What is crime? What is law?

 Crime is an inevitable outgrowth of capitalism. The ideology of the cash nexus between man and man are the prime social incentives to crime.

A criminal is literally a person accused and convicted of being harmful to society. But is he really harmful to society than the old gent in the wig who pronounces sentence upon him? A crime is an act forbidden by the law of the land all laws devised by the strongest force in a community, and in the last analysis, made for the protection of the dominant class. This means that law has not been evolved to protect society but rather a tool developed through the class struggle used to protect that class which dominates the State. Within propertied society the law’s most important task is to protect the right of possession; that is why by far the largest class of crimes may be called crimes against property. One of the first rules of capitalist society is that where people offend against the laws of property the solution is to punish them into submission.

 Criminality continues to grow, and the punishments inflicted, though they can neither protect nor indemnify the honest, only succeed in corrupting and degrading. Crime is mounting, bred by the miseries of  capitalism and the great majority of crimes are motivated by inferior economic position, by elementary need. Crime policy has little to do with reducing crime or protecting the public, and much more to do with controlling economically deprived sections of the population, providing an ideological diversion from more serious problems.

There are criminals and there are criminals. Society rests on private property. Go to the county estate owner and listen and you will soon think the poacher is the embodiment of all diabolical vices while the poacher invariably and rightly regards the land-owner as the emissary of the evil one!  In the  past the land was held in common and there is abundant evidence that all early human communities were communistic in character. The man who attempted to retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced off a portion of the common ground was a criminal of the deepest dye.  Nevertheless these criminals have clawed their way to the top and have become the respectable members of modern society. The poacher asserting a right  belonging to a past time is condemned as anti-social! A poacher may be an outside the law but he preserves the mentality of honest people.

The gangsters of the Al Capone type merely expresses the dominant  power, afflicted with the drives of the capitalist but without the sanction of social superiority and acceptance. Anti-social behavior remains anti-social, whether it be called the individual initiative of the millionaire or the racketeering of a mobster. “This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it”  Al Capone has been quoted as saying and elsewhere he said “Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class” Al Capone

It cannot be denied, of course, that the causes of crime are many and varied. But to lump all possible factors together indiscriminately is to obscure an elementary truth. Broken homes, family tensions, slum areas, gang activities, unemployment and insufficient income, lack of recreational facilities, poor educational methods and opportunities – all these things are indubitably involved in the creation of the criminal.  This is just another way of saying: Capitalism causes crime. For what are all these “complex” factors but aspects of our bourgeois culture? What are they but  illustrations of an outmoded system of private property?

The materialist viewpoint is invaluable because it shows us the interrelation of causes; it makes clear which factors are primary, which derivative; it explains how various elements are intertwined in a dynamic cultural pattern. The Marxist does not insist that all crimes are economic in character (although the evidence indicates that the great majority of crimes are such) ; we do, however, make it plain that the economic structure of society determines the cultural facts which orthodox theorists hold are non-economic in essence. Is the broken home a contributing factor in the origin of crime? Very well, but is not the broken home a manifestation of the conflict of capitalist culture, particularly prevalent in those unprivileged areas where unemployment, etc., inevitably disrupt normal family relations? Are slum clearance and housing projects important? Quite so: but the slum is an inevitable product of capitalist development, and the utopianism of hoping to achieve adequate housing under an outmoded system of private property is evident from what has come out of the none-too-laudable housing schemes. Poor educational opportunities, lack of recreational facilities – what are these but proof-by-example of class oppression? Mere enumeration of possible causes is not enough; what is necessary is a social theory which indicates which factors are basic, which of a reflex or secondary nature. The Marxian analysis, which relates cultural factors to the economic bedrock of society, makes it clear that the social scientists who enumerate multitudinous factors as isolated causes are guilty of the therapeutic error of symptom treatment: they are attempting to cope with factors (education, housing, unemployment, etc.) which are on the periphery of social reality. The primary fact is capitalist class society, organised on the basis of private property and private profit; from this basic economic fact flow the surface evils with which muddled sociologists are preoccupied.

The socialist recognises that in our class society, with the controlling social stratum enabled through its monopoly of the means of production to exploit the non-owning groups in the interests of its own material profit, there exists a fundamental clash of interests, which takes overt form in such phenomena as strikes, revolutions – and criminal acts. All of these expressions of class conflict represent, more or less directly, an attack upon the right of private property by the non-owning, or working class. Individual criminal acts are products of direct economic oppression, or of attitudes and sentiments engendered by class divisions, or of both.  Crime and organised revolt, then, are but two expressions, the former primitive and futile, the latter conscious and purposeful, of the same fundamental class conflict. This conflict grows out of the the competitive principle of private property, exercised in the interests of a minority.  The development o capitalism has produced the widest extremes of wealth and poverty; created enormous slum districts and underprivileged areas; wars in every generation; and formulated a most elaborate system of checks and restraints upon individual and social conduct and all the time while lawlessness and crime have been ever increasing because the sacred interests of private profit is leaving people in a condition of insecurity which sooner or later resolve themselves in revolt, or assert themselves in criminal behavior. More and more repressive laws have been created, more and more agencies of enforcement established. Criminal threats upon property rights must be prevented by the principle of deterrence through fear. Capitalist society  necessitates an ever-increasing degree the policing of the lower class by the agents of the ruling class.

 The socialist movement has the  power to put an end to the system responsible for the deprivation and poverty which give rise to crime in the first place. Socialists seek to abolish the present machinery of so-called justice, with all its painful and inhuman aspects, but we do not want to replace it with either total individual liberty to do as one wishes or the crowd’s summary justice of the lynch-mob. Socialists  are usually blamed for the vagueness  of our proposals to solve the most painful social problem as soon as it comes to dealing with the problem of reconstruction and practical life in the future society. However, it is not up to the Socialist Party to fix the future beforehand, but rather to simply guarantee the conditions of freedom necessary for the social evolution to eventually secure the greatest well-being and the greatest material, spiritual and intellectual development for all. We do not boast that we possess absolute truth, good for all times, universally applicable, or determinable in advance, but that instead, once freedom has been secured, mankind will go forward discovering and acting gradually with the least number of upheavals and with a minimum of friction. Thus our solutions always leave the door open to different and, one hopes, better solutions. In the interest of public safety it is useful that railwaymen, for instance, specialise in their job and doctors for example  entirely devote themselves to their skills. But we need not permit  someone to be a  judge by profession. Everybody should take care of social defence, in the same way in which everybody promptly helps when disaster strikes. If people do not feel sufficiently protected by the public, no doubt they immediately call for the policeman. Therefore, the only way of preventing the policeman from existing is to make him useless by replacing him in those functions that constitute a real protection for the public.

Let people remember that among the most hideous crimes are the millions of deaths by slow starvation during the first years of a child life.

Working Class Holidays

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The travel agencies produce glamorous brochures of wonderful holiday idylls being enjoyed by fortunate workers but Adecco the employment agency have come up with some interesting statistics on the subject. 'A third of office workers do not take all their annual leave, with some feeling guilty about asking for time off, research suggests. Almost one in seven take their full entitlement only because they are required to, according to a a survey of 1,000 workers.' (Times, 19 August) Again this hardly suggests the press notion of work-shy workers. RD

Alienated Lives

Why are Scots sicker than the rest of the UK?

Dr Phil Hanlon and researchers at the Centre for Population Health have compared life, incomes and health outcomes in Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. They found “deprivation profiles” were almost identical, but premature deaths in Glasgow were 30 per cent higher.

This excess mortality ran across almost all ages, males and females and deprived and non-deprived neighbourhoods. It was not, surprisingly, lung cancer, heart and liver disease were not the factors tipping Glaswegians over the UK average.  It was higher levels of drug and alcohol misuse, suicide and death through violence.

Why are some Glaswegians so prone to self-harming and life-shortening behaviours?

Chief Medical Officer Harry Burns cites the work of Aaron Antonovsky, who maintained that a sense of coherence (SOC) is necessary for adult health. The  medical sociologist defined the SOC as “the extent to which one has a feeling of confidence that the stimuli deriving from one’s internal and external environments are structured, predictable and explicable, that one has the internal resources to meet the demands posed by these stimuli and, finally, that these demands are seen as challenges, worthy of investment and engagement”.

In other words, good health is a mixture of optimism and control that relies on life being comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. Comprehensibility allows people to perceive events as ordered, consistent, and structured. Manageability allows people to feel they can cope. Meaning allows life to make sense, and challenges to seem worthy of commitment.

Socialist Courier would rather phrase it in Marxist terms - Scots are more alienated. So many people are stuck in meaningless lives they can only self-medicate using drugs, booze or food.

