What is socialism?

What will such a socialist society look like?

 In Wages, Price and Profit, Marx writes “that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premisses and tries to evade conclusions”, and he goes on: “To clamour for equal or even equitable retribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question.”
Marx is being critical of those who direct attention away from our revolutionary goal - the abolition of the wages system.

 There is nothing at all either reformist to Marx’s thought. He is less interested in the social division of income and more about the distribution of free time, of opportunities for fulfilling activity, of unpleasant or rebarbative work; with the distribution of welfare more generally, of social and economic benefits and burdens. And he is concerned, in particular and above all, with the distribution of productive resources, on which according to him this wider distribution depends. It is universal freedom and self-development that he envisages and looks forward to at the end of the line. Marx claims that the revolution will put an end to alienation, that it will enable every member of society to develop his or her capacities, that it will promote community and solidarity between people, and that it will facilitate the expansion of human productive powers and the universal satisfaction of human needs. Marx upholds the principle of collective control over resources and he envisaged an end to scarcity. All people, equally, will be able to satisfy their needs. But the means of consumption will not be divided into exactly equivalent individual shares and even equal labour contributions will not be matched by such shares being of the same size. Only those who need drugs or medical treatment will have access to them, for instance, the vulnerable young an the elderly frail receiving priority,  responding to the specific needs of each individual — must, in some senses, mean unequal individual treatment. Satisfying needs is not the  fantasy of an abundance without limits. Needs does not mean every want or fancy but goes far beyond the absolute minimum subsistence level. Marx disparaged the type of socialism where there is “equality of wages paid by the common capital, (that is) the community as the general capitalist.” Even without a capitalist, there is still wage-slavery.

No more classes or state, so no more private property. The end of politics, since there are no-one to be governed. No more leaders and no more followers. There is the administration of things.  No opposition between town and country, humanity is spread harmoniously over the earth's surface. The disappearance of the division between manual and intellectual labour, a reflection of the class struggle. Social man uses the productive machine to create a social product. What socialism would be is a free association of completely free men, where no separation between private and common interest exist: a society where “everyone could give himself a complete education in whatever domain he fancied”. For “man’s activity becomes an adverse force which subjugates him, instead of his being its master” when there is a division of labour where everyone must then have a profession that he has not chosen and in which he is forced to remain if he does not want to lose his means of existence. In socialism, on the contrary, a man would be given “the possibility to do this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to go fishing in the afternoon, to do cattle breeding in the evening, to criticise after dinner”, as he choses. [German Ideology]
Socialist society provides to men and women to develop all their capacities in their own interests and in the interests of society as a whole. It is clear that there is not the slightest relation between Marx’s vision of socialism and what passed for it in the Soviet Union or the social-democracies welfare state.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is a voluntary union of people who share a common outlook and the common desire to work to realise its principles in life —the establishment of socialism. The unity and the understanding of the working class is essential if the working class is to prevail against the capitalists. Reformism is the idea that socialism can be achieved through a gradual addition of reforms won by constitutional means and without the overthrow of capitalism. This we reject. The aim of the Socialist Party is to achieve a socialism in which the common ownership of the means of production and distribution shall replace the existing capitalist system. It found expression in the teachings of men like John Ball, Gerald Winstanley, Robert Owen and those pioneers of the British labour movement, the Chartists. We must move forward for we cannot go back. Capitalism, in the search for greater profits, expanded the production of goods on an enormous scale into highly developed, large-scale production, thus establishing the basis on which socialism can be built. But capitalism does not evolve into socialism. It has to be transformed into socialism by the conscious action of people. The age-long dream of those thinkers and the fighters of the past can only become reality when the working class wages the struggle to take political and economic power from the capitalist class and sets about building a socialist society. The means of production—the factories, mines, land and transport—are taken away from the capitalists. They are transformed into social property. This means that they belong to and are worked by the whole of the people, that the fruits of production likewise become social property, used to advance the standard of life of the peoples. No longer can the capitalists by virtue of the fact that they own the means of production, live off the labour of the working class. No longer are the workers compelled to sell their labour power to the capitalists in order to live. Production is planned to meet the material and cultural needs of the people which is only possible because the means of production have been taken out of the hands of competing private owners, whose only concern was to produce what was profitable, not what was needed by the people. Socialism means a wider, more purposeful life for all. The definition of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” becomes a reality. Today’s “democracy” is government of the people by the capitalists in the interests of the capitalists. The basis for socialism is the initiative of the people, the active processes of self-government and social life. Without this the building of socialism is impossible.

A parliamentary majority is of key importance in beginning the advance to socialism. But by itself it cannot bring about socialism. Economic power  means ownership and control of all the means of production—the factories, mills, mines, land,  etc. So long as these remain in the private hands of the capitalist class, society remains capitalist society irrespective of the character of the government in power. The workers continue to be exploited. Production continues to be production for profit. Planned production is impossible. The essence of the Marxist view of the transition to socialism is that unless political and economic power is taken out of the hands of the capitalist class and transferred into the hands of the majority of the people no advance to socialism is possible. Parliament is rooted in history. Through it the British people have expressed their aspirations for social progress for centuries (English Revolution 1640; Chartism 1840). Political power means control of the State apparatus, which is more than Parliament. It is the control of the armed forces, the police, law and justice, education, propaganda, etc. — all of which are headed by defenders of capitalism. The state apparatus is the machinery of coercion and government established by every ruling class to maintain its rule over the subject classes. Experience in the past has shown that the defenders of capitalism  are ready to use their power to thwart any move which might be disadvantageous to the capitalist class as a whole or to any individual section. Parliament could play a key role in the development of socialism but a Parliament not resting on a passive people whose task was ended with voting it into power. It would rest on and be impelled by a politically active people, whose struggle for socialism outside Parliament would continue and be part of the political activities. In short, it would be a Parliament reflecting the will of the people and giving the sanction of its authority to their struggle. Once the ruling class have been dispossessed and their power has evaporated, the State’s role and the Socialist Party’s function are finished. Both disappear.

Fleeting Prosperity

The city of Mississauga (near Toronto) that for years was thought of as a Prosperous, well-run city is no longer considered so. For decades, constantly in the black, no property tax increases and the mayor returned with a ninety per cent majority. Then the province started downloading services to the municipalities and Mississauga, like many towns and cities, could not cope. In 2013 it went into debt and raised property taxes. Under capitalism prosperity and security can be very fleeting for cities as well as for workers. John Ayers.

Socialist Consciousness

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for socialist consciousness which sounds very mysterious and philosophical. As a matter of fact, ‘socialist consciousness’ is simply another way of expressing enlightened self-interest.

The working class is crucial to the socialist revolution for essentially two reasons. One is that the process of production, the production and transportation of food, clothing, shelter, etc., is fundamental to any society and the section of society which can gain control of that process can gain control of the society as a whole. For example, a strike of teachers may have considerable political impact but it brings nothing but the immediate activities to a halt. But workers in a steel mill, on a railroad, in an auto plant, can affect the economy far beyond their own specific workplace. The second reason for the centrality of the working class is that the socialist revolution must involve the transformation of work and the workplace or it is not a social revolution at all. Whatever else may happen - and a revolution is a vast, complex totality - if the workers do not gain possession of the means of production, then governments may have been overthrown, but society has not been transformed.

