Socialism – Empowering the Powerless

Capitalism is spiralling ever deeper into an abyss. If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realise that certain mindsets really do influence our behaviour.

The Socialist Party accepts the view that it is necessary for the workers before they can begin to introduce Socialism to conquer the powers of Government in order that they may control the Governmental machinery and through it the armed forces. The fulfilment of our programme requires that a majority of the workers shall understand and want Socialism. Given such a majority and its reflex in a majority of socialist delegates on local councils and in the House of Commons, the workers will be in a position to impose their will on the present ruling class. Our position is subjected criticism. Our critics deny that the power of the capitalists rests on their control of Parliament. They argue that while political power is necessary it can be obtained only by the workers building up a rival organisation and with it overthrowing the capitalist State. They endeavour to show it is possible that in an advanced and stable capitalist democracy the ruling class are able to throw aside the recognised forms of government, to ignore the institutions which they had proclaimed to be the basis of society, to rule by brute force and to survive, proof that revolutionary Parliamentary action by the workers is futile and a situation requiring the application of methods other than those we advocate such as armed resistance to the ruling class.

The Socialist Party does not minimise the necessity and importance of the worker keeping up the struggle to maintain the wage-scale, resisting cuts, etc. If he always laid down to the demands of his exploiters without resistance he would not be worth his salt as a man, or fit for waging the class struggle to put an end to exploitation.  The class war is far from over. It can only end with the dispossession of the owning minority and the consequent disappearance of classes and class-divided society. Only by recognising the struggle between capital and labour, and acting to bring about the victory of labour, of the working class, can classes once and for all be abolished, common ownership be established, and real human interests and relationships begin.

We have yet to hear a convincing argument how you are supposed to become a "revolutionary" without engaging - and eventually agreeing - at some point with the IDEA of what such a revolution would entail.  All we are doing in the Socialist Party, essentially, is trying to help the emergence of majority socialist consciousness. People can, and do, come to socialist conclusions without us, but they can come to this more quickly if they hear it from an organised group dedicated exclusively to putting over the case for socialism. We can't force or brainwash people into wanting to be free, they can only learn this from their own experience. We see majority socialist consciousness emerging from people's experiences of capitalism coupled with them hearing the case for socialism, not necessarily from us, though it would seem that we are the only group that takes doing this seriously. We depend for the success of our message on people who are prepared to THINK.

Socialism means that people have taken their destiny into their own hands. Socialism can't be created by decree or by force by a minority. It can only be implemented by the majority of the people taking over the economy (taking over their workplaces, streets, and estates) and reorganising them as they see fit. But being against vanguards is not the same as being against organisation. A vanguard is a particular type of organisation, with specific aims and to reject vanguardism is not to reject organisation.

The Socialist Party do not see itself as yet another leadership, but merely as an instrument of the working class. We function to help generalise their experience of the class struggle, to make a total critique of their condition and of its causes, and to develop the mass revolutionary consciousness necessary if society is to be totally transformed. We reject an organisational role. What we want people to come to is the realisation that they should take over their workplaces, communities, and put themselves in a position to control all of the decisions that affect them directly, and to run things themselves. If we were to be a vanguard, in the sense of an enlightened minority seeking to gain power over others, we could never achieve this aim, because WE would have the power, rather than people having power over their own lives, collectively and individually. We would also be assuming the arrogance to think we have a monopoly of truth, rather than certain views which we debate with others including amongst ourselves, coming to a better viewpoint at the end of it. There is a big difference between an organisation that produces propaganda and so on, and helps promote the popular will where people accept decisions  because they have been convinced by the case and  have freely chosen to do so and a vanguard in the common sense of the word, meaning a party seeking to gain power over the masses. Revolution will be a process of self-education. Without the active participation of the mass of the working class in the fight for a state-free society cannot even be contemplated.

 As soon as the revolution has accomplished this task, the state is replaced by the socialist administration of affairs. There is no government in a socialist society. “Capturing” Parliament is only a measure of acceptance of socialism and a coup de grace to capitalist rule. The real revolution in social relations will be made in our lives and by ourselves, not Parliament. What really matters is a conscious socialist majority outside parliament, ready and organised, to take over and run industry and society. Electing a socialist majority in parliament is essentially just a reflection of this. It is not parliament that establishes socialism, but the socialist working-class majority outside parliament and they do this, not by their votes, but by their active participating beyond this in the transformation of society.

 William Morris envisaged that, at some stage, socialists would enter parliament but in his words "...so long as it is understood that they go there as rebels, and not as members of the governing body prepared to pass palliative measures to keep Society alive." 

If It Makes A Buck Sell It.

At the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994, the attention of sports fans, and some who were not were riveted on the clash between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, in the wake of the vicious attack on Kerrigan at the American championships.

 Though Harding denied prior knowledge of the attack she fooled nobody, especially after notes Harding made about Kerrigan's training times and location were found. Now, we have what looks to be, a successful movie, " I Tonya'', about her turbulent life.

 A two hour documentary, ''Truth And Lies, The Tonya Harding Story'', was aired on ABC, on January 11. So now Ms. Harding, who is hardly an Angel of Mercy has become a media Superstar.

This may seem baffling to some, though it should not, because notoriety sells, in fact, it sells big time. 

It is enough to make any decent person puke their guts out, but it's totally consistent with capitalism's value system - "if it makes a buck sell it!''

For socialism, 

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

Ulva to be owned by the community

A community trust on the island of Mull will buy the neighbouring island of Ulva for 4.2 million pounds ($5.95 million).

