Chaotic Persistance

Mark Lowcock, UN's humanitarian chief, told its Insecurity Council. on October 30, that 13 million people in Syria, who have fled their homes because of the war, have limited access to basic needs, such as food and health care.

Yet people persist in telling me a socialist society would degenerate into chaos.

Hooray for Capitalism.

For socialism, 
Steve, Mehmet, John & contributing members of the SPC.

Saving Humanity

“The strongest man is the one who is the least isolated; the most independent is the one who has most contacts and friendships and thereby a wider field for choosing his close collaborators; the most developed man is he who best can, and knows how to, utilise Man’s common inheritance as well as the achievements of his contemporaries.” Errico Malatesta

The Socialist Party stands for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a world socialist system. By socialism, we mean a system in which the means of production and distribution is commonly owned by society is democratically controlled by its members. Only socialism can rid the world of poverty and inequality, stop wars, end oppression and exploitation, save the environment from destruction and provide the conditions for the full realisation of human creative potential. A system under the democratic control of the people is the only basis for establishing a class-free and sustainable society based on the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The Socialist Party stand in the tradition of the socialists who opposed Leninism Stalinism, and Trotskyism and we fight today to reclaim the democratic, revolutionary politics of Marx and Engels. Socialism cannot be achieved by reform of the current system only through the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order workers defeat the capitalist class and permanently end its rule. For capitalism to be overthrown, the majority of the working class must be won over to revolutionary action and the socialist case.  The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. Socialism cannot come about by the actions of a minority. The struggle for socialism is the struggle of the great mass of workers to control their lives and their society, what Marx called “a movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority”. We support those workers' movements such as trade unions that tend to improve the position and self-confidence of workers and of other oppressed sections of the population as the basic defensive organisations of the working class.

All recorded history is the history of class struggles and consequent evolutionary changes in the form of society; the class divisions and institutions varying from age to age according to the current economic basis, and each form being superseded by another when its mission is fulfilled. Today this is truer than ever. Under the form of society dictated by modern capitalist production, the means of life are concentrated in the hands of a small privileged class, which exploits the propertyless working masses, appropriates all the product of their labour reduces them to the lowest and most servile level of existence that will permit them to continue working and reproducing their kind, and in addition obtains, by virtue of that economic supremacy, control of the entire state power. This regime of contradiction between ‘social production’ and ‘individual appropriation’, of irreconcilable antagonism between masters and man, employers and employed, property owners and proletarians – the class struggle of today – has brought mankind into unprecedented conflict, misery, and chaos – a veritable abomination of desolation and terror. But it is fast approaching a crisis entailing its overthrow which will lead to an emancipated world, a society of economic and social equals wherein class divisions, privileges and disabilities will for the first time in history be impossible; a system of social ownership of the means of production industrially administered by the workers on an organised and harmonious plan, ensuring from every man according to his capacity and to every man according to his needs, under the motto “All for each and each for All”.

This social revolution is the objective of the Socialist Party, the end towards which every step it takes must directly tend. The task is no mere pastime; it is a battle. We cannot deny the war between the classes, or to pretend it can somehow be peacefully resolved by an armistice.  So elemental, it is a conflict which can be ended by nothing short of the world wide destruction of the capitalist power.  It is time for our fellow-workers to hearken to the call, to discard its futile reformism, to jettison their leader’s careerism, opportunism and cowardice, full of doubts and fears, clinging with pitiful faith to capitalism, hoping against hope, sceptical of the working people upon whom they depend, they spread their pessimism like a poison into the workers themselves.  How familiar their wavering.

It is time to recognise the vital necessity of the fight and to unite all our forces in countering the class enemy, organised and unified by solidarity so as to deliver, in cooperation and coordination, the knockout blow to a hated class and system. The Socialist Party bids all class-conscious workers rally. Political parties are the product of the class struggle. In a class-free society which has rid itself of the remnants of vested class interests and associated ideology, there will be no political parties. They will be unnecessary. But we have not yet achieved a class-free society. We are in the midst of a society torn asunder by class struggle, and the political parties of necessity express and reflect the interests of classes in conflict. The working class is the custodian of socialism, of all further development of mankind. The capitalist class is no longer a progressive class. It cannot lead mankind forward. It can only drag it backward. Based upon private property, it has long-since fulfilled whatever progressive role it had to play in the development of society. Capitalism now fetters the productive forces, drags society into desolation and catastrophe.

This is the plain fact which we socialist understand this above all is no messiah or elite group can save mankind but there is but one possible hope: Socialism. Should mankind make the wrong choice, there will probably be surviving individual members of the human race to again start up the weary path through the countless ages of barbarism until eventually we once again reach civilisation.

The School Gap

The gap in educational performance between rich and poor pupils in Scotland gets wider as they progress through primary school, official data has revealed.

By the time they reach P7 wealthier children have pulled further ahead of their poorer peers in basic skills such as reading, writing and numeracy.

The annual school figures show that poorer pupils are still struggling to keep up.

The 2016-17 statistics, based on teachers’ judgements, show that the gap in numeracy skills between the richest and poorest pupils widens from 14% in P1 to 20% in P7. In reading the gap increases from 17% to 20% over the same period, while, in writing it widens from 18% to 22% and in listening and talking from 12%  to 17%.

