No Mean City - book review

From the November 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the thirties, a Gorbals bakery worker and a journalist by the names of McArthur and H. Kingsley Long wrote a novel describing the Glasgow slum area — the Gorbals — as it appeared to them in the 20's and 30's.

Basically, it is the story of a slum hooligan named Johnnie Stark, nicknamed Razor King, and of the gangland violences which were regular features of Glasgow life at that period. The gangs in Glasgow were not organized for criminal purposes and were hooligans trying to overcome the boredom and monotony of a sordid existence. Most lived in squalor — ten and eleven to a room — most were unemployed.

The authors concentrate their story round the Gorbals area (McArthur lived there), but the social conditions they described could be found in all working-class slums in Glasgow; Bridgeton, Anderson, Plantation, Calton, Townhead. All that these misguided hooligans could hope to gain from their inter-gang wars was permanent facial disfigurement as a result of razor-slashing, or a cracked skull as a result of being hit on the head by a beer bottle. But the excitement and anticipation of the fight relieved the boredom, and this was a major factor in making their miserable social condition tolerable.

This perverse way of looking at life could not, nor cannot, be explained if the slum background is ignored.

The Gorbals became part of Glasgow in 1846. Situated in rather a pleasant area on the banks of the Clyde, it was originally a fishing village. (Glasgow, in fact, specialised in salmon fishing up until the 18th century). The Clyde was a fordable stream about three feet deep at the Broomilaw (eventually deepened to take ships of 25-foot draft).

The commercial development of Glasgow was due to the tobacco trade. Ships took manufactured goods, leather work, saddles, clothing materials, etc to the American colony, Virginia, and returned laden with tobacco. The Glasgow "tobacco lords" made huge fortunes.

The more pleasing architectural parts of Glasgow owe their origin to the wealth and largesse of the tobacco lords. The tobacco trade collapsed with the American War of Independence in 1776, and the heavy industrial development of the Clyde valley (coal, iron and steel) began a few years later, and started to intensify in 1815 when George Watt designed the first steamship. Glasgow became a huge immigration centre for Eastern Europeans, mainly Russian and Polish Jews, Italians, Germans, Belgians, and of course Irish (the New York of the 19th century). All came to seek employment in the mills, mines and shipyards.

Scotland generally had no large indigenous labour force, and needed immigrant labour. Glasgow probably had the highest proportion and the least time in which they could be absorbed into the meagre social background which existed. Tenement houses were literally thrown up in the immediate areas of the factory or mill. Mile upon mile of these social abominations still form the bulk of working-class housing in Glasgow. Most consist of two rooms with no bathroom or hot water and outside W.C. on each of the four floors.

A slum is a product of overcrowding and through the lack of proper washing facilities, the house usually becomes verminous. Engel's descriptions of the slums of Manchester and Salford apply with more force in Glasgow. Overcrowding, lack of privacy, and domestic discomfort forces the slum-dwellers into the streets and eventually into the pub. It is no accident that Glasgow had, or had up until recently, the highest number of pubs per square mile than any other city in the world.

Not unnaturally, the people became heavy drinkers. Unlike the slum dwellers of Calcutta and Bombay, who at least have the warmth of the sun for an ally and can even sleep in the open air, the Glasgow tenement and slum-dweller is not so lucky. Living in a soot-laden atmosphere in a cold, wet and windy climate, he becomes dominated by his living conditions and the tedium of work (and the lack of it). Such is the urgency of immediate existence they become aggressive, argumentative, and intolerant. Directed along Socialist lines this would be an advantage, but as it is these only serve to perpetuate a narrow conservatism and a suspicion of any new ideas, including those of the SPGB.

