Mrs Barbour's Army (music video)

 

The only solution - socialist revolution

 

Democratic control over the means of production and the establishment of socialism is the only solution to austerity, unending war and the destruction of our environment. And it is the only road to the reversal of the current descent into barbarism and the only thing that will save the world. Reformism is not the same as socialism. The job of socialists to clarify what socialism means and how it will be achieved. We can’t make that distinction clear if we lend our support to capitalist politicians no matter what they call themselves. This is our most fundamental task. We can’t substitute fake socialism for the real thing. It will only cause defeat and demoralisation. . It brings workers  to think, “what the hell’s the use of fighting when it will only lead to defeat?”

 

The only solution to the plight of the working people and the planet is socialist revolution—the complete overthrow of the capitalist mode of production for profit and replacing it with a system of production for want and need, democratically controlled by the working class—to end hunger, homelessness, oppression and inequality. This can’t be achieved if we support the candidates of the parties of capital—the parties of war, racism, sexism and oppression of the masses of humanity on the planet. It is an oxymoron to support capitalist politicians while fighting capitalism. There can be no clearer example today of the wrong-thinking of giving support—critical or otherwise—to any candidate representing the parties of the capitalist class no matter what they call themselves or how radical they sound. They represent the class enemy of the working class. You have no country. Every national flag in the world today means protection for the employing class, who appropriate the things produced by the workers. It has no message for those who toil. As long as there is a class that preys, the class exploited and preyed upon will continue to struggle for emancipation. People prefer to work for better living conditions for themselves and their families today rather than wait for a paradise on earth for future generations. And this is as it should be.  The days when a worker shall rest content in promises for the future, be it an economic, industrial or heavenly future, are dead and gone. If it be in the realms of human possibility to attain, we want higher wages, shorter hours and better living conditions right now. Mankind seeks happiness and avoids discomfort and largely in this fact lies the hope of the humanity. When an economic need of anything arises, that need has to be satisfied. Sometimes we grow impatient and say that events move slowly, but when economic pressure becomes strong enough all things yield. Old ideas are  displaced by new ones.

We build the mansions and palaces and we live in hovels. We sweat in the factories  – for somebody else to enjoy. We feed the world; we clothe the world; we house the world – and if we are out of a job for one week – we are broke, we are hunting for another master – another boss again.

The reformists and philanthropists promise us many things. Oh yes, they promise many things. There is only one thing that you and I receive. That thing is wage-slavery.  Sometimes you may see politicians who are trying to lighten the burdens of the workers by legislation, such as shortening the hours of the working day. When we protest they will give us a few sops to keep us compliant. The real business of socialism is to abolish a society that is based on the wages system. It proposes that the working class shall take over all the great industries; it means that these industries shall be owned and managed by the workers without handing over any profits to any boss. It is ownership of the factory that makes oneperson wealthy  and and another, who has no property, a wage slave. 

Socialism means the overthrow of the wage system. This is the real essence of socialism.

There is only one flag worth fighting for and that is the red flag, which means universal solidarity of the workers of the world in their fight to abolish the profit system. Join the Socialist Party – the international organization of the working class for the abolition of capitalism. 

Why is the Socialist Party different?  Why should working men and women join the Socialist Party and support its candidates?  The answer is that the aims of socialism are always in the interest of the working class. Workers share nothing in common with their employers. 

Dump The Bosses Off Your Back (music video)

 

This is Socialism. Are You a Socialist?

 If men and women understood what socialism really is and means they would flock to the socialist movement. They would strive just as hard for the advancement of the socialist idea as any capitalist ever schemed for profits because socialism is the only hope in the world for working people.

It is necessary to repeat a truism that few people can deny, but many forget. There are two classes in society.

The capitalist class owns the factories, farms, transport, communications and all the machinery for producing wealth

The working class who are forced to sell their energies to the private property owners, because they, the workers, do not own the means and instruments of wealth production, and are propertyless.

There is a clash of interests within capitalism. On the one hand, workers organise in the industrial field in trade unions to struggle for better working conditions, and higher wages while capitalists strive to force wages down. Conditions are favourable for workers in their struggle if there is little unemployment and unfavourable when there is widespread high unemployment.

Under capitalism and against capitalism you can demand nothing more essential, more definite, and more encompassing than the abolition of classes, i.e., the abolition of all exploitation. What to some appears as the antagonism between rich and poor, is in reality the class antagonism between the exploiting owners of the production apparatus and the non-possessing exploited workers. We, the workers, are the exploited class. And we demand and fight for, mastery over the production apparatus, where under common ownership in a class-free society true equality will be established. Socialism is the international movement of the working class to abolish the wage system. It is a revolutionary movement OF THE WORKERS, BY the workers and FOR the workers. 

A person who works for wages is a slave, worse than a slave, for a slave can always look to a master to be fed, clothed and housed. The wage-worker is forced to get a job – to sell one’s working strength to a boss or beg, starve or steal.

Men and women can never be free or independent as long as they have to beg the idlers for a chance to work. The man who owns your job owns you. Generally, he will pay you barely enough to live on, while he keeps for himself all the things you make.

And we workers make everything in the world. There is nothing fine, valuable, beautiful, or useful that is used by men and women, no matter who they are, that is not made by the hands and the brains of workingmen or women.

