Socialism need not be a dream

There’s probably no bigger crime in politics than to imagine a world without war, inequality, a world without frontiers and without classes. It is dismissed as a utopian dream. To advocate the socialist vision of a world beyond capitalism, where the human needs of all prevail over the private profits of a few, is to be thought of as a crank.. But these days there is now a new openness to socialist ideas. People are disappointed and demoralised by the reality of growing wealth inequality and the increasing misery. There has been a decline of living standards, and mounting insecurity for working people. The destruction of the environment and global-warming have dashed the hopes for the future for many people. Now there are millions of others who want something better from life. Socialism is no longer taboo.

Some on the Left promote a kinder, more equitable version of capitalism, one in which the existence of elite wealth is taxed to pay for free health care and education, to provide affordable housing. This is the policy of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Of course, it isn’t socialism  but basically a modernised version of the New Deal. This isn’t the socialism of Karl Marx or Eugene Debs. There’s no  actual anti-capitalist revolution on the Justice Democrats agenda, no common ownership and democratic control of industry and production, placing the decision-making powers into the hands of the working people themselves. It is a gentler more humane model of capitalism that has long existed in parts of Europe, where the welfare system provides free education and health care, and businesses are obliged to offer benefits like longer vacations, paid family leave so to stabilize capitalist economies. This is not workers appropriating the wealth they produce but workers being incorporated into a partnership with capitalists, sharing a seat at the board-room table so that employers and the government can feel safe at the price of paying a bit more in tax and passing a few worker-friendly laws. As of the second quarter of 2019, the wealth of the 1% was estimated by the Federal Reserve Board to be $34.72 trillion. If their wealth remains unchanged during the next ten years, using the estimate of Sander’s wealth tax coming to $4.35 trillion, their wealth will be reduced by less than 13% to $30.37 trillion. By contrast, the wealthiest 1% hold real estate valued at $4 trillion with home mortgages of $440 billion. The property tax at 1% comes to $40 billion which represents 0.115% of their total wealth. The 1% will continue holding a substantial sum and be in a position to exercise much power. We will still have our billionaires even though the “socialist” Sander’s has stated “I don’t think that billionaires should exist.”

Such reformism is not enough to save society. The rule of capital is toxic no matter how much honey is used to make it palatable. Capitalists, Wall Street and the corporate media consider a return to even the New Deal policies that Sanders espouses irreconcilable with their drive for profits. The present system with its unfolding climate crisis is leading us into the abyss. There is not much time to get organised politically, to take hold of  the reins of society from the populist demagogues, the planet polluters, the militarists, and Wall Street CEOs who have brought society to the brink of disaster.

To save society and the planet, we don’t need billionaires named Bezos or Buffet to bless us with their philanthropy, as long as we recognise the sanctity of their extreme wealth. Actually, the whole of the capitalist class are unnecessary to civilization’s survival, they are a brake on human development. The first bold steps towards a new society is the creation of a mass independent socialist party. The sooner the capitalist profit system can be relegated to history’s proverbial dustbin, the sooner our species can discover what it actually means to be fully human, fully alive. The choice of a socialist future, or no future, hangs in the balance

Adapted from here
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/25/no-billionaires-no-fascists-no-warmongers-to-the-socialist-future/

And here

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/25/most-people-pay-a-higher-wealth-tax-than-the-wealthy/

A few observations.

Nationalism is a delusion and a snare and quite incompatible with socialist principles. A world of harmony and plenty could only be created by the actions of workers the world over, no matter what their language, colour, sex or ethnic group. Only if the workers of England, Scotland and Wales are united in the struggle to overthrow their common ruling class are they likely to meet with success.

It’s an old theory that the cause of poverty and misery is “too many people.” At first sight this theory might seem to make sense, but what it ignores is that although the population of the world has increased so has its ability to produce. Productivity has increased such that now plenty for all is quite possible—when once the wealth of the world is owned in common so that the motive of production can be used.