The number of teachers in Scotland has risen by 543 in the space of a year, now standing at 51,513. However, the number of pupils has also risen to 688,959, meaning that the ratio of pupils to teachers has fallen slightly to 13.6, with the average class size remaining static at 23.5.

This is the Socialist Party message

The capitalists try to present their system as the best of all possible worlds.  The system is built so the capitalist can be free to enslave and exploit us. The capitalist class says revolution was good in the past when they were making it, to give themselves the political power to bring about their system. But then they want it to stop. But now things have reached a new stage where for the first time in history the working class, which represents the majority of society, is not only going to do the fighting but is also going to take the benefits and use them for the majority of society and for mankind as a whole.  From 1904 until to-day the Socialist Party has delivered the same message day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and still the workers let themselves be led up the blind alleys of disappointment and despair, following leaders with pathetic trust on the painful march to a promised land that always remains over the hill.

Is the Socialist Party message so hard to understand? No! It is the very essence of simplicity. The workers produce the wealth of the world, the capitalists own it. Just as the workers hand over what they produce to-day to the capitalists, they could keep it for themselves if they wished to do so. The capitalists perform no useful task in wealth production, they are just parasites. They take the fruits of the workers' labour because the workers let them, and the workers let them do so because they are duped by the myth that the capitalists are necessary. The aim of the capitalists is to force or cajole the workers into the submissive attitude of willing slaves, heaping up wealth for others to enjoy, and flattery and promises, cant and hypocrisy will be instruments used to secure this end. It is not remedies for particular social diseases that we need but the removal of the source of all social disease—the legal figment that enables the capitalists to live on our backs. The legal arrangement that because a man has money he, therefore, has the right to exploit his fellow men is a social agreement that has not always existed, and it can be abolished at any time that society decides to take this step. Society includes everybody, both workers and capitalists, and the workers are the great majority in society. The workers of the world can control their destinies once they shed their delusions and cast off the useless burden of capitalist privilege that they have borne upon their backs for so long. But the work they have to do must be done by themselves.  The only path is knowledge of what we are, wealth-producing slaves of capital, and what we can be, freely associated workers owning in common our means of production and using them to supply the needs of all, without the intervention of privilege of any kind except youth, age or sickness

The history of mankind can be described as the history of the efforts of human communities to free themselves from the constraints always imposed by the necessity of meeting their daily survival needs and reproducing the species.  This statement sums up historical materialism. The purpose of socialist revolution is not to restore a “natural order of things” that was somehow got rid of at some point in history. The various forms of society in the past have been the responses worked out by men and women to surmount the problems of how to survive and reproduce. Chattel slavery was just as “natural” a practice as is capitalist exploitation today. The purpose of socialist revolution is to provide today’s society with a form of organisation that corresponds to the material possibilities open to us today and that satisfies the current conditions that the history of mankind has taught us to consider most appropriate to the well-being of humanity. Contemporary society has the objective material capacities – in the developed societies, at any rate – to put an end to capitalist exploitation and all the forms of oppression that it perpetuates. This is the basic and primary reason for working for socialism.

Marxism holds that the life of human society is in the final analysis determined by the level of development of the productive forces. It can be described as the first rigorously study and scientific vision of society. Marxism does not hold that the existence and development of societies are determined absolutely, that they have no freedom? If it did then it is misleading to hold out the prospect of revolution, for in the final analysis it would be the determinism of the productive forces that counts. Men and women can make plans for their individual and collective existence. The development of societies does not follow a predestined, predetermined course. Societies can act on and influence their development. 

Humanity is one

 There is nothing that fuels the socialist movement more than capitalism’s own troubles, the displeasure, disaffection, and anxiety it produces. The fundamental driving forces behind the movement for Socialism are the rigours, the hardships of a working-class existence under a social system that turns out wealth unlimited and permits only a minority to enjoy it. This contradiction makes fools or knaves out of all supporters of capitalism who pose as champions of working class desires.  People are getting ever closer to understanding that they live in an economic system that is not for them. Our fellow-workers will sooner or later realise that capitalism—i.e., the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution—is the cause of their poverty and its attendant evils and that any and all reforms within capitalist society will do nothing more than to bring about some slight amelioration of the poverty problem. The socialist movement can be regenerated. In this capitalist system, we are wage slaves and socialists are determined not to be slaves anymore. They pay us a wage and in turn, for it, they take and do with us whatever they want. They use us like animals, like a machine, just another tool to get as much energy and money out of our labour as they can.  The Socialist Party is not a political party that says it represents everybody. The Socialist Party does not say it represents both capitalists and the workers, and preaches the idea of harmony between capitalists and the workers because there can’t be harmony between the slaves and the slave-masters. There can’t be harmony between the exploited and the exploiters because the slave-master lives by exploiting the workers – the capitalist lives by exploiting, that’s his whole existence. And we live for the day when we can break those chains of exploitation. The Socialist Party is the party of the wage-slave. We proudly and openly proclaim that. And more than that, we proudly and openly proclaim that our class which is now in wage slavery is not going to put up with it much longer. We’re going to break those shackles. We are one mighty class and we intend taking power throughout the world for the first time in history.