Much has since changed since 1932. For one thing Glasgow, far from being the second city in the British Empire with over 1 million inhabitants, now has a population of 816,000 (1972 estimate) — a reduction of 18 per cent in the last twelve years. Many of the slums have gone, but many more remain. In fact, the slum reception housing areas built in 1933-37 like Blackhill and Shettleston are rapidly becoming slum areas as overcrowding grows afresh. It should not be assumed that it was socially enlightened planners and politicians who were responsible for demolishing the slums. A far more potent reason was the appalling health hazards which these slums produced. Apart from inevitable poverty diseases like TB and rickets, infectious diseases like scarlet fever and diphtheria were quite common in the 'twenties and 'thirties in the Gorbals in the south, Calton and Bridgeton in the east; Cowcaddens in the north and the highest infantile mortality rate of any industrial county. The infant mortality rate for the city as a whole in 1935 was 110 per thousand.

The tower blocks rise in the Gorbals — whole streets have been demolished. The Irish and the Jewish immigrants of the old Gorbals have been socially assimilated, but the Pakistanis and Indians and other Asian immigrants now take their place. The same old squalor plagues these newcomers and racial tension has now become a new element in gang warfare. The post-war slum reception areas like Castlemilk, Easterhouse and Possil have produced their own gangs and vandals, and little wonder. These cheerless cellular dormitories could only inspire in the young the urge to get out of them as quickly as possible.. Miles from the city centre, poor transport services, little or no amenities; in fact, pubs were not allowed in pre-war housing schemes. They present such a desolate prospect that many wish they were back in the slums again with its intensive social life based on the camaraderie of poverty.

Full employment after World War II eased the worst rigours of poverty. The Bingo halls and the betting shops are full. The pubs are now catering for women (a post-war innovation), and more whiskey and less "red biddy" is being drunk.

The creation of an industrial sore such as Glasgow in the heady days of unrestricted exploitation in the 19th century has taught the capitalists a very expensive lesson. The scale of re-housing, health and welfare services, were and are far higher than any city of comparable population in the UK and possibly Europe. And yet Glasgow, it is claimed, is the success story of the social reformer! Low rents, good Council housing, health centres, new schools and hospitals. The poverty of the past, we are told, is so much water under Jamaica Bridge. The drunks and the derelicts still sleep it off in the Glasgow Green, but a newer phenomenon, the prostitutes and drug addicts, are now to be seen in George Square. Truly a sign of the affluent society, as nobody could afford either in pre-war Glasgow.

Politically Glasgow has had more than its share of prominent Left-wingers. A stronghold  of the ILP for many years, it certainly did not lack advocates in Parliament — Maxton; McGovern; Campbell Stephen; Kirkwood; MacLean and others. But still Glasgow does not flourish. As unemployment re-emerges, as prices rise, and the threat of redundancy becomes more imminent, the old feeling of apprehension returns. Have the good times gone — will slump and poverty return?

The Socialist knows that we cannot have capitalism without these for very long. There is no permanence in social reform. It all has to be done again and again.

Why should the working class in Glasgow and elsewhere gamble on poverty or capitalist prosperity? This choice need not be made. Glasgow has allowed itself to be wrung dry of surplus-value by the rapacity of capitalism. Its sons became undersized, undernourished, under-housed and over-worked in order to build massive fortunes for a race of arrogant parasites. There is absolutely no reason why they should continue to do so.

If they will look beyond the sponsored parochialism of local politics to the broader issues of Socialism and consciously associate themselves with a working-class movement intent on the abolition of capitalism, then and only then will Glasgow flourish.
Jim D'Arcy

This Is Progress?

One of the illusions spread by supporters of capitalism is that although it has a dire history of exploitation and poverty it is gradually improving. Try telling that story to the half million Bolivian children who are still suffering from near-Dickensian conditions. 'Bolivia has lowered the legal working age to allow children to work from the age of 10 as long as they also attend school and are self-employed. The law also permits 12-year-olds to be contracted to work for others. But they need parental authorisation. ...... More than 500,000 children already work to supplement the family income in Bolivia according to the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef).' (BBC News, 18 July) RD

Desperate People

They are not the only desperate people. Many from North Africa are trying to flee poverty and cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. 600,000 are waiting to make the journey and so far this year 42,000 have reached Italy. The risks they take to escape their poverty are high, often using unseaworthy boats causing the deaths of 170 so far this year. Such a system that causes and allows this to happen should be trashed and soon. John Ayers.