Many anti-immigration advocates believe this myth of overpopulation and that Britain is already “overcrowded"; this drives rents up; immigration only makes matters worse. We must point out that it’s quite invalid to treat what is called Britain in isolation. The population and resources of this island are not an independent unit producing for itself in isolation from the rest of the world.

 Today the world is one economic unit; all the parts of the world are interdependent. But the political units into which the world is divided tend to obscure this. So if we’re discussing economic problems we can only do so validly by treating the world as a whole. In the division of productive functions in the world some parts concentrate on producing raw materials, others manufactured goods, and others workers. These productive resources are only brought together under capitalism through the workings of the market. Today Britain is one of the parts where there is work and African countries where there is not. The tendency will thus be for workers to migrate from Africa to Britain. Just as if there were a demand for wheat in Germany wheat would tend to go there. This is no fancy example: under capitalism workers are commodities just like wheat, cocoa or coffee.

Many say immigrants should stay “in their own country.” But workers everywhere, save in the legal sense, have no country. The wealth of the world is monopolised by a tiny minority on whom they depend for a living. Workers from the various parts of the world have no opposed interests. They are all in the same economic position: wage and salary workers work for those who own. Their interests are the same: to end the system that degrades them by treating them as mere things.

The Socialist Party doesn’t advocate multi-cultural integration of immigrants into our way of life. What is “our way of life" but working for the wealthy? Socialists aren’t interested in helping the owners get workers who are less used to wage-slavery to adjust, integrate or fit in with capitalism. Socialists suggest that workers everywhere organise to end the way of life capitalism imposes on them.

Nor do Socialists hold much trust in laws to ban discrimination. The power of the State can’t stamp out the prejudices which arise out of the very system it is used to uphold.

It is only in a world where wealth is commonly owned and democratically run by the community in its interest that prejudice and antagonism between peoples will disappear. In a socialist world there won’t be the built-in generators of prejudice there are under capitalism.

In Labour Party left-wing circles nationalisation is still seen as socialism or at least as a step towards socialism. But the Socialist Party view the matter differently. Nationalisation is just a way of running capitalist industry, a form of state capitalism. Nationalisation preserves the right of the former owners to a free income from the unpaid labour of the working class. Only, instead of getting their tribute as dividends and interest on private shares and stocks they get it as interest on government bonds given as compensation. The Stock Exchange is an elaborate market which allows capitalists to switch their money from industry to industry in accordance with the rates of profit. Many shareholders took the chance to use this mechanism: they sold their stock and used the proceeds to buy private shares again. As Marx pointed out the capitalist couldn’t care where his money is invested, in whisky or bibles, as long as he gets his profits. As a matter of fact, some shareholders may not have been too unhappy about the nationalisation as it gave them a chance to get out of a particular.

To the Socialist Party nationalisation has never had any attraction, either as a means or an end. State capitalism is not in the interests of the working class and for this reason we are opposed to it. What we stand for is something different.

Supporters and opponents alike often mistakenly analyse the tendency towards state capitalism as socialist. Indeed, as a result of years of misuse the word “socialism” has now virtually come to mean “state capitalism” for most people. But socialism must be clearly distinguished from State capitalism otherwise the working class will be intervening on the political scene only to support State capital against private capital, just as in the last century they intervened to support the industrial capitalists against the landed aristocracy. Socialism means a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by and in the interests of society as a whole. While state capitalism retains all the features and categories of the capitalist economy – the wages system, commodity production, profits, money, banks socialism abolishes them. Socialism is opposed to both private and state capitalism and alone is in the interests of the working class.

Socialism alone can provide the economic foundation for the full and free development of men and women.

Scotland in Poverty

The statistics for child poverty in parts of Fife are stark. A report in 2018 by End Child Poverty said that across the region there were 17,667 children – 24.47% –growing up in poverty. In Buckhaven, Methil and Wemyss Villages, the figure was 36.62% of children, while in the Kirkcaldy East council ward it was 38.68%.

