What For?

 

The media headlines all tell the same tale: the “horror” of the invasion; the atrocities of the Russians and the outraged feelings of decent civilised nations. Experts and intellectuals tell us a victory for Ukraine will a victory in the war for democracy. Yet the same news outlets talk of the closing down of television channels and the banning of political parties.

War is inseparable from the capitalist system. Witness the failure of all the so-called international conferences to settle the disputes among the nations. Not only has diplomacy ended in fiasco, but they have actually led to increased tensions that have rendered the capitalist world asunder. War means squandering of wealth; it means devastation of provinces and countries and death for a great many people. Now working people in neighbouring nations live in an atmosphere of imminent war. All national policies are now directed towards the preparation for war. Military budgets are increased to acquire deadlier weaponry. Armies and air forces are modernised.

The Socialist Party declares we will no longer fight in the interests and in the wars of capitalism. Even when war is covered with patriotic and nationalistic speeches war remains always unjustified and hated. Every day we see more and more clearly the destructive consequences of the wars.

In the past, war was usually the business of the elite of the population, the nobles and knights. Normally, the majority not only took no part in the fighting but, in point of fact, their lives were very little affected, even indirectly, by the conduct and outcome of wars and battles.  Often wars were conducted by hired-out mercenary armies. The question of who won the war was of hardly any concern to the average serf. His duties and obligations were the same whether Baron X or  Duke Y prevailed on the battlefield.

Today, everything is changed. It is the privileged class who are unaffected by warfare, retiring to rural retreats or safe foreign resorts. Now, directly or indirectly, every working person is part of the war machine. Not only are workers conscripted into military service, as civilians they have become targets in a strategy of inflicting terror tactics. Sanctions and sieges are applied to starve populations into submission.

Experience has already shown that the people can be, and probably have been, dragged into wars against their will. Certainly, they are subjected to campaigns of propaganda and indoctrination, fed nationalistic and patriotic messages. And soon they begin to believe the war is their fight.

When oligarchs quarrel, it is the people who receive the blows.

Against War, For The Social Revolution

 

“The people of every nation are being deluded by their rulers, who say to them, "You, who are governed by us, are all in danger of being conquered by other nations; we are watching over your welfare and safety, and consequently we demand of you annually some millions of rubles—the fruit of your labor—to be used by us in the acquisition of arms, cannon, powder, and ships for your defense; we also demand that you yourselves shall enter institutions, organized by us, where you will become senseless particles of a huge machine—the army—which will be under our absolute control. On entering this army you will cease to be men with wills of your own; you will simply do what we require of you. But what we wish, above all else, is to exercise dominion; the means by which we dominate is killing, therefore we will instruct you to kill." - Tolstoy

Our ideas must be clear on the question of war. In whose interests is this war being fought? For what ends is this war being fought? Is the continuance of this war in the interests of the working people? These questions must be faced. It is not the oligarchs, the instigators of the war, who pay for war with their lives and their fortunes. It is with the casualties of the workers, with the hardships and privations of their homes and their families in the warring countries. The workers have no interest to be the tools and pawns of their billionaire rulers. 

This war is not a war for democracy against fascism. Why has Yerenskyy banned all political parties that dissent from his policies? And permit the Banderites to prosper. It is not a war for the liberties of sovereign nations. It is not a war for the defence of peace against aggression. These phrases are the hypocrisy and deception imposed upon working people. This war is a fight between the rival powers over profits and world domination. This war will bring only great suffering and boundless misery to millions of working-class homes. We are told that this is a war in defence of peace against aggression and that therefore all defenders of peace and collective security should support it. There never was a bigger lie. Why did they oppose the idea of the neutral Ukraine which could have prevented aggression? This is a war to which no worker in any country can give support.

To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable hostility towards war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity of public opinion have thrown their support for the Ukrainian government. The war is in the interests of democracy is the sum of their understanding. Former humanitarians now muster under the banner of the war-mongers. In order to be opposed to war, one must be opposed to capitalism, since modern wars belong among this system’s conditions of existence. The enemy is world capitalism. 

We are taking sides in this conflict, but it’s the third side. It’s the side of the workers, against the owning class that exploits them now, as well as against the owning class that wants to exploit them. War takes a heavy toll on us. We condemn this war crime against humanity and mourn those who perished. We want justice for the dead and safety for the living.  Our war is against the capitalists in our country, a class struggle. The armament industry shares on the stock markets wobble at every peace move and become buoyant at the prospects of continuing war. War is only in the interests of the handful of sharks and vultures who are drawing millions of profits out of the necessities of the people and out of the lavish feast of State spending on weaponry.  It is only in the interests of the ruling few.

We know that the principal victims of military action will be the sons and daughters of working-class families who serve in the military forces and innocent civilians who have already suffered so much.

We have no quarrel with the ordinary working-class men, women and children of Ukraine, Russia, or any other country. The continuance of this war is not in the interests of the common people. For the people, it brings only limitless hardships—not in any ideal cause, not in their own cause, but only in the cause of a quarrel of rival exploiters. The interests of the people demand the speediest termination of this war.

