Won't be fooled again

Socialism is often called the society of the free and equal while democracy is defined as the rule of the people. These simple definitions still ring true. But when some say they too call for a socialist democracy it is incumbent upon us to enquire “Just what do you mean by socialism, and what do you mean by democracy?” and ask “Do you mean what Marx and Engels said? Or do you mean what Lenin and Stalin did?” Workers around the world have become more acutely sensitive than ever before to the value and importance of democratic rights and there is no doubt that mass media propaganda has profoundly affected the sentiments of the working class in regard to socialism. The one-party dictatorship that was in Russia and elsewhere has been identified with the name of socialism and it is perhaps understandable that workers have been prejudiced against socialism. The socialist movement will not advance significantly until it regains the initiative and corrects the misrepresentations of socialism and the misinterpretations of democracy. Our strategy, as socialists, is simply to restate what socialism and democracy meant to the founders and pioneers of our movement and to bring their formulations up to date and apply them to present conditions. There is no room for misunderstanding. It requires a clean break with all the perversions and distortions of the real meaning of socialism and democracy and their relation to each other, and a return to the original definitions. Nothing short of this will do. The authentic socialist movement is the most democratic movement in all history.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority” cannot be anything else but democratic, if we understand by “democracy” the rule of the people, the majority.  A society where the people are without voice or the is just as foreign to the thoughts of Marx and Engels as the reformist idea that socialism can be handed down to the workers by degrees by those who exploit them.

Marx and Engels reiterated their position that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves”. That is a way of saying that a socialist a revolution is unthinkable without the active participation of the majority of the working class. Nothing could be more democratic than that. Only the revolution that replaces the class rule of the capitalists by the class rule of the workers who constitute the vast majority of people can really establish democracy.

Marx and Engels never taught that the nationalisation of the forces of production signified the establishment of socialism, still less could they have sanctioned, even if they had been able to imagine, the monstrous idea that socialism was without freedom and without equality, or that people controlled by a ruthless police dictatorship, complete with prisons, torture chambers and forced-labour camps, could be designated as a “socialist” society. Marxists defined socialism as a classless society—with abundance, freedom and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic workers’ state, to say nothing of a state in the monstrous form of a bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority. The Communist Manifesto said: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association.” NB: “an association”, not a state—“an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”

Just as those travesties described as “ peoples democracies” cannot be passed themselves off genuine workers democracies, nor should  those who claim describe capitalist countries as democratic succeed in duping us. What is termed bourgeois democracy is a system of minority rule, and the beneficiaries of it are the small minority of exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slaveowners of ancient times were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of the Athenian democracy. Within bourgeois democracy people can exercise the right of free speech through a free media. But this formal right of freedom is outweighed rather heavily by the inconvenient circumstance that the small capitalist minority happens to enjoy a complete monopoly of ownership and control of all the big presses, and of television and radio, and of all other means of communication and information as right now we witness the endeavours of the authorities to control the internet and the world wide web.

The right to join or form union organisation is a precious right, a democratic right, yet workers have neither voice nor vote in the management of the industry which they have created, nor in regulating the speed of the assembly line. Full control of production is still the exclusive prerogative of “management”, that is, of the absentee stock-holders. Workers have no democratic rights in industry at all, as far as regulating production is concerned; that these rights are exclusively reserved for the parasitic owners, who never see the inside of a factory. What’s democratic about that? Another word to express socialism is “industrial democracy”, the extension of democracy to industry, the democratic control of industry by the workers themselves, where private ownership eliminated.

But even so, with all that, a little democracy is better than none. We socialists have never denied that. Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet peoples’ needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, the many structures of economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that people can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives. Democracy and socialism go hand in hand. Socialists do not want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy. Socialists do not want big corporate bureaucracies to control our society. Rather, we believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect. Resources are used to make money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We believe that the economic institutions should commonly owned and collectively controlled by the people themselves. Democracy does not come from the top, it comes from the bottom.

“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is perhaps the most misfortunate of expressions and perhaps one of the most misunderstood phrase that has been seized upon by followers of Lenin to justify the idea of the existence of a coercive State after the establishment of “socialism”, that stage various Bolshevik-type  groups believe that we must go through as a lengthy transition before "real communism" can be brought about. Marx did believe that a period known as "the dictatorship of the proletariat" would separate capitalism and socialism/communism. However, this phrase was consciously and dishonestly distorted by Lenin.

Marx meant by the word dictatorship in an explicit sense to mean the domination of society by one class through its control over the state machine. He often, for example, referred to Britain as a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", though he was freely allowed to write and work in the country. Marx took the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" from the French revolutionaries he met when he lived in Paris in the mid-1840s. Only, whereas they saw this as being a minority dictatorship supposedly on behalf of the working class (or proletariat) Marx gave it a democratic content and saw it as the unlimited exercise of political power by the working class by and on its own behalf. What Marx envisaged was a period between the end of capitalist political rule and the establishment of socialism (or communism, the same thing) when political power would be exercised by the majority working class within a democratic context. So, yes, he did envisage democracy and freedom of speech for all people, even capitalists and former capitalists, under his interpretation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Engels referred to the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and, although we can doubt that it really was a beginning of a transition to socialism, it was an elected council with competing parties-quite unlike Russia under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.  Leninism made what can only be construed as a quite deliberate play on words, using the term dictatorship in its popularly understood sense, to mean the denial of basic democratic freedoms, the maintenance of rule by force and the ruthless suppression of political opponents. Lenin gave special emphasis to the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to identify the term with a state ruled by a vanguard party. It is noticeable however that Lenin's Three Sources of Marxism article contained no mention of the phrase or Lenin's particular conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Although, the Socialist Party say that the working class should still organise to win control of political power and use it in the course of establishing socialism - and would call this the "dictatorship of the proletariat" if pressed - we don't envisage this as lasting for any length of time and think the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" to be so open to misunderstanding as to be counter-productive. If used by Socialist Party members it is meant the working class conquest of power, which should not be confuse with a socialist society. We prefer to speak simply of the (very short-term democratic) exercise of political power by the working class.

The "poverty premium"

In Scotland the poorest households are paying £1,300 a year more than their wealthier neighbours for everyday goods and services. Thereport by a coalition of churches andcharities draws on a year of grassroots research conducted in Glasgow and charts the so-called "poverty premium"; the high prices charged for everyday essentials including food, fuel, finance, furniture, and even funerals in the city's poorest neighbourhoods.

Niall Cooper, Director of Church Action on Poverty, said: “It shouldn’t cost money to be poor. It is unacceptable for companies to exploit their most vulnerable customers by charging them the highest prices.”

Peter MacDonald, leader of the Iona Community, said: “It is clear from this report, consistent with several others, that we are not ‘all in this together’. The poorest among us are paying the price of austerity. This is morally and economically just plain wrong.”

Martin Johnstone, chief executive of Faith in Community Scotland and secretary of Scotland’s Poverty Truth Commission, said: “This report highlights what many of our poorest citizens already know. If you are poor then food, fuel, furniture and even funerals costs you more than if you have spare money in the bank. That is ludicrous but it is reality. It’s a scandal, a scandal that we must overturn, once and for all. Having read this report no politician, no business and no citizen should rest content until things are different.”

Socialist Courier would say that this confirms what the Socialist Party has been saying for decades. Poverty is an inherent part of capitalism and rather than expecting supporters of the capitalist system such as businesses and politicians to remedy the failure to provide for all, no citizen should rest until things are different and we have socialism.