In their minds most of the workers involved in these class battles fight without ever conceiving of themselves as a class confronting the ruling class and its state. They think of themselves as fighting this particular boss, or the bosses in this particular industry; and they do not usually add up the experiences into a comprehensive generalisation of the class nature of the capitalist society.

The fact is that classes exist and hey exist because some men live by owning the factories and the machines, and the rest of us  have to go to work on these machines which we don’t own. The boss squeezes as much profit out of the worker as he can. The worker tries to gain as close to a living wage out of the boss as he or she can. And should the workers stopped struggling, they’d just be squeezed even more. That’s why there’s a class struggle. There are SQUEEZERS and there are the SQUEEZED.

Consciousness of any kind cannot exist without a mind for its repository, any more than a mind can exist without a body. Socialist consciousness requires a repository where it can be accumulated and ordered, from which it can be instilled in others, and by which it can be constantly revised, checked, renewed and defended. The ingenuity of man has invented the mass socialist party, the political organisation of the working class. Without a working class with socialist consciousness and a revolutionary party organising its action on that basis, no victory, no socialism.

Workers should see that the Socialist Party reflect their interests more consistently than our opponents. In all lands the interests of the working-class are identical. With the development of world-commerce and production for the world-market the position of the workers in each country becomes increasingly dependent on that of the workers in other countries. The liberation of the working-class is, therefore, a task in which the workers of all lands are equally concerned. Being conscious of this fact the Socialist Party proclaims its solidarity with the class-conscious workers of all lands. We would contend that only a socialist party is capable of winning the battle of ideas for the struggle against capitalism is at the same time necessarily a struggle of the socialist against capitalist consciousness. Victory in the one case is impossible without victory in the other.

The great wealth of the world is the product of the labour of countless people. But while the working people created this wealth, they do not own or control it. The capitalist system has concentrated the ownership of the tremendous productive forces in the hands of a small group of capitalists. This creates a basic conflict: production is collective, involving the coordinated and interconnected labour of millions, but the control of it, is private. The capitalist exploits the working class and creates poverty and economic insecurity. Businessmen invest capital and plunder the natural resources. The system of capitalism is a system of economic chaos, plagued by periodic crises. These crises are inseparable from the economic system and is exacerbated by  the speculation of the bankers, financiers and industrialists, each tries to profit off one another and because of this individual greed, the working people suffer, and the economy is thrown into turmoil.

 At first, banks served mainly as intermediaries for payments. With the development of capitalism the activity of the banks as traders in capital became more extensive. The accumulation of capital and concentration of production in industry led to the concentration in the banks of enormous amounts of spare money seeking profitable application. The share of the large-scale banks in the total amount of bank turnover steadily grew. In every country a small handful of the biggest bankers and industrialists  hold in their grasp all the vitally important branches of the economy and dispose of the overwhelming bulk of social wealth. Management by capitalist monopolies inevitably becomes the rule of a finance oligarchy that become too big to fail and receive government subsidies and bail-outs. The oligarchs begin to rule in the political sphere too. The operation of  capitalism is an obstacle to the well-being of society. The situation demands a new, more rational system of economic organisation that will use the productive forces for the benefit of the vast majority of society.

As it is, millions suffer and the capitalist class benefits from this immeasurable misery of countless numbers of people. This exploitative and oppressive system, where profit is master, holds millions hostage to hunger and want and it has poisoned the very air we breathe and polluted the water we drink. The situation cries out for change, for a new, more rational social system – socialism!

Out of capitalist competition paradoxically arises the concentration of industry. For the competitive struggle, waged primarily by cheapening costs, develops the imperative to produce more and sell more. This involves the necessity of enlarging the scale of production, emphasised by the pressure of technological change, with its constantly greater demands for fixed capital and raw materials, and the efforts to overcome a fall in the rate of profit by increasing its mass. Thus capitalist expansion and accumulation are accompanied by the gradual but inexorable rise to power of large-scale industry. Small individual producers are replaced by giant corporations, applying  the most efficient methods of modern production and distribution, accessing the markets throughout the world, controlling the supply of the raw materials. Thus competition gives place to monopoly that crosses the confines of borders.

In capitalism the core economic property relations involve the separation of the direct producers from the means of production (class of propertyless proletarians), the commodity form of the products of social labour (including labour power) and the ownership of the means of production by capitalist enterprises.

 Ownership and management are separated . Ownership is vested in stockholders who own but do not manage and merely receive dividends. Management is vested in the CEOs. The owners of shares knows nothing of the enterprise, except its dividend yield and stock market quotations. Corporate industry is institutional or impersonal, albeit the older relations of private or personal ownership and appropriation persist. Separation of ownership and management permits seizure of control by the financial oligarchy, which imposes its dictatorship over industry and permits overly generous remuneration for their services. Class lines may appear blurred but they have become more rigid and class differences grown more acute.

Creating a socialist world where people live from birth to death never having to suffer under the chains of wage slavery is what all of us should be fighting for. This is socialist consciousness.

Food For Thought

On May 22, the state of Tennessee passed a law allowing the electrocution in the event that drugs for lethal injections were not available. A European ban on the drugs has made them hard to get. The legislation passed 23 to 3 in the state senate and 68 to 13 in the house. However it is done, the death penalty is in force. It's amazing that society makes someone a criminal then kills him/her for being one. We look forward to a society where crime is virtually non- existent and the death penalty is not on the agenda. John Ayers.

A Snapshot.

An article in the Toronto Star re power cuts in India revealed the fact that the impoverished state in question, Uttar Pradesh, has never had enough electricity to service its 200 million population. However to some 63% of homes it doesn't matter – they have no access in any case - a snapshot of 'booming modern India". John Ayers.

Our Class Against Our Enemy

The class struggle and class warfare continue under all circumstances in capitalist society. Workers’ efforts to organise unions in order to raise wages, shorten hours, and improve working conditions go back to the earliest days of capitalism. Throughout history, the bosses have always tried to keep workers divided, unorganised and weak, in order to intensify their exploitation and thereby grab bigger profits. The capitalist class has never stopped–and will never stop–its efforts to destroy and weaken the trade union movement. A powerful, militant trade union movement is a constant threat to profits. As long as the ownership of land and industry is under control of the capitalist class, the economy is run solely for the maximum profit interest of the bosses, and their state power is used to protect their capitalist system.

Workers must be guided by the slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all” and must advance solidarity in all battles against the capitalist enemy and combat all practices that cause disunity. and divide the workers, competing with each other for jobs, bidding against each other to give employers the cheapest deal, often scabbing on each other.