Sam Royston, chair of End Child Poverty and director of policy and research at the Children’s Society, said at the time the figures were “scandalous”.

Reports out this year paint a similarly grim picture. Data released in June by the End Child Poverty Coalition revealed that 27% of children in the St Andrews ward were living in poverty – the highest in North East Fife, with East Neuk and Landward at 20 per cent.

Rhona Cunningham,  Fife Gingerbread’s chief executive, talking about the impact of austerity in Fife. “The welfare reform and how that has rolled out has practically devastated some of the most vulnerable communities,” she says. When she began working at Fife Gingerbread a decade and a half ago, child poverty was “not so much of an issue”. That was five years before the 2008 global financial crash plunged Britain into recession, and an economic crisis that was followed by a decade of deep cuts to public spending by Tory-led governments.

Cunningham and colleagues at Fife Gingerbread help people living in some of the poorest parts of the county. They include former mining communities that have struggled since the pits closed in the 1980s: towns such as Cowdenbeath, Lochgelly, Leven, Methil and Buckhaven, where the charity provides meals, clothing and emotional support to people on low incomes. 

Alleviating child poverty is an urgent priority for the charity. Over the last 12 months, it has helped 816 children and 328 adults. The 2019 Fife Gingerbread Christmas appeal Heat and Eat hopes to raise money for meter cards so families can put the heating on over the festive season. Most people seeking help are scraping by to survive, says Cunningham.

“There is no safety net,” she adds. “There is nothing at the back of them. The prospect of having £500 in the bank is like a lottery win. You’ve got whole communities who kind of feel like there’s no hope.” Cunningham says child poverty can be measured in various ways but gauging the issue at Fife Gingerbread is straightforward. “For us on the ground, it’s quite simple,” she explains. “It’s about families who have children, who don’t have enough income, and they have far too much expenditure.”

She talks about the poverty trap, and says people are struggling on zero hours contracts. They are paid the minimum wage. They struggle to pay high rents for homes in the private sector. The cost of food and travel rises, but pay doesn’t. Childcare is expensive. She says the introduction of policies such as Universal Credit, sanctions and the bedroom tax have caused severe financial problems for families, making them reliant on charities for essentials.

“Every single thing has kind of slowly chipped away at the bricks,” she says. “They’ve already drained their resources as much as they can. Basically they don’t have anywhere else to go.” Another effect of austerity, she adds, is that the benefit system has become “increasingly punitive”.

In May the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Professor Phillip Alston, said “ideological” cuts to public services since 2010 have led to “tragic consequences”. His report said that close to 40 per cent of children are likely to live in poverty by 2021, adding the DWP had been tasked with “designing a digital and sanitised version of the 19th century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens”.

As part of a drive to reduce child poverty, the Scottish government announced this year it will introduce a new Scottish Child Payment, a plan to give money to low-income families, starting in early 2021. But a report in October by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation urged the Scottish government to do more, arguing this plan alone will not be enough to reach its target of reducing child poverty to 10 per cent by 2030.

Fife Gingerbread has also been affected by cuts. In January, Cunningham went public about its financial crisis and said the charity needed £600,000 to keep operating at its current level. External funding had ended. At the time, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon was urged to intervene after being warned the charity would be unable to serve two thirds of the 200 families it supports. 

“This is the world we live in. So it is a bit ironic that, at times, when the need is greater than ever, when poverty levels are way higher than they’ve ever been and show no signs whatsoever of reducing, that the services that support the most vulnerable, are the most vulnerable.”

Between 2010 and 2019 cuts of more than £30m have been made to welfare, housing and social services, according to the United Nations. Cuts have been made to budgets from policing to health.