Getting Burnt

That Russell Hobbs has withdrawn thousands of irons after customers have reported them bursting into flames in their hands should come as no surprise. The company knew about the problem for sometime before withdrawing the faulty models. 'Tim Wright, the vice-president of Spectrum Brands, Russell Hobbs parent company, admitted the company discovered the problem 18 months ago, and apologised for all who had been hurt. ..... Questioned about the delay in recalling the faulty products, he said: "We did actually discover it over a year ago as you say. We recognised that we had a flex in our irons which is actually UK and European compliant, but in certain occasions was causing an issue.' (Daily Telegraph, 6 December) The whole motive force of capitalism is to make a profit. Everything else is secondary including safety. RD

A Torturous Society

Torture according to the press is something carried out by unscrupulous foreigners but just isn't British. So how come  a letter discovered in Downing Street at the National Archives has placed Britain in the dock at European Court of Human Rights accused of torturing detainees in Northern Ireland in the 1970s? 'The confidential memo written in March 1977 by Merlyn Rees, then Labour home secretary, states that, six years earlier, Tory ministers had authorised the use of torture in Ulster. Mr Rees told prime minister James Callaghan that he thought individuals or soldiers should not be prosecuted because "a political decision was taken" to use the so-called deep interrogation techniques.' (Times, 6 December) These techniques included wall standing in stress positions, white noise, hooding, sleep deprivation and withholding of food and water. RD

Taking on Trotskyism

The first things that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed, immediately after the October revolution, were the soviets, the workers' councils and all the democratic bodies. In this respect Lenin and Trotsky were the worst enemies of socialism in the 20th century.

Certain characteristics are shared by most Trotskyist groups.

(1)   They are committed to the outdated concept of Bolshevism and fail to see revolution as involving the vast majority of the working class, but as a minority action in which the party leads the masses to the violent overthrow of the existing State. All Trotskyist organisations start from the premise that workers are too stupid to understand or want socialism by their own volition. Therefore, revolutionary ideas have to be introduced from outside the working class by all-knowing 'professional revolutionaries' who will lead workers to the promised land.

(2)   Trotskyists have a Bolshevik attitude to political democracy. Not only are their organisations based on Leninist democratic centralism whereby power flows from the leadership downwards.

(3)   They accept the Leninist conception of socialism (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as 'the first stage' of Communism and reject the claim that socialism and communism both mean a stateless, propertyless, classless society which can be attained immediately.

(4)    Trotskyists are reformists, advocating a list of what Trotsky called 'transitional demands'. These range from demands for a minimum wage to giving advice to the Government on how to run foreign policy. In theory, Trotskyists claim to be under no illusion that the reforms demanded could be achieved within the framework of capitalism but are posed as bait to get workers to struggle for them and that the workers would learn in the course of the struggle that these demands could not be achieved within capitalism and so would come to struggle (under the leadership of the vanguard party) to abolish capitalism.

In discussion with them you gain the clear impression that they share the illusion that the reforms they advocate can be achieved under capitalism (as, indeed, some of them could be). In other words, they are often the victims of their own "tactics".

(5)   They usually all advise workers to vote for the Labour Party when it comes to election time despite their professed recognition that Labour is a capitalist party. The sad thing is they think they are changing the Labour Party yet it is Labour is changing them.

The Socialist Party is hostile to all defenders of capitalism, but none more than those who preserve capitalism in the name of fighting for socialism. Trotsky was no different in principle than Stalin. As Anton Ciliga  put it:

“Trotsky as well as Stalin wished to pass off the State as being the proletariat, the bureaucratic dictatorship over the proletariat as the proletarian dictatorship, the victory of State capitalism over both private capitalism and socialism as a victory of the latter.”

 In exile Trotsky played the role of "loyal opposition" to the Stalin regime in Russia. He was very critical of the political aspects of this regime (at least some of them, since he too stood for a one-party dictatorship in Russia), but to his dying day defended the view that the Russian revolution had established a "Workers State" in Russia (whatever that might be) and that this represented a gain (whatever that was) for the working class both of Russia and of the whole world. how could the adjective "workers" be applied to a regime where workers could be sent to a labour camp for turning up late for work and shot for going on strike? Trotsky was only able to sustain his point of view by making the completely unmarxist assumption that capitalist distribution relations (the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could exist on the basis of socialist production relations. Marx, by contrast, had concluded, from a study of past and present societies, that the mode of distribution was entirely determined by the mode of production. Thus the existence of privileged distribution relations in Russia should itself have been sufficient proof that Russia had nothing to do with socialism. Trotsky rejected the view that Russia was state capitalist on the flimsiest of grounds: the absence of a private capitalist class, of private shareholders and bondholders who could inherit and bequeath their property. He failed to see that what made Russia capitalist was the existence there of wage-labour and capital accumulation not the nature and mode of recruitment of its ruling class.

Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. This meant that, in contrast to Lenin who mistakenly saw state capitalism as a necessary step towards socialism, Trotsky committed the different mistake of seeing state capitalism as the negation of capitalism. Trotskyism, the movement he gave rise to, is a blend of Leninism and Reformism, committed on paper to replacing private capitalism with state capitalism through a violent insurrection led by a vanguard party, but in practice working to achieve state capitalism through reforms to be enacted by Labour governments.

Our analysis of Trotskyism is not based upon some narrow sectarianism—it's based upon principle. We do not, nor have we ever, supported capitalist parties, especially those that dress up in revolutionary garb in order to hoodwink the workers. Trotskyists represent all the political mistakes made by the working class last century—from the Labour Party to the Soviet Union. Trotskyism is the mirror image of Stalinism. Trotskyists have never liked to admit that they are simply Leninists who did not like Stalin's continuation of what Lenin began. We do not doubt that well-meaning individuals get caught up in such chicanery for no other reason than a desire to see a better world. However, sentiment can never be a substitute for truth.

God And Mammon

The Christian churches are adamant that they care nothing for the material aspects of this world and concentrate on spiritual values. The Roman Catholic Church, with its new Pope is particularly concerned about its recent past history. 'The Vatican's bank - which he threatened to shut down - is now closing hundreds of suspect accounts as it tries to shrug off its scandalous reputation after decades in which it was a by-word for money laundering and tax evasion.' (Times, 5 December) RD

An Unhealthy Society

According to a study by the Royal Brampton and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust merely going shopping inside capitalism at Oxford Street in London can be dangerous. 'A study found that even healthy people suffered damage to their arteries after spending two hours exposed to fumes from buses and taxis on the famous shopping street.' (Times, 5 December) Earlier this year scientists at King's College London revealed that Oxford  Street had the world's highest recorded level of nitrogen dioxide pollution, caused mainly by diesel vehicles. The solution? Ban diesel vehicles? You have got to be kidding this is capitalism. RD

Abolishing money

If you simply define socialism as merely anti-capitalism, then all sorts of things become “socialist” and ending up with absurd propositions such as a “socialist” system which would have the capitalist mode of production as dominant or a mutualist society where people enter voluntary slavery or simply sell their liberty piecemeal. How is it possible to imagine fighting an adversary without understanding its functioning and by only attacking one aspect of its domination such as the banks or financial sector? Socialism is a profoundly anti-propertarian proposition as it would prevent the basic concepts that make capitalism capitalist.

It's no wonder we can't live in harmony with the Earth as we treat this world of ours as a piece of private property, subject to price fluctuations on the stock market. It's no wonder we can't 'live in harmony with the Earth' now as we treat the Earth as a piece of real estate, subject to price fluctuations on the stock market. Most people have been taught to believe that socialism means mass poverty and a lack of liberty.  Of course, most people don't want to sacrifice their standard of living and their freedom.  Yet there is a basic proposition of true socialism that no pro-capitalist apologist will touch with a ten-foot barge pole. That proposition is abolition of the thing that is causing poverty and takes away our liberty - the wages system and its replacement with a system wherein labour will receive directly and indirectly the full fruit of its labour! Workers may well ask themselves what is fair about the conservative motto, "A fair day's wages for a fairs day’s work."? What is fair about a pickpocket economic system wherein capitalist profit derives from labour that the capitalist does not pay for? What is more, some workers are beginning to question the very thing that they are today struggling to get more of! MONEY!

