get  short-changed  so that the capitalists can make more money. People in poor countries are cheated when multinational corporations steal their natural resources. Poor people are cheated when they are kept from getting good jobs, good houses, and good health care, because it is profitable for capitalists to have an over-supply of unskilled desperate labour. Women are cheated when they are viewed  only as prospective wives and mothers for the work of child raising and housework and still be available as low-paid employment. Working people  in factories and offices are cheated when they work long hours at boring jobs, sometimes dangerous,  which dull their senses and make them feel as if they were machines, and then find that only the people at the top benefit from their toil and sweat.

Power now rests in the hands of a very few people, yet the real power everywhere belongs to the people if they were to unite. However, all our lives we’ve been told that we’re separate and different from everyone else. We’re taught to view people in other groups suspiciously. Our rulers want it that way: they tell us that the only way we can be worth anything is to be better than another.  They encourage divisions among us to make us feel less deprived, as long as there is someone worse off.

 The media try to fool us into believing that their picture of the world is an accurate one – a picture we know is a lie. They  blame fellow-workers for our problems and for war. Its the fault of  people on welfare for high taxes, black people for crime, etc. In their eyes we are the “little people”, who have no interests of our own, which are in conflict with the interests of the rich. They try to turn us against each other.

 Socialism is not the destruction of democracy, but the taking, in the name of humanity, of all the wealth that exists in the world. In the society of the future, socialism will be the enjoyment of all existing wealth, by all  and according to the principle: From each according to abilities, to each according to needs. Socialists seek no new government, no new state, whether it calls itself popular or democratic, revolutionary or provisional. Socialists do not want to institute a new ruling class, of representatives who always end up representing nobody but themselves. The common wealth  belongs to the entirety of humanity to use in common.  The land, the machines, the workshops, the houses, etc., will serve everyone in common of them. No go-betweens, no brokers or helpful servants who always end up becoming the true masters: we want all the wealth existent to be taken directly by the people themselves and to be kept by their  hands, and that the people themselves decide the best way to enjoy it, be it for production or consumption.

 Some ask the Socialist Party if free access is possible? Would we have enough products to let everyone have the right to take as they wished, without demanding from individuals more labour than they are willing to give? We respond: yes. Certainly, we can apply this principle: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, because, in future societies, production will be so abundant that there will be no need to limit consumption, or to demand from people more work than they are willing or able to give.

Right now, we cannot even begin to imagine this immense growth in production, but we can guess at it by examining the causes that will provoke it. These causes can be summed up in three principles:

1. Harmony of cooperation in the different branches of human activity will replace today’s fighting that translates into competition

2. Large-scale introduction of all kinds of new technology.

3. The considerable conservation of the forces of labour and of raw materials, facilitated by the abolition of environmental harmful or useless wasteful production. How much resources and energy are used today by the armies of the land, sea and air to build arsenals. How many of these forces are wasted to produce luxury objects that serve nothing but the needs of vain and corrupt..

Competition and rivalry are the fundamental principles of capitalist production, which has as its motto: Mors tua vita mea, your death is my life - the ruin of one makes the fortune of another. The result is the relentless conflicts between nations, individual against individual, between workers as well as between capitalists. in the society of the future, this individualistic principle of capitalist production, every man for himself against all others, and everyone against everyone, will be replaced by the true principle of human society: all for one and one for all – what immense changes will we not obtain in the results of production? Imagine how great will be the growth of production, when each man, far from needing to fight against all the others, will be helped by them, when he will have them not as enemies but as cooperators. If the collective work of ten men attains results absolutely impossible for one man alone, how grand will be the results obtained by the large-scale cooperation of all men who, today, work hostilely against each other?

And technology? The appearance of these powerful helpers of work, as large as it seems to us today, is quite minimal in comparison to what it will be in societies to come.

Today, the machine often has the ignorance of the capitalist against it, but more often still his interest. How many machines are going unapplied only because they do not bring an immediate benefit to the capitalist? The worker is today the enemy of automation and the robots, and rightfully so, because they are the monster that comes to  to starve, to degrade, to torture , to crush. But what an immense interest we would have, on the contrary, in augmenting their number when we will no longer be the slave to the machine but on the contrary, they would be at beck and call helping us and working for our well-being.

There will be enough for everyone. Thanks to this abundance work will lose the dreadful character of enslavement. Still our critics observe that perhaps at the beginning, products will not be abundant enough; it will be necessary to ration and to divide up resources, rewarding some by the quantity or quality of work that each person has done.

To this we respond that, in a future society, even when we are obligated to ration resources, we must remain socialist: this is to say that the rationing must be done by sharing out according not to merits, but to needs.