Land is an asset for the many, not the few absent, land-owners whose have hold over Scotland date back to an era when it was a largely agricultural nation run by the wealthy gentry. This had led to about 430 people owning half of Scotland's privately held land.

Ulva, which neighbours Mull on the west coast of Scotland, has been in economic decline for decades and has less than 10 residents, including its owner. The North West Mull Community Woodland Company (NWMCWC), which is behind the plan to buy Ulva, was set up in 2006 to purchase and manage woodlands in the north west of Mull. The NWMCWC said last year it wanted to invest in the 1,860 hectare (4,600 acres) island's infrastructure and local industry to boost its flagging fortunes.

What socialism is not

It is impossible to exaggerate the harm done to the socialist movement by those who, calling themselves socialists, have taught the workers to believe that state-capitalism and social reform are socialism. Millions of workers all over the world have, through this misdirection, been led to support some form of capitalism, trusting that it would solve their problems.  We in the Socialist Party have always been conscientious in explaining what we understand socialism to mean. But being so concerned about being misinterpreted has permitted our critics to ridiculed our principled position as “doctrinaire” or “dogma”. What events have proved is that the Socialist Party's insistence on the need for clear ideas about socialism has been repeatedly justified. What then is Socialism? Socialism is a system of human society of a special kind. Its fundamental is the common ownership of all that is necessary to the common good. This implies the end of buying and selling and the end of the wages system. Now is the time, not for day-dreaming or for getting out plans for reforming capitalism, but for deep thought about the nature of the capitalist system and of its opposite, socialism.

Capitalism moves in cycles of growth and stagnation, boom and bust, job creation and job cuts, increasing and declining investment. It always has, and it always will for as long as it exists. Under the capitalist system, there’s little planning for the ebbs and flows of economic life.  The profits system is not a government-ruled command structure directed by any single state authority – not even that of the president of the world capitalist system’s most powerful state, the United States. If capitalism is in one of its recurring recessions, then the party not in power blames all the woes for the crisis upon the party in office, often including the mess it had inherited. When capitalism is (or seems to be) on an upswing, creating jobs, the ruling government takes the credit for the current state of the business cycle. Whoever is in government would like its citizens to believe it is somehow directly responsible for the economic expansion. Little mention is made by either the ruling party or its opposition that the boom is built on the persistently low wages and weak benefits granted to workers, that the stock-market share prices are inflated in a momentary bubble which will burst eventually, and that the growing prosperity is being concentrated corporate and financial hands, the harbingers of the inevitable crash. One thing we can be sure about is that the next economic crisis is coming.

 Unless a fundamental change in the basis of society is carried out, the world's resources will still be privately owned and utilised for the purpose of profit-making. There will still be two classes with antagonistic interests, one class living by rent, interest, and profit, the other living by selling its labour-power for wages or salary. True, this is “wicked” in the sense that it is unnecessary, but it can only be removed by abolishing its cause, the private ownership of the means of wealth-production and distribution. While there is private ownership (including so-called “public” ownership or State capitalism) it is impossible to have harmony and identity of interest between the classes. The only way to abolish class struggle is to abolish the classes. The post-capitalist world will not just happen. It will correspond to the development of the ideas of the majority. The effort now devoted to thinking out the basic causes of the problems of riches and poverty, unemployment and strikes, will be more valuable than years of scheming to soften the rigours of the capitalist system.

There are many consequences to the daily barrage of lies produced by the capitalist media. The idea of the socialist vision is not pie in the sky.  If you do not desire to continue to live under capitalism you have but one single, simple alternative. How long capitalism endures is a matter for those who suffer under it and who are misled by it—the working class. They have the power to establish a society of harmony. We are talking here about a massive movement of ideas—no less than a majority revolution to overthrow one social system and replace it with another, a historically unique act. This world is owned by a few. Why not consider the possibility of us, the producers in this world, taking it over and running it in the interest of all, with human needs the dominant factor.

The Socialist Party is unique in keeping open platform for the expression of the point of view of opponents. We oppose all forms of suppression, not in response to some abstract principle, but because we recognise that socialist society demands for its operation, as for its achievement, a responsible, intelligent population, used to drawing its own conclusions from the observation of facts and the weighing up of the arguments of opposing schools of thought. We only know our position to be correct because it survives continuous criticism. We do not deny that suppression may be immediately useful to the British governing class. We do deny that it can serve the purpose of the socialist movement.

Refugees left destitute in Scotland

Refugee Survival Trust – which provides emergency grants to asylum seekers and refugees when their support has been stopped – is raising the alarm after distributing more than £100,000 of destitution payments in 2017.

The British Red Cross claimed that seeing people “feeling hopeless and suicidal” as a result of destitution was a now a “routine occurrence”

 Positive Action in Housing, which also helps destitute refugees and migrants, said its own most recent figures were “shockingly high”.

Refugees can find themselves destitute due to administrative delays and errors at all stages of the asylum process, and sometimes have to fight to prove their eligibility. After all appeals have been refused the Home Office insists people should return home and declares them to have no recourse to public funds (NRPF). However many people claim their lives would be in danger, if they were to return.

One refugee family who applied for help had been told it would take 26 weeks to process their claim for child benefit.  Also highlighted was the rise in grants required to pay for travel to Liverpool – as since 2015 those wishing to submit fresh claims or further submissions must travel there. The Home Office does not provide travel expenses even to those who are destitute.