Workers must also build toward independent political action by the working class. For the most part, labour seeks political expression through the Labour Party and this reliance on a capitalist party is one reason for the workers’ political impotence. The government, regardless of which party is in temporary control, is actually the political general staff of the ruling class. Workers’ understanding must be developed so that they fight the bosses politically as well as economically.

 For as long as capitalism exists, there will be capitalist exploitation. That is the way capitalism operates, the only way it can operate. For the capitalists run things for their own profit. They don’t have to pay wages to machines, and the workers not replaced by machines have to produce more than ever. In those factories made obsolete by new machines, employers intensify speed-up in an effort to compete. If they can, they cut wages and lengthen hours. Eventually, such factories modernise or have to be closed down. Workers are removed farther and farther from the commodities they produce; they have less and less reason to take pride in their work. For the workers, new technology and automation mean insecurity, and often disaster. Traditional skilled and semi-skilled trades become useless in many cases. Labour-saving machines are not objectionable in themselves. What is objectionable is the way in which capitalism introduces new machines, their use to increase profits at the workers’ expense, to bring on unemployment and depression and hunger. The way to deal effectively with the problem is to fight to shorten working hours with no cut in daily or weekly pay. Workers has done it before, and must do it again. We have to fight back now against what the capitalists try to do to us. A working class and a people that does not fight for its material needs, and for its dignity, will never get to socialism, and is in danger of being reduced to slavery. We can’t make capitalism work like socialism, but we can limit some of the capitalist thievery. But our real task is to kick out the capitalists and establish socialism. But that doesn’t mean we can just sit around and wait for socialism.

 We are fighting the same enemy; we must work together; we must help each other. Workers become the grave diggers of capitalism. Capitalism forces the workers to connect theory with practice, to wander all over the world, to try their hand at all occupations, to find themselves reduced to a common level, to organize and discipline themselves as a class. All this makes them fit to build a new society. Capitalism hardens them, tests them, wipes out all their illusions, gives them arms, and compels them under penalty of extinction to go forward towards socialism. In the struggle of the workers against their enemy, whatever victories they win in the beginning are but temporary. The victory of the workers is the end not only of wage slavery but of all class rule forever. In socialism, there are no longer a market, commodities, values, prices, nor wages. Goods are no longer sold for a market, but are produced for use. There being no class struggles, there is now no need for a State. Even police disappear as the basis for crime is gone, since labour is so productive that all the wants of life easily can be obtained. Socialism lays the basis for a new type of life by the ending of the misery and despotism. The government over persons is transformed into the administration of things.

Workers unite! Fight for socialism! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain!

Everyone Loses Except Guess Who?

An SPC member recently had a chat with a lady who works for a newspaper in Burlington. She said the entire layout department had been let go and the work was outsourced to India, quite possible and common in our electronic age. It doesn't mean good luck for the workers there either because of very low wages, the only reason they have the chance of work. Under capitalism, everyone loses except the capitalist class and that is why we must have a world-wide worker response. John Ayers.

More Fracking Problems.

Residents of Ramones in NE Mexico are now finding cracks in their cinder block walls caused by tremors from fracking. The Mexican government has reformed its laws to allow foreign companies to drill for oil and gas for a portion of the profits. Fracking injects a high- pressure mix of water, sand, and chemicals into rock to get to the oil and gas. This may not seem like a wise thing to do in a country that has experienced major earthquakes, but where profit is concerned, common sense goes out of the window. John Ayers.

Eco-socialism...is plain old socialism

Humanity stands on the brink of extinction yet few particularly care enough to be motivated into taking determined action to change things. The evidence is out there, in the open, for all to see, reported by the media, discussed by professionals and debated by politicians, that the world is in some real deep shit (literally). Even when the effects of climate change is being actually witnessed today, the proposals to reverse the process (if it is indeed possible to mitigate them now) is put off until  tomorrow, or better still, the day after tomorrow, or ideally, the week after next.

A plausible reason for disinterest and lack of engagement is that people have been manipulated into a fatalistic sense of acceptance. Plus most of the serious consequences will be for our children, or grandchildren, to face, not ourselves (or so many of us mistakenly led to believe). So the destruction of the environment isn’t really such an immediate problem like having to earn enough money to pay the rising prices at the supermarket check-out or to pay the energy bill (and conveniently forget the climate connection).

Having us passive and detached, rather than agitating to stop a pending catastrophe, suits governments and corporations very nicely. Because if we start questioning too much the causes of the problems and querying why so little is being done to fix the trouble, we will start to understand how our economics really functions, but far more importantly, for whose interests the system  really serves. The policy-makers may well be frightened of the fact that we just might learn the central role of business profits in shaping our future. The more we might discover about the truth in the supposed impartiality of decision making, the less faith and trust we could have in our 'betters’and their supposed superior sense of judgement.

 It is capitalism that steal the world resources and causes devastation of our natural environment.  Either we get rid of this system or it will destroy mankind. Time is of an urgency for people to take action. The hour is late.

Humanity is constantly aware of the influence of nature, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the energy we use. In short, we are connected with nature  and cannot live outside nature. An enormous amount of human labour has been spent on transforming nature.  We have subdued nature to serve the interests of society. Forests were destroyed and arable land increased. Forests were something wild and menacing, all our fairy tales told us so. In the name of civilisation the forests had been cut down, our natural surroundings tamed. The human interaction with nature has become increasingly disharmonised. From the influence of unplanned profit production processes our water, air, the soil, flora and fauna have become poisoned. The toxic changes even more dangerous than earlier thought and no longer controllable. If human beings do not succeed in preventing and reducing damage to the biosphere, plants, animals and people perish together. Life itself depends on whether humanity can resolve the ecological situation that have arisen today. The predictable consequences of capitalism is making man's destruction of the biosphere  inevitable (and an act of suicide).

This man-made environmental crisis is a global problem. Its solution lies in the rational re-organisation of production and a clear awareness of our planetary responsibility. The problem  cannot be solved scientifically but only politically.  People could be free to implement the adaptations to our way of life if it was not for the fact that we are busy serving our masters interests and intent upon achieving the goals of the capitalist class. The threat to the future of the planet and to very existence of the people who live on it, lie in the profit system. The challenge for all those who want a better world and to safeguard the planet is to stop that disaster before it is too late (...and the time grows shorter with every new day that passes). The future depends on wresting control of society from those who control it now.

Technological and scientific changes do not develop separate and apart from people. Men make the changes and, in the process are changed themselves. Their jobs will be different, their needs will be different, as will their demands, and above all their ideas and thinking will be different.

Capitalism wastes its own resources, and will do so as long as the present system lasts. Humans cannot exist other than by working with nature. Using the fruits of a scientific understanding we can build a world whose beauty we can enjoy. This is the kind of society socialists strive towards.  

Socialist Party statement on the Marx copyright

This spring, London-based publishers Lawrence & Wishart came under fire online and in the leftist press for allegedly trying to ‘privatise’the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By now over six thousand activists have signed online petitions demanding that the “nasty, capitalistic” publishers retract their claim of a copyright ‘monopoly’over the duo’s collected writings. The allegations make for compelling headlines, but in reality the issue isn’t so clear cut.