Why is paying wages theft? Picture, for example, a worker paid $80 for eight hours of work, but produces goods worth $80 in only two hours, then the rest of that time, s/he is working without pay. During those other six hours, the worker produces $240 of goods. That amount (minus the other costs of running the industry) is surplus value. The capitalist, who privately owns and controls the means of production, appropriates (steals) the surplus value by asserting ownership over the new commodities. The surplus value is turned into profit when the commodities are sold, and a portion is reinvested as capital for the industry to expand. The capitalist class dominates the working class in three main ways: 1) economically via their ownership of the means of production 2) politically via their state apparatus (including the threat and use of force); and 3) ideologically via their culture (media, religion, education, traditions, etc.). The working class should not abandon its daily struggle against capital, but should continuously advance it for the appropriation of the means of production and the abolition of wages. For revolutionary socialists our criticism of capitalism is based on the identification of the exploitation of wage labourers by capital as the producer of surplus value, and not on finance capital which only valorizes itself on interest raised on the social surplus value which comes from the productive sphere as does the landowners’ rent. Logically therefore, the struggle must begin with the destruction of industrial capital. But the fact is that most “anti-globalists” defend the production of commodities (when it is not “multi-national” and, preferably, when it is carried out in the framework of nationalised industry and/or small units of artisanal production, cooperatives, etc.)

Abolish money? You socialists are mad! Not so. The thing about money that socialists find unacceptable lies outside its use as legal tender or as a medium of exchange. What socialists decry is an abominable aspect of money which appears to be inseparable from it -- its use in the producers' market as CAPITAL. So what should socialism use instead of money? Some advocate labour time vouchers! Unlike money, these will not circulate. Unlike money, the labour voucher will be non-transferable. Unlike money, whose stamp provides no clue as to how its possessor came by it, the labour voucher will record socially-necessary labour time expended by the worker, which voucher (after deductions for retirees and those unable to work, for maintenance and/or expansion of the industrial and service infrastructure, for medical research, for restoration of the environment, etc.) will be exchangeable for an equal amount of socially-necessary labour that is crystallized in consumer goods -- value for value. But some other socialists promote a system of free access according to self-defined needs.  Once free access to goods is made available, why would someone work for someone else in exchange of money? It would be useless. Why should someone buy something, when he can get it for free? Some form of barter, perhaps in cases of rare items, may still exist, but it will be unable to harm the system.

We don't want to "abolish" money, we want to simply make it obsolete. When the means of production are managed by society, they will be run for the benefit of society, which would lead to free access. This would make it pointless to work for money anymore, thus making the monetary system "superfluous." We are at a stage in which we have overcome scarcity. Therefore, goods can be distributed on the basis of free access. Should we limit access to goods merely to "incentive" people? In fact, it is the opposite. In the current system, only a minority can become doctors, for instance. In a socialist society, however, everyone will be able to study and work where he wants. The lack of free access to goods generates inequality, and if you e.g. are born in a poor family, no matter what social-democrat politics are in place, you likely will not be able to study what you want. Even in the case that studying was completely free, you may need to e.g. get a dead-end job quickly because you or your family needs money.

The abolition of commodity production necessarily means the abolition of wage labour itself. Wages are never anything other than the price of a particular commodity: labour power. If products no longer represent values, and if the allocation of labour power is no longer subject to the accidental laws of the market, then it is also impossible to consider labour power itself as an exchange value and to give it a market price. The members of society, henceforth undertaking collectively social labour, which meanwhile has been simplified enormously, will no longer be paid for services. This is what is meant by the abolition of wage labour, which has always been a synonym for socialism/communism. There is nothing utopian or impracticable about it. Men and women will work in order to live, instead of living in order to work. Whatever activities and projects we undertook, we would participate in them because we found them inherently fulfilling, not because we needed a wage or owed our monthly hours to the cooperative. This is hardly so implausible, considering the degree to which decisions about work are already driven by non-material considerations.

The reason for being a socialist is to fight the class system. Like the lyrics of The Internationale says: "There are no supreme saviours, neither God, nor Caesar, nor Tribune” and so a socialism must thus be directed by all of its members, and not entrust itself to the "leaders". The movement towards the emancipation of humanity can only be the result of the action of the majority. Marx attacked the capitalist system for the absence of all provision to render the productive process human, agreeable, or at least bearable. The demise of wage labour may seem like a faraway dream but once upon a time people actually worried about what we would do after being liberated from our daily dreary drudgery. “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a few generations, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” In a 1956 discussion, Max Horkheimer remarks to Theodor Adorno that “nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings.” Recent technological advances has created an even more boundless potential for abundance. With some knowledge of what lies ahead, perhaps we will be better able to avoid setting off in the wrong direction.

Reading Notes.

In "The Spirits of Just Men – Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen In The Moonshine Capital of The World", author Charles D. Thompson Junior describes the plight of the farmer in the 1930s, " As this upheaval took place (i.e., the agricultural mechanization) subsistence farmers still left on their little farms – those who had learned special skills as intricate as reaching into the uterus of a cow to rearrange the legs of a breech-birth calf, how to repair harnesses and make hinges for doors, or how to butcher their own meats and build barns from timber on their own land – would be told they were unskilled in the search for off-farm jobs. Their choices would be to hang on where they could at least manage their own time or sell themselves to an ungrateful industrial world. Some went willingly off the farms. Others remained and instead turned to the ingenuity they had always relied on." ( i.e., the production of illicit moonshine – even here they were exploited by the gangsters and lawmen who demanded their 'fair' shares that always turned out to be much more then the worker, of course – shades of the closing of the commons and clearing of the land for industrialization in Britain. John Ayers.

Dirty Water And Its Effects

The Toronto Star article, " Retracing the Past of a Nestle whistleblower" (October 4 2014) who publicized the fact that Nestle bribed doctors in Pakistan to push its baby formula over breast- feeding. The result was malnourished and dying babies because the formula was more often than not mixed with dirty water, the only water available to 44% of the Pakistani population. It did not affect the Nestle profit, though – dirty water, clean water, it's all the same to capital! John Ayers.

Capitalism And Cuts

The increasing rationing of state funded care, as councils attempted to slash costs, has left growing numbers of elderly people without access to the care system. In turn it has forced millions of family members to step in, many of them giving up their own jobs. 'The acute shortage of care for older people in Britain is exposed in official figures showing how the population of care homes was left virtually unchanged during a decade which saw the biggest expansion in the overall elderly population ever. According to a study published by the Office for National Statistics the number of people in care homes in England and Wales rose by only 0.3 per cent in the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, standing at just   short of 291,000. But the overall number of over 65s jumped by 11 per cent in the same period - 37 times faster.' (Daily Telegraph, 6 December) Having suffered a life of exploitation and poverty old workers' misery continues. RD

Anti-anti imperialism (2)

We find that government today is in reality the executive committee of the trusts and affiliated banks who use diplomacy and armed force if not actually to annex countries, at least to secure markets, excluding competition in their self-allotted spheres of interests. Imperialism aims at the control of all the small nations to exploit them for its own benefit. "Anti-imperialism" is the slogan of local aspiring capitalists who wish to dominate the region in place of the US/UK/EU, a situation which would still leave the mass of the population there exploited and oppressed with the eternal problem of finding enough money to buy the things they need to live.