In April 2014 a face-to-face support and advocacy service, run by Scottish Refugee Council and funded by the Home Office, was replaced by a UK phone line run by Migrant Help on a reduced grant from for the UK Government department.

“In an age when information sharing is so incredibly easy, it is absolutely crazy that we are putting people through this journey, which is at best inconvenient and expensive and at worst dangerous and psychologically damaging,” RST Coordinator Zoe Holliday said. 

She claimed that the government had done “a great PR job” of celebrating the successful resettlement of Syrian refugees, supported through the UNHCR’s Vulnerable Persons Resettlement programme. However, for an estimated 3,500 asylum seekers housed in Glasgow – whose claims are processed while in the UK – Holliday claimed the experience was “bureaucratic, unpredictable and profoundly upsetting”.

Positive Action in Housing Director Robina Qureshi said: “The [UK] Government appears to be ripping support away when people are fast tracked into refusal, leaving people in a kind of shock as to what to do next. The stress is unimaginable.” She claimed charities were being left to “pick up the pieces” of the failing asylum policy. “This seems to be the growing trend of government,” Quereshi said. She added: “to leave the basic humanitarian needs to be provided by charity and faith groups and ordinary citizens. “We have been charged with the care of very vulnerable groups – children, older people with suspected dementia on the verge of street destitution, [people who are] mentally ill and those who have been trafficked.”

Jillian McBride, Refugee Services operations manager for British Red Cross, said that many people it worked with, relied on hosting schemes, night shelters or ended up on the streets. “Since 2014 we have seen a worsening crisis in Scotland, which increasing numbers of people presenting in our office homeless and or hungry,” she said. McBride added: “Sadly, seeing people who feeling hopeless and suicidal has become a routine occurrence within our services and we’ve had to have all of our staff and volunteers trained in suicide intervention skills.”

Scottish Refugee Council said it was also dealing with upsetting cases. It recently saw a family with two children who had had no asylum support for six months although they were eligible for it."

Its media officer Pauline Diamond Salim explained“Destitution is designed into the UK ‘s asylum system. It is a cruel, punitive policy that absolutely wrecks people’s lives. It is completely unnecessary and inhumane to force people into exploitative and dangerous situations. The UK Government uses destitution – and the threat of destitution – as a central element of its hostile environment policy.”

https://theferret.scot/scotland-refugee-destitution/

Green Space

Green space – both private and public parks, gardens, grounds, covers 54% of the urban land area, 1,593 square kilometres – the equivalent of 22 Loch Lomonds. This equates to 27 hectares of green space per 1,000 people (excluding private gardens) – equivalent to a tennis court size of green space per person.

Of this 37% is amenity green space and 28%, private gardens and grounds. Scotland’s most used accessible green spaces - public parks and sports areas, account for 4% and 9% of green space respectively.

Council expenditure on parks and green space has been cut from £27,814 per 1,000 people in 2010/11 to £21,794 in 2015/16.

Chief executive of Greenspace Scotland Julie Procter, said: "This study raises important questions about the quality of green space in our towns and cities. It shows that Scotland’s green space is not delivering to its maximum potential for our people and our places. Whilst many of our parks and green spaces are still in good heart, the report shows we are rapidly approaching a tipping point leading to the downward spiral of reduced maintenance, poorer quality green spaces and lower levels of use – meaning we are at risk of losing the wonderful health, social and environmental benefits that quality green spaces provide."

We Are One

Today's dire threats do not arise out of nowhere. They have a cause. Too many of our fellow-workers are naive enough to believe that capitalism can and should be fixed. "Identity politics" is essentially seeking a better deal for women, LGBT and blacks within capitalism and we suggest this is a divisive form of politics to practice.

The Socialist Party has always held that socialism will mean ‘the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex’. In other words, that it will end all oppression and discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. Such discrimination divides the class of wage and salary workers whereas socialism can only be achieved when workers unite to bring it about. We are opposed to ‘identity politics’ as this, too, divides the working class. We still see socialism as the outcome of the class struggle of the working class (in the broad sense) pursuing its interest for a better material life and a better quality of life. We don’t know what will spark off the mass movement for socialism but concern for the environment could be a factor. In any event, as capitalism and its pursuit of profit is the cause of damage to the environment, the aim of the environmentalist movement can only be achieved in socialist society; at some point, they may come to realise this.  

The change of arguments from class politics to ‘identity politics’ is welcomed by the authorities who prefer divide and rule to class unity. Minority groups are urged to identify themselves politically as such and to campaign to get gains and concessions only for themselves. Previously, revolutionaries and even reformists had talked in terms of getting a benefit for the whole wage and salary working class, irrespective of their ethnic origin, gender, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever. This class approach is now being abandoned (though not by us) and reformists and liberals have turned to protecting ‘identity’ groups that are subject to prejudice and discrimination, seeing the setting up of ‘safe spaces’ from which the expression of views offensive to them are banned as one way to do this. But the question remains: which is the best way to deal with people who hold racist or other prejudiced views? Is it to ban them from expressing them? Or is it to confront them in open debate and refute their views and expose them as dangerous? The Socialist Party see no reason to change our position of favouring the second approach.