Or perhaps as John Lennon puts it  “you can't really function you're so full of fear” and  they “keep you doped with religion sex and tv”

Desperate Workers

 

The biggest accountancy firms have received record numbers of applications for entry-level positions, as university leavers flock to them for work. 'PwC, the largest of the Big Four, said that it had received 22,123 applications this year for about 1,100 positions in its latest annual graduate intake. .... KPMG had nearly 21,000 applications for about 650 graduate jobs ...... EY received 11,600 applications for 700 jobs.' (Times, 15 August) These figures give the lie to the usual glib press jibe about lazy workers. RD

Why Are Called Care Homes?

The National Press have some strange priorities. Headlines and special supplements were devoted to a royal birth whilst the following  event got very little coverage. 'A grandmother died of malnutrition a day after being admitted to hospital from a care home where she had become so emaciated that she was described at an inquest as looking like a skeleton.' (Times, 16 August) The 88 year old weighed just 4st 12 lbs and was dehydrated after her treatment at a care home. After a life time of work this is the fate of many workers, but it will get little attention in the royalty-obsessed newspapers. RD

Martin Irons - Not Forgotten

Socialist Courier continues its occasional series of drawing attention to the forgotten figures of the Scottish labour movement.

Few have heard of the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, the largest and most important clash between management and organized labor in 19th-century Texas history. In Bruceville, 16 miles south of Waco, is a monument to Martin Irons, who was the strike leader. Some historians and contemporaries cast Irons as the epitome of impatient, romantic, and even deluded labor activist.  Irons became a special target of the railroad bosses, the newspapers , particularly the New York Times,  and he also angered Powderly, the head of the union because of his militant and unwavering leadership in the strike.

He was born in Dundee in 1827 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14.  He was friendless, penniless, alone and  had a clear head and a warm heart. He saw and felt the injustice suffered by his class.

He worked as a machinist for the railroads all over the Southwest. According to Ruth Allen's "The Great Southwest Strike" ( University of Texas, 1942), his politics consisted of anger "at the encroaching domination of corporate business as monopolist and employer, with agrarian insistence upon ownership of the land as the basis of liberty."

Irons, a master workman, joined the Knights of Labor in 1884 and helped form District Assembly 101, composed of workers for Jay Gould's Southwestern railroads. He was later elected chairman of the executive committee of the union assembly. Jay Gould was, to put it gently, a Robber Baron who controlled all the Southwestern railroads through interlocking companies. Jay Gould made himself famous by saying, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”

In 1885, the year before the Great Strike, Gould fired the Knights of Labor shop men of the Wabash line, causing a walkout. The Knights working for other railroads refused to operate any train with Wabash cars and so brought Gould to the bargaining table. It was a great victory for the workers, and the Knights gained members increasing from about 100,000 to over 700,000,  more than 30,000 members in Texas in 1885.


 But Gould was determined to destroy the union.  As Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party of America writes:
 “as chairman of the executive board of the Knights of Labor of the Gould southwest railway system, defied capitalist tyranny, and from that hour he was doomed. All the powers of capitalism combined to crush him, and when at last he succumbed to overwhelming odds, he was hounded from place to place until he was ragged and foot-sore and the pangs of hunger gnawed at his vitals.”

In March 1886, Irons called a strike against Gould's Texas & Pacific Railway over the firing of a foreman in Marshall. The T&P strike soon spread to other railroad lines, as in the '85 strike. The workers uncoupled cars and seized switch junctures. Gould hired scabs and the Pinkertons (another Scot’s connection). The Pinkerton "detective agency" was union-busting force in those days, and also specialized in busting heads.

According to Debs “ Gould did not have gold enough to buy Irons. This was the greatest crime of labor's honest leader. The press united in fiercest denunciation. Every lie that malignity could conceive was circulated. In the popular mind Martin Irons was the blackest-hearted villain that ever went unhung. Pinkerton blood-hounds tracked him night and day.”

Gould also asked for military assistance from the governors of states affected by the strike. Texas Gov. John Ireland sent the state militia and the Texas Rangers to Buttermilk Switch in Fort Worth. This early example of using the Rangers for union-busting is of particular interest to those who remember the Rangers' strike-breaking activities in the Valley during efforts to organize the farmworkers in the 1960s. The ensuing violence turned public opinion against the strikers. Gould refused to negotiate, and the strike failed.

“Failure of the Great Southwest Strike represented the first major defeat sustained by the Knights of Labor and proved to be a fatal blow to their vision of an industrial union that would unite all railroad workers in the Southwest into 'one big union.' Once again, an emerging labor organization was crushed when competing with powerful, determined and well-organized industrialists in command of nationally based corporations," Ruth Allen concludes.

 Irons had served, suffered for and honored his class. But he had lost. His class now turned against him and joined in the execration of the enemy. This pained him more than all else. But he bore even this without a murmur. “He was a despised agitator and shunned of men too mean and sordid to comprehend the lofty motive that inspired him....He endured the taunts and jeers and all the bitter mockery of fate with patient heroism."
Martin Irons was blacklisted and could not hold a regular job. He moved to St. Louis, Little Rock, Ark., and Fort Worth for brief periods, sometimes using an assumed name. Debs describes the life:
“For fourteen long years he fought single-handed the battle against persecution. He tramped far, and among strangers, under an assumed name, sought to earn enough to get bread. But he was tracked like a beast and driven from shelter. For this “poor wanderer of a stormy day” there was no pity. He had stood between his class and their oppressors-he was brave, and would not flinch; he was honest, and he would not sell; this was his crime, and he must die.’

 In 1894, his health was failing; G.B. Harris of Bruceville, a socialist, offered him a home. Allen reports that Irons continued to work for social reform until his death in 1900. Debs says when Irons “spoke of Socialism he seemed transfigured, and all the smouldering fires within his soul blazed from his sunken eyes once more.”

A lot of busted heads and broken lives went into making the eight-hour workday a reality. Think how mad Martin Irons and all those other fighters would be at ho  the corporations are getting away with mandatory overtime and 60-hour work-weeks. The thing about corporations is that they never give anything away out of the goodness of their non-existent hearts. The only social obligation of a corporation is to make money. Workers still have to fight for a decent life.

From here and here 

Food for thought

Staying with the environment, and contradicting all the clean, green Tar Sands adverts we are getting on TV, The Toronto Star (July 20) reported that Canadian Natural Resources has been unable to stop an underground oil blowout that has gone on for six weeks at Cold Lake, Alberta. So far, some 26,000 and counting barrels of bitumen and 30,600 kilograms of oily vegetation have been removed. To say nothing of the 'in situ' or underground extraction technology called cyclic steam stimulation that involves injecting thousands of gallons of super hot, high pressure steam into deep underground reservoirs. Obviously, it's a crazy thing to do and is an accident waiting to happen, but it makes money, for some. John Ayers.

Time to liberate humanity

We live in a world rife with misery and oppression. Hunger, poverty, unemployment, racial and sexual discrimination, and many forms of repression, from the restriction of the most basic democratic rights like freedom of speech to hideous barbarism like torture and genocide, are still the lot of the majority of the people of the world. Today the whole world is in the grip of a deep economic crisis of capitalism. The gulf between the rich and the poor, between the powerful and the dispossessed, is widening. Capitalists have only one reason for being – to accumulate more and more capital. We live in a world dominated by capitalism, a system which allows a small minority of capitalists to oppress and exploit the great majority of humankind. It is capitalism that brings about great inequalities in living standards with more poor people now in the world than ever before.

Far from diminishing with the advances in science and technology, the various forms of misery is growing.  It is an astonishing paradox that, in a world where there could be plenty for all, there is increasing  want and hunger.The anarchy of production and the crises under capitalism explains the enormous waste of productive forces and also explains why, alongside this waste, millions of people lack the basic necessities and why even famine strikes in various parts of the world. At the root of all these problems is the exploitation of some people by other people. All of the deprivations and conflicts are brought about by a society divided into oppressors and oppressed, the capitalist class exploiting the working class.

Only a socialist revolution can put an end to the capitalist relations of exploitation and establish a society of abundance. Socialist society is based on the free association of all individuals who work together to produce the goods necessary for their collective well-being. All will work according to their capacities and their needs will be fully satisfied. Individuals will no longer be governed by the division of labour and all conflict between city and countryside and between manual and intellectual work will be eliminated. The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves. They will achieve it through socialist revolution, which will suppress the private ownership of the means of production in order to establish socialist and collective property and replace capitalist commodity production by the socialist organisation of production

The expropriation of the capitalists and the socialisation of the means of production and distribution will lead directly to the abolition of society divided into classes with opposing interests. The abolition of classes will in turn lead to the withering away of the State, and ultimately to its extinction, for the State is not, and can never be, anything other than the instrument of dictatorship of one class over others. The fundamental interests of workers are the same throughout the world.