God Is Not Talking

As an example of the above, California is entering its third year of drought. In many areas farming has come to a standstill and farmers and their workers are suffering economically. The Toronto Star described a scene, " The two field workers scraped hoes over weeds that weren't there. "Let us pretend we see many weeds." Francisco Galvez told his friend Rafael. That way, maybe they would get a full week's work." A Mormon missionary has been visiting Francisco and his family. He says they all say the same thing, "If your mind is right you can talk to God and he will tell you what to do." Given the enormity of the problem it seems like God is not talking. John Ayers.

Gaza Stripped Bare

The siege of the Gaza Strip was imposed in 2007 to induce the Gazans to overthrow the Hamas administration they have elected. Keeping Gaza and the West Bank isolated from direct contact with the outside world is crucial to Israel’s claim to continued sovereignty over the occupied territories and preventing the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state. Some sections of the Israeli ruling class are prepared to accept a peace settlement based on the “two-state solution”. Peace would give Israeli business unrestricted access to Arab export markets and cheap labour. The present government, however, is tied to the occupation – above all, the military-industrial complex and the settlers’ lobby. Netanyahu’s Likud is loathe to contemplate a genuine Palestinian state. For these people, peace is a danger to be warded off at all costs. This explains Israel’s cold reception to the re-amalgamation of Abbas West Bank Palestinian Authority and Gaza’s Hamas.

The Israeli state oppresses the Palestinians, driving them into the hands of the fanatics of Hamas out of despair at the failure of the secular Palestinian left. In turn the pitiful rocket and mortar attacks provide for the Israeli state 'proof' of the murderous nature of the Palestinians and drives the Israeli public to support harsher and harsher measures against the against the Palestinian people who are all now viewed as complicit in terrorism. This is a self destructive spiral and must be broken. The Israeli state is not shaken by the ineffectual rockets of Hamas. Neither the Israeli army nor Hamas really care about 'their' civilians, except as bloody images for the cameras of the world's press in order to justify their own next atrocity.

Perhaps one of the saddest and longest lasting examples of a working class divided against itself is the continuing factional struggle between Israeli and Palestinian workers. Our appeal is to both Jewish and Palestine workers to shun the political intentions and racial rhetoric of both the rulers of Israel and Hamas. Not every Jewish citizen of Israel is a Zionist at heart -- they are merely workers. Indeed Jews and Arabs can live side by side as 20% of Israeli-Arabs demonstrate, albeit they suffer the discrimination of the Jewish religious lobby and Zionist expansionists. Zealots expounded Jewishness as a separate race while Islamic fundamentalists find fertile ground among the oppressed Moslem population.

Israel/Palestine is today de facto one state. But it is an apartheid state which discriminates against non-Jews in favour of Jews. Currently, the West Bank and East Jerusalem house some 500,000 Jewish settlers living in more than 130 settlements dispersed throughout these areas.

Dr Ghada Karmi, author of ‘Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine’, writes:
“The Palestinian task now is to fight against this apartheid and mount a struggle, not for an impossible Palestinian state, but for equal rights under Israeli rule. They would need to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is now a liability that only camouflages the true situation, and then confront Israel, their actual ruler, directly. As stateless people under military occupation, they must demand equal civil and political rights with Israeli citizens, and apply for Israeli citizenship if necessary. That puts the onus on Israel to respond: either to ignore the five million Palestinians it rules, or vacate their land, or grant them equal rights.”

 Peace will create better conditions for democracy. No longer obsessed with ethnic conflict, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians will be able to refocus on the social, economic and ecological problems spawned by the “normal” peacetime functioning of capitalism. A space for socialist ideas will open up in this corner of the world. We ask that workers set aside the reaction of nationalism, religious bigotry, ethnic hatred, racism and join together to root out the real problem itself — capitalism.