The social solidarity of community feeling is the common inheritance of all mankind. But being a powerful social force it has lent itself to exploitation. Therefore with the development of class rule, this great impulse is made subordinate to the class interests of the rulers. It becomes debased and perverted to definite anti-social ends. As soon as the people become a slave class “the land of their fathers” is theirs no more. Patriotism to them becomes a fraudulent thing. The “country” is that of their masters alone. Nevertheless, the instinct of loyalty to the community is too deep-seated to be eradicated so easily, and it becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of the rulers against the people themselves. Only socialism will liberate human brotherhood and sisterhood from the narrow confines of nationality and patriotism. These sentiments will then be remembered only as artificial restrictions of mankind's sympathy and mutual help; as obstacles to the expansion of the human mind; as impediments to the needful and helpful development of human unity and co-operation; as bonds that bound men and women to slavery; as incentives that set people at each others' throats. Despite its shameless perversion by a robber class the great impulse to human solidarity is by no means dead.  Even the hellish system of individualism, with its doctrine of every man for himself and the devil, take the hindmost, has been unable to kill it. Ours is the last great struggle for the liberation of humanity from wage slavery, the great principle of human solidarity will come to full fruition and win its supreme historical battle.

The Socialist Party has always maintained that the Labour and social-democratic parties were useless for the purpose of introducing socialism. We saw that their reformist programmes would permit them to enact measures of reform and no more and that to enact their puny reforms these parties would be forced to cooperate openly with capitalist governments, or would have to form governments themselves. In either case, they would be involved in the administration of the capitalist system.

We saw further that the voters and members behind these parties lacked political knowledge and were befogged by pro-capitalist illusions, such as the necessity for leaders, the impartiality of the State, the permanency of the wages system, etc., in short, the boasted strength of these parties was but a sign of their fatal weakness. Since their massive support was fugitive in nature it could only be kept by pandering to the backwardness and the prejudices of the supporters; thus the progress in numbers was but the building up of political inertia. An inertia that could not be overcome by brilliant or forceful leadership, since the leaders that would be permitted to rise would be precisely those who most faithfully corresponded to the needs of these backward masses. From the very foundation of our Party, we were able to demonstrate that unenlightened, reform-seeking masses were unfitted for the revolutionary act of abolishing the capitalist system. Insight, determination and the strength to take responsibility are exactly the qualities that our class needs in order to emancipate itself, and it is only on the basis of socialist consciousness that such qualities can arise. Hence our insistence on the need for understanding.

Capitalism - A crime against humanity

The Socialist Party's purpose is to move the concept of socialism itself from the possible to the plausible. Notwithstanding our significant achievements, we are still falling short of our aspirations for system change.  The aspect of our work to transform from an educational advocacy group to a mass socialist party has remained elusive. We hold a practical vision for the structural change of the basis of our society.

We have reached a turning point in planetary history. Our planet produces more than enough food to feed everyone and has for a number of years. However, food is unequally distributed and far too much is wasted.  Some have access to much, while others not enough.  The current capitalist system is untenable, and a future of instability, mass unemployment, and ecological breakdown lurks on the horizon. We don’t have the luxury to procrastinate. Socialist action is like sailing: we know our destination, but the winds and the currents keep changing, and we must tack to adjust to real-world conditions. Integrated, systemic thinking is urgently needed. Catalysts of change may emerge unknowingly, depending on circumstance. We may not recognise,the forces of systemic change, but we can help create the preconditions for their crystallisation. We need to touch the heart as much as the head. 

The focus on symptoms rather than causes would not achieve the necessary transformative change. The time is now for a mass movement of people saying “We want something different.” The aim of socialism is to meet the needs of all human beings while operating within ecological limits. It seeks to maximise the well-being of all. We, humans, have much more in common than most people assume, unable to see beyond contemporary divisiveness in so many parts of the world. Our common humanity provides the foundation for a global movement.

 Apart from the political dictatorship—which they could study in the past of Britain and Western Europe—where are or ever were these so-called Socialist features of Russia? Commodity production, the production of goods for sale and profit, the existence of a great propertyless wage-earning class, the huge national debts and bond-holding, the banks and insurance institutions, the inequalities of income and the complex taxation systems, the preoccupation with Capitalist investment, foreign trade and the military struggle for territories and the control of trade routes—these are the features not of Russia as such or America or Britain as such, but of world-embracing Capitalism.

The many defences of capitalism were the unsupportable notion that Russia in the form of the great nationalised industrial monopolies was socialist. State capitalism is not socialism and cannot be shown to be anything else, but a form of capitalism and one familiar enough in all countries. The more sophisticated critics retreat to an indefensible position as their second line of defence, i.e., that “socialism” now means “state capitalism,” anyway because they and so many others profess to think that it does. What has happened in Russia is not the mere continuation of Russian tradition under another name, nor the development of a different “socialism” (which would be like deciding to call chalk, cheese), but the emergence of capitalism, growing more marked with the passage of time, in place of feudalism. Russian evolution is Russia’s delayed version of the Revolution which brought capitalism to supremacy in France a century and a half ago. The turn of events in Russia is not the failure of socialism or its corruption by Russian tradition, but the total failure of the Bolsheviks to impose socialism on an unready country, against the wishes of the population who were not and are not socialists.

Marx, in his writings, predicted that someday the capitalists would have to take care of their slaves; that they would be forced to feed and otherwise keep alive an ever-increasing army of unemployed workers. Modern capitalism with the Welfare State an all its social services has fulfilled this prediction with a vengeance. Nevertheless, it was not accomplished by the full agreement of all the capitalist class. Many f the master class dispute the necessity and have endeavoured to minimise the State's intervention. They believe that unemployed workers and their dependents must be left to survive on their own and oppose relief expenditures by the government as “wasteful extravagance”,“harmful to business’, as well as “demoralising the recipients and creating a dependency culture.  While the more enlightened employer believes in giving hand-outs as the order of the day because the exploiting class cannot kill the goose that lays the golden egg.  Experience demonstrates that the old method of private charity can no longer cope with the conditions resulting from widespread unemployment, and thus the government is forced to administer relief. Buying off the discontent of hungry workers is more efficient than maintaining an enormous police force or employing other repressive apparatus to keep the workers in subjection. Disorders, riots, and possible insurrections of desperate workers are thereby averted.