Capitalism is poisoning the air we breathe, poisoning the water we drink, and polluting both land and sea. No lasting solution to any of these problems will be found while capitalism is allowed to survive in the world. Today the human species stands at a turning point: either we have the socialist transformation of society or we are eventually destroyed by environmental disaster. The only viable way forward is to achieve socialism, a classless and stateless society on a world scale where people do not oppress and exploit each other and where we live in harmony with our natural environment.

The only way forward is to struggle to bring about this social revolution and begin the struggle to build a socialist society where oppressive and exploitative class divisions and all the evils that go with them are abolished. The working class has it within its power to overthrow capitalist society and pave the way for the liberation of the whole of humankind.

“By peaceful means if possible, by forcible if necessary” is the reply of the Socialist Party of Great Britain to the question “How do we propose attaining our object?” The Socialist Party is the bearer of historic memory. The working class character and the integrity of the Socialist Party are of vital importance. All the votes of the people would do us no good if our party ceased to be a revolutionary socialist  party yielding to the temptation to modify our principles for the sake of swelling our vote. Nor can there be any  possible good from any kind of a political alliance with non-socialist parties. The Socialist Party wants the votes only of those who want socialism.  Join with us in the struggle against capitalism and for revolution. The hour is late. Join us now before it is too late!

Reading Notes

We are all familiar today with the tax evasion antics of the rich, but it is nothing new. In "A brief History of Life in the Middle Ages", Martyn Whittock writes, "Local landowners could remove their lands from royal taxation by setting up a monastic church, administered by a family member. This was clearly not in the spirit of how monasteries should be established and such monasteries were more of a tax loophole than a statement of individual piety." (to put it mildly!)

How far has humanity come in its still primitive stage? The same book states, " In terms of life expectancy, life in early medieval England was comparable with the poorest less economically developed countries (LECDs) of the twenty-first century. In fact, when life expectancy for women dropped to 26 years in Sierra Leone in 2002, following a catastrophic civil war which had brought the country to the lowest point on the world rating of LECDs, it was one year longer than the estimate for women in the early Middle Ages. That same year, the male life expectancy in Burkina Faso was 35.3 years -- about the medieval male average." Obviously, we have a long way to go until we can call ourselves civilized. John Ayers.

Food for thought

Garment factories in Bangladesh are not just killing people by collapsing and bursting into flames. They also dump their toxic wastes into rivers and canals that, naturally, drift downstream and contaminate drinking water for people there. So companies like Walmart, J.C. Penney, and H & M not only benefit from low wages and appalling working conditions, but also by having no cost or responsibility to keep the environment clean by properly disposing of their waste. It must be heaven for the profit takers, just what capitalism ordered! John Ayers.

The Trade Union Question

The workers, who have suffered their disappointments from the traditional parties begin themselves quite naturally to press for other means of political expression: means which they believe to be their own. The trade unions are the simplest and most elementary form of workers’ organisations. From the moment trade unions came into existence the strike has always been their principal weapon. The “right to strike” has always stood in the forefront of trade union experience and behind all negotiations, bargains, and settlements. Indeed, all trade union power rests trade unionists willingness to “withdraw their labour”. It is a “right” which cannot be taken away. It can be legally fettered and intimidation may make it difficult to exercise  but to cease work is the essence of working class combination.

Despite the fall in membership workers have demonstrated a remarkable tenacity in clinging to their trade unions. Whatever may happen to this or that union or any number of unions, the workers do not wish to abandon the union movement but to broaden it, increase its militancy, etc. So long as capitalism endures, organisation of some kind on the job to deal with the boss is indispensable. The reason for this is has to do with the system of capitalist exploitation, workers are compelled, in the process of self-defence to struggle not only against separate capitalists, but against the entire capitalist system as well. During the course of their struggle with capitalism, the unions came into collision with the whole capitalist system and with the capitalist State itself. It is a movement of wage-workers and all its problems are based upon the fact that the members of the unions are wage-workers who, to live, must sell their labour power to the private owners of the means of production. The fundamental purpose of the trade unions is the pursuit of the interests of the wage-workers.

It should be remembered that the trade unions are organisations of workers at work, bound up with the question of the terms of labour, such as wages, hours of labour, conditions of work, terms upon which the work has to be done in thousands of different occupations. These are essentially property questions, expressing themselves in struggles between opposing classes for the products of industry. The more they multiply and become general, the more it gives rise to the demand for the control and ownership of industry by the workers themselves. Ownership and control cannot be separated from each other. They who own industry control it.“He who owns the means whereby I live, owns me” Shakespeare wrote.  Hence the question of the workers’ control of industry and the coming of the classless society based upon community ownership are inseparable questions also.

 The issue of the role of the trade unions in the control of industry, what it should be now and in the future, has been a burning question for many trades unionists. The ideas, demands and movements of workers’ participation, workers’ control, self-management, direct workers’ rule, workers’ democracy have a long-standing tradition and are deeply rooted. The pioneers of  the unions recognised the slave condition of the workers in capitalism and had faith in the worker’s power and capacity to abolish the slavery and build a new society of free men-controlling industry in a classless society.  Industrial unionists and syndicalists gave very definite answers to the question. The syndicalists and industrialists advanced the idea of the workers in a particular industry owning and controlling it from top to bottom. This conception of the future of the unions was the modern counterpart to the “House of Trades” of the Chartist pioneers. An adaptation of the industrial unionist proposals was made by the guild socialists who advocated the social ownership of the means of production, the administration of certain political affairs by a citizens’ parliament and the administration of industry by industrial unions or guilds, organized in an industrial assembly, subordinate to Parliament in regard to general policy. GDH Cole argued for the democratisation of the capitalist state with the unions taking a greater share of responsibility for the running of industry by means of representation on its governing bodies, protecting  wage rates, hours of labour, factory conditions, etc., acting as a brake on the rate of exploitation of the workers. They would be  the custodians of certain forms of social insurance, such as unemployment pay, sick pay, old age pensions. They would have the function of “consultants” with regard to the general development and organisation of the economic life of the country.  Syndicalists and industrial unionists assumed that the unions would not only control industry but also serve as the basis of the whole social administration. Guild socialists realised the weakness of this theory and maintained that the State should continue to represent the people as citizens or consumers.

Whatever of value there is in the vision of an industrial democracy, there is no evidence of the possibility of the working class achieving power in that way.  Industry may be “socialized” by trade union control but production will remain on a capitalist basis. At first sight, it is appears an  attractive idea: Get rid of the owners, work for ourselves and enjoy the full fruits of our labour. The idea of  taking over managerial functions from the employers till the factories fully belonged to the workers seems impelling.

 But it is a trap.

A company has to buy its raw materials on the market, along with every other company. A company has to sell its finished products on the market, along with every other company.  A  company has to invest in new plant and equipment, along with every other company.  To do this, they must make enough surplus value and like any other business it is done by employing less staff or by increasing intensity of work or taking a wage cut.  It means workers attacking their own living standards. Workers control of industry is largely incompatible with a union’s character as a voluntary association of the workers formed primarily to protect and represent their interests.  It  means the participation of workers in their own exploitation. As long as the capitalism has not been abolished workers will be obliged to submit to its requirements.

Workers have to seek other methods and goals.

A Little More Food for thought

Relevant to the recent revelation that the US is spying on its own citizens and the governments of other countries, the New York Times (July 21) reported on two Italian hackers working on the Mediterranean island of Malta. They search for bugs, software flaws that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit. It allows them to break into the computer systems of their foreign adversaries. Of course, we all know that all countries are at the same game and that the US just got caught with its pants down. What a system that forces everybody to spy on everybody else just to keep up and compete. John Ayers.

Food for thought

Saudi prince, Alwaleed Bin Talal is suing Forbes magazine because in their list of the world's billionaires, his fortune of $20 billion was underestimated by $9.6 billion, according to the prince. Consequently, he should be a few rungs higher on the rich list. How arrogant can they get?
Seems Marx must have been wrong with his crisis theory. In "What' Holding Developing Economies Down" by David Olive (Toronto Star, July 6, 2013) he quotes Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and author of "Breakout Nations", as saying, " Crisis gives birth to reform, which flowers into a boom, which matures into political complacency, which ages into a new crisis". Nothing to do with the capitalist system really
then! John Ayers.

Business for Scotland

Tory supporter, Laurie Clark, the owner and managing director of Paisley-based firm Anglo-Scottish Concrete told Prime Minister David Cameron that he would be backing independence in the referendum.