Lenin wrote a pamphlet which he entitled Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In it he argued that, through a process which had been completed by the turn of the century, capitalism had changed its character. Industrial capital and bank capital had merged into finance capital, and competitive capitalism had given way to monopoly capitalism in which trusts, cartels and other monopolistic arrangements had come to dominate production. Faced with falling profits from investments at home, these monopolies were under economic pressure to export capital and invest it in the economically backward parts of the world where higher than normal profits could be made. Hence, Lenin went on, the struggle by the most advanced industrial countries to secure colonies where such "super-profits" could be made. When, after 1917, Lenin became the head of the Bolshevik regime in Russia the theory was expanded to argue that the imperialist countries were exploiting the whole population of the backward areas they controlled and that even a section of the working class in the imperialist countries benefited from the super—profits made from the imperialist exploitation of these countries in the form of social reforms and higher wages, Lenin argued that imperialism was in part a conscious strategy to buy off the working classes in the imperialist countries. His evidence consists of one quote from arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes , and one from Engels to the effect that the workers of England "merrily share the feast" of its colonies.

Firstly his analysis is out of date when applied to the current situation. Perhaps more importantly Lenin's theory of imperialism Lenin's theory of imperialism pitted the working class of undeveloped countries against that of the developed ones. It led to upholding national interest against class interest. Lenin's position was not a mistake. The Labour Aristocracy theory had the political purpose of enabling the Bolsheviks to argue for the workers in the colonies to form united fronts with their local ruling classes against Imperialism. This in turn had the aim of dividing the working class internationally, and turning it into cannon fodder for capitalist war. Lenin's expanded theory made the struggle in the world not one between an international working class and an international capitalist class, but between imperialist and anti—imperialist states. The international class struggle which socialism preached was replaced by a doctrine which preached an international struggle between states.

The whole thrust of Marx's own analysis of capitalism was that the workers movement would first triumph in the economically advanced parts of the world, not in a relatively backward economic area like Russia. Lenin explained away this contradiction by arguing that Marx had been describing the situation in the pre—imperialist stage of capitalism whereas, in the imperialist stage which had evolved after his death, the capitalist state had become so strong that the breakthrough would not take place in an advanced capitalist country but in the weakest imperialist state. Tsarist Russia had been the weakest link in the chain of imperialist countries and this explained why it was there that the first "workers revolution" had taken place. This was tantamount to saying that the Russian revolution was the first "anti—imperialist" revolution, and in a sense it was. Russia was the first country to escape from the domination of the Western capitalist countries and to follow a path of economic development that depended on using the state to accumulate capital internally instead of relying on the export of capital from other countries.

In the early days of the Bolshevik regime, when Russia was faced with a civil war and outside intervention by the Western capitalist powers, Lenin realised that this was a card he could play to try to save his regime. Playing the anti -imperialist card meant appealing to the "toiling masses" of Asia not to establish socialism but to carry out their own anti-imperialist revolutions. The 'super-exploited" countries were to be encouraged to seek independence as this would weaken the imperialist states, who were putting pressure on Bolshevik Russia. This strategy was presented to the workers movement in the West as a way of provoking the socialist revolution in their countries. Deprived of their super— profits, the ruling class in the imperialist countries would no longer be able to bribe their workers with social reforms and higher wages; the workers would therefore turn away from reformism and embrace revolution.

After Lenin's death in 1924, this strategy of building up an "anti-imperialist" front against the West was continued by his successors. Because it taught that all the people of a colonial or a dominated country had a common interest in obtaining independence, i.e. a state of their own, it was very attractive to nationalist ideologists and politicians in these countries. They called on all the inhabitants of the country they sought to rule to unite behind them in a common struggle to achieve independence. As a result, in these countries "socialism" became associated with militant nationalism rather than with the working-class internationalism it had originally been. The political struggle there came to be seen as a struggle, not between the working class and the capitalist class, hut as a struggle of all patriotic elements— workers, peasants and capitalists together—against a handful of traitorous, unpatriotic elements who would have sold out to foreign imperialists. They called on all the inhabitants of the country they sought to rule to unite behind them in a common struggle to achieve independence. As a result, in these countries "socialism" became associated with militant nationalism rather than with the working—class internationalism it had originally been. The political struggle there came to be seen as a struggle, not between the working class and the capitalist class, hut as a struggle of all patriotic elements— workers, peasants and capitalists together—against a handful of traitorous, unpatriotic elements who would have sold out to foreign imperialists.

Marx and Engels had little to say on the subject of imperialism. Their remarks on colonialism and foreign trade, particularly the section on counter-tendencies to the tendency of the Falling Rate of Profit, have been used to give authority to other theories and blown up out of proportion (Capital Volume 3 ) These three pages were used to justify anti-imperialism, but all they basically say is that a national capital tries to avoid the crisis caused by the Falling Rate of Profit, which in turn is caused by the increase in the ratio of constant to variable capital, of machinery to workers, by investing in foreign countries. Briefly, The Falling Rate of Profit is explained by the fact that capitalists are forced by competition to produce cheaper goods by increasing the ratio of machinery to workers. Because labour is the only source of value, the rate of profit is given by dividing the proportion of living labour in the product by the proportion of dead labour, or machinery. This rate must fall as the proportion of machinery rises. Capital invested "at home", in production for foreign trade, can also yield a higher rate of profit

"because it competes with commodities produced by other countries with less developed production facilities, so that the more advanced country sells its goods above their value". This enables the more advanced country to dominate the less advanced, by making more profit. Capital invested directly in production in the colonies also produces more profit: "the reason why this can yield higher rates of profit is that the profit rate is generally higher there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the exploitation of labour, through the use of slaves and coolies, etc." What this passage means is that a higher rate of profit is obtainable in countries where exploitation is less developed, where more variable capital (labour) is required to turn out a given quantum of value from a given unit of constant capital (machinery).

Marx doesn't make too much of this counter-tendency to the Falling Rate of Profit. He adds that though the more advanced country "receives more labour in exchange for less", it is all "pocketed by a particular class, just as in the exchange between labour and capital in general". Both foreign trade and capital export are just particular examples of capitalism in general. They are not qualitatively different from what capital does within its "home" country. The "super-profits" of anti-Imperialist theory are, in other words, simply larger quantities of ordinary profits. Taking over competitors with less developed production facilities by destroying them by selling cheaper goods, and taking advantage of these less developed facilities to make more profit, is part of capital's daily life. Moralistic protest about the unfairness of imperialism, as opposed to ordinary capitalism, is an attempt to confuse us about the nature of the beast. (The enslavement of Africans was qualitatively worse than the forced deportations of the English, Scots and Irish poor, but if a capitalist power is more savage and parasitic abroad than it is at home, that is only because the class struggle at home has restrained it. If "First World" workers have been "bribed", that is because they have forced the bosses to bribe them.)

Marxian economics does not measure the level of exploitation by how high or low wages are but by reference to the amount of surplus value produced as compared with the amount of wages paid, whether high or low. By this measure the workers of the advanced countries were more exploited than those of the colonies, despite their higher wages, because they produced more profits per worker. Lenin failed to understand why different rates of wages prevail in different countries. According to him, wages are higher in imperialist countries because the capitalists there bribe their workers out of the superprofits which they earn from exploiting the subjugated countries. Marx's explanation as to why wages were higher in these countries. Both productivity and the rate of exploitation (ratio of paid to unpaid labour) were higher there:

"The more productive one country is relative to another in the world market, the higher will be its wages compared with the other. In England, not only nominal wages but (also) real wages are higher than on the continent. The worker eats more meat, he satisfies more needs. This, however, only applies to the industrial worker and not the agricultural labourer. But in proportion to the productivity of the English workers their wages are not higher (than the wages paid in other countries)" (Theories of Surplus Value).

A lower rate of wages does not make any one country any less capitalist than another: The ruling class in all countries pay workers as much as they think they have to, calculated from:

a) the need for workers to stay alive and, to a greater or lesser degree, healthy,

b) the shortage or otherwise of workers capable of doing the job, and

c) the class struggle

(Where does a wage rise gained by struggle end and a bribe begin? Lenin's position implies that British workers should deduce what proportion of their pay checks are the proceeds of the exploitation of the colonies, and hand that proportion back to their employers, declaring their refusal to be bribed.)