The natural instinct of human beings is towards cooperation and sharing, but, distorted by capitalism and its dog-eat-dog competition and ideology of nationalism, self-interest has become the pre-eminent behaviour trait. Nationalism in one country begets its echo in others. The world is besieged by a range of problems, many if not all of which are firmly rooted in the outdated socio-economic structure of capitalism and which threaten the survival of the human race and the planet.   This capitalist system of wage slavery doesn’t allow us the choice of whether or not we are going to struggle. Everybody knows the fact that we all have to struggle to get by. The history of our class in this country is the history of struggle. Work is a struggle, daily life is a struggle, and winning our emancipation is going to be a struggle. We all should know about it, learn from it and build on it.  This whole system of capitalism forces us to struggle, drives us to unite together to fight back. We learn through our struggle that by ourselves, as one person, we can’t accomplish very much, but when we unite together we can move forward and gain a better understanding so we can break these chains.

Our society has to be re-built to meet the needs of all. The employing class doesn’t consciously organise production and they can’t consciously organise production for the needs and the interest of society as a whole. The capitalists are not thinking about the interests of society, they’re not thinking about what people need. Each one of them is thinking about one thing, and the first question they’re all asking when they see anything, whether it’s a person or raw materials, a machine, or whatever – the first question they ask is, “How can I make money out of it?” That’s the whole name of the game and that’s how they try to run society. And those are the ideas they try to put into everybody’s mind – that you are either a slave or slave-master, you are either working for somebody or else you’ve got to make somebody work for you. Each of them is in competition with the other, and each of them is constantly trying to make it over on the other and sell more than the other one. And in doing this they are constantly introducing new machines and throwing workers into the streets, trying to make the products faster and undersell their competition. There’s only one place you can make money – that’s out of us. So they drive us harder to make more money for them. And each of them tries to expand production as if there were no limit to it – until it runs up against the limits of this set-up itself. A tremendous gulf develops between what’s produced under these conditions and what we can buy with the wages we get from them. So the whole breakneck pace turns around. They lay us off and, those left get driven even harder, and so the gulf gets bigger and so it goes, as we see now.

This is not a system that can meet the needs of the people. It’s not a system that even considers the question of how to meet the needs of the people. When the slaves start rebelling, they will throw a few scraps and hope that it gets people fighting among themselves for those.  Under the present relations, this is the way it is. But this is not because of any forces beyond our control that cannot be changed. It’s simply and only because of the economic relations and economic system of capitalism that we live under, and because of the rule, the dictatorship, of this capitalist class.  Come election time they’re all for the working man and woman. They’re all for us say, “I’m a worker just like the rest of you all.”

The only solution is the ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by the working class, to be administered in the interests of the community as a whole. With this understanding clearly established in the mind of the working class, we shall be standing on the threshold of a new and happier era in human history.

Regardless of nationality, race, colour, and political and religious creeds, the working class has always been inspired by one idea—the overthrow of capitalist society, built on slavery, exploitation and violence. In this struggle of labour against capital, the working class can win only by mustering all their forces against the common enemy.  This is why for the working class, in order to save itself from economic exploitation and enslavement —unity is imperative. There is but one power that can save mankind from being plunged into catastrophe. That power is the working class if property organised and determined to fight all who would oppose and prevent its complete emancipation.  When workers flex their muscles, capital quakes. As individuals, we are powerless to change things. We can’t use that two feet of conveyor belt before us by ourselves. The forces we have at our command in society, these machines and everything else that make society run, cannot be run by individuals working against each other, just for themselves. We have to cooperate. But together we are not powerless. In fact, we are the most powerful class in history. We are the class that’s going to transform all of society and advances humanity to a whole new higher level of social evolution.   

Socialism NOW!

The Socialist Party believes there is a way to overcome the world's economic and social problems and it is to replace the capitalist system with a socialist one. The only way to end poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, war is to take society out of the hands of the capitalist class. The Socialist Party's objective is the socialist reconstruction of society. In a socialist system, commonly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprises would become the dominant form of ownership in our economy. For socialism to work, the working people must be intimately involved in helping to run the country and industry. Workers would be involved in management and in decision making at all levels. Socialism and democracy go hand-in-hand.

Right now the earth is producing more than enough to feed every human being — both on a global scale and within the countries associated with starvation. Enough grain is produced to provide everyone with ample protein and more than 3,000 calories a day. However, over one-third of this grain is fed to livestock. People are not hungry because food is scarce or because there are too many people. Pressure on the environment does not come from demands to produce more food — there is already enough.

In Mexico, where at least 80 per cent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, livestock — mostly for export to the USA — consume more basic grains than the country’s entire rural population. However, the system of ownership and control in agricultural production and the market economy prevents everyone being fed. The capacity to produce food is immense yet a large proportion of the world’s population lives in conditions of abject poverty and deprivation. 700 million people go hungry throughout the world. Hunger, deprivation, and homelessness are not limited to the under-developed world but increasingly hitting the poor in the rich countries. In the United States, about 40 million people are classified as “hungry” but no one can argue that this is because not enough food is being produced. Hunger exists in the face of plenty.