“The referendum is not a choice between Scottish and British identity. Instead, for me, it is about how best we realise the potential of Scotland, create wealth and jobs, expand the private sector and reform the public sector in the interests of the nation as a whole... We could and should be attracting much more substantial business, investment and jobs with fiscal solutions and broader public policy tailored to the distinctive Scottish economic environment.”

As the Socialist Courier frequently asserts the issue of an independent Scotland is one for the capitalist class to decide upon the division of their spoils. Some will favour it and some will oppose the idea but at the root, as Clark infers - it will all be about who gets the profits - and that certainly won’t be the members of the Scottish working class.

World Revolution

“The whole world has tended to become one community similar to that which exists in a single country. A few weeks ago men were buying and selling. lending and borrowing, contracting and planning, with little attention to national boundaries, when suddenly the whole co-operative system was disrupted.” Standard Oil describing the effect of World War One

  In modern industry, raw material is taken from the Earth, pass through factories, where it is manufactured into articles of sale, and then distributed to markets by various ways of transport. The whole system of  transaction is made possible and facilitated by means of money and credit—by banks and banking. Without the constant co-operation of millions of workers employed in these various sub-divisions there can be no industry in the modern sense. The objective conditions for socialism are apparent everywhere. Cooperative mass organisation of labour within industry, collective corporate enterprise and its far-flung interests, separation of ownership and management and the collective performance of managerial functions by hired employees. We can see this exemplified  by the supermarket chain stores in distribution. An abundance exists which makes possible and necessary the collective or socialist distribution of goods, a socialisation of consumption to correspond with the socialization of production. Capitalism rejects this possibility and necessity because it means its own abolition.

Industry is integrated in socialism, managed as a whole, not as scattered parts disregarding and clashing with one another. Considerations of private interest or profit interfere neither with production nor consumption. Rational planning of industry is possible, with the exclusive aim of meeting community needs. The abundance of industry is released on an immensely enlarged scale. As this means the abolition of capitalism there is a clash of the old and the new, a struggle of classes, a struggle for power between the classes representing the old and the new.

The struggle for power aims to get control of the state or to retain control. Like all states, the capitalist state is an organ of class rule and suppression, under capitalist control, enmeshed in all the class-economic and exploiting relations of the existing order. Capitalism creates an ideology to disguise and justify its predatory character: it is a necessary device of class domination. The dominant capitalist interests use all means, of an increasingly forcible nature as the struggle sharpens, to retain control of the state for a twofold purpose: to suppress the proletariat and its allies in the struggle for power, and to augment the economic activity of the state. Although their ideal is that government is best which governs least capitalists constantly enlarges the scope and use of state power. More and more state action was required by the complex relations and problems arising out of capitalist expansion. Governments “protect” the home market and newly developing industries,  enterprises call for state intervention in the form of financial subsidies or actual government ownership for various reasons: their unprofitable character, lack of private capital, as a source of government revenue, in the interests of the economy as a whole, or simply for reasons of political expediency. The state “regulates” the relations of capitalism. State capitalism is used to  encourage and permit more rapid economic development.

The term state capitalism was originally used to designate only the government ownership of economic enterprises. But its meaning is now much wider to include all forms of government intervention in economic activity to aid capitalism to overcome the contradictions and antagonisms in industry, particularly in the United States. The intervention is always within the relations of capitalist property and exploitation, of the subjection of labour to capital. All forms of state capitalism are animated by the necessity and use of the collective action of the state to “strengthen” capitalism as much as it can and “compensate” for the effects of  the anarchy of production as much as is possible. State capitalism has been greeted by many on the Left  and the reformists as the progressive unfoldment of a new social order. In reality, the result has been the deepening entrenchment of capitalism.

Pressure from workers has forced the adoption of reforms and minor concessions of social legislation to “placate” this labour opposition. The usual justification for reform from the Left lies in the fact that they make it easier for the workers to organise themselves and enlighten themselves about the real meaning of capitalism and the part that they are forced to play under it, and shows the thinking worker how futile it is to dream of reforming capitalism. They furnish, besides that, a rallying ground for those workers who cannot see beyond their own nose, and perhaps would not understand socialism, but do feel the need for a shorter working day.

The risk, however, arises when reformists try to persuade the workers as well as themselves that socialism only means the sum of a number of such petty acts and restrictions; that in other words, welfare measures are socialism. By that approach “socialism” gets the credit for legislation which are in all but name means for defending capitalism against socialism and all the disadvantages which arise from that fact are written down to the discredit of socialism. The dominant class interests use a bastardised “socialism” to prevent the coming of socialism and to stabilise capitalism

No doubt reform changes will always produce a certain reaction such as disillusionment but that may be less if there are some real advantages than if the whole measure is an elaborate swindle. The main point, however, is whether the experience of decades of social reform activities has not been to show that it would be simpler and better to concentrate our efforts on the abolition of capitalism than on any attempts to reform it. That is not to say that we need reject capitalist reforms but we ought to regard them as what they are, as attempts to prolong capitalism. The less enthusiasm we show ourselves about them, the more keen will the capitalist may well champion them.

Our business as socialist is to show how inadequate all such reforms are as solutions to remove the evils from which the workers suffer. But above all there is a need for us to make clear that only with the abolition of production for profit, and the competition between the capitalists for sources of profitable investment which is an inevitable result of the capitalist system, can we get rid of the social problems of capitalism such as poverty, crime and war.

 Socialists may sometimes talk about the inevitability of socialism but there is for socialists a great danger to forget the requirement for enthusiasm for the great social and economic transformation of society. Many overlook the fact that it is the collective workers’ will which  forms the essential element in that development of socialism. We also assume that the workers will continue to engage in the daily class struggle . Were they to accept the coming of socialism  in a fatalist sense, and think that they could sit down tamely and wait till socialism came to them, they would soon lose all the rights that they have gained and become mere slaves.

The reformism of capitalism must fail. But that does not make socialism inevitable. Capitalism does not “grow into” socialism, it merely determines the necessary historical conditions, which provide the  working class with the opportunity for creative action. State capitalism is not the transition to socialism but a reaction against it and  becomes a type of corporate capitalism. There is no “final" crisis of capitalism , unless the workers makes it so. For capitalism can always find a “way out” from a recession, even if it is by stumbling about blindly for the exit.

When class-conscious  workers, both politically and economically, have become so well organised as to make their exploitation impossible, then capitalism will have reached the end of its life. That is what we understand by social revolution, and our ideal – that of human brother- and sisterhood – is revolutionary, because it is only to be realised by the social revolution.

Who Owns the North Pole Part 62

With help from the French energy company Total and the China National Petroleum Corporation, Russian capitalists celebrate global warming by building $20 Billion natural gas plant in  the Arctic.

Gas produced from the Yamal LNG plant would be shipped to Asia along northern sea lanes that only began opening up four years ago as warmer ocean temperatures thawed and thinned the ice sheets. Global warming may be causing worrisome environmental  damage, but for oil and gas industrialists such changes can mean new-found profits.

http://www.allgov.com/news/us-and-the-world/russians-capitalists-celebrate-global-warming-by-building-20-billion-natural-gas-plant-in-arctic-130726?news=850682

This "wonderful" world - Or a new one?

The basic problem of capitalism is the source of all its weakness is found in the fact that this system does not carry on production for the benefit of society as a whole but for the profit of a relatively small owning or controlling class. The industries by which society must live are owned by private individuals or by the government who ruthlessly exploit the masses who work in these industries. Under capitalism production is regulated not by the needs of the majority  but by whether or not the capitalist or ruling class can make a profit by such production; commodities are not produced primarily for use, but for profit. Even the limited progress that capitalism has accomplished for humanity has been achieved at the cost of incredible misery, poverty and slaughter of the working class.

 Conflict and disruptive struggles between individual capitalists and between rival capitalist States are systematic. There exists a  division of capitalist society into classes of exploiters and producers, with resultant class struggle between them.  Capitalist production is anarchic. Capitalism can live only by a rapid extension of its market. The innumerable individual capitalists and companies, compete and ruthlessly exploit the toiling working class, produce whatever they think they can sell. The development of the capitalist system has not been even and steady, but by a series of jerks. The zigzag graph made by the cyclical crises  is quite familiar. First, the upward trend, a period of industrial expansion, with rising prices and wages, an era of good employment, “prosperity” and optimism, gradually developing into a boom, with its characteristic orgies of feverish production, stock speculation, etc.; secondly, the downward trend, with the gradual surfeit of the market from excess production, slowing down of industry, wage-cuts, fall of prices, mass unemployment, financial “panics” and general economic crisis; and thirdly, the trough of the crisis, in which the productive forces are diminished and the choking surplus of commodities, in the low state of production, are consumed or wasted in various ways and the markets thus cleared for a fresh race between the swiftly expanding productive forces and the more slowly developing capitalist market. The current recession  showed how whole sections of the capitalist economy can fall into paralysis, and this paralysis spreads.