Poverty has risen dramatically over the decade. Poverty in Scotland is rising, from an already unacceptably high level. More people are facing situations where they cannot afford the basics nor play a full role in society. Almost one in five people in Scotland now live in poverty, and for children the situation is worse, with one in four in poverty. The use of food banks doubles when Universal Credit is rolled out. Homelessness has increased and crime rates are up, as well as hospital waiting lists.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/how-austerity-means-scottish-families-are-getting-caught-in-the-poverty-trap/ar-BBXhCqg?ocid=spartandhp

Understanding People

The study of history has little purpose if it does not enable us to avoid errors of past generations that had not the advantage of being able to study history. We want the present generation to avoid the reformist errors of their fore-fathers. We live in unfriendly times. As neighbourhoods have made way for wretched anonymous tower blocks, so neighbourliness has become outdated. It is not that people have chosen to become careless and uncooperative; as social animals we are never happier than when we are able to behave in mutuality, empathy and compassion towards our fellow human beings. But the way that life has come to be organised conspires against our will to be human.

For the truth is that community is now little more than a quaint ideal. The depressing reality is that more than ever we live in a society which does not resemble anything very social. This sense of crushing alienation, which was once a mere term of jargon employed by those who had read Marx is now inescapable. The streets are settings for fear and loneliness. Housing is designed according to the cheap measurements of profits for rapacious landlords whose concern for comfort, dignity or social fellowship in the place where we live simply does not exist. The transport system is unsafe and its weary users shuffle ritualistically to and from wage slavery in various conditions of unease, stress and anger. Services are running down—the basic needs of workers are too expensive to bother with, so let us dwell amongst the refuse of late twentieth century squalor. This is our environment. For most of us saving our environment is not about trees and forests and fish ponds; they are out of reach and survival within the urban wasteland is about dodging the dog shit and hoping that it will be someone else’s house that they break into.

An alienated world of non-community turns others into strangers and strangers into enemies. People turn in on themselves and place barriers like stone fortress walls around their lives, their emotions. And within the darkness of these enclosed lives horrible, unthinkable abuses occur. People like to speak about “the freedom of the individual”, as if being atomised, isolated and excluded from social cooperation were somehow a form of liberation. It is not; it feels horrible inside those fragile, impoverishing, alienated humanity’s existence. And this is where awful nightmare’s come to life. Yesterday’s unthinkable becomes today’s headline and, perhaps, tomorrow’s routine. This capitalist system under which we all live—even if we many deny that they do, and most do not even know that they do—has committed against us the greatest of crimes. It has denied us our freedom to be innocent. We are born neither good nor bad. To imagine otherwise is as sensible as to imagine that we are born with a preference for Pepsi rather than Coke.

We are born to be within the world as it is. And the world as it is right now is not a happy place in which to be born.

Millions and millions of children are born into conditions of such material constraint that it is amazing they grow up fit for anything. Some do not emerge fit for anything. The wounds suffered as a result of authoritarian parenting, of sexual and violent abuse (both misuses of power) and of squalid and ignorant upbringings are injuries which were once unthinkable—or at least, unthought about. Perhaps, if capitalism had been removed long ago, these effects would have been of a lesser magnitude and we could go in greater innocence towards creating our futures.

 

The reformists, who were always wrong, now stand mute before what is to them an inexplicable breakdown in civilised culture. After all, had they not set up a welfare state, with its ever-ready social workers and free schools for the poor? But the kids can’t stand the schools and see no point in going when all they must learn is to become unemployed—sorry, “Job Seekers”. The churches talk about the collapse of the family, with their eyes carefully averted from the disaster zone of the family which heads their religion.

Now Tory ministers cry for moral education in the schools. But what reasonably sensible school student would for one minute accept moral instruction from that rabble of corrupt and callous rogues? And what moral depravity would characterise the child who received an A+ in the exam set by exploiters to test the sturdiness of the soon to be replaced exploited?