Despite the realisation by the property owners and their political representatives of the need of government-welfare to maintain the status quo, their efforts are always directed toward the reducing the cost. Economy measures are continuously pushed in an effort to reduce the amount welfare claimants are eligible for, tending to bring the payments down to the bare subsistence level. Added to this is the old attempt to discourage the taking of welfare by enforcing red-tape regulations and placing a moral stigma upon those applying...scroungers and fraudsters. The result of these constant attacks is to impair the precarious and already too low economic standing of the workers. The tendency is to drive the standard of living towards and below the subsistence level. Yet, at the same time, for obvious reasons, they must see to it that this standard of living does not fall below the starvation level.  The concessions of reforms given to the workers under capitalism may temporarily alleviate but will never eradicate the misery of the working class. The continuation of capitalism will only serve to perpetuate the hardships and suffering of the workers, both employed and unemployed

There does arise, however, a point where the workers must and do resist. Through the limited trade unions and various NGO organizations worker attempt to weather the pressure of austerity. This determination not to submit is inevitable and is the result of necessity and experience. Temporary respite can and has been obtained by resistance. But real victory for the working class depends upon capturing control of the state, which now strives to keep the workers in subjection and attempts to allay their discontent by offering reforms and ameliorations, which are insufficient. The capture of “political power”, rather than the resisting of "state pressure”, must become the object of the workers. Ridding society of capitalism is the only solution. It can be seen that no amount or variety of reform will ever be able to abolish the workers' discontent. On the day that this discontent becomes crystalised into socialist understanding, we will see the end of capitalism and all its evil effects.

Socialist Standard No. 1362 February 2018

• Editorial: Who Needs Money?
• Pathfinders: The New Home Help
• Capitalism: A Major Global Problem
• What’s Wrong With Dreaming?
• Cooking the Books: Whom to Tax?
• Liberate Technology. Liberate Ourselves.
• Material World: Investors High on Pot
• Bitcoin-mania
• Bitcoin: What Would Marx Think?
• Franco, Fascism and Modern Spain
• George Julian Harney: Red Republican
• Cooking the Books: Zombie Capitalists
• The Russian 'Planned Economy' – What Was It?
• Proper Gander: On The House
• Book Reviews: 'Capitalism’s Contradictions', 'Lenin on Cooperatives - & Other Articles on Marxism, Philosophy and Society', & 'The Vest Pocket Kodak & the First World War'
• Exhibition Review: Savage Ink - the Cartoon & the Caricature
• 50 Years Ago: Black Power in the United States
• In Place of Capitalism
• Rear View
• Cartoon: Free Lunch

Apathy and silence is compliance

The Socialist Party desires to build a better and healthier society with mutual aid at its core. One thing the workers will get from all governments everywhere are the usual nauseating sermons from the rulers calling on the ruled to work harder and produce more. Members of the Socialist Party are struggling for social justice, for human emancipation, and for a solidarity economics. We seek a truly free society without violence and totalitarianism; a society in which everyone pulled together for the common good.

The Socialist Party argument is that the workers live by selling their mental and physical energies to the employing class. They then go to work and produce wealth for the employers of value far larger than that represented by their wages. It is out of this “surplus value” that the employing class came to be the owners of all but a small part of the accumulated wealth of the country. Broadly speaking, the employing class, in peace and in war, have squeezed out of their workers in factories, fields, mines, and offices, all that can be squeezed out of them in the existing circumstances. This is a very fortunate situation for the propertied class, but it has its corresponding disadvantage in that the civil and military costs of running the State, its administration, its police, its armaments and its wars, are in the last resort a burden on their profits and property. Far from being proponents of some all-engulfing statism, Marx and Engels saw the state, as class antagonisms dissipated, withering away — being transformed as an instrument to preserve democracy into an administrative tool.

As socialists, we re-affirm that all peoples should seek their emancipation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as human beings, as members of the human race in a world without national frontiers and in which free movement is possible and where all people live together as equals. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a World Cooperative Commonwealth of which we will all be free and equal members – citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states.

We sympathise with the suffering of our fellow workers, whatever their ethnic origin. It is always they who suffer the brunt of their masters’ wars. Peace is always better than war because wars are never fought in the interests of ordinary people. It is also because war provides an ideal opportunity and excuse to suppress democratic rights on both sides. Peace will create better conditions for democracy. No longer obsessed with nationalistic conflict, our fellow-workers across the world will be able to re-focus on the social, economic and ecological problems spawned by the “normal” peacetime functioning of capitalism. A space for socialist ideas will then open up. 

The Socialist Party teaches that the revolution against capitalism and the socialist reconstruction of the old world can be accomplished only through conscious, collective action by the workers themselves. A mass socialist movement capable of coping with such a colossal task cannot arise haphazardly but requires to be consciously built.  Our aim is to transform from a propaganda group into a party capable of influencing and organising our fellow-workers to create a mass socialist party of the working class. When the majority of the people refuse to be fooled and intimidated any longer; when they refuse to stay on their knees; when they recognise the fundamental weakness of their oppressors, they can become transformed overnight from seemingly meek, subdued and helpless sheep into mighty lions.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like
dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many - they are few.