"The different states of the different civilised countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common, they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed" (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).

A country may be highly industrialised or a developed agricultural one or the chief supplier of raw materials for industry or whatever. This happens due to the division of labour amongst the various capitalist countries.

Yes, Marx and Engels did support certain nationalist movements and some wars - TO BRING CAPITALISM TO FEUDAL STATES, to usher the capitalist class into political power so they could create the pre-requisites of socialism; an actual working class within an industrialised society. Prussia against the Slavs. Britain and France against Tsarist Russia. Even Prussia against France so as to strengthen unification of Germany . But can anyone seriously think that such a policy is required in to-days world where capitalism is now the predominant system and its the working class thats the decisive class not the capitalists . What may have been right in the 19thCentury for Marx and Engels , may not now be the right choice in the 20th Century under changed circumstances . What was perhaps provident for backward Russia in the eyes of Lenin or Trotsky need not be applicable or advisable for the rest of us .

Almost every country is more powerful than another, and tries to dominate it, (apparently ignorant of Marx's advice that a nation which oppresses another can never itself be free.) Even the smallest countries harbour designs on bits of their neighbours' territory. The tendency of nations to dominate others leads to the view that they are all imperialist, which renders the term anti-imperialism meaningless. Advocating the political independence of the working class is very different from promoting national independence.

The logic of such movements is to subordinate the interests of workers to those of the bourgeois leadership and that such movements can tie their movement to presently supportive states that may well be prepared to use it as a bargaining chip in their pursuit of their own geopolitical interests. Different regimes that may now present themselves as anti-imperialist have a history of collaborating with imperialism. It is of the essence of bourgeois nationalists that, when imperialism prevents them for building their own independent capitalist state, they may lead struggles against it, but they are striving to carve out a place for themselves within the existing system, not to overthrow it. This means that, sooner or later, they will come to terms with imperialism. Successful anti-imperialism becomes imperialism. This is well illustrated by the example of Germany. The Communist International actually offered some support to the Nazis in the early twenties on the grounds that they were a national liberation struggle. Germany was an oppressed nation, occupied and looted by French and British imperialism. The Nazis fought the occupying troops, so the Comintern supported the former, militarily and politically. A decade later, this anti-imperialist movement had become German Imperialism. Israel was founded in a national struggle against the British Empire and resulted in the forced removal of Palestinians and the occupation of the Palestine. Indonesia does not remotely correspond to any precolonial domain, and possesses an enormous variety of peoples, cultures, languages and religions.The people at one end have far more in common with their neighbours across the national frontier than with their fellow "Indonesians", its shape was determined by the last Dutch conquests. We witnessed the result in East Timor. The bourgeoisie is a global class. Nations mostly emerged after capitalism. Consciously or not, and there are numerous examples of conscious strategy, capitalism created nations. A key feature of global capitalism is that the world is organized into a system of states in which a few – the imperialist powers – dominate the rest economically, politically, and militarily." and this poses the question "...what stance Marxists should take when states fight each other ? "

Our Jacobite Ruler – King Francis

Further to the previously posted Culloden video, this factoid may interest people if Charlie had prevailed Franz, Duke of Bavaria (Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria Herzog von Bayern; born 14 July 1933), head of the House of Wittelsbach, the former ruling family of the Kingdom of Bavaria would be our monarch and known as Francis the 2nd.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz,_Duke_of_Bavaria

http://www.jacobite.ca/kings/francis2.htm

Billions And Beggars

Recently published statistics about the extremely rich illustrate what an insane society in which we live. In the city of London, especially around the railway stations it is common to be approached by beggars, but no such plight awaits Amancia Ortega who is "worth" £35 billion at the last count. 'The rags to riches billionaire behind the fashion chain Zara has overtaken the Duke of Westminster to become Britain's richest property developer. ....... The reclusive 78-year-old Spaniard sank his wealth huge wealth into brick and mortar and now has £4 billion global property empire including a large chunk of Mayfair and office blocks in the city.' (Daily Mail, 5 December) RD

Best Time Of Your Life?

The mass media likes to project the idea that youthfulness is carefree, that it is the best time of your life, but recent research would deny such an idyllic period. 'Depression and anxiety are affecting more young people than ever before. According to a study published today by the Office for National Statistics, one in five 16- to 24-year-olds are suffering psychological problems, which is almost the rate at which these are seen in early middle age, the life-stage usually most associated with mental health issues.' (Guardian, 4 November) Capitalism is an anxious society for most workers but with rising youth unemployment there are additional problems.RD

Troubles Ahead

Despite the picture the government is trying to draw about how they are coping with the economic crisis, some economic institutions are drawing  vastly different conclusions. 'The plans set out by George Osborne in the Autumn Statement on Wednesday will require government spending cuts "on a colossal scale" after the election, an independent forecaster has warned. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said just £35bn of cuts had already happened, with £55bn yet to come. The detail of reductions had not yet been spelled out, IFS director Paul Johnson said.' (BBC News, 4 December) The reason for the vagueness about future welfare cuts is of course the approaching election. RD

Anti-anti-imperialism (1)

The Left have just not been interested any criticism of what has become a dogma in their circles: that socialists are duty-bound to support struggles for "national liberation". The "revolutionary" Left simply "trot" out the old anti-imperialism position of supporting the weaker country against imperialist aggression which refuses any real class analysis of war. “Imperialism” is a slippery word as all states seek to channel as much of world profits their way as they can. It is just that some states are stronger – some, much, much stronger – than others and so are better at doing this. In which case “imperialist” would just be another way of describing the successful states. But this does not mean that currently weaker states are not striving to do the same. Imperialism is not something separate from capitalism. All capitalist countries, not just those normally labelled “imperialist”, are prepared to use force to further the vital economic interests of their capitalist class. Every up-and-coming capitalist power finds the world already carved up by the established powers. If it is to expand its influence it must clash with these powers, as Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia have found and as China is now finding. All of them, in their time, have beaten the "anti-imperialist" drum, that is, have opposed the domination of the world by Britain and France and later America. Mussolini talked of Italy as a "proletarian nation" in a class war against the "bourgeois nations". Nazi Germany stirred up Arab and Latin American nationalism. Japan advanced the slogan of "Asia for the Asians". Russia, too, and now China, like Germany before, vociferously denounce Anglo-French-American imperialism. Anti-imperialism is the doctrine long used by capitalists in relatively weak countries to try and pursue their ends.

Anti-imperialist nationalism is the ideology of an actual or aspirant capitalist class that seeks the way to its own independent state blocked by imperialism and therefore must mobilize the masses to help break down this obstacle. The logic of such movements is to subordinate the interests of workers and other exploited classes to those of the bourgeois leadership and that such movements can tie their movement to presently supportive states that may well be prepared to use it as a bargaining chip in their pursuit of their own geopolitical interests. Different Islamist tendencies and regimes that may now present themselves as anti-imperialist have a history of collaborating with imperialism. It is of the essence of bourgeois nationalists that, when imperialism prevents them for building their own independent capitalist state, they may lead struggles against it, but they are striving to carve out a place for themselves within the existing system, not to overthrow it. This means that, sooner or later, they will come to terms with imperialism.

In ‘Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism’ Lenin sought to demonstrate that capitalism was not only in decline, but exhausted its progressive role in history, it had become, in its imperialist phase, positively retrogressive, also missed the mark.  Lenin’s article on imperialism was written at a time where members of the Second International were busy voting for war credits while the working class was being slaughtered by the millions so Lenin was not interested in writing a “theory” of imperialism for all time but a polemic during WW1, an inter-imperialist conflict. The main branch of support for this was that it was German militarism which supposedly caused the war. Lenin made the point of showing how all the allied powers were probably far worse imperialists and militarists than Germany. Having identified the "age of imperialism" as "capitalism's last stage of development" and as "the eve of the proletarian revolution," Lenin saw the WW1 as the beginning of an international revolution and consistently called not for the restoration of the capitalist peace but for turning the imperialist war into civil war.