The works of Marx and Engels are valuable because they systematically document and explain the basic economic processes underpinning class societies. And an understanding of these processes is vital for identifying the problems with our own class society—capitalism—and what needs to be done to rectify them. Of course, countless later writers have helpfully summarised, elucidated, corrected, and interpreted Marx and Engels’s works, though many of the original writings remain relevant and worthy of study today.

Both men having died in the 19th century, the copyrights on their original publications have long since expired. They are now in the public domain, meaning that, as far as the law is concerned, anyone is free to copy and distribute them. However, this status applies only to the works as they were originally published, unannotated and (usually) in German. Under copyright law, whenever someone produces a new version of a public-domain work that extends or transforms it in an intellectually creative way, such as through editing, critical commentary, or translation into another language, a new copyright is manifested in the novel creative elements. British law fixes the term of copyright at 70 years following the death of the creator, so any translations and critical editions produced since 1944 are likely to be proprietary in the UK.

The recent furore over Lawrence & Wishart began when they demanded that the Marxists Internet Archive, a free online library, stop distributing material from a particular modern collection with the title Marx/Engels Collected Works. This collection is a 50-volume scholarly edition and English translation which Lawrence & Wishart had commissioned themselves (in collaboration with two other publishers) between 1975 and 2005. Though as a matter of law the publishers have the right to restrict republication of their own particular edition, their detractors have misunderstood this to mean that Lawrence & Wishart were asserting complete economic control over all of Marx and Engels’s works generally. In reality, the original German texts upon which the Collected Works is based, as well as many earlier English translations and editions of these same texts, remain in the public domain.

Certainly the Socialist Party would welcome a move by Lawrence & Wishart to release their Collected Works into the public domain, or under terms which would permit the Marxists Internet Archive to resume distributing it. But at the same time it is understandable why they have so far opted not to do this. Like any other private enterprise marketing a product, their very existence is predicated on their exclusive control of the fruits of their employees’ labour. It is illogical to attack a single commercial publisher for engaging in business practices which are, by economic necessity, no different from those of every other one.

What we can do, and indeed what we have always done, is to roundly condemn the entire socio-economic system which has led to the repugnant concept of  ‘intellectual property’. Not long ago the notion that anyone ought to be able to claim exclusive rights to the expression of an idea would have been considered absurd. Today, however, legislative and technological measures have enabled and entrenched the commodification of humanity’s intellectual output. While computers and the Internet have long since made it feasible to freely share the totality of the world’s knowledge, the realization of this has been thwarted at every turn by those whose business models require that information, like physical commodities, remain scarce. In the digital world, of course, information is never scarce—entire libraries can be duplicated a thousand times over with the click of a button. Rather than face up to this fact, publishers have collectively erected artificial legal and technical barriers to the distribution of knowledge. Here, as elsewhere in capitalism, technological progress and social utility take a back seat to the preservation of profits.

The fundamental problem with the removal of Marx/Engels Collected Works from the Internet, then, lies not with Lawrence & Wishart’s demand, nor with the bourgeois copyright regime which gave it legal force. Rather, it is with the capitalist mode of production in general, in which nothing—not even scholarly editions of socialist texts—is produced unless it can be sold at a profit. Capitalist businesses which are not willing to take such legally sanctioned but antisocial steps as are required to preserve their profits are doomed to fail, only to be supplanted by competitors with no such qualms. We therefore call on working people everywhere to unite for a single political solution: the abolition of the global capitalist system and its replacement with one based on common ownership and production for use instead of for profit.

Money Before Need

The Red Door, a vital 106 bed shelter for Toronto's homeless may be forced to close owing to a legal battle between Toronto diet doctor, Sidney Bernstein and his wealthy neighbours, co-owners of the facility. A court order put Red Door into receivership when an investigation found that $2.4 million in mortgage funds was diverted from the business partners without the knowledge of all partners. The dispute means the Red Door facility will remain closed and not service people in need while the money problem is sorted. In capitalism, money comes before need every time. John Ayers.

This Filth Is Being Created Now.

In contrast to the green image being pushed by the oil companies re the Alberta Tar Sands, Archbishop Desmond Tutu commented after a helicopter flight, "The fact that this filth is being created now, when the link between carbon emissions and global warming is so obvious, reflects negligence and greed. Oilsands development not only devastates our shared climate, it is also stripping away the rights of First Nations and affected communities to protect their children, land and water from being poisoned". Too right, Desmond. John Ayers.

Real Socialism

Workers are not bound by tradition to the Labour Party; political parties are not formed by traditions, but by interests.

Reformism is a deception for workers will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital. The capitalist grant reforms with one hand, and with the other always take them back, reduce them to nought, use them to enslave the workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetuate wage-slavery. Reformism, even when quite sincere, in practice becomes a weapon by means of which to corrupt and weaken the workers. The reformists try to divide and deceive the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty concessions. Reformism actually means abandoning socialism and replacing it by liberal “social policy”. The working people are not content to remain wage slaves of the capitalists. There are no solutions within the capitalist system.

Under capitalism the workers are wage slaves, slaves of the bosses. The bosses run the factories in order to maximise profits. This means that they pay workers as little as possible, that they do not hesitate to cut corners on safety to cut overheads, and poor quality products are purposely produced in order to increase profit margins. History has shown that these conditions are always present under capitalism, and cannot be eliminated as long as there is capitalism. A capitalist has to exploit his workers in order to survive as a capitalist. Under capitalism there is rule of the bosses. The opposing forces are always the same – the master class and the working class.

Socialism means democracy at every level of decision-making. The guiding principle of a socialist society would be “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. One of the important tasks of the Socialist Party is to rescue the whole concept of socialism from mistaken views on what it actually means and to point out that real socialism is worth fighting for. The term ‘socialism’ has been identified by large parts of the population with what emerged in Russia under Lenin and then Stalin. The right-wing attempt to prove that socialism is incompatible with democracy, that socialism cannot be but authoritarian.

We often meet with the argument that “there is no alternative to capitalism, look at the a mess communism made of the Soviet Union and now even that has failed”. Of course, it was capitalism in the Soviet Union which failed and not socialism. Real socialism is something all together different. Under capitalism, workers have no control over what is produced and how. All that is decided by how much profit some capitalist will gain.The capitalists’ ability to purchase and to sell labour power at will is a characteristic of capitalism. For the capitalist, the aim of production is not to produce goods to use, but instead it is a compulsory drive to accumulate capital through exploitation – simply put, to make more money. Once money becomes the aim of production, labour power has to become a commodity. In other words, a worker’s labour power can be bought and sold. Labour power as a commodity is the necessary complement of the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalists. Only by buying the worker’s labour power can the capitalist make profits. Workers produce more than what the capitalist pays them in wages and benefits. This is the basis of exploitation of the workers. What the workers produce over and beyond the socially necessary labour for keeping themselves and their families alive and working is surplus value. Surplus value is the only source of profits and it is what socialist mean when we say the workers is robbed of the fruit of his labour.