Shelley 

Homes for people

More than 1000 flats and houses that could be used to ease the homeless crisis have been lying empty for more than 10 years.

Figures obtained by the Scottish Lib Dems reveal there are more than 20,000 long-term vacant private sector homes in 23 of Scotland’s 31 local authority areas surveyed.

 Midlothian Council said they knew of a home that’s been empty since April 1993.

While new build homes cost an average of £100,000 to construct, the bill for refurbishing an empty property is significantly, at between £6,000 and £25,000.

The number of children living in temporary accommodation had risen by 10% in one year. There were 6,581 children living in temporary homes on September 30 last year.

The Radical Imagination of Socialists

 Doom and gloom predictions can be helpful: the threat of catastrophe can encourage reforms. Too often, however, it inspires an attitude of hopelessness, which all too easily turns into disdain and expectations of failure. The prevalence of negative thinking creates cynicism and pessimism. It’s rare that a week goes by without some statistical reminder of wealth and income inequality or additional evidence from climate change scientists to confirm the depressing outlook. Scientists and historians have begun to warn that we are reaching a critical juncture. Cycles of inequality and resource use are heading for a tipping point that in many past civilisations precipitated political unrest, war and finally collapse. Social inequality and exclusion have spawned anger and revolts. Sometimes, workers are pitted against workers, as what seems to be happening in some European countries, where migrant workers are portrayed as job snatchers when the real problem is the failure of capitalism.  The point is that society can never be stable or enjoy sustained when large segments of society are disempowered through political rules favouring the privileged few.

Every day and everywhere we are confronted with the extremes of capitalism. Extravagant designer-wear stores with the homeless sitting in the doorway in rags. We are often enraged the unjust nature of this world. But inequality is not a recent feature of a profit-driven economy. Modern poverty exists because of a human-made economic system – capitalism. We need to bring about change. We cannot rely on good intentions or use Band-Aids to treat the symptoms but not the sickness. We need organizations and movements to build people-power to win. Political action can be aided by social media. But it succeeds only through face-to-face relationships that have sustained every social movement in history. The working class has the numbers to create a just and fair society.  The elite who profit off or misery tell us. "This is just the way it is. Your voice is irrelevant." This is a lie. There is almost nothing we cannot change -- if we choose to and work for it. To capture political power in our society, much more of us need to let go of the idea that nothing can be done. This isn't about helping others, but about our own liberation, yet we cannot achieve it on our own. When we decline to engage in politics as many dissatisfied workers do, we increase the grip of the powerful over our lives. Our voices must be heard and our actions must be felt if we seek change.  In a society where the wealthy rule unchallenged and the planet is in jeopardy with humanity itself at risk, opting out is not an option. If we don't act now there may not be a future for civilisation.

By any standards of sanity, it is incredible that a society which possesses such enormous productive potential should devote so much of its effort to making weapons of destruction Should we, then, join the campaign to persuade the government to renounce nuclear weapons? That would be to approach the problem from the wrong end. Weapons are not produced to satisfy a government’s destructive impulses. They are produced to prosecute the armed conflicts which in turn are caused by the economic rivalries of capitalism. All of these are inseparable. What it amounts to is that weapons of war are an inevitable product of capitalist society. Those who support capitalism. yet wish that its governments would voluntarily deprive themselves of the most powerful weapons available are baying for something even more remote than the moon.

  Divisions in society are becoming ever wider. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting left behind. For example, wages paid to workers in Germany increased by 5% between 2000 and 2016, while income from investments and business activities jumped by 30%.

Some have accused the Socialist Party of turning our backs on capitalism’s day-to-day troubles. It is true that we refuse to be sidetracked from our purpose of socialist advocacy in order to promote some reform of capitalism, although throughout our existence we have heard many appeals to do so upon which we have been urged to concentrate our efforts at the expense of our socialist integrity. We have rejected these appeals because we know that such problems find their roots in capitalism's property basis To end them, we must establish a socialist society in which the world’s wealth is owned by the world. Such an objective is the only thing worth striving for. There is no need for war, just as there is no natural need for poverty or mass starvation or housing shortages or hospital waiting lists. It is because society is organised to provide profits for the few rather than satisfaction for the many that these problems face us. The working class has only to say "stop" and the entire present system of society will cease to be. We have only to take the means of wealth production and distribution into the common ownership and democratic control of the whole community to put an end to the need for fighting over markets and resources and frontiers. We need only withdraw our consent to capitalism.

Many people are incredulous when the Socialist Party declare that money and banking will have no part to play in the post-capitalist society. Money is rightly said to be the lubricating oil that enables the capitalist mechanism to move, but it is not the motive power, for the true drive is the human need for the necessities of life. In need of these necessities, workers must sell their labour-power before they can buy commodities for their subsistence, and by the social trickery they are legally robbed of full access to the social wealth which they have produced, the deception being that wages will purchase but a portion of the total wealth made by them, the surplus being split up among the employing class. In contrast to state capitalism and those who advocate the nationalisation of the financial system. Socialists stand for the complete ending of the assessment of values in terms of money. Socialist society will not produce exchange-values or spend any part of its labour force obtaining the metal gold for currency, so essential to capitalist production and payment. It will, undivided by classes, produce and distribute goods and services without money or price for use by the whole community. The market is deaf to the voices of those without money with which to express their needs. 