It is revealing that the assertion that hunger is caused by “over-population” is so widespread. It says a lot about how ordinary people are regarded. People are pictured as an economic liability when, in reality, all wealth begins with people, with human labour. The blame for growing poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation should not be placed on the poor and hungry, the victims. It should be placed on the pursuit of profit. Capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour and nature. Land, natural resources and energy sources are exploited at one end of the production process and the waste-absorbing capacity of the environment at the other end. The primary cause of the spiralling human and environmental crises on our planet is not the growing world population but capitalism’s unfair global economic policies. If “too many people” cause hunger, we would expect to find the most hunger in countries which have the most people in each area of land producing crops. But no such pattern exists. In reality, a food system where a few are in control inevitably under-uses and misuses food-producing resources. Throughout the world, larger landholders consistently produce less per hectare than the small producers. The environment is not being destroyed because people are trying to produce more food to feed growing populations. It is being destroyed because production is directed into the most profitable areas, regardless of the impact on humans or the environment, by predatory corporations which have concentrated control over food-producing resources in their hands. In Africa, large tracts of land perfectly suitable for permanent crops such as grazing grasses and fruit or nut trees have been torn up to make way for cotton and peanuts for export.

The best approach to combat poverty, world hunger, and ecological degradation is not through population control but through the fairer distribution of wealth and resources. It is not growing populations that threaten to destroy the environment, but forces of capital. Because of the nature of capitalism, millions starve to death each year — or survive year after year in a chronically malnourished state — because they are too poor to constitute an ‘effective demand’ on the market, and so they get nothing.  The root cause of today’s global crises is the globalisation of the market economy. Capitalism makes every effort to conceal this.

It was St Ambrose (340-397 AD) who said:

“Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common. God beneficiently has created all things that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth become the common possession of all. It is nature itself that has given birth to the right of the community, while it is only unjust usurpation that has created the right of private property.”

The right of private property, the right of a few to own and control the means by which all must live, the right of the owners of the means of production to utilise it to exploit the rest of the community in the interest of their personal profit, the right to determine what shall be produced and how, regardless of the misery and wretchedness of those who produce it.

In the wake of that principle, that so-called right, came slavery, in which the multitude toiled in chains that a few masters might live in luxury; feudalism, when a handful of nobles feasted and wallowed in idleness on the enforced labour of others; then capitalism, when the masses were herded into factories, to get the wherewithal to live, while the product of their labour was appropriated by the new lords of capital. The right to private property, the right to exploit, the right to rob, the right to over-produce and cause crises, the right to compete, and cause wars. The basic cause of capitalist ills, and the basic answer? The abolition of the right of private property, and instead the common ownership of the means of production, so that all may enjoy the fruit of their labour, and consume it, thus eliminating the crises of over-production, and the crises of military wars. For there is no other way. It is capitalism or socialism.

The Roma "Child Sex Scandal"

The Socialist Standard highlighted the persecution of the Roma, particularly in Eastern Europe. But the scapegoating also exists here in Scotland.

A charity group which works to support Roma communities in Glasgow has hit out at claims children as young as primary school age are being forced into prostitution on the streets of Govanhill. Friends of Romano Lav (FoRL) have now released a statement which blasts the "spurious and unevidenced" allegations. Members say they have "not encountered any instances of the child protection issues" highlighted this week. "They would say that," is the response. It's a no-win situation for Roma community workers. If you don't speak, you will never influence or integrate. If you speak, you will not be believed.

Police Scotland said there was "no information or intelligence to substantiate the concerns" 

 The Times recent lurid investigative report by journalist Marc Horne stated that ‘children [are being] sold for sex on the streets of Govanhill’. Yet this claim was not supported by evidence taken to the police, but rather on pub gossip and local hearsay. . The nature of the reporting on Govanhill was remarkably similar to the moral panic over the case of ‘Maria’, supposedly ‘stolen by Gypsies’ in Greece in 2013. That the Roma have a proclivity for selling their children is a racist story that follows them. It is a story hundreds of years old; it is a story that always finds new traction. When the Roma began moving to Sheffield in 2013, newspapers reported that a Roma family tried to sell a child to a chip-shop owner.

Socialism is the only alternative

Under capitalism, so many in this society are forced to endure great hardship and suffering, exploitation, injustice and brutality, while wars and the ongoing destruction of the natural environment threaten the very future of humanity. Capitalism is a system of exploitation, misery and destruction. The capitalist system, based on private ownership of the means of production has no future. Having outlived its usefulness, it is incapable of meeting the needs and aspirations of the world’s peoples. By its very nature, capitalism generates and intensifies mass unemployment and poverty, national chauvinism and exclusivism, racism, gender inequality and oppression, environmental collapse, and war. Under capitalism, both labour and the natural environment are exploited for the capitalists’ overriding objective – profit. As a system, capitalism can exist only by continually increasing the extent and intensity of its exploitation and impoverishment of labour and plunder of the environment.