The cyclical crisis also greatly sharpens the major social contradiction of capitalism, the ever-active antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class. In economic crises the capitalists always seek to shift the economic burden onto the workers through wage-cuts, etc., and this still further stokes the class struggle. Hence, the capitalist cyclical crises have been especially periods of great strikes fiercely fought, growing class consciousness of the workers.  A basic indication to-day of the general crisis of capitalism is the increasing revolutionary upsurge throughout the world.  It varies in intensity from intensified protest movements to increased strike actions to actual struggles for power. Workers, faced by intolerable conditions, are exhibiting the characteristic signs of radicalisation. Workers everywhere are beginning  to penetrate the lies of capitalism.

Capitalism has created the objective conditions for socialism. But it can go no further.  Capitalism has provided its own executioners and grave diggers, the working class. Socialism is no longer is it simply the aspiration of an oppressed working class. Now it is a living, growing reality. Socialism abolishes the chaos and anarchy of capitalist production and social organization; it does away with the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalist industry, breeder of industrial crises and war. It sets up instead a planned system of economy in harmony with the global character of modern industry and social relationships. Instead of a hodge-podge of competing enterprises, socialism will create a great, inter-linked and co-ordinated modern industrial-agricultural machine; instead of a profit-making apparatus to fatten a few while millions starve, it socialism will building its industries for the benefit of the producers. In  socialism there is no exploitation. There will be no ruling, owning class, no class to get a rake-off from the worker’s production.The main task of all capitalist governments is the suppression and exploitation of the people.

The capitalists, as is their wont, seek to justify their destructive type of competition by asserting that it is rooted firmly in human nature. Such appeals to “human nature,” however, must be taken cautiously. By that method of reasoning it would be quite easy to conclude that the rich capitalist who heartlessly casts workers out of the factory penniless and gives no thought as to their future has quite a different “human nature” than of the Amazon hunter who, with his high sense of tribal solidarity, before eating his kill, calls loudly in the four directions in case perchance there may be another hungry hunter nearby. Changed social conditions develop different “human natures.”

 Socialism will be use machinery and technology  on the broadest scale possible to produce the necessities of life in the industries, transport systems and communication services. Socialist society will also know how to develop the creative and  artistic impulses of the people which are presently checked by poverty and slavery, hamstrung by the profit-making motive, where the masses and poisoned by anti-social codes of morals and ethics. Every free community will involve the maximum cultivation of the intellectual and artistic powers of all. The imprint of individuality and originality will be upon everything. Socialism frees humanity from the stultifying effects of the present struggle for existence and opens up before it new horizons of joys and tasks.

The socialist revolution is the most profound of all revolutions in history. It initiates changes more rapid and far-reaching than any in the whole experience of mankind. The hundreds of millions of workers, striking off their age-old chains of slavery, will construct a society of liberty and prosperity and intelligence. Socialism will inaugurate a new era for the human race, the building of a new world. The overthrow of capitalism and the development of socialism will bring about the immediate or eventual solution of many great social problems. Some of these originate in capitalism, and others have plagued humanity for scores of centuries -  war, religion, superstition, prostitution, famine, disease, crime, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, race and national chauvinism, the suppression of woman, and every form of slavery and exploitation of one class by another.  Capitalism, with its wars, wage slavery, slums, crooked doctors, etc., undermines the health of the race and destroys its physique. Socialism with its healthy dwellings and working conditions, its nutritious and plentiful food,  will offer well-being to all.

Socialists have and must always interest themselves in the nature of the capitalist state. They must fight to have it democratised even from the point of view of capitalist democracy. But in that struggle we must be constantly be teaching the workers that not capitalist democracy and not the capitalist state will bring us socialism but workers themselves.

We take it for granted that socialism cannot be introduced by a change of the constitution and the enactment of one law after another. We take it for granted that the state is an instrument to serve and protect the interests of the capitalist class. The police, the military, the courts and all the powers lodged in government departments and ministries are all freely at the service of the ruling class. Behind the Parliamentary majority there must stand the organised workers – there must be mass struggles and participation to secure the necessary transformation of the State machine. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the whole class exercising political power, realising new forms of organisation.  It is the class struggle in its most intense form that will decide what class will have power and whether a socialist world will be created.

Capitalism, based upon human exploitation, stands as the great barrier to social progress. There will come day in the not so far distant future when our children, immersed in this new life, will look back with horror upon capitalism and be aghast by just how long we tolerated it for.

The True Story of American History

This Is Progress?

Many  have the notion that we live in a society that despite its flaws is somehow or other progressing but recent developments must make them wonder. The Government have a van driving around London in areas where large numbers of ethnic minorities live which feature the message 'In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest'. We have an UKIP MEP referring to 'bongo bongo land'. What kind of progress is this? The ideas of nationalism and racism are obnoxious to socialists and hopefully to more workers RD

The Enigma

FIGHT FOR A WORLD OF ABUNDANCE

Many mistake the economic crash, the failures at the Stock Exchange, financial and banking disasters for the cause. Such like factors may lead to, but are not the causes of, business depressions and the recession. Capitalism is a s free-for-all that endures for a while. Every manufacturer and trader is the antagonist, opponent, and rival of all others; each seeks to surpass or conquer all others in the industrial battle.  Manufacturers must keep on turning out goods to keep machinery and works in action; the businessman places orders in anticipation of new orders, and in this way pays his old debts by contracting new ones. Finally all trade becomes blockaded; business stagnates; industry languishes; orders slow up, for
stocks are abnormally large. Workers are put on short-time,  temporary laid off, or made redundant and dismissed. Manufacturers are compelled to shut down their works, or cut back on production. Businesses cannot pay their old debts, for they cannot contract new ones. Banks refuse to loan money, some of them will even burst because they have loaned out too much.

There exists great riddles. Why is it millions upon millions hundreds should suffer deprivation and misery in a world that can provide abundance?  Why is there poverty amidst plenty? Why this endless repetition of suffering? Why is there no remedy? These are the questions which every thoughtful person must seriously contemplate and endeavor to solve.

Capitalism has itself constructed the basis for transcending the misery to which it condemns humanity. It long ago built up the productive forces—industry, technology and a globalised network economy—to the point where the possibility exists to produce an abundance of all the things people need. Shortages of housing, food and every other form of want can be easily overcome, but that potential remains trapped by capitalism’s pursuit of profit.  Capitalism is a free-for-all that endures for a while. Every manufacturer and trader is the antagonist, opponent, and rival of all others; each seeks to surpass or conquer all others in the industrial battle.

Reformists promise to redistribute wealth, to regulate the multinationals and the banking giants. They promise panaceas of social security that are unrealisable while the conditions of capitalism remain. Hopes arise that out of this they may restore the economy. Futile hopes, empty dreams! Raw material exists in abundance, human energy and ingenuity is in abundance, the genuine desire for useful articles of all kinds exists in every home,yet under capitalist control of industry it is impossible to bring these together. Nothing is so easily produced as wealth. The earth is one vast mass of raw materials. Hidden in every passing river, in every wave or tide, in every gust of wind and ray of sun, are the renewable forces to be transformed into energy. We can tap into Nature’s fabulous abundance to banish for all time the spectre of want, and make Earth fit for human habitation, once again. The Socialist’s  mission is to win the world back from capitalist barbarism. A socialist society would seek to produce the needs of all rather than the profit of an elite class of profiteers.

 By producing an abundance of necessary goods for all, socialism removes the very basis for the existence of classes. Necessary work would be divided equally among all. And the introduction of labor-saving technology, instead of creating unemployment as it does under capitalism, would be used to shorten the work week and free workers’ lives for greater leisure. In such ways the basis would be laid for the development of a society free of all forms of exploitation and oppression. The worst in socialism will be better than the best in capitalism

Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production  and exchange and their democratic organization and management by all the people in a society free of classes, class divisions and class  rule. Socialism is the democratic organization of production use,  of production for abundance, of plenty for all, without the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the union of the whole world into an international association of free and equal peoples, disposing in common of the natural resources and wealth of our shared planet.

Can this great ideal ever be realised?

Socialist society is not a dream or utopia. All the conditions for the formation of such a society have already created within the capitalist world itself. The scientific, technological and productive powers of humanity have already grown so enormously that founding a society committed to the well-being of all is perfectly feasible. Capitalism has created the great social force that can materialise this liberating prospect. The staggering power of capital on a global scale is a reflection of the power of a world working class. Unlike other oppressed classes in the history of human society, the working class cannot set itself free without freeing the whole of humanity. Socialist society is the product of workers' revolution to put an end to the system of wage-slavery; a social revolution which inevitably transforms the entire foundation of the production relations.A large part of these resources is now either wasted in different ways or is even deliberately used to hinder efforts to improve society and satisfy human needs. But for all the immensity of society's material resources.