The socialist is a worker who refuses to be a slave, to be low, to submit and cheer the foolery of a system which spits on us. The socialist knows that to be human is to be conscious, with a potential for creativity and cooperation. We can join together and live as equals in a world where all production is for use and all life for living, not buying and selling. The socialist refuses to lie down and take it; we know that united in our millions we will be so strong that the parasite class will be forced to surrender their privilege and either share the world with us or else leave it for another place.
But socialists were not born socialists. No member of the Socialist Party emerged from the womb complaining about wage slavery and singing The Internationale. Socialists are workers who once believed that Queen Mothers were important and bosses must own the world and children must starve and capitalism is the only way for humans to exist.
Socialists are dangerous men and women who asked the question “Why?” and hit on a revolutionary answer. They are people who could see that the profit system will never meet the workers’ needs and that a sane world of production for use would and could. In short, you will never solve the problems of the poor if you allow the rich to keep the world for themselves. Only when the wealth-producing majority decide that we will all be rich, in the sense of commonly owning and democratically controlling the world we inhabit, will it all change.

What do workers need to do? To begin with, a lot of asking “Why?” When you hit on the answers you will be angry. So you should be—but anger on its own leads nowhere. What we need to do is unite, with knowledge as our weaponry and cooperation as our guarantee of victory. Why not join us? Why leave it any longer? 

The Robots Are Coming

Automation could cost Scotland 230,000 jobs over the next decade, according to a Cities Outlook report. It said 1 in 5 posts in Scottish cities could be displaced by 2030.

Of the total 230,000 Scottish jobs at risk, this includes 112,700 jobs in Glasgow, 60,800 in Edinburgh, 35,900 in Aberdeen, and 20,000 in Dundee.

In all Scottish cities, around 9% of existing jobs are in occupations predicted to grow in future. The emergence of new industries will create new jobs which do not currently exist - just as the rise of sectors such as the IT industry did over the past century, it said. In Edinburgh and Aberdeen job losses in some sectors could be offset by an upswing in high-skilled jobs as a result of automation and globalisation. 

In both cities, more than a third of the jobs predicted to grow are in high skilled private sector occupations, while 29% and 22% are in low skilled private sector roles in Edinburgh and Aberdeen respectively.

In contrast, more than a third of the jobs set to grow in Dundee (35%) are in low skilled private sector occupations. In Glasgow, the number of low skilled jobs set to grow (27%) is also higher than the number of high skilled jobs (25%).

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-42853756

Welcome to the Plutocracy and Oligarchy

 We live in an insane world, one that becomes more and more insane with every day that passes. To pick up a newspaper is to find a daily catalogue of wars and threats of wars, hatreds and atrocities, murder and violence. 

We know that capitalism cannot be blamed for everything wrong with the world, the fact is that it is responsible for most of them. Capitalism’s wars maim hundreds of thousands and undermine the health of countless others. But you know all this. As long as capitalism lasts, there is little chance of society ever really tackling the problem of ill-health and wars. We know, for example, that cancer research comes a long way behind arms production in the priorities of modern society. Why is this? Simple answer: arms are more immediately important to the capitalist class than finding a cure for cancer. Arms can be used to defend their commercial interests. Curing cancer would only save a few million lives a year. Who, other than cancer sufferers, would care?

Nationalism is a great aid to the capitalist class, so it is probable that they will continue to spend millions to enhance it. Our only hope for a peaceful and humane world is for the workers of all nations to overcome their nationalism, and unite and organise to create a world without borders, armies, and wars. To achieve peace we must understand the real cause of war. To be effective a peace movement must direct itself to the task of replacing the economic system that causes war. Since this can be done only through the organised action of the great majority, the movement must work to inform itself and the working class at large about the program for establishing a socially-owned, cooperative economic system. Telling people what they already know, that war is bad, is not enough. What needs to be said is how to change society so war will no longer be necessary. If the social revolution is the only way to eliminate war, the sooner we begin organising for that the sooner will we arrive at our goal of peace. Tinkering with the capitalist system can never alter its fundamentally anti-social character. 

When the oppressed are weary from the hopeless struggle for existence, and might be moved to rise and throw off the yoke of oppression, the deadening hand of religion stretches out to them, bids them to be of good cheer and be patient, all will be well in the hereafter, where “all good people” will live in a heavenly rose garden. Many rise to the bait, as it is so comforting to think that this vale of tears is but a path to paradise. And so places of worship have arisen, palatial, beautiful and impregnated with incense; their pulpits have resounded with the mocking cry, “Come unto me all ye who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” The promise has meant a good deal to those who looked for no rest on this side of the tomb, and has helped to blind them to the possibilities of rest in their real life. Religion has not been a giver of rest but a scourge to drive the masses on to toil compliantly.