Lenin's conception possessed a fairly run-of-the-mill analysis of imperialism and colonialism as put forward by Social Democrats of the time. It was heavily based on a work of the Austrian Social Democrat Rudolf Hilferding. Due to the higher profits to be made in the colonies and less developed countries than at home. Lenin and Hilferding gave detailed accounts of the supposedly unstoppable growth of monopoly in industry and banking but carried it much further, crediting the banks with dominating industry and the cartels with fixing prices and dividing up world markets among themselves. Lenin wrote: "Cartels become one of the foundations of the whole economic life. Capitalism has been transformed into imperialism." Hilferding wrote: "An ever-increasing proportion of the capital used in industry is finance capital, capital at the disposition of the banks which is used by the industrialists". Lenin quoted and endorsed this. Hilferding said that it was only necessary to take over six large Berlin banks to take possession of ". . . the most important spheres of large-scale industry". It is worth noticing that in the depression of the 1930s most of the big German banks collapsed, or almost did so, along with the industrial companies in which the banks' money was tied up. Among other forecasts forecasts made by Lenin was that because of the dominance of finance capital "there was a decrease in the importance of the Stock Exchange". Kautsky, thought that the end result would be "a single world monopoly . . . a universal trust", followed by socialism. Hilferding thought that this single world monopoly was "thinkable economically, although socially and politically such a state appears unrealisable, for the antagonism of interests . . . would necessarily bring about its collapse". But Hilferding thought that world cartels would result in "longer . . . periods of prosperity" and shorter depressions. The long depression of the 1930s and others since belie this. How far this process will go remains to be seen, but the belief of Hilferding and Lenin that competition was dead, has been disproved. Hilferding, Lenin and all failed to allow for the sectional divisions of interest in the capitalist class. Hilferding treated the monopolist industries as representing a united capitalist class. Lenin made a valid point in his Imperialism about some annexationist wars. He wrote that sometimes the powers try to annexe regions "not so much for their own direct advantage as to weaken an adversary and undermine its hegemony". Lenin and Hilferding both saw the growth of monopoly and its resulting wars as a prelude to socialism, and insisted that socialism was the only answer. But Hilferding found himself acting as Finance Minister in a German coalition government, trying vainly to solve the problems of German capitalism. And Lenin's "socialism" has resulted in Russia becoming a capitalist super-power.

It was only in 1920, in a preface to the French and German editions of his ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’ that Lenin introduced the idea that a section of the working class in the imperialist countries shared in the booty extracted from capitalists, the so-called “aristocracy of labour” of skilled workers – shares in the proceeds of the exploitation of colonial and now ‘Third World’ countries, workers and peasants in the rest of the world. Basically, he argued that as profits were greater in the undeveloped parts of the world capitalists were eager to invest there; this brought the capitalist states into continual conflict over the division of the world. Part of the "super-profits" of this imperialist exploitation were used to pay higher wages and provide social reforms for sections of the workers at home. They were thus led away from revolutionary socialism towards opportunism. His anti-imperialism was to try to secure the support of anti-colonial movements for his beleaguered regime in Russia. If they succeeded, he believed, they would deprive the imperialist state concerned of its super-profits and so also of its ability to buy off its workers. Deprived of their share the workers' standard of living would drop and they would once again become revolutionary, affording a chance for a Bolshevik-type vanguard to seize power. It was a political manoeuvre – “workers and colonial peoples unite” – that went against the basic principle of Marxian economics that wages represent the value of the labour-power a worker sells and contain no element of surplus value. Wages paid to skilled workers here reflect the higher quality – due to more education, training and skill – of the labour power they have to sell. Marx had a quite different explanation as to why wages were higher in these countries. Both productivity and the rate of exploitation (ratio of paid to unpaid labour) were higher there:

"The more productive one country is relative to another in the world market, the higher will be its wages compared with the other. In England, not only nominal wages but (also) real wages are higher than on the continent. The worker eats more meat, he satisfies more needs. This, however, only applies to the industrial worker and not the agricultural labourer. But in proportion to the productivity of the English workers their wages are not higher (than the wages paid in other countries)" (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, pages 16-17).

A lower rate of wages does not make any one country any less capitalist than another: "The different states of the different civilised countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common, they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed" ( Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).

Many on the Left assert that socialists should support any movement, even if it is not socialist, that weakens "American imperialism" which they say is the main threat to social revolution throughout the world, just as Marx supported moves against Tsarist Russia. Second, and this comes from Lenin, the Vietcong and workers in the West are fighting the same enemy—imperialism—and so we should support each other. It is true that in the middle of the nineteenth century Marx saw Tsarist Russia, the "gendarme of Europe", as a great threat to the further social progress of mankind. He felt that if Russia overran western Europe it would crush the democratic movement and put the social revolution back for years. Therefore, he was ready to support any moves that might weaken the power of Tsarist Russia. He supported Britain, France and Turkey in the Crimean war. He stood for an independent Polish state, to be a buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. He did all he could to expose the pro- Russia policies and intrigues of Lord Palmerston. These may seem odd activities for a socialist—and, indeed, we have criticised Marx for them. Marx argued that before Socialism is possible society must pass through the capitalist stage. But this is no automatic process; it depends on the outcome of human struggles. Russia was "reactionary" in the proper sense of the word in that it was a threat to the development even of capitalism. Marx opposed Tsarist Russia, not because it was the strongest capitalist power, but because it was the strongest anti-capitalist power. Looking back now we can see that Marx was over-optimistic as to the prospects of a socialist revolution in Europe. In time the capitalist states of western Europe grew stronger and the Tsarist Empire weaker, finally to be destroyed along with Austro- Hungary and Imperial Germany in the first world war. Before that even, Russia in a bid to keep its armed forces up to date had become indebted to the capitalists of France and Belgium. Well before the turn of the century we can say that conditions had changed since Marx's day. Capitalism was firmly established as the new world order. Russia was no longer a threat. Anti-imperialism is not the same as anti-capitalism. The task of socialists is clear - to oppose all wars and nationalist movements and to work to build up a world-wide workers' movement with socialism as its aim. This has always been the policy of the Socialist Party. Anti-imperialist struggles are class struggles under an ideological smokescreen, but not of the working class. They are either struggles by an aspiring capitalist class to establish themselves as a new national ruling class or struggles by an established but weak national ruling class to gather a bigger share of world profits for themselves. There is no reason why socialists should support them. Socialists do not allow themselves to be used as tools of some capitalist state. Socialists are opposed to world capitalism and to governments everywhere. If we are to eliminate wars, waged to obtain markets for the surplus wealth the workers produce, we must realise that our position in society is to transform the private ownership of the means of production and distribution into social ownership, producing for use instead of for profit. The function of the World Socialist Movement is to educate the workers to this end.