The advances in computerisation and information technology means that the organisation of a world community with collective participation in the design, planning and execution of society's diverse functions is possible more than ever before.  The backbone of socialist society is the creative and living power of billions of men and women beings freed from class bondage, wage-slavery, intellectual slavery, alienation and degradation. The free human being is the guarantee for the realisation of communist society.

In socialism, production  is organised for use, not for profit. Production is carried on in a  planned,  democratically-controlled way, not on the  basis of whether or not the private capitalist can make a profit on  the market.

Where there is abundance for all, the nightmare of insecurity vanishes. There are jobs for all, and they are no longer dependent  on whether or not the employer can make a fat profit on a fat market. There is not only a high standard of living, but every industrial advance is followed by a rising standard of living and a declining  working-day. More leisure, less toil.

Where there is abundance for all, and where no one has the economic power to exploit and oppress others, the basis of classes,  class division and class conflict vanishes. The basis of a ruling state,  of a government of violence and repression, with its prisons and police and army, also disappears. Police and thieves, prisons and violence are inevitable where there is economic inequality, or abundance for the few and scarcity for the many. They disappear when  there is plenty for all, therefore economic equality, therefore social  equality.

Where there is abundance for all, and where all have equal  access to the fruits of the soil and the wealth of industry, the mad  conflicts and wars between nations and peoples vanish. With them  vanishes the irrepressible urge that exists under capitalism for one  nation to subject others, to rob it of its resources, to exploit and oppress it, to provoke and maintain the hideous national and racial antagonisms that cling to capitalism like an ineradicable bloodstain.

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain are organized to make the working class  conscious of its historical mission, of the great part it must play in reorganising society itself. We are part and parcel of  the working class and the labour movement.

We do not say to the workers: "Fix your eyes so rigidly on the  socialist future that you ignore the needs and battles of the day."  Rather, we also say: "Fight every-day for that which will  strengthens the working class,  which gives it a stronger position in society, which increases its self-confidence and militancy, which pits it against its mortal enemy capitalism and the capitalist class-which strengthens its independence, and which, therefore, brings it a step further along the road  of struggle for the socialist future."

Socialism  puts an end to the class division of society and abolishes the wage-labour system. Thus, market, exchange of commodities, and money disappear. Production for profit is replaced by production to meet people's needs and to bring about greater prosperity for all. Work, which in capitalist society for the overwhelming majority is an involuntary, mechanical and strenuous activity to earn a living, gives way to voluntary, creative and conscious activity to enrich human life. Everyone, by virtue of being a human being and being born into human society will be equally entitled to all of life's resources and the products of collective effort. From everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their need — this is a basic principle of communist society.  The administrative affairs of the society will be managed by the cooperation, consensus and collective decision-making of all of its members.

Not only class divisions but also the division of people according to occupation will disappear. All fields of creative activity will be opened up to all. The development of each person will be the condition of development of the society.

Socialism is a global society. National boundaries and divisions will disappear and give way to a universal human identity. Socialist society is a society free of religion, superstitious beliefs, ideology and archaic traditions and moralities that strangle free thought.

The wage-labour system, that is the daily compulsion of the great majority of people to sell their physical and intellectual abilities to others in order to make a living, is the source and essence of the violence which is inherent of this system. This naked violence has many direct victims: Women, workers, children, the aged, people of the poorer regions of the world, anyone who stands up to any oppression, and anyone who has been branded as belonging to this or that "minority". In this system, thanks essentially to the rivalry of economic blocs, war and genocide have assumed staggering proportions. The technology of war and mass destruction is far more advanced than the technology used in production of goods. The bourgeoisie's global arsenal can annihilate the world several times over. This is the system that has actually used horrendous nuclear and chemical weapons against people.

Nowhere in socialist theory is use of force viewed as a necessary component of workers' revolution.

Capitalism is a world system and the workers' socialist movement must also be organised on a global scale, a  body uniting the workers' global struggle for socialism.

Food for thought

Though some countries are getting too much water with flooding caused by global warming, in Egypt the government is worried they may not get enough. Their concern is caused by Ethiopia's proposed construction of the $42 billion Grand Renaissance dam that might reduce the amount of water in the Nile. The Egyptian government said, "Egypt will never surrender its right to Nile water and all options to safeguard it are being considered." Younis Makhyoun, the
leader of the Islamist party said that Egypt should back rebels in Ethiopia or, as a last resort, destroy the dam. Whatever the outcome, it will not be good and underlines the primitive division of the earth into competing countries under our current system. A socialist world would manage resources for the benefit of everyone using the best scientific and common sense paradigms. John Ayers.

Misplaced Loyalty

The ideas of nationalism are repugnant to socialists. Which country you are born in is an accident, in fact your birth itself was probably an accident. Despite this many workers sing national anthems, wave flags and identify themselves with "their country". Britain like every other country is owned by a tiny handful of the population and recent figures have shown the British working class are becoming even poorer. 'British workers have suffered one of the biggest falls in real wages among European countries over the past three years, with only crisis-hit Greece, Portugal and the Netherlands doing worse. New figures collated by the House of Commons Library show a 5.5 per cent drop in wages after inflation since 2010.' (Independent, 11 August) RD

Remember our Past - Fight for our Future

The union movement has proven itself to be a powerful instrument of a defensive character and as a potential force that poses the possibility of a fundamental transformation in socio-economic relations from wage labor to a free association of labor and common ownership of its product -  socialism. The history of US labour has often been mythologised into a stereotype based on Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters and the Mafia, as portrayed by Sylvester Stallone in the movie FIST. The idea of a labor unions led by a corrupt and self-serving class collaborationist bureaucracy has been too simplistic and misleading. In the United States employers are often not merely above the law, they are the law. Hand in hand with industrial despotism goes political despotism. The master class controls everything, police, courts; the whole political and state power is in its possession and under its control.

 On June 21, 1877 eleven “Mollie Maguires” were executed. The men who perished were early martyrs to the class struggle in the United States.  In 1887 occurred the infamous judicial  murder of the Haymarket Martyrs. In the seven years of 1890–97 an estimated 92 people were killed in major strikes, and from January 1902 to September 1904 an estimated 198 people were killed and 1,966 wounded. Over the years 1877–1968 state and federal troops intervened in labour disputes, almost invariably on behalf of the employers, on more than 160 occasions. Overall, a check of strike casualties actually reported in the national press over these same years gives a total of 700 dead and thousands more injured. 29 people were killed in major strikes between 1947 and 1962.

 Capitalism feeds upon the blood of labour.

The employers, through their agents in control of government and the entire state apparatus, have erected a whole network of laws and regulations designed to hamstring the labor movement. These range from the various regulations designed to make it difficult for unions to establish the fact that they represent a majority of a specific group of workers, to those which only permit strike action after a long process of delay, that not only make it illegal to strike within the life of contracts, to the ever- increasing use of court injunctions forbidding or limiting pickets, and the extension of compulsory arbitration to ever wider areas of the work force. Organized labor has grown weaker in relation to the growth of the work force.  Large layers of workers, poorly paid and helpless before the onslaughts of rising prices, the price of health-care, all the insecurities that are products of capitalist society, have fallen prey to the capitalist- inspired propaganda that the union movement is a narrow, a sectional power bloc, insensitive to their needs and concerned only with its own welfare. But think on. Do you find that the fatter the employer gets, the fatter also grows the employee? Or rather is it that the wealthier the boss becomes, the poorer his workers get.

Between the working class and the capitalist class there exists an  irreconcilable conflict, a class struggle for life. No glib-tongued politician, no academic professor deny the fact. There are ranged on the one side all those who owned the tools of production, and on the other those who used them.  It is a struggle that will not go away, and  can only be ended by the abolition of the capitalist class. This is the natural order of the damnable and sordid economic system in which we live.  This is the order which will remain until it is altered by one of these classes, and the class which will make the alteration will be the working-class or slave class.  That is its mission.  With the proper understanding of the economic system, the workers will soon find means to end that system, and to raise on its ruins a development of society having for its goal the benefit of the whole of the community instead of only the vested interests of a few.