In the old Soviet Union workers remained wage-labourers. In the West they may have had more civil rights – to express themselves freely, to organize, demonstrate, strike, struggle for the improvement of wages and labour conditions,  more social rights – to employment, health service, retirement. But their social position is the same. Workers, East and West, had no say about the organisation and planning; they do not decide about the distribution of the results of their work. Their social emancipation requires, therefore, the abolition of both private and state ownership of the means of work; these must be socialised.

But real socialism enables the workers to decide how to organise itself and the resources of society to meet the needs of the people. As long as profit for the few whether they be private owners, shareholders or government officials is the basis of the economic system, that system is capitalism. Socialism is the fundamental opposite of capitalism, substituting social ownership of the means of production for  private ownership.  In socialism labour power is no longer a commodity, you no longer sell your labour power to the employing class.

Marx expressed what socialism is with great clarity. Production is performed in an associated, not competitive way; which means that production is under the worker’s control, instead of by some other power. This clearly excludes a bureaucracy, whether it be a corporate hierarchy or of a State ministry. Real socialism means that the individual participates actively in the planning and its implementation; it means political and industrial democracy. Socialism is a society which serves the needs of mankind. Socialism is the condition of human freedom and creativity. It is the end of alienation where humanity is no longer in conflict with nature, where individuals will no longer be strangers among strangers as in a foreign land, but the world will be his or her home.

Socialism is the transformation of private property into common social property. To be common social property means: to belong to the society as a whole without anybody’s right to sell it or exclude another to its access. The justification for the socialisation of the means of production is that those means were actually produced by the accumulated social work of producers over a long period of time. Socialism is a truly democratic act is the effective introduction of worker’s self-management. The general assemblies in small communities, or the councils composed of delegates in large ones becomes the highest authority, responsible for the basic making of decisions regarding all issues of production, distribution and communal life. It has the right of full control, involving responsibility for decision-making. We place our trust in the people and their understanding of the needs of their places of work and their communities.

Where do our interests lie? Let it be in the slogan of common ownership of the means of life.

Position Switching Says It All

Is there any difference between mainstream political parties? In Ontario's recent provincial election – forced when the minority centralist Liberals tabled the most progressive budget in years but was not supported by the leftist NDP. During the election campaign, the Liberals occupied the Left, the NDP the center, and the Conservatives veered far right and shot themselves in the foot by promising to fire 100, 000 public servants. The Liberals won a majority and promise to bring in the same budget. The position switching says it all – there are no real party policies or differences. John Ayers.

Food? ( For Thought )

Brazilian artist Paulo Ito captured the mood at the world cup when he drew a picture of a starving child sitting at a table with nothing on his plate but a soccer ball – kind of puts things in perspective! John Ayers.

Choice? What Choice?

Some supporters of capitalism praise its variety and the multitude of choices it gives its citizens, but George Grayson a professor of the College of William and Mary has a different tale to tell about Carlos Slim Helu the Mexican billionaire and his dominance in that country. 'Someone in Mexico will get up in the morning and eat breakfast in one of his restaurants while reading one of his newspapers. They will then make a phone call on one of his phone networks and buy insurance from him too,' said Mr Grayson.' (Times, 10 July) Helu is worth a staggering $75.4 billion and owns more than 220 companies and many Mexicans will be born in his hospitals, drive on his roads, live in homes built with his cement and smoke his tobacco. The truth is that capitalism is dominated by a handful of dominating billionaires. RD

No More Scotland - But the World

As the world economic crisis continues we can see the burden of the crisis being dumped on the shoulders of the working class. We can see government after government in the capitalist world enacting legislation with similar ends: to make the working class pay for the present crisis of capitalism. Throughout the world popular resistance is rising. The ruling class here and elsewhere are attempting to whip up chauvinism and nationalism. The working class is multi-national, composed of workers of many different nationalities. Their common identity is that they are all exploited by the capitalist class. All workers must strive to forge unity with their fellow workers of all nationalities in the common effort for full democracy and socialism. All sorts of “progressives” have been more and more resorting to the method of dividing the workers by advocating different doctrines designed to weaken the struggle of the working class. One such idea is nationalism, which advocates the division and splitting up of the working class on the specious pretext of protecting the interests of national culture or national independence.

Achieving “independence” under capitalism – private ownership, commodity production, the rule of the market, etc.– will not bring freedom and democracy for the working class. Instead, the working class will continue to be subjected to exploitation and wage slavery. That is why  nationalists of any stripe are charlatans, i.e., they are lying, when they claim that they are the champions of the democratic rights of the workers. They never have been and never will be because that is impossible. There cannot be a “Peoples Republic of Scotland”. Leftists who pick up the national flag has become accepted fare even in the Trotskyist ranks.

 The more wealth the predatory employing class amass, the greater becomes its greed and ambition to absorb and seize new wealth, and the more it intensifies its oppression of the people within its own country. Such domestic oppression will be all the more carried out under the cloak of nationalism. When it is to its own advantage does the ruling class use the slogan of nationalism to arouse the people. Nationalism means exclusiveness and isolation. Any nationalism finally implies that those people are better than all others. Is it not a deplorable mistake for the so-called revolutionary left to consider themselves allied in any way with the class that deceive workers for their own interests?

Class-conscious workers fight hard against every kind of nationalism. What class interest does nationalism serve? Would it aid the class struggle against capitalism or be a diversion from that struggle?  Class-conscious workers cannot rally under the national flag. Nationalism is always the tool of the bourgeoisie, historically. To speak of Scottish nationalism as a progressive force,  is to play the game of a section of the rich. No amount of secession can ever succeed in bringing freedom. The slogan of “independence then socialism” which claims to be progressive and revolutionary in no way constitutes a path towards socialism.

Socialists are internationalists and not nationalists. Even in the countries oppressed by foreign powers the goal of the struggle is not to try to repeat the process of the bourgeois-democratic revolution of nation-building but to develop the process of a socialist revolution.

The Socialist Party recognises these lies and this fakery. The solution cannot be a return to a romantic fictitious past. We must go forward to a really free, really classless society. Democracy can only be realised by a socialist revolution. Nationalism leads directly to a capitalist system  where the vast majority of the population still end up as exploited. The capitalist gangster clans will continue their class warfare over who will get to steal how much of Scotland’s resources. What’s needed is to organise class struggle against our rulers. If all workers joined in class struggle we could make short work of the bosses who accumulate billions off our labour, swearing devotion to the UK or to Scotland while stashing their wealth in off-shore banks and buying shares in foreign land-grabs, the modern equivalent of the Highland Clearances.