Capitalism Distorts Everything

The old notion as depicted in most dictionaries is that sport is a "pleasurable activity", but capitalism has changed all that. 'As many as 99% of Russian athletes are guilty of doping, a German TV documentary has alleged. The programme claims that Russian officials systematically accepted payment from athletes to supply banned substances and cover up tests. The documentary, shown by Das Erste, also implicates the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in covering up the abuse.' (BBC News, 4 December) The BBC has not independently verified any of the allegations in the documentary, but in the programme, broadcast on Wednesday, former Russia discus thrower Evgenia Pecherina claimed that "most, the majority, 99%" of Russian athletes use banned substances. Liliya Shobukhova, who won the London Marathon in 2010, is also interviewed in the programme and admits paying the Russian Athletics Federation 450,000 euros (£350,000) to cover up a positive doping test. RD

OOPS, There Goes Another £90 Billion

The Chancellor George Osborne recently revealed a load of financial re-organisations and gave the impression that somehow or other he was in charge of the crisis. 'The Chancellor is expected to draw on figures showing better-than-forecast growth, rapidly falling unemployment and record numbers of start-ups to argue that his economic prescription is working. Weaker-than-expect tax receipts are likely, however to force the chancellor to admit that a deficit he had once promised to clear by the end of parliament will instead be close to £90 billion.' (Times, 3 December) A £90 billion deficit - once again capitalism makes a fool of the politicians. RD

The socialist imagination

As the world economy plunges further into its worst crisis since the Great Depression, political discourse has been dominated by a discussion of socialist revolution. The word "socialism" designates one of the the noisiest topic of current debate. Everyone is using it. Everyone thinks it means something different. Into this universal catchword everyone injects whatever he or she loves or hates, fears or desires. Socialism has always abounded in visions of a life free from the pressure of capitalist market forces, whether in self-sufficient local communities or in democratically planned economies. But as Frederick Engels argued back in the 1870s, state ownership is not the same as socialism and is, in fact, quite compatible with support for capitalism. Commenting on events in Germany at the time, Engels noted:

“Since Bismarck went in for state-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism.”

Socialism means more than state ownership or state intervention in a mixed economy. Previous show-cases for what should be called state-capitalism have been exposed.  Russia’s command economy collapsed. China has a system of market exploitation. Europe’s social democrats have long ago transformed themselves from defenders of the welfare state to advocates of privatisation and deregulation. It is becoming obvious to millions around the world that we cannot solve our economic and environmental crises without replacing capitalism. Yet the left have little to offer because they no longer know what socialism means.  It is true socialism has been a contested term ever since it was first coined in the early nineteenth century. Engels noted that in the 1840s “socialism” was associated with “the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances,” and who had no connection with the workers’ movement. Little then seems to have changed with today. Reformers still argue that now is not the time to advance a case for full socialism and offer up instead a fare of half-measures and a list of palliatives. Socialists certainly need to be realistic, and nobody will object to fighting for social justice, but the problem with the gradualist approach emerge as soon as we looks at the concrete proposals they offer up. The bottom line is that many proposed reforms are so cautious that they fail to make any serious challenge to the status quo. Instead, they are little more than a recipe for propping up capitalism. They are “realistic” only if our goal is to preserve the existing system for as long as possible, not if we hope to create a movement to replace it and the real fantasy is the idea of a market-based solution to the environmental crisis. Political action inspired by the goal of ending all forms of oppression, exploitation and degradation is similarly necessary but insufficient. An understanding of the economic causes of these phenomena and how they impact on people globally is vital. Economic categories of explanation with universal instantiation such as labour, commodity, value, and capital are required for a global perspective on the task of liberation. Explanations of that have a partial understanding of its nature will produce partial programmes for liberation. Partial forms of anti-capitalism will be utopian. An exclusive focus on reforms makes the goal of social revolution unrealisable. As long as the commodity form dominates the labour process in the spheres of production and consumption then market forces would destroy such experiments as cooperatives. The only practicable way of abolishing money, wage slavery and the law of value, Marx argued, would be to remove all aspects of the mode of production from its global form as commodity and value, including labour power itself. The only means to achieving this end could be the global movement of workers towards the collective appropriation of the means of production including machinery, raw materials and labour. Workers, as a class, liberate their labour power at the same time as liberating the products of labour from their value form as money, wages and capital. Thus today, Marxists tend to argue that movements for women, black, gay or national liberation are de facto utopian if they promote partial solutions to their oppression and ignore the connection with the global struggle for freedom from economic oppression and for a classless society.

Unlike the utopian socialists, who drew up intricate blueprints of post-capitalist society (which they sometimes attempted to put into practice on a small scale), Marx and Engels never publically speculated on the detailed organisation of a future socialist society. The key task for them was building a movement to overthrow capitalism. If and when that movement won power, it would be up to the members of the new society to decide democratically how it was to be organised, in the concrete historical circumstances in which they found themselves. Marx and Engels were the first to bring socialism down from the clouds and put it on a real-world, scientific basis. Their starting point was not ideals, but reality:

“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, but those which they find existing and those produced by their activity.”

Utopians before Marx dreamed of an egalitarian society, and drew up elaborate plans for them--rigorously detailed blueprints for industry, education and social life. The utopians hoped that if these plans were presented to rich and powerful people, they would be convinced by the rationality of socialism and that change would be the product of enlightened, courageous minorities working on behalf of the grateful masses. Marx and Engels were the first to see socialism as the logical end result of the class struggle that was already in progress. "All previous historical movements," they wrote in the Communist Manifesto "were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." This movement of the "immense majority" is not a utopian dream. It is a part of the real world, a struggle already in progress. As Marx wrote in a letter:

“We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for... explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.”

We don't have to draw up elaborately detailed plans for a socialist future, but we can imagine the broad outlines of would be possible if we, the working people, ran society: We could house everyone with free housing? We could feed everyone with free food. We could give people real leisure time, to spend with their friends and families, travel, pursue other interests by reducing the time spent at work. There has been a tradition within socialism that blueprints, or anything that could even resemble them must be shunned. Not all would agree: a detailed sketch of the future society is desirable, if not essential. We are required to draw up our vision of future society. Critics of capitalism have got to think through and explain to others how we propose to do things differently, and why outcomes will be significantly better. Even though people are receptive to our criticisms about capitalism, we have little credibility when it comes to replacing capitalism with a wholly different economic system. In the light of the unfortunate history of socialism and its frequent misrepresentation, people have every reason to be sceptical that the Socialist Party knows how to create a superior economic system. We have to give concrete answers to serious questions.  The first question is, “What do we want?” What, in general, and even not so general terms, is the form of the socialist society that we seek? The second question is, “Why do we want it?” What exactly is wrong with capitalism, and why is socialism a improvement? And the third question is, “How can we achieve it?”

We clearly need to speculate on the nature of a non-market classless society and the possibility of realising this in the present. Speculation involves the exercise of the imagination. Speculation is involved in the creation of theory. It is an activity that generates ideas of where current tendencies and trends might lead. Setting imaginative goals and creating blueprints to guide action are not only a necessary feature of democratic planning but an essential aspect of understanding history. Marx and Engels used their speculative imaginations to describe the non-market society of the future. They had clear conceptions of the socialist project both as viable goal and means. For Marx, the goal of the socialist project is the emergence of free individuality and the recovery of human sociality from the effects of exploitation and oppression. Marx argued that the socialist project needs certain objective conditions, one being the formation of a global non-market classless society.

Peter Watkin's 1964 Culloden

A mock documentary on the Battle of Culloden showing the slaughter. Well worth a watch

Polluting Regardless Of Its Effets

An article in the Toronto Star of September 15 focused on the Norwegian government's efforts to produce oil without endangering the environment. Norway is one of only five countries making sufficient progress towards their target cuts in greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding international agreement to combat climate change. This means little when the US, Canada, and China, who have not signed the agreement carry on polluting regardless of its effect on the environment. But even Norway has its problems – the state-owned Statoil injects steam underground to thin the bitumen and then pumps it to the surface. After diluting the bitumen with lighter hydrocarbons, it is sent to the refinery as in situ drilling. The process burns up a lot of energy to produce a single barrel of crude oil. It also produces two or three more times the greenhouse gas emissions per barrel than open pit mining in the Alberta oilsands that has received so much criticism. The point is that under capitalism profit is the determinant and no well meaning government can get around that fact. Only a system of common ownership where production would use common sense will alter it. John Ayers.