The Socialist Party has set forth an inspiring vision for the building a socialist society, where human beings everywhere would be free of relations of exploitation and oppression and destructive antagonistic conflicts, and could be fit caretakers of the planet But to make this a reality, we need a revolution. Many insist, “there could never be a revolution”. Today, Big Business and its intellectual apologists maintain that socialism is finished, that human development has ended, and that capitalism will endure forever. This is wrong—revolution is possible. Of course, revolution cannot happen with conditions and people the way they are now. But revolution can come about as conditions and people are moved to change as people come to see that things do not have to be this way, as they come to understand why things are the way they are and how things could be radically different, and as they are inspired and organised to join the world socialist movement and build up its strength. Revolution will not be made by trying to bring down this powerful system when there is not yet a basis for that—or by just waiting for “one fine day” when the revolution will somehow magically become possible. Revolution requires consistent work building for revolution, based on an understanding of what it takes to actually get to the point of revolution, and how to have a real chance of winning.  Only socialism makes the needs and aspirations of the people its highest priority.  And only socialism can use the benefits of the scientific and technological revolution for the well-being of all, not for the enrichment of a few and for waging war. There is no alternative to socialism, no “third road.” The achievement of socialism will mark a real advance towards true social democracy – the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. In a socialist world, the means of producing and distributing wealth will be the common property of society as a whole. The exploitation of labour will be abolished. Ecological degradation will be stopped, and a planned approach to the relationship of human life with the natural environment will be implemented. Want, poverty, insecurity, and discrimination, rooted in capitalist exploitation, will be ended, a new society based on solidarity, equality and emancipation.

The economic system in which we live is capitalism. Under this system the means of production are predominantly privately owned; the capitalists operate their factories, banks, and offices, mines, forest operations, transport and service industries in order to extract profits. The source of profit and accumulation of capital is the exploitation of the working class – all those who work by hand and brain. Human labour, in combination with nature, is the source of all material wealth and cultural values.

Under capitalism, the workers own no means of production. Having no principal source of income other than their capacity to work, they must sell their labour power for a wage to the capitalists in order to live. The working class is the vast majority of the population. It includes workers employed in all sectors of the economy, both organised and unorganised, as well as the unemployed and under-employed, and their families. The basic conflict between capital and labour is inherent to the capitalist system. The capitalists, who control the main means of production, employ wage-workers only so long as their labour produces profits for them. They hold down wages to the lowest possible level so as to squeeze greater profits out of the exploitation of the workers. The workers fight to maintain and increase their wages, improve their living and working conditions, and extend their economic, social and political rights. This is the heart of the class struggle under capitalism which affects the whole of society, and which at a certain stage impels the working class to revolutionary struggle aimed at changing the social system itself. Under capitalism, the labour process is carried on by the joint effort of large numbers of workers in factories, plants, and offices. But while labour and the production process is social, its fruits are privately appropriated by the owners of the means of production. This basic contradiction – between the social character of production and the private capitalist appropriation of the commodities produced – lies at the root of all the evils of capitalism: unemployment, economic and social insecurity, mass poverty, economic crisis and the drive to war. At the same time, capitalism also creates its own gravediggers – the working class.

Capitalism concentrates wealth and the ownership of the means of production into fewer and fewer hands. The ever-increasing concentration, centralisation, and internationalization of capital has created a staggering divide. capitalism confirms Karl Marx’s general law of accumulation – that capitalism everywhere creates more private wealth but also drives more people into wage labour and poverty. The capitalist economy operates in cycles of boom, crisis, depression and recovery. Periodically, expansion is followed by a glut of goods on the market. Plants close down, workers are thrown on the street – not because people have no need for what industry can produce, but because goods do not sell in quantities and at prices that would ensure a level of profit satisfactory to the capitalists.  The capitalists try to thrust the burden of such crises on the backs of working people, who are compelled to fight back.

The pace of scientific and technological advance and its rapid application in all spheres of life has qualitatively transformed the productive forces – the tools, the raw materials and most importantly, labour itself. The character and substance of workers’ labour in the process of production are changing, and this is affecting both the composition of the working class and its relation to other classes. Capital, is on the constant drive to increase profit, uses technology to lower production costs by replacing human labour with machines and other labour-saving processes. Scientific and technological progress has become the source of increased exploitation and alienation of the working class. The introduction of new technology has not changed the essence of capitalism, and will not emancipate the working class. Capital benefits most from the introduction of high tech and new production techniques, such as “just-in-time” production. The more technological progress there is, the higher the productivity rate, the higher the rate of exploitation, and the higher the intensity of labour, deepening the gulf between capital and working people. The longer (or shorter) hours and increased physical and mental stress demanded of the individual worker have a negative effect on the health and safety of all workers.

The revolution in science and technology has intensified the anarchy of production and the unevenness of capitalist development. The fierce competition between rival enterprises drives each corporation to introduce cost-saving technology. But technological innovation is extremely expensive, and its application in the workplace intensifies the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Capitalists, in turn, tries to offset this tendency of declining rate of profit by: driving down its labour costs through wage cuts, speed-ups, lengthening the work day, contract work, redundancies, plant shutdowns, and other forms of corporate restructuring and absorbing or merging with its competitors. Technological innovation is responsible for major structural changes, unevenness between different spheres of production and overall distortion of the economy both within each country and on a world scale.

Advances in information technology are a key factor in the globalisation and standardisation of many areas of production. Within a general context of increasing mobility for capital, there is an enhanced transportability of production in particular. In expanding numbers and types of industries, capital can respond to strikes or workers’ demands by quickly – and almost seamlessly – relocating entire production processes on a permanent or temporary basis. As with all previous technological revolutions, these changes in production require the working class to develop new tactics and new forms of struggle to meet the challenge, including increasing international cooperation and joint action by the international working class movement.