The class struggle is the ceaseless struggle which goes on from day to day in every country. The struggle on all occasions is over some advantage which the one seeks to obtain over the other.  It may take the form of more wages or shorter hours or the alteration of some working condition; but the particular point really does not matter, the opposing forces are always the same – the master class and the working class. Society is  like a huge market where two commodity possessors come to sell their goods. The capitalist brings his commodity – money, and the worker his commodity – labor power. The worker sells his labor power in exchange for a wage which is what will bring him the subsistence of life, food, clothing and shelter.  In return for their slavery they receive only sufficient pay to enable them to continue operating the machinery from day to day, and to perpetuate their class.  It would be a catastrophe to the capitalist system if slaves did not breed more slaves. The supporters of a system are those who have gained control of it or control of the means of production, those whose interests are bound up in it.  The system is capitalism, and those who control it are capitalists.

The State in a class-divided society can be nothing other than an instrument in the hands of the class owning the property and means of production in society. The talk of “reconciling class interests” is simple deceit. It is impossible to reconcile the interests of the slave owner and the slave, the exploiter and the exploited. Parliament grew out of feudalism and after the capitalist revolution developed as the natural custodian of the interests of capitalism. It was founded on private property foundations. Its laws are the laws of private property. The modifications that have taken place, the extension of the franchise and the growth of social legislation for the working-class are the reflection of the growing strength and power of the working-class.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain endeavours to convince the workers of the inadequacy of reformism and the necessity for revolution. We shall fight reformists  to the end. Not by lies and slanders, not by violence, but through argument. We, socialists, refuse to join the reformists in leading the workers into the camp of capitalism. The intensity of the class struggle is greater today than at any time since the capitalists overthrew feudalism. Now it is the working class that must overthrow capitalism. Use the ballot against capitalism. Vote for socialism. Vote for the Socialist Party, the only party that keeps the revolutionary banner unfurled  in unremitting struggle for a socialism.

 Non-revolutionary political parties contest one another for votes and office. They represent different sections of the ruling class struggling for their share of profits and privilege, vying with eachother for control of the governmental bureaucracy, and perhaps presenting different theories of how best to keep the compliance of the people by securing this or that reform or concession for this or that section of the population. All promise material betterment, peace, prosperity and security yet none of these are possible under capitalism. These parties are dedicated to the maintenance and defense of capitalism and only differ in the ways and the manner of the “appeal” which they make to the voter.

All varieties of non-revolutionary politics PRESUPPOSE the continuance of the existing order in its fundamental structure: that is to say in capitalist society, its capitalist property relations, the exploitation of the majority by the propertied minority.

Socialists must break through the deceptions of politics. They must pose directly the central issue: the class struggle for  socialism. Their success in an election campaign is not to be measured in votes won, but in the extent they have succeeded in bringing the central issue before the consciousness of the working class. The main issue for the worker is the CLASS issue. All of its propaganda, all its discussion must be attached to this issue. Now, more clearly than ever before, it must be the Socialist Party for socialism.

The Glorious 12th

The grouse season opens.  A week of fishing and stalking in Sutherland's Reay forest estate is being offered for £6,500.

Scotland has the most inequitable land ownership in Europe. More than half of of all privately owned in Scotland is in the hands of 432 people. In Scotland, the largest eight landowners own 908,000 acres or 3.2 per cent of accessible land. 50 individuals own  20 per cent of Scottish land.

 According to the academic and land reformer, Jim Hunter explains "We're now six years into an SNP government which has so far done absolutely nothing legislatively about the fact that Scotland continues to be stuck with the most concentrated, most inequitable, most unreformed and most undemocratic land ownership system in the entire developed world."

Agricultural subsidies and forestry grants are weighted so that the largest farms, owned by the biggest landowners, receive the largest handouts. Such owners can claim five-figure sums a week in subsidies. The landowners also cash in on windfarms to the tune of £1bn a year. Scotland's richest people are skimming off more millions from taxpayers when benefits are being capped and the bedroom tax is forcing people on to the street.  A 28,000 acre Highland estate near Bridge of Orchy is on the market for £11.4 million and whoever buys it will immediately qualify for state-funded hand-outs of £12,000 a week,

Land means power, so Scotland's few hundred aristocrats can scarcely be expected to give up on four centuries of owning more than half of the country. They regard themselves as the sole arbiters of what is good in the countryside. As for protecting wildlife, then perhaps we simply have to assume that those golden eagles and other birds of prey found dead on grouse shooting estates every year must have poisoned themselves.

Since the end of the Second World War landowners have without regulation been able to create tracks across their property providing they are for farming or forestry purposes. However, the environmental groups – who include the RSPB, Ramblers Scotland, Scottish Wild Land Group and the National Trust for Scotland – say many of the tracks laid are for country sports such as shooting and have no agricultural or forestry use. They also insist that a number are poorly constructed, unsightly and threaten the environment. Helen Todd of Ramblers Scotland and co-convener of the campaign group said: “Currently tracks can simply be bulldozed across the countryside almost anywhere in Scotland, and have caused huge visual and environmental damage in some of Scotland’s finest landscapes.”

Beryl Leatherland, also of the Scottish Wild Land Group, added: “Tracks have been dug deep into peat, releasing large quantities of CO2 and destroying sensitive habitats, carved straight up steep hillsides and even over the summits of several hills, leaving erosion scars that spread for years and are visible for many miles. Some of the examples we have seen amount to little more than vandalism.”

Since the early 17th century, a cabal of landowners has enjoyed the riches and privileges conferred on them by ownership of land that, for the most part, was obtained illegally and at the point of a sword. The Scots aristocrats are as Tom Johnston once said in his book Noble Families “the descendants of successful pirates and rogues”.

Andy Wightman, author of “The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland (and How They Got It), explains "The land on which many of our lairds sit was stolen in the 17th century. But these ill-gotten gains were protected by acts which maintained their hegemony after the rest of Europe ditched feudalism and concentrated land ownership." He describes how the aristocracy embraced the 1560 Reformation as a means of getting their hands on land belonging to the "Auld Kirk". They needed to protect their stolen goods with a robust law. The Act of Prescription (1617) declared that any land occupied for 40 years or more was indemnified from future legal challenge. The law remains in place and has effectively upheld the gentry's rights to stolen goods for 400 years.

Tom Gray, spokesman and co-ordinator of the Scottish Tenants Farmers Association, said "The families of many of Scotland's tenant farmers have worked this land for generations. They have invested money in them and made improvements, while the estate owners sit back and employ agents to raise rents every three years...we are seeing an increasing number of cases where our members are being forced out due to a lack of co-operation by the estate owners and often downright intimidation."

 Andrew Riddell was a tenant farmer. He and his family had worked on the farm for more than 100 years and then, one day, he was given notice to quit by his landlord, Alastair Salvesen, billionaire and Scotland's third-richest man. The notice followed a year-long legal case which finally found in favour of Salvesen. The judge ruled that the protections Riddell thought he had in the tenancy arrangement were trumped by the landlord's rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. He killed himself after collecting his final harvest.

THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH

Richard Scott is the 10th Duke of Buccleuch. He owns 240,000 acres of land worth between £800m and £1bn, making him the largest private landowner in the UK. His title confers on him chairmanship of the Buccleuch Group which has interests in commercial property, rural affairs and food. The title was created in 1663 by King Charles II for his eldest son, the Duke of Monmouth.

THE DUKE OF ATHOLL

The 12th Duke of Atholl is Bruce George Ronald Murray, who inherited the title following the death of John Murray last year. The Atholls were to become participants in the Highland Clearances when tenants on their land were thrown off to make way for sheep.

THE DUKE OF ROXBURGHE

Guy David Innes-Ker is the 10th Duke of Roxburghe. He was the elder son of the 9th duke by his second wife. He succeeded his father to the title of Duke of Roxburghe in 1974. The duke is also a baronet and a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals, having been educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He has expressed disappointment that the Land Reform Review Group "concentrates so heavily on expansion of community ownership".

A Cancerous System

A survey of 2,217 adults carried out by YouGov for the charity Macmillan Cancer Support has revealed the appalling state of treatment for NHS patients. Patients say their medical files have been lost, putting their health at serious risk. They add that they are "humiliated" by nurses and forced to wait to go to the toilet. 'A survey found that of the 170,000 cancer victims admitted to hospitals in England each year, around 18,000 - or 11 per cent - said their files were lost by a doctor or nurse. Some 15 per cent felt they were belittled by nurses while 14 per cent were forced to wait at least 30 minutes after asking for help to go to the toilet - one per cent waited for at least two hours.' (Daily Express, 9 August) Needless to say this treatment is for members of the working class. Members of the owning class can afford the best of medical treatment. RD

Politics And Poverty

Despite the Coalition government's claim to be a family-orientated organisation families are suffering at their hands. Food banks across Britain are being inundated with requests for emergency meals as families struggle to feed their children through the school holidays. The Trussell Trust, which runs the country's largest network of food banks, says this is the busiest summer it has ever experienced, with some of its branches seeing double the number of requests for emergency parcels since the start of the holidays. 'Parents whose children ordinarily receive free school lunches are among those struggling the most, as they now have to find an extra meal every day. The trust says the situation is worse than last summer because of rising food prices - which despite falling slightly in the latest Government figures are more than 4 per cent higher than last year - and the impact of the Coalition's welfare changes that were launched in  April.' (Independent, 9 August) RD

The War of the Classes

This war of the classes has raged throughout the ages and not always have the participants even been conscious of their parts in it. It is nevertheless universal and bitter. The class struggle will end when the causes that give rise to it are removed. The economic structure of society must be remodeled before the basis for a real civilization can be laid, formed with knowledge and power. The working class will change the economic basis of our life and establish equality where exploitation and misery now reign supreme. The workers are obliged to  fight for their own existence and for the future of all society.