Sometimes, through the fog of confusion which is how life is viewed by many people, and despite the brutalised indifference which seems to be the price of keeping afloat within the relentless competition to afford any kind of a life, certain events make us especially sad. These events are very largely selected for us by unaccountable media chiefs whose employees orchestrate public grief on such occasions. That does not diminish the authenticity of our sadness. After all, we are human beings. We are social animals. And sometimes, after a terrorist bomb or a famine, a collective nerve is touched. And then what?

Socialists do not indulge in piety. That can be left to those who prefer to respond on their knees with their eyes shut. We leave moral self-righteousness as their monopoly as well. No sugary sentiments of love for little children will be heard from us. It is only under a system where the material stimulus to love and care is lacking that “loving thy neighbour” is promoted as some great virtue. No proposals here for teaching children what is right and wrong; not under a system which would have willingly taken those sane children only five years further into their lives and taught them to kill strangers as paid members of the British army.

Occasional sadness is a sign that we have not been wholly brutalised. Just as the fact that the overwhelming majority of children do not adjust willingly to the competitive, vicious and violent norms of the capitalist ethos is proof that this system has not and will not desensitise us all. To punish the dehumanised for what an inhumane world has taught them to become is as wise as to lock a dog in a kennel and then beat it for barking. The fact is that the kennel door is unlocked. It does not have to be like this.

Many people today are so little interested in politics that in all the parliaments of the present day world there is not a single person who can be said to represent their interests. This is true in Britain where there is a large Labour Party representation and where there have been labour governments. It is true in the United States where there is no Labour Party representation and where there has never been a Labour government. And it is true in Canada where Liberals and Conservatives have been changing places and holding hands in governing the country ever since Confederation.

Nothing is more certain than that workers are content to give their continued support to the system that enslaves them. At every election there are a few major parties and a varying number of smaller parties seeking the support of the electorate, and all of them propose to preserve the present order of society. They have this in common regardless of the features that seem to distinguish them. Leading the list are Labour and Conservatives. Behind them a few paces are the LibDems and the nationalists.

It is true that the Labour Party governments over the years have brought into effect an assortment of reforms which were all supposed to have added up to a better life. Great has been the abuse levelled against The Socialist Party because of the fact that from its inception it has steadfastly set itself against the advocacy of palliatives or improvements that strengthen the existing system of society. No other party in this country occupies a similar position, and many who were once opposed to it on this particular point have vanished from the political scene.

 To those who still persist in such advocacy let us ask: "What are you out for?" Some will probably reply: "We are out for socialism, but we know the working class cannot understand and struggle for socialism until they are better fed and better housed than at present."

 And so they concentrate on feeding, housing, etc. If there were evidence to show that all well-fed and well-housed workers were in the forefront of the revolutionary struggle, one could understand their attitude. But there is none. Does it follow that those who throw off the shackles of religion, or who secure a "clear head" by giving up alcoholic liquors become socialists? No, in very many cases they are pronounced anti-socialists. And is the study of socialism taken up and revolutionary change advocated by the flunkeys or by those whose efficiency as wage-slaves is studied by such "model" employers and the like? There is no more justification in arguing that the working class must be well fed, well clothed and decently housed before they can understand and organise for socialism than there is for the opposite attitude that it is necessary to starve and grind them down before any real consciousness of their position and determination to alter it will possess them.

While the mineral wealth of the world, along with the other means of life are in the hands of the capitalist class, places like the Congo with its geographic importance and its riches in resources will remain the objects of plunder for any gang of rulers who get the chance. The alternative to these continuous thieves' quarrels is obvious. It is to make all the natural and industrial assets of the world the common property of all mankind, to finish with buying, selling, profits and wages, and start producing for free distribution on the basis of people’s needs. This alternative can only be made operative by the workers first understanding the need for it and then organising for it.

 To bring these necessary conditions about will take a lot of work, but looking at Africa and looking at capitalism today, the need could hardly be more pressing.