The capitalist system has long since become parasitic, unable and unwilling to satisfy the growing needs of the people. For the working class to exercise genuine people’s rule, they must control the economy. Democracy, therefore, requires socialism: the common ownership of the machinery, raw materials and other means of production used to sustain and enhance human life. For the first time in history, however, the majority of the people will rule and establish a genuine democracy. The dictatorship of capital over labour – the rule of the minority over the majority – will be abolished and replaced by a social democracy in which political power will reside with the people For the first time, the interests of the people will be the prime determinant of our economic, political and cultural life. With socialism, the creation of social wealth has only one objective – to further the interests of the people, by raising living standards, improving and extending social services and unleashing the cultural forces now stifled by capitalist domination. Since industry will be owned by the working people, the bourgeoisie will disappear as a class; consequently, the conditions will be created for ending the conflict between labour and capital. New social relations, socialist in character, will come into being in which the interests of the workers, engineers, scientists, and managers will be harmonised. The socialist alternative will bring into being the sort of society humanity has dreamed of for centuries – a class-free society founded on an abundance of material wealth in which the state will wither away and people will each contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs.

The inequality of life-expectancy

Scots born in the wealthiest parts of the country are expected to live up to around a decade longer than those born in the poorest communities, new figures have shown.

Males from the 20% least deprived areas in Scotland have a life expectancy 10.5 years greater than those from the 20% most deprived areas. For females the gap is 7.8 years.

The council areas with the highest life expectancy for females were East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire, where a baby girl could expect to live for 83.5 years.

By contrast, West Dunbartonshire had the lowest life expectancy for females at 78.8 years - a difference of 4.7 years.

For males, life expectancy at birth was highest in Orkney at 80.3 years, and almost seven years lower in Glasgow City at 73.4 years.

Public health spokesman Colin Smyth said: "These figures expose the postcode lottery Scotland faces. The prosperity of the family you were born into has a huge impact on your life chances, quality of life and ultimately life expectancy."

Build the Fight - People Power

We define the means of production as the tools, machinery, and technology that enable humans to transform the natural resources so to provide sustenance for ourselves. The resources in question are land, water, ores and minerals, and the tools and facilities that enable the growing of crops and the alteration of raw materials by the capture of energy to power the manufacturing processes into consumable goods and services by labour. A people that do not have access to and control over these means and methods cannot be said to possess or exercise self-determination.  The working class majority does not have control or ownership over  the means of production and distribution. We are not free. In order to democratically transform the capitalist world-economy, we have to transform the agent central to this process, the working class. This transformation starts with the self-organisation of the working class.  Self-organisation means workers directly organising themselves through various participatory means (unions, assemblies, etc.) primarily at their work-place, but also where they live, play, and study. Workers and communities have to drive the social transformation process through their self-organisation and self-management. The point of this self-organisation is for workers to make collective, democratic decisions about how, when, and to what ends their labour serves, and about how to take action collectively to determine the course of their own lives and their own actions.  This, however, does not mean that the Socialist Party shouldn't try to influence the development of the working class and our fellow-workers. We hold that we should openly present our ideas an offer our strategies and tactics of political action in open forums, discussions, assemblies, etc., and debate them out in a principled democratic fashion to allow the people to decide for themselves whether they make sense and are worth implementing and pursuing.  Within the capitalist structure, self-reliance is a critical form of resistance.  Socialism is not a worker-managed capitalism, but a new civilisation in which men and women stand in dignified relation to each other, not as buyers and sellers in a class society, but where the common effort to produce the means of living entitles all to equal access to society’s products and services. A complete transformation which ends commerce and replaces international capitalist conflict by international co-operation.

We have to be clear, crystal clear, nevertheless, that self-determination is unattainable without socialism. Self-determination is not possible within capitalism because the endless pursuit of profits that drives this system only empowers private ownership and the individual appropriation of wealth.  The end result of this exploitative economic system is inequality and inequity. We know this from the brutality of the nightmares of history demonstrated to us time and time again over the course of the last 500 years. Reproducing capitalism, either in its market-oriented or state-dictated forms, will only replicate the injustices and miseries that have plagued humanity. The Socialist Party advocates a participatory, bottom-up democratic route to economic democracy, in which we envision associations of cooperatives and systems of mutual aid providing communal solidarity and the democratic ownership and control of the ecologically friendly and labour liberating technologies.  We are crystal clear that self-determination expressed as national sovereignty is a trap since all nation-state imposes the dictates of the capitalist system. Remaining within the capitalist world-system means that you have to submit to the domination and rule of capital which only empowers the national ruling class against the rest of the population. Capitalism couldn't care less about the needs of the people. One of the tragedies resulting from the advent of independence is the large number of workers who quickly become disillusioned by the capitalist policies of their new rulers. Capitalism makes the interest of all workers one. 

Our political opponents stress that they stood for various national "rights” and "freedoms” for workers. They have neither intention nor seek the mandate to remove the relations of employer and employee, wage-slave, and capitalist. They will not remove the dependence of workers upon those who own the means of producing wealth. They will not make those means the common property of the whole of society. The Socialist Party alone advocates free access to the means of life— Socialism, a class-free society which means the end of conflicts between countries, economic or military, between human beings. We wish to abolish a society where the most important rights are those that reflect the fact that society resembles a jungle. Workers must understand that suppression and coercion are ever present dangers while capitalism lasts whether the government is Labour, Tory or nationalist. The end of these conditions will come not by the sterile policy of changing national boundaries and introducing new passports, but by the revolutionary act of changing the basis of society from private to common ownership or the means of producing wealth. The sooner that workers realise their common interest and strive together to overthrow their common enemy, the sooner will men and women not have to prostitute themselves. Only with socialism will their knowledge be used for the benefit of mankind as a whole, unhampered by monetary considerations.