But we are not permitted to enjoy these things. The bosses claim them all. They only give us (in wages) enough to eke out a poor existence.

The whole secret of our slavery lies in the fact that a few people OWN THE FACTORIES, the MINES, the MILLS, the LAND the TRANSPORTATION and the COMMUNICATIONS.

Socialism proposes that the workers who operate the industries shall OWN them in common – that men and women shall work for themselves and shall own the things they make without DIVIDING UP with any property owners. This is socialism in a nutshell. If you are an unhappy miserable worker living from hand to mouth and in constant fear of losing your job, it ought to sound good to you.

 

There is no way out for workers within the framework of capitalism. Struggle as they may improve their lot, and they do sometimes get a few crumbs.  Here lies the root of the trouble. When the majority of workers become class-conscious nothing will prevent them from overthrowing and replacing capitalism by the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of wealth production, which presupposes a money-free, class-free society, in which people will have access to all the good things that society can produce.

Is this too much to ask of those who produce but do not possess? Only you can judge. Would that we could circulate our literature wide and far. Would that our words carry to each one of you weary wage-slaves the message of socialism. Socialism is the movement of your class, the WORKING CLASS. Join it and help yourself and every other workingman and woman to free themselves from wage-slavery.

WORKERS AWAKE FROM YOUR SLUMBERS—YOU HAVE A WORLD TO GAIN.

Alistair Hulett -Which side are you on? (music video)

 

We Are Marxists

 

Over the last few decades have witnessed an increasing number of anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movements seeking a voice through protest and opposition to the damaging practices of transnational corporations and the institutions of the World Bank, IMF and WTO.

The probability is that the vast majority of these individuals have never studied economics or politics and don’t understand much of the workings of current economic policies, but they certainly do see and feel the results and negative effects of these policies and they have a feel for what is unjust. They share a common desire for a better world, a fairer world. They may not have identified clearly or explicitly what it is they want in this other, better world, but they have undoubtedly recognised much of what they don’t want. Their protests and their slogans are demands to be heard; these are ways of expressing anger, frustration and disagreement with the status quo.

Around the world such groups are voicing many different grievances from many different angles, protesting against the methods and results of worldwide capitalist Big Business. So many different reasons from so many different perspectives; different levels of anger, deprivation, and disenfranchisement.

It would be unrealistic to make broad generalisations about the myriad of individual goals but it’s certainly possible to bring the separate bits and pieces together and view them as perspectives with converging aims. All these fingers may not be poised over exactly the right button but at least they are pointing in the right direction.

It’s about choices. People’s first choice should be socialism. It seems such a small step but a huge paradigm shift. For people focused on life’s necessities – enough food for the family every day, somewhere secure to sleep, healthcare for those who are sick and childcare for increasing numbers of mothers obliged to take a job to pay the bills. It’s hard to focus on the light at the end when the tunnel is long and dark.

So, as socialists, how do we address this last little push, this yawning gap? Let’s not criticise those who haven’t figured it out yet. Let’s harness their strengths and energies. We need first to get people to see the light at the end of the tunnel, recognize it for what it is and then keep focused on heading for it through the darkness of capitalism, in growing numbers, with growing strength in the knowledge that there is a better world, a socialist world.

To those of us interested in social progress, the greatest of evils that have confronted and still confront humanity, is poverty, a cancerous growth that has shattered the lives of workers. Housed in soulless council estates, an exhibition of ugliness, who can but wonder that workers have their senses dulled, and their creative aspirations crushed out of them. Debased through overwork and periodic unemployment, living in conditions of squalor-breeding disease, and having little time to review the world around them, it is understandable why the working class have not yet found a solution to their poverty.

And what of the respectable poverty of those workers who dwell in sweet suburbia? Those workers who surreptitiously scrimp and save in order to keep up appearances. A demoralising existence, but one of respectability which must be maintained at all costs, even if it means apeing in manners, speech and dress the parasitic ruling class. Behind this facade of false jovialness is the growing fear of insecurity. Capitalism is casting a dark shadow of doubt in the minds of workers wherever they live.

 The workers receive only sufficient on average to maintain them in efficient working condition. In contrast to this, the capitalists have, in abundance, those things that are denied to the workers. Yet the working class produce everything that is placed on the world market. Workers, it is no use relying on the capitalist class to solve your problems. If they could abolish poverty, they would lose their privileged position, power and prestige. 

Our fellow workers do not delve into the roots. It is the socialist who has the solution, and it is the working class who has the power to build a world in which life can be a beautiful adventure. A world where slums and starvation no longer exist.

The Socialist Party since its establishment in 1904 has become the repository of genuine Marxist thought in this country and bases its political practice on the basic tenets of Marxism. We affirm that Marx’s vision of socialism – or communism, for he used the terms interchangeably – was a wage-free, class-free, money-free and state-free, a world wherein the machinery of production and the resources of nature would be owned in common by humanity and wherein the state as an apparatus of government over people would give way to a simple administration of things.

As Marx made clear, the very nature of his conception of socialism precluded any form of minority violence; socialism would necessarily have to be established by the conscious, democratic action of the working class – the producers of all real wealth – and be maintained by the most wide-ranging forms of participative democracy. Marx devoted much time and energy to repudiating the views of those who urged terrorism on the working class as a means of resolving any facet of its exploitation.