Global Warming Problems.

Global warming can create big problems for animals farmed for food, the experts say. Turkeys are vulnerable to heat that makes their breast meat mushy and unappetizing. Disease can spread through a chicken coop and severe weather can wipe out entire herds of cattle. According to Gale Strasbourg, a professor of food and nutrition at Michigan State University, " Within a day or two after a heat wave you will go from no problem at all to forty per cent of turkey breasts having a problem." Ian Miller, ex-principal climate specialist for the World Bank said," The US Department of Agriculture approach to climate change is like trying to promote driver safety while helping the car industry make faster cars." Scientists who are working to create new breeds of animals that can cope with a warmer climate argue that they too are focused on depleting resources. Of course, nowhere do we see a concerted effort to get to the root of the problem – the way we produce the goods needed for society and the ways in which that is done. John Ayers.

It Goes Against His Recent Actions

In a rare endorsement of science, specifically vaccination, Prime Minister Harper said, " Don't indulge your theories; think of your children and listen to the experts" A commendable sentiment as science and vaccinations have saved millions of lives. However, it goes against his recent actions regarding science and facts – cuts to research funding for the Department of Justice, massive closures of libraries, including loss of collections of Health Canada, and even restrictions on the ability of meteorologists to use the words 'climate change', part of his sustained efforts to muzzle scientific work in general. John Ayers.

The Case For Socialism

One of the great mysteries  is why people tolerate such a system as ours that is full of exploitation and oppression particularly if Abraham Lincoln’s aphorism is true that:
 “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
 When the majority of the people refuse to be fooled any longer they can as in Percy Shelley’s words:
 “Rise like lions after slumber,
 In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many - they are few.”

Some refuse to learn while others decline to remember. Socialists are those who remember and set their course by the lessons they have learned. “The emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself,” said Karl Marx. When speaking of socialist revolution we seek “no condescending saviors” as the International says. we believe that task belongs to the workers themselves. There can be no socialism without the working class of the world. Those who really want to build a new and better world of socialist freedom must see to it that the intellectual constructors of new models of society do not succeed in enticing the people with their false radicalism. It must be made clear that for all their criticism and attacks on the status quo that they stand for the retention of capitalism in various forms.

There’s no point in forming a socialist party if it isn’t out to change people’s ideas: and if it is, then it must prepare for the task. Socialist parties are the living carriers and embodiment of the ideas learned and recalled from our collective past. Our idea of revolutionary politics boil down to this idea – to teach the working class to rely upon itself and upon its own ideas and organisation and not submit at any time to the interest, the needs, the leadership, the programme, the movement, the organisation, or the ideas of any other class. To remain independent. Some are aghast: “You don’t mean to say that you really believe that the working class can emancipate themselves, can themselves take political power? and establish a new democratic society? ... They need a strong hand over them, to lead them , to show the way ...” These people refuse to learn the idea that the workers can free themselves. If there is one thing that human history shows, and human history is the history of the struggle for human liberation, for the ideas of freedom – it is that these ideas cannot long be suppressed. If history gives no other lesson, it gives this one. Ideas representing the most sacred yearnings of the oppressed and exploited everywhere have triumphed before. They will triumph again. It is our conviction that the socialist revolution will triumph.

We are not deterministically declaring socialism is inevitable. If this was so we would not require a socialist party and simply devote ourselves to social activism as the goal will take care of itself and all we would need is the creation of workers councils. If it were that easy!

The working class understands the necessity of combining into unions, of resisting the onslaught of capital.  As long as the workers’ struggle is confined to the narrow limits of trade unionism the power of capital over labour is guaranteed. Our task in the economic struggle is not to fight for better terms in the sale of labour-power, that role is for the unions, but to fight for the abolition of the capitalist system that compels the working class to sell themselves as wage-slaves. Our task  is to move the class struggle towards capturing the state machine.  After we have overthrown the capitalists we will do away with the capitalist parliament and  we will establish socialism.  People will participate directly in running society from top to bottom to administer the vast riches of the world, its lands, forests, mineral resources, lakes and rivers as well as the means of production, for the common benefit of all. There will be an end to all exploitation. The wealth will be the property of the people and not of individual capitalists.