Adapted from here

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42802-build-and-fight-the-program-and-strategy-of-cooperation-jackson

Common Ownership?

An estimated 562,230 acres (227,526ha) of land in Scotland is in community ownership, according to a new report.

492 parcels of land are managed by 403 community groups across Scotland.

The estimated 562,230 acres represents 2.9% of the total land area of Scotland.

Sleep-walking in the Park

 'Sleep in the Park' taking place in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens with prominent media personalities participating aims to raise money to combat homelessness and catalyse a movement to end homelessness in Scotland within a five-year period. A noble act, indeed, but will it succeed. Experience tells not. We recall how Big Issue was started back in 1991 to help the homeless by allowing them to help themselves. Hostels, supported housing and other homeless projects may help some people to progress, but they can’t solve the problem of homelessness itself.

It is easy to accuse the beggars on the street of not really being destitute and desperate. They are sly opportunists on the make, claiming to be homeless so to con the honest public. It says so in the Sun, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail who insist that the beggars are undeserving. The pernicious tabloid rags tell lies about society's modern paupers, claiming that they are con-merchants.  These newspapers celebrate the family, but for thousands of youngsters, family life is a story of intense poverty and degrading abuse. The benefits system makes it grimmer still.  No money, no shelter, no hope. Capitalism is a society of haves and have-nots, of winners and losers. Homeless people are at the unlucky end of the social scale. Many other people are only one wage packet away from being drawn towards homelessness. So, to accept that homelessness is just a part of life is to accept the capitalist system which traps us all.

Homelessness is a complex issue. For every homeless person, there is a raft of interrelated reasons why they may be in that situation. Some are simple: loss of housing through relationship breakdowns, inability to pay for housing, drink, drugs, mental health issues, abuse and domestic violence. For some, all they really need is a house or flat. For others, more complex social help is required from specialists perhaps in drink and drug rehabilitation, or social workers to support individuals through crises.  Many of the issues homeless people face are centred around their ability to pay for their accommodation and to maintain those payments. Loss of a job, reduction in working hours or wages can have a devastating impact and can often result in homelessness.  However, as a general rule, in times of economic downturn, the number of homeless persons increases exponentially. No amount of charity or campaigning will alter the root cause of the problem and the profit-driven nature of housing.

 When society is driven by economic forces, rather than what people want and need, then some people inevitably suffer. Increased funding, new services, or reformed procedures may help a few people in the short-term, but they can’t address the causes of the problem. If we want to end the conditions we exist under we will not do so by misguidedly placing faith in politicians nor through subscribing to charities. No doubt on an individual basis “Sleep in the Park' will help some to be able to better their own situations, but in the bigger picture it, like so many other homeless charities, is unable to achieve anything of real and lasting value. There was a huge homeless problem 20 years ago in the UK and there is still one now. Unless capitalism is swept away, there will still be one in 20 years time. What is required is class consciousness and democratic political action. Under capitalism, housing, like everything else, is a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. For those unable to afford it, homelessness is the only option unless bailed out by the limited council and state help or charitable donations. These are not solving the problem, merely at best reducing some of its ill effects. Business has no interest in solving social problems, contrary to the hopes of Social Bite. Its goal, always, is profit. If housing was fairly distributed according to need rather than via a market, then the problem of homelessness would disappear and there would be no need for such social entrepreneurship as lauded by Josh Littlejohn and similar well-meaning people. 

WE HAVE A VISION

Socialism is a common-sense path to a fairer, more prosperous world. The Socialist Party understands socialism as a fundamental change that is an outgrowth of capitalism. The working class consciously organizes itself to achieve the transition from private to common ownership of the means of producing within the economy. The working class as a whole are the overwhelming majority of society. The working class creates everything that the world’s people need to survive and thrive – from food, housing, healthcare, energy, education to transportation, music, and art. Because working people make society run, they are also uniquely positioned to change the society. Workers, when united and working together have the power to change the world.  We are a party of working class internationalism. Capitalism is a global system of exploitation and oppression. What is done to workers in other countries profoundly affects workers here and vice versa; their triumphs are also our triumphs.

The capitalist economic system is based on the continual expansion of production. So capitalism will reproduce environmental problems as long as it is in existence. We can’t have a healthy humanity without a healthy natural world. The capitalist economic system often presents workers, their families, and communities with an impossible choice: either work in destructive industries, or face unemployment, hunger, and deprivation.