Let us make our voice heard—the voice of those who do not want this war. This demand for the speedy termination of the war is not coming from friends of  Putin or Zerenskyy. On the contrary, they are coming from those who through all these years have opposed autocrats and dictators in all countries. 

But what about peace terms, the question is asked? The first task is for the end of the war.  The Socialist Party is under no illusions as to the character of any peace under the conditions of capitalism. Any peace under the conditions of the capitalist system is unstable, full of injustices and full of sources of future conflict. We know that just permanent peace can only be finally realised when the power of the capitalist class is broken and is replaced by the power of the working people, by socialism. When we call for the immediate ending of the present war, we call for this final aim. Our aim is the cooperation of the free peoples in the building of a new world order which shall maintain peace against aggression from any quarter, make possible extending disarmament and prepare the way for the most rapid advance to world socialism.

When we fight for the immediate ending of the war, it is in order to carry forward our struggle for these aims. The struggle of the people needs to be directed against these real enemies of the people—against their war, against their gambling with the people’s lives, against their plundering of the people, against their whole system of privilege, hypocrisy and exploitation.

AID FOR THE NEEDY, NOT THE GREEDY

NOT PEOPLE AGAINST PEOPLE, BUT CLASS AGAINST CLASS.

MARX ON CO-OPS

 (a) We acknowledge the cooperative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising and despotic system of the subordination of labour to. capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers

(b) Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wage slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the cooperative system will never transform capitalistic society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and cooperative labour general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.

(c) We recommend to the working men to embark on cooperative production rather than in cooperative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system, the former attacks its groundwork.

(d) We recommend to all cooperative societies to convert one part of their joint income into a fund for propagating their principles by example as well as by precept, in other words, by promoting the establishment of new cooperative fabrics, as well as by teaching and preaching.

(e) In order to prevent cooperative societies from degenerating into ordinary middle-class joint-stock companies (societies par actions), all workers employed, whether shareholders or not, ought to share-alike. As a mere temporary expedient, we are willing to allow shareholders a low rate of interest.- Marx Inaugural Address of the I.W.M.A.

He was indeed sympathetic to the cooperative model.

Apart from the above he previously wrote in 1864:
‘The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, maybe carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands...’

And later in Volume 3 of Capital Marx argued of co-operatives that ‘the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.'

However, in each case, Marx also described the limitations of co-operatives NOT advocating them as solutions.

‘...however... excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. … To save the industrious masses, co-operative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour…To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes.’ (IWMA 1864)

‘Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.’ (IWMA 1866)

‘The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system’ (Capital, Vol.3)

Marx was saying that workers taking control of their own productive work processes, of organising co-operatively in firms, appeared to be a positive reaction on the part of workers to private capitalism. As such it was a source of growing confidence for the working class, proof that the historically progressive role of private capitalists had come to an end:

‘Co-operative factories furnish proof that the capitalist has become no less redundant as a functionary in production as he himself, looking down from his high perch, finds the big landowner redundant.’ (Capital, Vol. 3)

Changing the world

Under capitalism, the conditions of labour are dictated by supervisors who are driven to maintain or increase profits by the fear of losing their jobs. With socialism, where the whole people owned the land and means of wealth production, they would arrange their own conditions of labour. They would naturally adopt the shortest, easiest and safest methods to achieve their objectives because such a course would give them the maximum amount of leisure. In any case, freedom to exercise craft pride would be possible in socialism, under capitalism it is not. The worker’s business is to work. He or she must work in such a way as to satisfy the capitalist greed for profits; there is no time for him or her to find pleasure in it.

The aim of the Socialist Party is to replace a society divided into property-owners and non-property-owners, by a system of society in which the only claim to the enjoyment of wealth produced, will be the rendering of service by all who are fit to do so. This involves the suppression of all incomes derived from the ownership of property, but does the Labour Party propose that suppression? If not, the Labour Party is not a socialist party, and cannot be trusted to advance socialism. The capitalist class does, at present, own and control the means of producing wealth, and will not, without compulsion, yield its legal right to live by the ownership of property. Rather than face this fact, rather than admit that the class struggle exists and can be abolished from society only by the victory of the working-class majority, the Labour Party proclaims its belief in the possibility of achieving socialism without destroying the property rights of the capitalist class. It believes that it has found a solution to the ancient problem of making omelettes without breaking eggs. It will have “socialism” without “confiscation.”

All of the Labour Party’s nationalisation proposals involve the payment of compensation in the shape of interest-bearing bonds to the former owners. Now, apart from the futility of trying to introduce socialism piecemeal, industry by industry, what will be the position when the Labour Party has finished nationalising all the essential services? The capitalist class will still be property-owners —their property being Government Bonds instead of company shares, etc. They will still live by owning, and without rendering service.

The working class will still be engaged in producing wealth for the benefit of the capitalist class. Socialism will not be in existence, and no important working-class problem will have been solved.

The alternative advocated by us is to propagate socialism and organise the working-class in a Socialist Party on a clear-cut socialist programme.  The working-class are the great majority. When they become Socialist they will endeavour to obtain possession of the machinery of government in the usual “constitutional” way.