According to our capitalist society the owners of the means of life are under no obligation to see that their fellow beings, who do not possess such means, are provided with the opportunity to make a living. When the capitalist cannot make profits out of the labour of the workers he turns them out, cuts off their source of bread without the least compunction. They may starve to death for all he cares. He is not their keeper except while they keep him in fat dividends. While differing in many respects from previous forms of exploitation, capitalism is no less cruel and merciless. The capitalists own the means by which we live and thus we are at their mercy in no less degree than were our ancestors in the days of chattel slavery. The kings of old ruled the world with an iron hand, but they had a much smaller world to command than the industrial monarchs of today. Modern capitalism leaves a trail behind it as bloody as that of its predecessors and a record of cruelty and injustice just as brutal.

The truth of the matter is that this is a rich man’s State and a rich man’s Government. The State is there to act on behalf of capital and to protect its interests against the people. The government is the executive committee of employing class. The State is an instrument of power in the hands of the industrialists, bankers and landlords, who by this token are the ruling class. The State is there to effect the exploitation and oppression of the workers and the poor. The government, its laws, its agencies: the military, the police, the courts, the jails— all are there to effect the exploitation and oppression of you and millions like you. The capitalist desires to squeeze more sweat and blood out of the workers, and there is the wish of the workers to fight back against their enemy, who feeds upon them. There is war, a class war. It is waged by one class, the oppressors, against the other class, the oppressed. In this war, the State is always and invariably on the side of the oppressors. Some of its representatives may try to achieve the ends of capital by cajoling and wheedling. But they always keep the big stick ready. The State — that is the big stick of the owners of wealth, the big stick of the corporations. Every one who tries to persuade you that the State is a friend to defend you, that the State is neutral and impartial and only the honest broker and mediator offering fair regulatory legislation is lying.  Under capitalism you cannot protect both  the capitalists and  the workers.  When you protect “industry” you give it freedom to exploit “labor”. When you protect labor you make it possible for labor to get more out of industry. Socialists  recognize the true nature of the capitalist State. The State may change its appearance and its appendages. It may use the parliamentary system, with a limited freedom of speech to opponents — as long as this opposition is not too dangerous. It tightens the screws and tries to silence the opposition when the situation becomes disturbing for businesses.  Under different circumstances it may do away with parliamentary procedure altogether and institute a dictatorship when a danger to capitalism becomes particularly acute.  The forms change and the language  differs according to time and place. But the essence remains. The essence being the capitalist State is in the employ of capitalism for the preservation of capitalism.

“Who are the Socialist Party of Great Britain ?” We would like to answer immediately, “It is the political organisation to be used as the means toward gaining socialism” But alas that is only our own aspiration and not yet the reality. Too often many look upon the party as the ultimate end we are striving for, and not the means to that end. We are accused that we are a  merely a theoretical propaganda party and this policy stands in the way of success. “Practical politics” is to-day in ascendance everywhere. Principles have naught to say on the matter. The point is to win, and to win at all costs. We have no monopoly on the use of the word socialism.  But in the end the cause will know its own. We will continue to say until we are proved wrong that democracy has prepared for the workers all the means necessary to achieve socialism. Let the workers use universal suffrage to send socialists into all the legislative assemblies. Let the socialists form a majority in these assemblies and when this is done, the way is open to abolish the capitalist system. To make socialism possible the workers must take hold of the State machinery of capitalism.

 There is no room for any collaboration or co-operation of any kind with the ruling class which must be dispossessed, both politically and economically. There can be no bond or union between  those in Government, and we, who wish to overthrow them. There can be nothing in common but the battlefield and the struggle. If this class war successfully carried out by the working class brings about a victory, then with an end of the class system it will enable us to attain true social peace. The SPGB, therefore, calls upon all the workers to mass round the banner of socialism. 

Morality And Money

The British government likes to portray itself as an organisation of the highest moral principles and absolutely opposed to brutality. Except of course when it threatens their master's profits. 'Britain is in talks to sell 12 Typhoon fighter jets to Bahrain, despite the Gulf state's controversial human rights record. The proposed deal with the Gulf monarchy rocked by protests in 2011 is thought to be worth more than £1 billion and is part of a concerted effort by Gulf countries to strengthen military ties with Britain. ........... Amnesty International claimed the arms negotiations showed human rights worries were once again playing second fiddle to British business deals.' (Daily Telegraph, 10 August) The highly political deal was one of the main agenda items in a recent Downing Street meeting between David Cameron and King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa. Bahrain's government faced condemnation and accusations of brutality for its repression of protests led by the island's Shia majority in early 2011. RD

Food for thought

The New York Times (July 7) provided yet another example of a 'tiger economy' leaving the people behind. The Philippines growth of 7.8% and the rising glass towers is evidence of lots of money but work is scarce, low-paid, and seventeen million have left to find work elsewhere. More than nine million cannot afford the $135/month needed to eat.
Meanwhile, research conducted by Equilar for the Times shows that the 200 top executives' average pay packet came in at $15.1 million, a leap of sixteen per cent from 2011. For example, Leslie Moonves, CBS pulled in $60.3 million, Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation, $22.4 million, Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle, $96.2 million, Marissa A. Mayer, Yahoo 36.6 million. Nice work if you can get it, and get away with it. John Ayers

The Rich Housing List

Indeed a housing crisis exists, particularly for the rich - a crisis of which country estate to buy. The magazine for the lairds and the squires, Country Life,  has advertised a number of desirable rural residencies in Scotland.

10,143-acre Cluny estate at Laggan, Invernessshire,  ‘offers over £7.5 million'. The house has three main reception rooms along with seven main bedrooms and five bathrooms. Eleven estate houses and cottages are used to house staff or could be developed as holiday lets.

Hoscote estate at Roberton, in the Borthwick Water valley in upper Teviotdale, nine miles south-west of Hawick, little more than an hour's drive from the Scottish capital, for which ‘offers over £2.95 million' are sought. As well as the refurbished nine-bedroom main house surrounded by  formal gardens, the estate includes five modernised houses and cottages, an in-hand livestock farm. It also offers a pheasant shoot, roe-deer stalking, duck-shooting and trout fishing on Borthwick Water.

Culdaremore near Fortingall, in the heart of Highland Perthshire, another small estate with a  five-bedroom main house, gardens and a range of traditional stone buildings, surrounded by 375 acres of pasture, hill grazing and conifer plantations. Offers over £1.25m are sought. Also available is  red- and roe-deer stalking, fishing on the River Lyon, a tributary of the Tay, and the potential to create a low-ground pheasant shoot.

Offers over £1.25m for the picturesque, 194-acre Achara estate near the Highland village of Duror, near Loch Linnhe in coastal Argyll. The house was built in the Scots Baronial style.  In addition to the  eight-bedroom main house overlooking Loch Linnhe, the estate boasts a converted three-bedroom coach house and two cottages suitable for holiday lets.

 At offers over £950,000 Lessudden House on the eastern edge of pretty St Boswells village, 4-and-a-half miles from Melrose, Roxburghshire, and within a realistic commuting distance from both Edinburgh and Newcastle. Lessudden House sits in the midst of 19 acres of enchanting gardens and grounds, surrounded on three sides by parkland grazing. Accommodation includes reception and dining halls, two further main reception rooms, five main bedrooms and an attic bedroom. A range of stabling offers potential for development.

Wellfield House and Lodge at Duns, 15 miles from Berwick. Offers over £1.5m are sought for the five-bedroom house, and its two bedroom lodge. The main house is set in some eight acres of wooded gardens and grounds

Offers over £1.65m are sought for Leithen Lodge at Innerleithen, Peeblesshire, a refurbished the three-storey main house, with courtyard apartment and wing, and  20 acres of gardens, grounds and parkland.

The House of Aquahorthies near Inverurie, ‘offers over £1.3m', A nine-bedroom house, AND  some 38 acres of landscaped grounds, woodland and paddocks