 The reality is that the enemy of the Scottish working class is capitalism. The friends of the Scottish workers are the English working class, who are exploited in common with them and live under the same economic system. It will be suicidal for the Scottish to fight in isolation. Hence it follows that it is the task of the Scottish workers is to stay united with their English counterparts

Unlike the deluded left nationalists, the Socialist Party will not tag along with, follow behind, or try to lead the nationalist movement. We will instead resolutely struggle against them by propagating socialism. We must constantly hammer home that the SNP and their ilk are nothing but tools of the ruling class. Deceived, as people will discover in the years to come, that they have been most cruelly misled and have been wasting their time fostering nationalist illusions.  Nationalism is divisive and destructive and ultimately only serves the bosses. Home rule does not eliminate class rule.

 A struggle for socialism is a struggle for democracy. Our struggle is to end exploitation – our own as well as everyone else’s. The destruction of capitalism is the collective workers struggle and the mobilising and uniting of the whole class, of workers of all lands, to take up the fight for the historic task of overthrowing capitalist rule and  building socialism is our mission. We cannot unite with those “socialists” who preach reformism and the accomplishment of their goals under capitalism. The Socialist Party position is a declaration of war for the end of the capitalist system and the establishment of the classless, communist society. A global cooperative community can only be built under the watchword, “Workers of the world unite!”

Reading Notes

- In a profit society, a dead soldier may well be worth more than a  live one. In "1493" by Charles C. Mann, he writes on the agrarian revolution taking place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the desperate need for fertilizer, " At the time, the best known soil additive was bone meal , made by pulverizing bones from slaughter houses. Bushels of bones went to grinding factories in Britain, France, and Germany. Demand ratcheted up, driven by fears of soil depletion. Bone dealers supplied the factories from increasingly untoward sources, including the recent battlefields of Waterloo and Austerlitz.'It is now ascertained beyond doubt, by actual experiment upon an extensive scale, that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce,' remarked the London Observer in 1822." John Ayers.

Crime and Punishment!

The Metro News of May 5 claimed that, "Lawyers sanctioned for criminal like activity by The Law Society of Upper Canada in the last decade have stolen, defrauded, or diverted some $61 million held in trust funds for clients. They treat client trust accounts as personal piggy banks, facilitate multi-million dollar frauds, and drain retirement savings of the elderly. Fewer than one in five were charged criminally and most avoided jail. In one case, a lawyer took $75,000 in part because he wanted a Lexus. Of those sentenced criminally, the punishments were as lenient as house arrest and community service. Of forty-one who were tried, only twelve went to jail. The Law Society of Upper Canada does not, as a rule, report suspected criminal acts by lawyers to the police. Some will argue that there are honest lawyers but, nevertheless, crooked or honest, all exist to uphold the status quo and therefore enable the capitalist class to legally steal from the working class – better a society were there are no lawyers. John Ayers.

A Tipical Screwball Situation

On any day of the year tourists pay up to $100 a day to get into Florida's Theme parks. There, they will be waited on by homeless people who, in the case of Disney World, work for $8.03 per hour. Many live in cheap motels because they can't afford to rent anywhere else. As one mother said, " It's hard just trying to get our feet inside the door with the combined expenses of application fees, security deposits, and the first month's rent needed for a place of their own." Nor does the county have any shelters for the 1,216 households with children. Some motel owners who are strictly small time businessmen are suing the local sheriff to force him to evict guests who have not paid rent and are in violation of the policy of four people to a room. This is another typical screwball situation thrown up by a crazy economic situation that condemns many to a life of poverty. Abolition of that system is what is needed. John Ayers.

So Much For Loyalty

Yet another manufacturer has closed shop in Southern Ontario. The Heinz ketchup plant, in that town for 105 years, is pulling up stakes and leaving the usual mess and betrayed feelings. By the end of June, just 250 workers will be left to continue if they accede to one of the tricks of survival these days, - lower wages, as yet to be determined, and this says nothing about the farmers who supplied the tomatoes. One need not feel betrayed by capitalism because loyalty has never been in its vocabulary if a better chance comes along. John Ayers.

The Not So Great War

New Pamphlet

PUBLIC MEETING

'The Not So Great 1914-18 War' 

8.00pm Wednesday 20^th August 2014


Maryhill Community Central Halls, 
304 Maryhill Road,
 Glasgow G20 7YE

Red Is The Colour Of Our Flag

Very few people believe in the wisdom of any of the ideologists of capitalism any more. The bankers, employers, politicians and economists talk about the state of the economy but none of them know what to do. The fundamental reason why the world recovery is faltering now is because this recession did not provide capitalists with new opportunities for profitable investment. To bolster their profits, employers are making it even more difficult for workers.The failure of the recession to solve capitalists’ problems explains why they are demanding, in every major country, cuts in public spending. Employers are on an offensive to take back what workers have won in previous years. Workers face deteriorating conditions, declining income and diminishing benefits. More and more workers find that one income is insufficient to support their families and many workers now have to hold down two jobs. While people are facing steadily lowering of living conditions, the movement against these conditions is still relatively undeveloped. The unions are largely inactive. There are pockets of resistance but these are not yet strong. The coming months and years will be important for workers to develop a militant movement. Some of the key struggles will be around keeping wages up with the cost of living and maintaining  contracts and job security as well as the the problems of declining membership as a result of years of not organising unorganised workers.

We stand for socialism: a new system in which the people own and control the economy, through the widest democracy. We stand for a socialism which is completely opposed to the exploitation of man by man which now divides the world: capitalism which is an outlived system. Capitalism  is played-out, its constructive aspects long dead. Its life-blood is private profit and oppression, whether avowedly capitalist or whether administered by self-styled “socialists.” We stand for a socialism that is both democratic and revolutionary. Socialism is not the rule of bureaucrats over the people. The new, free society will have as its sole purpose the needs of humankind and in place of the present anarchy, waste and inefficiency, production will be planned. This planning, requires the common ownership. Thanks to the tremendous productive capacity we have created, we will be able to satisfy all the basic needs of everyone. There will be no real shortages that would require some kind of policeman or bureaucrat to supervise who gets what and frustrate the democratic process. For the first time knowledge would be applied entirely for the benefit of mankind. Our wealth is part of humanity’s common heritage and the world’s natural resources would be used with no other thought than for the well-being of mankind.

To choose anything other than socialism is to opt for futility. The Socialist Party are  optimists. It is only the working class that is capable of wiping out all the misery and suffering in this world brought about by centuries of class society. But, while we understand why our future is bright, we are also materialists. We know that the road ahead is tortuous, full of twists and turns. Not all those who wave the red flag or claim to speak for the working class actually do so. Rather than overthrowing the capitalists, they argued that workers should make alliances among the capitalists and their politicians and support one faction against another as a lesser evil. Of course, the workers have made some gains through their struggles. The employers have had to make a considerable number of concessions. But what are these gains, really? To a certain extent, the gains won in struggle served to strengthen the unity and fighting capacity of the workers. But when you consider the wealth that the working people in this country have produced, when you consider the power and potential for abundance of the productive forces that the workers themselves have created, then these reforms are shown up for what they really are. They are nothing but crumbs, scraps left over on the table after the capitalists have had their feast. But today, it is the capitalists who are on the offensive and the working class that is in the position of the defensive. The capitalists following the path for their usual solution to their economic crises  in order to defend their profits. They want to tell people that revolution is impossible, and revolution can’t solve these problems, that the capitalist system is the best thing there is.