 Until a larger number of the workers understand and desire socialism, mass media devoted to the propaganda of socialist principles remains a project for the future. In the meantime, this blog will continue to advance the object of the Socialist Party, which seeks to organise all workers who desire to replace the present system of capitalism by a system based upon the possession and administration by the whole community of the means necessary to produce and apportion wealth to the full needs of all.

  

Free the People

 It is impossible for either the Conservative or the Labour Party, Republican or the Democratic Party, to offer any practicable solution for our social ills because those maladies are the inevitable and natural outgrowth of the wage system which system these parties are alike pledged to support and defend the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class is a continuous and irrepressible conflict, a conflict that tends every day rather be intensified than to be softened.

 Socialism means co-operative economics, based on common ownership of land and the means of production. Poverty is due to capitalism, i.e., to the monopoly by a diminishing class of the fruits of social effort. It can be abolished so soon as the class which suffers from it realises the cause of it and removes that cause. When the workers organise as a class, seize political power, and convert the means of living into the common property of all, then and then only will class distinctions and their social and economic accompaniments disappear.

The struggle between the capitalists over the surplus wealth wrung from their slaves on the one hand and the struggle between the slaves for jobs on the other are the fruits of immature development. They will vanish when in the struggle between these two classes as a whole, the workers, are victorious. Production will then be carried on in conscious co-operation in order to secure the fullest possible development for every individual. 

Our work is not to pander to the prejudices of the ignorant but to win the workers’ minds for socialism. Not by agreeing with their unsound ideas but by replacing these wrong notions with sound knowledge. Nothing can help you but the conscious organisation of your class for the conquest of political power and the introduction of a social order in which “private” or “public” property based on profit-making shall find no place, but in which the means of life shall be the common heritage of all.

 We do not say that “everything in the garden will be lovely” when a class-conscious working class controls Parliament. The capture of the political machinery is, as Marx says in the Communist Manifesto, the first step which must be taken to obtain emancipation. The succeeding conditions may be quite unlovely, depending upon the circumstances of the time and the degree of counter-revolution attempted. Parliament is a machine that arose and evolved long before capitalism. The tremendous outlay of finance and effort on the part of capitalists to assure that the workers vote for capitalist candidates and their lackeys show how important control of Parliament is. Then we are told that socialist control of Parliament will allow capitalists to have the money to pay for the upkeep of the armed forces for their own use. The actual fact is that the armed forces are maintained out of funds voted by Parliament. These huge sums are obtained from taxation paid by the employers out of the surplus extracted from the result of the workers’ labour. This exploitation will stop when the workers control political power and hence the funds out of which capitalists can pay armies will cease.

The capitalist system could not be run by bodies of employers hiring some armed bands to attack the whole working class. Capitalism depends, upon the regular and smooth conduct of affairs under which the wheels of industry can turn, commerce be carried on and profits are obtained. Therefore a constitution with delegated functions and a Parliament controlling nationally the forces of repression is an essential thing to the life of capitalism in all “advanced” countries.

The vote does not itself abolish capitalism but the vote in the hands of an organised socialist working class in advanced “democratic” capitalist countries, gives control of the machinery of coercion, the army, etc. Whether and how that force will need to be used depends on the capitalist minority, who will then, if they resist the majority, be rebels. Therefore, the resolute efforts of all those aiming at the conquest of the social powers are to control the political machine.

Mussolini or Lenin or Hitler, or the worldwide struggles of rising capitalists—each had to, first of all, conquer political power as represented in the political machinery of each country. The capitalists being few, are compelled to hire the workers to run the system, and also the civil and military forces to control it. Further, officers are helpless without an army and the army acts not according to its officers but according to instructions that are given by those in charge of political power.

Our policy is framed for the country in which we live, and according to existing conditions. Parliament being the central machine of the present constitution, we are compelled to control it in our own interests as a working class.

Should the capitalists destroy the constitution, the situation would be changed and the detailed policy of the workers would be different. But this assumption of the destruction of Parliamentary institutions reckons without the facts of economic life. In destroying the constitution the capitalists would cripple their system. Capitalism in advanced countries depends upon government by elected authority, local and national and the disruption of these bodies would result in chaos, not in a system. The incitement to open warfare resulting from the abolition of Parliament would prevent that ordered working of affairs upon which capitalism depends.

A socialist working-class intent upon abolishing capitalism would have a policy directly in conflict with the interests of capitalists—financial or industrial, and the day of Parliament carrying out the wishes of the capitalists would be over. Socialist knowledge, socialist organisation and socialist political action by the mass of the working class. The class war is the only sound basis for the socialist theory.

It cannot be too often repeated that socialism is not inevitable in the sense that the return of the seasons, the alternation of day and night, the ebb and flow of the tides are inevitable. Socialism is the first conscious putting forth of human genius in a concrete endeavour to make the earth a common human possession. Humanly speaking, it appears to us to be humanity’s next step. We recognise that the process can be helped or retarded. We can form but the merest estimate of the extent to which selfishness and stupidity may retard the change, but we are certain that each and every new member of the Socialist Party hastens its coming and the speedy realisation of our hopes - SOCIALISM.