Going In Circles

Oh the loyalty of capital – Dutch multinational, Royal DSM is now locating its plants in the US where there is an abundant supply of cheap natural gas and a 'very lightly regulated labour' market. (New York Times, Oct 5 2014). Apparently China, where the corporation has forty plants, is losing its edge as a source from which to serve the world. Is globalization making a U-turn? The paper asks. Not really, more like going in circles searching for the highest profit possible with no regard to the consequences for workers and their families! John Ayers.

Common Ownership

Consider the basic definition of socialism/communism - common ownership of the means of production and distribution. What does it mean? Private ownership is entirely run for profit. Capitalists don't care about you, they don't care about the environment, they don't care about people, they only care about profit. Just look at the American healthcare system. Instead of their healthcare system being run to help improve people's health and to heal the sick and injured, it is run entirely for the benefit of stock-holders.

Socialism is common ownership. Instead of society being run for the benefit of a minority and production being based on profit, property is owned collectively. It is often argued that such a concept as common ownership is unrealistic and an impractical dream. This is not true. We have it now on the World Wide Web with open-source software. Wikipedia is a superb example of a commons-based institution. Throughout history, land, fisheries and forests have been owned by communities, not just by private individuals. Have we forgotten the village green to be enjoyed by all? Common ownership is a principle according to which the means of production and distribution are held indivisibly rather than in the names of the individual members under private property. It means the wealth produced by society is freely accessible to anyone and everyone.

The Socialist Party hold a vision of a better world, freed from the hardships their families suffered under the system known as "capitalism". And seek common ownership of the means of production and distribution. It is the core concept of socialists that appears to has been purged from the left. Human beings share a common humanity, they are bound together by a sense of comradeship or fraternity (literally meaning 'brotherhood', but broadened in this context to embrace all humans). This encourages socialists to prefer cooperation to competition, and to favour collectivism over individualism. In this view, cooperation enables people to harness their collective energies and strengthens the bonds of community, while competition pits individuals against each other, breeding resentment, conflict and hostility. The classic formulation of this principle is found in Marx's communist principle of distribution: 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. This reflects the belief that the satisfaction of basic needs (hunger, thirst, shelter, health, personal security and so on) is a prerequisite for a worthwhile human existence and participation in social life.

Those who call themselves “market socialists” want to keep the same game (profit motive, law of value, competition), but put workers in charge of optimizing each team's strategy. Marxists want to put workers in charge of the game itself, so that we're free to decide what winning actually is rather than just the strategies we use to "win".

For sections of the socialist movement in the past such as some in the 2^nd International the state did play a role its role was not to nationalise industry and create a vast bureaucratic “state-socialist” economy. Put simply, the workers parties were to be elected to national governments, backed by the trade unions, cooperative movement and other popular organizations, and would then expropriate the capitalists. Political power would then be decentralized to local municipal levels and direct democracy introduced. This was the famous “withering away of the state” Engels talked about. The hopes of the 2^nd International didn’t go as planned. The first problem was that the workers parties never got a majority in parliament. So they began to water-down their programme and adopt a lot of reformism until the definition of socialism began to change from one of democratic and social ownership and control to nationalization and state-ownership. Socialism is incompatible with a command economy. Democracy means "rule by the people", if there is common ownership (popular ownership) of the means of production this means that the economy, at least, is democratically run. Both social democracy and socialism contain the word “social”. Generally it is invoked in a loose and ill-defined way and in practice has generally been collapsed into state ownership.

There has been various attempts to put socialism into practice. During the English Civil War, the Diggers, or True Levellers, briefly established a communal society in England. Babeuf was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution and he developed a quite distinctive position which it is entirely legitimate to describe as 'socialist'. Of course the word 'socialist' was not yet in currency. Babeuf usually described his position as the advocacy of 'true equality' or 'common happiness'. But his aim of a society based on economic equality and common ownership of property is clearly recognisable as what later became known as socialism. Robert Owen was the first to use the world Socialist in 1827 in his Cooperative Magazine. There were also the Utopian Socialists, such as Charles Fourier, who set up small scale communal societies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Waste, inefficiency, boredom, and inequality of modern work appalled Fourier. His main interest was in making work pleasant. He found division of labour unacceptable because it broke up work into minute repetitive operations. Unlike Robert Owen, he did not believe in the efficacy of big industry. Work should be concentrated in the countryside and small shops in towns where family life can be lived in communities and where all can know each other. Proudhon was the one who explicitly referred to property as theft and also had a very polemical argument with Marx on the nature of property and poverty. Proudhon shunned the idea of class war for social change. Voluntary agreement of the working people should lead the way towards a classless society. He advocated a nationwide system of decentralised workers cooperatives, which can bargain with one another for mutual exchange of goods and services. Many of these ideas are still around us, in different garbs. The[A1]  socialist idea was greatly deepened by Marx and Engels, but it was not invented by them, and what they meant by socialism is much the same as what many earlier thinkers meant by it. Marx was both appreciative and critical of these writings on socialism. He referred to them as “Utopian” because they had no conception of revolutionary action for actual change. The scientific socialist on the otherhand understood, as Engels pointed out:

“Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.”

The Socialist Party is a Marxist organisation standing in the tradition of Marx and Engels. We believe that the poverty and misery, the oppression and exploitation that marks our society is the result of control of the world’s wealth and productive resources by a tiny class that exploits the vast majority of society. This leads to humanity crippled by the reality and ideology of capitalist society. This reality leads the majority of humanity to premature death and the majority of working people to lives of drudgery and stress in a world over which they have no control. The ideas that support this social system are those of competition and the rat race. Humanity is left both physically and mentally scarred and disfigured while the planet it lives on is ravaged and devastated. The Socialist Party constantly strives for a society in which class divisions are abolished and the state that enforces class rule withers away. A society based on common ownership and control of its resources by each and every one of its citizens, democratically determining the development of its economy and society, will eradicate the divisions of class, race or sex. A democratically planned society has the potential to progressively reduce the burden of work allowing greater and greater participation in the running of society by those that create its wealth through their labour. The world of necessity (work) will give way to the world of freedom. This will lead to humanity actually living the ideas of cooperation and solidarity and see the true development of human personality in all its potential. Such a society, communism, will not create perfection because perfection itself is not a feature of humanity. It will remove the social causes of inhumanity so that everything that is truly human will be free. This emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. Because the capitalist state is a creation of the capitalist class and functions as a weapon of its rule it cannot be taken over by the workers and used to further the abolition of classes and itself. In other words it cannot be reformed. Because society is structured around the ownership of productive resources by a tiny minority and the compulsion of the majority to work, in order to live, to create profit for that minority, society cannot be reformed to abolish exploitation or the periodic economic crises that result from it. Only common ownership and control of the economic and social resources of society can abolish exploitation.

A socialist revolution simply means the vast majority of society under working class leadership carrying out this task. It represents society’s majority becoming truly politically active for the first time. The working class must therefore become the new ruling class of society, but a ruling class that seeks its own disappearance. Socialism cannot be achieved in one country but must embrace every country of the world.

A Wasteful Society

The mad wastefulness of capitalism is staggering. Take the expenditure of the USA in their recent military efforts. 'President Barrack Obama will ask lawmakers on Friday for an additional $3.2 billion to pay for the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq officials said Thursday .... The air war in Syria and Iraq - which commanders say could last years -  has involved thousands of sorties and hundreds of bombing raids, at a daily cost of $ 8.3 million, according to the Pentagon.' (Hindustantimes, 2 December) This immense expenditure represents a lot of human effort and energy. Think what that could mean inside a socialist society producing food, clothing and shelter for all. RD

Flaunting Their Wealth

The owning class are not known for their modesty, but even by their standards this is an outrageous example of their boastfulness.'Billionaire investor Jeff Greene is selling Palazzo die Amore, a 25-acre Beverley Hills compound suited for royalty. With an asking price of $195 million, it's the nation's priciest private residence.' (Yahoo, 6 November) Take that, all you homeless workers! RD