Gone will be the anarchy of capitalist production. Gone, too, the economic crises which today bring so much misery. The workers will distribute the resources of society according to the needs of the people, not to satisfy a few capitalists’ hunger for profits as is the case today. Through planning we shall build up and modernize the factories and other productive facilities and eliminate backward and backbreaking labor. We will construct new houses and medical, cultural and sports facilities for people. The quality of everyday life will improve vastly as socialist construction proceeds. Socialism will enable us to eliminate the regional economic disparities that today plague the world.

We will also have socialist relations of production to replace the capitalist organization of labour. The repressive system of foremen, supervisors and overseers will be wiped out. Workers will participate in the running of the factories by electing their works committee that will collectively assume the responsibility for the running of production and the quality of production.

 Socialism we will raise the level of education of the whole people. Higher education will no longer be reserved as the privilege of an elite. Not just education but the arts, scientific and cultural pursuits will also flourish. No more will people face deteriorating health or declining health care facilities. Socialism means tremendous progress. The future of humanity is a radically new society where classes and the state will have been completely eliminated. All members of society will contribute and share in the common good.

Voting for Democrats or Republicans, Labour or Tory, means supporting both sides’ attacks against the working class. Workers now face threats from both ruling-class parties on the most vulnerable sections of our class. Capitalism is an exploitative system and sexism and racism  are so interrelated within it that it offers no future for any worker. Workers have a stake in the struggle for democratic rights and must make use of those rights, no matter how limited, under capitalism to build their own organisations of struggle: the trade unions, community organisations — but, most of all, a socialist party. In doing it gives the ability to the working class to bring down this wretched system of exploitation and oppression. The working class needs a political alternative that meets the needs of our class, based on our class’s power and our collective strength, dedicated to overthrowing both the capitalist economic system and the state that defends it.

Raise Your Voice, Not The Sea Level 

To win

The capitalists in their never-ending greed for higher profits, are willing to make life a misery for  most working people. The working class, if it were united, could not only stop the assault in its tracks, it could turn this planet into a storehouse of plenty for all. Socialism is not a system of society constructed from a pre-ordained plan, built to order, but another stage of social evolution. Academics and intellectuals enjoy a certain measure of prestige esteem and influence that they can grow so deluded to hold that they are the prime movers of society and thus become architects of various models of societies arrogating the power of decision-making from the people themselves. These professors and philosophers create their own wish-fulfilling interpretation of Utopia. They endeavour to place themselves at the head of the labour movement which is to be the vehicle for their projects which they would steer the workers towards.  Ultra-radical as their ideas first appear, if scrutinised deeper, we see they adopt simply idealised forms of present-day capitalism - an impossible capitalism without exploitation. Pious proposals about an "ideal state of things" and what the worker "ought to get" won’t alter facts. Often in the end it is merely a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The left reformists, many of whom consider themselves socialists know it required to present a radical face, and lo and behold, their “socialism” emerges.  Socialists simply to tell the truth to our fellow workers: the revolution will not come through saviors but through the actions and the consciousness of the working class itself.

Our view of the socialist society is therefore a forecast of the lines of future development already indicated in the present. The actual builders of the future socialist society will be the socialist generations themselves and the Socialist Party refrains from offering these future generations any instructions or blueprints as in the words of Auguste Blanqui, a French revolutionary: “Tomorrow does not belong to us.” We assume that the people in the future society will be wiser than us and that they will know what to do far better than we can tell them. The Socialist Party can only anticipate and point out the general direction of development, and we should not try to do more. But what the future socialist society will look like is a question of interest and has importance in our propaganda.  Workers who join our movement will be inspired by a great vision of a new world and we can  trace some of the broad outlines if not all the details.