 There are no models or blueprints for building socialism. Nor is there a blueprint for the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism. It will be the product of a complex process. Our fellow-workers will collectively orchestrate that process.   The Socialist Party does not hold the view that a socialist revolution is can only be brought on a collapse of the economy or by a general strike.  We don’t agree that it is necessarily violent or a cataclysmic event. The electoral process will be part of that process. It will be a deeply democratic process, one that unleashes the creative energy of millions of people in motion. The Socialist Party recognises that social change can only be accomplished through the united action of mass social movements which express the majority will of the people. Peaceful methods of change are not only the right thing to do, they are the most effective way to unite and mobilise the greatest majorities.  The defence of democracy is central to defence of the interests of working people and will be based on the working class principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all.”. Our party believes that it is possible to make fundamental transformations using the electoral process. The Socialist Party does run candidates for elected office, however, we don’t yet run candidates in many places. This is due to several factors: our small size, the financial and resource demands of campaigns and the high costs of advertising.  Only through democracy can we advance to socialism. We go further than calling for political revolution. We fight to get rid of capitalism and replace it with socialism.

In a socialist system, the ownership and control of the means of production would be in the hands of those who do the work. As a result, those of us who produce would make these important decisions together. This would correspond to the way we produce the wealth together. With the people in the driver’s seat, and with profits no longer an aim, the things the people think are most important would come first. Enough resources would be available to do many things. Fellow-workers can have the confidence that together we can build a political and economic system of the people, by the people, and for the people.  The Socialist Party is a political party of the working class, for the working class.

The future is socialism

A better world is possible.  People around the world have always sought a future without war, exploitation, inequality, and poverty. They have sought a system in which they control their own lives and determine their own destinies.  The Socialist Party is dedicated to the establishment of socialism. Only socialism has the solutions to the problems of capitalism that we all face. The working class confronts a vicious and amoral enemy: the capitalist class and we are misled as to our real interests, blinded by the propaganda of fear and the politics of scapegoating. Every movement for progress is challenged by the power of the ruling class and their paid hacks in the media. Our world is threatened by the ravages of capital expansion and accumulation. All this is normal to the functioning of the capitalist system. We can’t and won’t let this continue. We need real solutions, real democracy, and real unity and not the empty promises of the bosses and their politicians. We, the workers, need to take political power from the hands of the wealthy few.  We need socialism.

The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation, the means of production and distribution. Workers sell their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers ability to labour, but pay them only a portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of paying workers wages and other costs of production — unpaid labor that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits. This surplus is the source of profit. These profits are turned into capital which capitalists use to further exploit the sources of all wealth — nature and the working class.

Capitalists are compelled by competition to seek to maximise profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid labour of workers, by increasing exploitation what capitalists often call increasing productivity. Under capitalism, economic development happens only if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our times. With the rapid advance of technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximise profit and exploit new markets.

Capitalism's vested interests use the most potent weapon to divide workers – racism, nationalism, religion, and sexism – poisoned ideologies. The capitalists use this power to ensure the continued economic and political dominance of their class. It is a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. Spreading division within the working class weakens all movements and struggles. 

Workers always seek to solve the chronic ills they face. The working class is compelled to resist increased exploitation. The class struggle starts with the fight for wages, hours, benefits, working conditions, job security, and jobs. But it also includes an endless variety of other forms of fighting specific battles: resisting speed-up, picketing and strike action. When workers struggle against the capitalist class or any part of it on any issue with the aim of improving or defending their lives, it is part of the class struggle. This class struggle takes place in the work-place where commodities are produced and distributed. This is the economic side of the class struggle. The class struggle also has a political side. It exists in the realm of ideology, that is, between social and political ideas that justify the political and economic policies of the contending classes. There is no limit to the range of issues that are part of the class struggle. The class struggle reaches full class and socialist consciousness only when the mass political party is built under working-class leadership in order to win power and construct socialism. The class struggle in an immediate sense pits workers against a particular company at the point of production and against the capitalist class as a whole in broader social and economic struggles. The aim of the class struggle is the winning of power in order to construct socialism.

The working class is the only force capable of the struggle for full social progress and socialism. Capitalism's dependence on the working class to create all wealth gives it a strategic role in the production process and great potential power. The Communist Manifesto declared: Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. From the smallest of class struggles to the largest, unity is the key to victory. This is the guiding principle of all unions and workers' movements: in unity is strength. Class-conscious organisation is the weapon of the working class.

Socialism is an economic system where the economy commonly owned and democraatically controlled, where the destructive competition of capitalism is replaced by its planned administration. Socialism doesn't mean nationalisation. Socialism will eliminate the waste of the capitalist system and the private/state appropriation of profit. Capitalism uses technological improvements to further exploit the working class; socialism uses technological improvements to increase productivity, to shorten working hours and to improve working conditions. Our planet has vast natural resources and productive industrial plants, extremely advanced technology and science, a huge reservoir of skilled workers with a tradition of initiative, innovation, and creativity. In a socialist society, the millions of people now unemployed, homeless, and under-employed could create more wealth for all to share to improve the lives of the majority.

 We see socialist society as a commonwealth of all working people, and where national and racial enmity and prejudice will be things of the past. A society where the essentials of life will be plentiful and readily available to all and the repressive apparatus of government will wither away leaving purely administrative functions. Social production and distribution of wealth would be according to the principles of the motto, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” We shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. 

Scots in Fuel Poverty

More than a quarter of Scottish homes are stuck in fuel poverty despite a ­government pledge to have eradicated the problem.

The number of households which spend too much on heating (where 10 per cent or more of the household income goes on heating) in 2016, is 649,000, about 26.5 per cent of all homes in Scotland.

Rural areas of Scotland fare worse with fuel poverty rates of 37 per cent, the figures show, while in social housing the rate remained at 32 per cent.