In the words of the Internationale, “The earth shall rise on new foundations, we have been naught, we shall be all.” The class that has borne untold sufferings and has nothing to lose but its chains. In the words of Eugene Victor Debs, “ I oppose all wars but one, the revolutionary class war to rid this earth of the evils of capitalism.”

We’re going to raise the red banner of revolution.

World War One and the SPGB

Haiti And International Promises

It's been four years since an earthquake devastated Haiti and still international promises remain unfulfilled. A recent audit found that the US government aid program had delivered only a quarter of the planned number of houses at nearly twice the estimated cost. 105,000 houses were destroyed in the quake that killed more than 200,000. Of the four thousand houses the US Agency for International development planned to build, only 906 were completed by December 2012. Of the 11,000 additional building sites the agency planned to prepare, only 6,220 were in deed done. Although immediate responses are generally good, the reality of cost often slows the process of rebuilding and efficiency. One would expect things to be quite different in a socialist society. John Ayers.

Cutting Corners Even If It Kills People

 Following up to the article on the Lac Megantic rail disaster last year (reported in Imagine, Fall, 2013), the Quebec government has arrested railway workers with criminal negligence. According to Greg Gormick (Toronto Star, May 18), they are charging the wrong parties. Instead, the government of Canada is responsible for decades if failed transportation policies. The railway's competitors, the trucking industry, has had their highways lavishly funded for little investment from the industry. On the railways, individual companies are expected to fund their own highways, the rail system, out of revenues. Light-density lines have been phased out and "On the remaining lines, the physical and human assets are constantly squeezed to wring out profits to maintain the infrastructure and service while keeping investors happy." This encapsulates the main problem of the capitalist system - that of doing anything, even if it kills people, to create a profit. "Under these conditions, should anyone be surprised if some railways – especially smaller, less profitable, short lines – wind up cutting corners to the point of negatively affecting safety?" Short answer – NO, we are not surprised one bit! John Ayers.

Totally Bonkers

There are many aspects of capitalism that show what a crazy society it is, but this news item takes a bit of beating for sheer madness. 'A garage in central London is on the market for an eye-watering half a million pounds but anyone buying it can rest assured that their Range Rover will fit in - just. ...... Measuring almost 9ft wide and 18ft long, if you rip out the cupboards, it also comes with a £280 a year service charge." (Independent, 9 July) Mariana Collett, an associate director of estate agents John D Wood & Co, described the lock-up as "substantial".  "Purely its location alone, moments from Kensington Gardens and Kensington Palace, makes this garage a valuable asset",she said.  Ms Collett may imagine the lock-up is a bit of a bargain as it is situated amidst your fellow billionaires - but £500,000 for a parking site is surely totally nuts. RD

Meet the new boss...same as the old boss

The role of “the party,” “cadre” or “vanguard” plays a large part in contemporary Left discussion. Marxism teaches that the revolution against capitalism and the socialist reconstruction of the old world can be accomplished only through conscious, collective action by the workers themselves. Revolution is not a goal in itself. Revolution is an instrument. The goal is building a socialist classless society, the self-emancipation of the working class, and self-emancipation of all the exploited, by building a classless society without exploitation, without oppression.

For almost a century Leninist groups, have been trying to build vanguard parties that would “lead” the working class to power. For its part when the working class has moved to challenge capitalism it has steadfastly ignored its would-be leaders. Rather than relying on a 'revolutionary' party they knew it was task of working people, through the organisations they would themselves create, to open the gateway to a new and better society.

The so-called revolutionary left is in crisis. Their organisations are small and without connection with the class many genuinely wish to liberate. This situation appears unlikely to change in the near future. Yet class struggle continues to take place on both a global and a local scale.

Socialism can’t be created by decree or by force by a minority. It can only be implemented by the majority of the people taking over the economy (taking over their workplaces and communities) and reorganising them as they see fit. Without said process and everyday content, socialism has no meaning but empty slogans.

We are against leaders who have the power to compel simply because they are leaders - but quite happy to have people responsible for others if they are a) accountable to them, b) chosen by them, and c) and recallable at any time.

A leader may say “all that our organisation has gained is because of me”. But it is not so. Whenever a movement wins better houses, or cheaper water and electricity, or prevents an eviction, this is not because of leaders. It is because of the strength of our numbers – as the workers and the poor, the great majority of the people of the world. It is not because a leader persuades the government to be nice, but because the actions of our mass movements force the government to give back some of what the bosses have taken from us. It is not because the leader knows how to get houses or electricity, but because a mass movement is united .

Leaders, indeed, will sometimes pretend that they know best and that the movement depends on them. But they can do this only by holding knowledge and power for themselves, keeping them away from the masses. This is why it is important to try to make our organisations as democratic as possible. If we rely on one leader, or a group of leaders for our victories, we are putting ourselves in a vulnerable position because we can easily be betrayed which can have devastating consequences.

The workers and the poor have nothing to gain and everything to lose by relying on leaders and governments. And we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by relying on ourselves, collectively. We are all leaders.

 The Socialist Party is not Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist, but plain simple revolutionaries. We do not intend to lead the masses towards a free and classless society because we are a part of the masses ourselves and adhere faithfully to the motto of the First International: “The emancipation of the workers is an act of the workers themselves.” If the masses wait for a revolutionary vanguard to lead them to the classless society or the free society, they will neither be free nor classless. There is enough evidence in support of the foregoing statement.

The term “dictatorship of the proletariat” was first employed by Marx in 1875 in a private document, and then popularised in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Many Marxists rightly think it a very unfortunate phrase, because no matter how many lengthy explanations are given concerning its true meaning, it lends itself to the interpretation that socialists stand for dictatorship. But that is not what Marx had in mind at all.

He was talking of the necessity for a victorious labor government during the transition period to resolutely destroy the old privileged positions and suppress all activities aimed at restoring the old order. In this sociological sense, he labelled the regime a “dictatorship”; not to signify minority rule in the manner of Robespierre’s Jacobin dictatorship in the eighteenth century French revolution, or Cromwell’s dictatorship in the seventeenth century English revolution, but only in the sense that it was still class rule.

 Rosa Luxemburg defined the proletarian dictatorship in her essays on the Russian Revolution:
“Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination; in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of capitalist society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class—that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people.”

Lenin assumed power in 1917 within a few years any libertarian content was discarded in Russia and the dictatorship became one not of a class but of a small group, with the Communist Party remaining the only one on the scene and all other parties suppressed and destroyed, and democracy eliminated from the inner councils of this one existing party as well.