Reformism has failed us. Reformist proposals promise to treat the symptoms of commodity production -- without challenging commodity production itself. The inability of reformist measures to tackle the root causes of our present crises should be evident to all. Only when the systemic causes of our social crises become common knowledge, will reformist measures that fail to tackle causes become delegitimised. despite constant tinkering, economic crises, boom and bust cycles, dispossession and hunger not the exceptions, but the rules of capitalism. For years we have been told by Labour Party supporters (who had never tried to teach or even to understand socialism) that the working class did not want socialism, they wanted ‘something now’. We return the jibe and ask when the Labour government is going to give it to them. We were told that ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’ and that the way to get socialism is to build it up piecemeal, adding one gain to another until some day we shall wake up and find that capitalism has imperceptibly changed into the cooperative commonwealth.  May we ask how many such half-loaves will be required to produce socialism? The principle which above all distinguishes the Socialist Party from the Labour Party is our realisation that there are no short and easy cuts to Socialism. Only a party whose members understand and want socialism can work to that end, and the growth of such a party cannot proceed faster than the work of spreading socialist knowledge. It was against the view we hold that the Labour Party were formed. They have always proclaimed their belief in the possibility of building up a party on a non-socialist basis, becoming the government of the country and introducing large measures of reform thus retaining the support of the electors while leading them, almost without their knowledge, on the road to socialism. The fallacy of that position, briefly stated, is that until we have socialism, we shall continue to have capitalism and capitalism can be run only on capitalist lines. You cannot keep capitalist private ownership and control, and yet administer the system in a way which will prevent it from producing its normal effects. You cannot have capitalism without a subject class of wage and salary earners struggling incessantly against the pressure which tends to make them more insecure and badly paid, drives them to harder work and reduces them in greater numbers to unemployment. The success of their theory rests upon the ability of a Labour Government to satisfy the electors, but the electors want results which they were led to expect and Labour cannot deliver the goods.

The mass socialist party that we require for change is the fusion of movements. Against this background of tragedy and folly, which might be expected to reduce us only to apathy and despair, we record with pride that, far from being discouraged, the Socialist Party remains active in its propaganda, and its members enthusiastic to end capitalism. In an insane world, the issue is more than ever—Capitalism or Socialism. Let us hold fast to sanity and campaign for socialism. The capitalist system is continually giving itself away; continually giving indications of the growth of that seed of its own destruction which is inherent in it.

"Forward together! Not one step back!" 

Church of Scotland Anti-Papism

Speaking during Christian Unity Week, Rev Dr John McPake, the Church of Scotland’s ecumenical officer, said there is ‘profound regret’ in his Church over historical anti-Catholicism in Scotland. Rev McPake said that while sectarianism has not gone away and ‘continues to raise its head,’ the ‘vast majority of sectarianism’ in Scotland is ‘no longer motivated by spiritual faith but is ‘animated by historical division.’

He pointed to poverty as one cause of the problem, saying that ‘sectarianism is found where communities are broken and divided for other reasons,’ adding that we have ‘common cause in building resilient communities which share in economic and social growth.’

It is appropriate to re-post what the Socialist Courier blog messaged back in June 2012

The Anti-Irish Church of Scotland

The national church in Scotland today is the Church of Scotland, which is legally recognised as such. The Church of Scotland is the largest religious grouping in Scotland with 36% of Scottish population nominally as members. The second largest religious grouping in Scotland is Roman Catholicism, with 16% of the Scottish population, most of which are of Irish descent. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the immigrants from Ireland were Catholic. From the 1960s, when almost everyone claimed a religious label, the “no religion” identity has grown considerably and people who profess no religion actually outnumber either those in the Roman Catholic church or Church of Scotland in Scotland.

In 1922, incited by a Kirk minister, a Protestant mob stoned and bottled buses carrying Catholic women and children to the Eucharistic Congress in Morningside, Edinburgh. In 1923 an official Presbyterian campaign against Irish immigration not only demonstrated the anti-Catholicism present in the Presbyterian churches at this time but also emphasised race and tried to portray differences as national, not just simply religious. This campaign has later become known as “The Kirk’s Disgrace”. It was about singling out an ethnic minority whose presence in Scotland was to be regarded as an evil, polluting the purity of the Scottish race and culture 

The campaign started at the Church of Scotland General Assembly, with a report called "The Menace of the Irish race to our Scottish Nationality " which protested that Catholics had “most abominably abused the privileges which the Scottish people had given them...Already there is a bitter feeling among the Scottish working classes against the Irish intruders. As the latter increase and the Scottish people realise the seriousness of the menace to their own racial supremacy in their native land, this bitterness will develop into a race antagonism which will have disastrous consequences for Scotland." At the same General Assembly, it was warned that the presence of “Irish Catholic aliens … would soon bring racial and sectarian warfare to Scotland”.

The expressions "racial supremacy" and "aliens" makes the report sound like it could have been written by Hitler's Nazi propagandists or white supremacists of the American south. Yet this report by Rev. John White's Church and Nation Committee was accepted by the General Assembly and a sub-committee formed to promote the anti-Irish cause

Restrictions on immigration from Ireland and the revision of the Education Act were proposed and passed. As the campaign was adopted by more senior church figures, more emphasis was put on what was meant to be “respectable” arguments surrounding race and national character. In 1928 the churches presented their case to the government. They complained that Scotland had become a “dumping ground” for Irish immigrants after the USA had reduced their quota and that 70% of parish and other relief funds, were spent on the Catholic Irish. The Church of Scotland's Church and Nation Committee called for the deportation of unemployed Catholics to Ireland - a country most of them by then had never seen. Scottish Catholics from the Highlands and Irish Protestants, however, could stay, because  "they are of the same race as ourselves"

Attempts to get government support collapsed when first the Glasgow Herald demonstrated that the immigration was not at all as high as was claimed, and when the government after an investigation of their own refused to have anything more to do with this campaign. The campaigners then decided to redirect their efforts and the 1930 General Assembly decided that the church should instead focus its attention on businesses and have them “employ Scottish labour where such is available”.  Now that the Kirk understood that no government would halt Irish immigration then they would appeal to the patriotism of Scottish employers to practice job discrimination in their hiring.