Before one can expect a social revolution, a political revolution must have taken place: the workers must have captured the State. The social revolution: the introduction of the new, higher relations of production i.e., no proprietorship, but common ownership of the social wealth, can develop the productivity of labour to a point where we can put into practice the motto: “From each according his ability; to each according his needs.”

 Of all these changes, which can be predicted, the transformation of the system of production and the increased productivity is in the forefront. Even at the present stage of economic development, if everybody worked and there was no waste, a universal four-hour day would undoubtedly be enough to provide abundance for all. The machinery and technology are today used to enslave the workers, while they could be used to help the workers and society as a whole.Once the whole of society is concentrated on the problem of increasing productivity, even a working day of four hours will be unnecessary. Work will be highly organised in the interests of efficiency of a cooperative labour process and freedom from toil and drudgery, made possible by the ever-increasing extent  science and technology advances productivity and automation to reduce the amount of labour time required.

Where there is abundance and free access it, people will have no further use for money and  the absurdity of wage rationing will become apparent. People will cease to work for wages. There will be no money, and there will not even be any bookkeeping transactions or coupons to regulate how much one works and how much he or she gets such as the labour time vouchers Marx suggested as a temporary measure during the time of scarcity.  People will work without any compulsion and take what they need. That is what the workers of all ages have been after—a better world.

A working class that does not see its own power today certainly doesn’t see that it can generate a real alternative to capitalism. Marx always stressed that action created consciousness, not vice versa. Tomorrow, when the explosions occur, all things including socialism will seem both possible and necessary. As revolutionaries who are loyal to our class, we support every effort on the part of workers to better their situation. We are open about the fact that we want to explain the need for socialist revolution. Unless struggle takes a revolutionary direction, worse is yet to come. Thomas Piketty in his acclaimed book ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ documents that the fundamental direction of capitalism is to descend back toward inequality conditions of the 19th-century.

Marxism is about the working class. The beginning, middle and end of analysis is the working-class. Revolutionary theory that does not connect at some stage with the real movement of the workers is a meaningless abstraction. Nowhere today does the revolutionary workers movement have the support to set in motion the social transformation of production. The immediate task is to expand our influence and membership among our class. No one knows the suffering better than the slave himself, and therefore it must be he who must free himself from the lash of the masters. Nothing can be stronger than the working class, when all the workers are properly organised; when they all stand together. Then will come the time about which many through the ages have dreamed; the time when the master and the slave shall have disappeared from the earth.

The workers have always been on the defensive to recover lost ground, so that after the fight they are in the same position as some time before the fight. The spirit of defense, however, is "Not to lose." That is all. To go toward victory in the industrial revolution that is already in its beginning stage, the workers must be embued with the spirit of attack. That means, "To Win." The Canadian One Big Union stressed class organisation rather than industrial organisation. In pursuance of this class policy it did not condemn political action, but rather declared that the only hope for the workers was in the economic and political solidarity of the working class, One Big Union and One Big Party. The 0. B. U. asserted that organisation by industries was just as archaic as organization by craft unionism, since unskilled workers moved from one industry to another as occasion demands. Thus the 0. B. U. firmly adopted the principle of placing all workers, regardless of at what they worked, within the same locals. In larger places, separate locals were formed which might coincide with different industries, but not necessarily. In that case, all the locals were connected by central labor councils which controlled the locality. Thus the 0. B. U. formed, not industrial union locals, but what amounted to workers councils (or soviets) on practically a geographical basis. The organisation structure stressed the principle of placing all workers employed in a given productive unit, regardless of skill or artificial division, into one group, whereby they could act concertedly for class interests. The role of the One Big Party - the socialist party  -  was a destructive one solely to dispossess the capitalist and dismantle the State, while the O. B .U. role was a constructive one, to build a new society and re-structure production for the co-operative commonwealth after the capitalist State was abolished.

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.