 Everyone knows that throughout its history the capitalist class has been represented in most countries by two or more political organizations except in periods of dictatorial suppression. This is explained by the fact that the various subdivisions of the class have different and sometimes even conflicting interests that demand special political consideration and expression. In the United States, for example, some capitalist groups, in highly advanced or favoured industries, are free-traders. In France, Italy and Germany, the capitalists to this very day continue to be represented by anywhere from four to six different political parties, which voice either special group or sectional interests, or different programmatic solutions to meet the needs of the class.

It is irrelevant in this connection to point out, as some do, that the formal democracy under capitalism has very restricted meaning and is robbed of its essence by the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a privileged few who are able to manipulate the political mechanism in their own interests and corrupt the legislators to do their bidding. This is all very interesting and true. But socialists have traditionally insisted that the answer to the corruption and bowdlerization of democracy under capitalism is not to throw out democracy altogether and place their fate in the hands of a few saviors, but to eliminate the social parasitism of capitalism so as to be able to extend, to broaden, to ensure a genuine popular democracy, first for the working people, and eventually for all mankind.

Capitalism Without Austerity?

 The Toronto Globe, May 2, included a photograph of workers demonstrating against austerity in the May Day parade in Paris. They obviously want capitalism without austerity and that is impossible. Governments trying to balance a budget will make cuts in welfare, medicare, education, and other social programs because they are attempting to run capitalism and must save money wherever they can. If the workers must suffer, well, so be it as long as more money is not needed from profit to save the cuts. The only solution is a society without the constraints of profit and money and where people's needs are the priority. John Ayers.

Fracking Nonsense.

A report by the Canadian Council of Canadians on the impact of shale Gas development said, " There is not enough known about the environmental and health impacts of fracking to declare it safe. Key elements of the provinces' regulatory systems are not based on strong science and remain untested." Despite that, the federal government has refused to make amendments to those regulations. Contrary to what people say, you can, then, trust governments. You can trust them to do whatever suits the needs of big business and to hell with the problems. John Ayers.

Wage Slavery or Liberation

The immediate goal of reformists is legislation. The Socialist Party’s immediate goal is the social revolution. We know that most promised reforms will not be realised and that, even if realised, they will only ameliorate the lot of one set of workers at the expense of the others. We also know that gains made may well be later lost. How foolish it is for the workers to ask the capitalists to give them something that they have the power to take. Reforms are either economically unsound or politically impossible. That the workers can get only what they have the power to take. If they have the power to take, and begin to exercise that power, the capitalists will often try to get ahead of them and give, hoping to get credit that they do not deserve and deceive the workers into the belief that the benefits do not come because of their own organized powers but because of kindness in the hearts of the capitalists. All reforms  stop short of overthrowing the capitalist system become co-opted by that system and turned to its advantage (but not necessarily to the advantage of any particular capitalists). We only see one solution: the revolution. We clearly separate ourselves from reformists and believe all interests must be subordinated to the revolution. The Socialist Party above all wants to destroy the cause of all iniquities, all exploitation, all poverty and crime: private property.

We shouldn’t expect a miraculous transformation of human nature: that transformation will take place afterwards by the effects of the new conditions of existence. To suppose them to be instantaneous, contemporaneous with the revolution, means putting the effect before the cause. The revolution we conceive of can only be made by and for the people, without any false representatives. We believe that the new organisation of society from the bottom up and not from top down, by the decrees. The revolution obviously can’t be the work of a party but demands the cooperation of the masses. Without the involvement of the masses we may carry out a coup d’etat, not a revolution. The workers have no need of  leaders: they are quite capable of charging one of their own with a particular task. Workers need to form common aspirations and a community of ideas. Only through this that do workers unite.

The workers must go forward, take possession of their tools, of the means of labor and life without paying tribute and without serving anyone. Workers don’t have to ask permission of anyone to take over factories, workshops and offices and to install themselves there. Wealth will only truly be placed in common when everyone works, when production will have been organised in the common interest. The fundamental principle of the organisation of production is that each person should work, must render him or herself useful unless he or she is sick or frail, too young or too elderly. All men and women should make themselves useful to society through work. it will be up to the workers to organise work and to regulate their reciprocal relations. Force will be nothing about it; voluntary agreement is necessary. It will occur through free association.  People will pass from one job to another, from manual labour to study and artistic recreation. But in working, in studying, in cultivating the fine arts, etc, the goal will always be to make ourselves useful to our comrades. Work is life and also the social bond that unites men and women in society. There must be solidarity in labour in order for society to function properly.

The Socialist Party say that enough is already produced to satisfy all the needs of all people, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and provide welfare to the millions suffering in poverty. There is an abundance today. The landowner and the capitalist only allow the fields and factories to produce for profits. If no profit the landowner leaves the land fallow, the capitalist closes the factory and the workers go hungry. We possess, even today, sufficient means of production to satisfy all reasonable needs. There will be simple relations of reciprocity and assistance. Experience and agreements will tell the individual and the labour associations what society has need of at a given moment. Everyone instead of thinking of their own interests, will fraternise, practice solidarity on a worldwide scale.

The Socialist Party must do everything possible to widen and generalize the movement and give it a revolutionary character. But above all we must be with the workers and prove the need for the future society. We must demonstrate that socialism isn’t an abstract concept, a scientific dream, or a distant vision, but a vital and living possibility. Socialism is not Utopia that OUGHT to be established but a future system which we inevitably MUST attain.

 Capitalism is tremendously wasteful and destructive system. Profits are the heart of capitalism, markets its circulating system; capitalist enterprise consequently required the transformation of production for use into production for profit and increasingly larger markets.

Capitalism is based on wage slavery. The capitalists hire wage workers to produce wealth, give them part of that wealth in the form of wages and keep the rest. We do not sell our labour to the capitalists; we sell our labour power. Labour power is just as different from labour as a machine is different from the work it does. Labour power is the mental and physical capabilities of man which he exercises when he produces wealth.

Terrorism Is Big Business

 Terrorism is big business. The Toronto Star of May 10th. reported that Britain spent $5.9 billion on domestic counter terrorism measures in 2010/11 while the US has spent $1 trillion since 9/11. The chances of dying in a terrorist attack in the States is one in six million. The odds of dying from a wasp, hornet, or bee sting is one in 75,000. As usual, capitalism can't get its priorities right.

 The same issue tells us that Japan is in deep trouble as its population declines and is projected to drop to 50 million by the end of the century compared to its high of 128 million (2008) That would be good news in a world that wants to control population increase, but in capitalism it is the death knoll as the economy is shrinking and to be successful, as we all know, you must keep on growing. John Ayers.

A Crazy Society

Socialists are often accused of being mad because we propose a new society based on common ownership but we feel particularly sane when we read of the following. A very rare 19th Century postage stamp from a former British colony in South America has sold for a record $9.5m (£5.6m) at auction in New York. 'It took only two minutes for the British Guiana one-cent magenta stamp to be sold to an anonymous bidder. It measures just 1in by 1in (2.5cm by 2.5cm), and had not been publicly exhibited since 1986.' (BBC News, 18 June) Children dying for the lack of a couple of dollars whilst some anonymous parasite lavishes millions on a spec of paper. We are the mad ones? RD