The City of Mississauga, Ontario is noted for being a reasonably prosperous place, as far as capitalism will allow, and also a City where the public services are run extremely well. This would not be possible were it not for the number of volunteer workers involved, which was admitted recently by a City administrator. I regret I have been unable to find statistics in this matter, but the number of volunteers in all aspects of social life must be thousands. Yet still, the majority of people anywhere think society would collapse if people weren't paid to do work.
For socialism, Steve, Mehmet, John & contributing members of the SPC.
In September 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a brutal military coup against the then president of Chile, Salvador Allende. It was an act that was condemned around the world. But over in East Kilbride, Scotland, a few men were compelled by a sense of solidarity with the Chilean people to act in support. Pinochet’s army used British-built Hawker Hunter jets to attack the presidential palace, the engines of which were routinely sent back to Scotland to be serviced. Led by a firebrand shop steward, the workers in the factory refused to touch them.
This earnest, if slightly laboured documentary reunites the now retired engineers and reveals to them the impact their actions had. There are some unexpectedly moving moments in an understated film that gets much of its charm from the down-to-earth decency of the characters. The men are shown messages of thanks from the Chileans whose lives they touched. “That’s smashing,” says one modestly, adding that thanks were really not necessary.
When Scots refused to service Chile’s jet fighters after the 1973 military coup, their protest all but grounded the air force – and may have saved prisoners’ lives. Nae Pasaran, a powerful documentary, tells their story.
he artificial spiders’ webs hanging in the windows of the Royal British Legion in East Kilbride, on the edge of Glasgow, are just part of the Halloween decorations. But they feel oddly appropriate on this bright, frosty morning in the company of men whose distant triumphs have recently had the cobwebs dusted off them. Sitting off to one side is the 41-year-old Chilean film-maker Felipe Bustos Sierra. Huddled around a table next to him are the former Rolls Royce plant workers whose bold statement of solidarity with the Chilean people in the mid-1970s is the subject of Nae Pasaran!, an inspirational documentary that proves principled acts can have positive consequences – even if they take decades to come to light.
Six months after the bloody coup of 11 September 1973, which began the brutal 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, these four Scotsmen – Bob Fulton, Robert Somerville, John Keenan, Stuart Barrie – downed tools and refused to service and repair engines for the Chilean air force’s Hawker Hunter planes. “Down tools?” says Bob, a former engine inspector and the instigator of the boycott. “We hadnae time to pick ’em up!”
Bob is 95 now, a gentle man with expansive hand gestures who sometimes holds on to the sides of the table while he talks, as if he’s planning to drive it away. He can still remember vividly the events of that March day in 1974: “I got to my desk in the morning and there was this compressor shaft up on the table ready for me to inspect. The first thing you do is check the card. Well, I turned the card round.” He acts out the scene, flipping a beermat over and staring disbelievingly at the underside. “And there it was: Chile.”
“We had already condemned the Chilean junta,” adds Stuart, who is 74. John, the 78-year-old former assembly unit worker and member of the works committee, leans in to clarify. “The people being tortured and murdered, many of them were just like us: trade unionists. At our monthly meeting, Robert had made a motion condemning the actions in Chile. And then when Bob recognised the engines – well, you tell him!”
Bob jabs a finger at me. “This is true,” he says, and I notice Felipe giving the fond smile of someone who has had that finger jabbed at him plenty of times. “I went to the foreman and said, ‘I cannae work on that.’ From there, I went to see Stuart, who was a shop steward, and told him there were bits and pieces of the Chilean engine possibly on the line already.” Stuart is chuckling: “I can hear him shouting, ‘There’s Chilean engines in here! The whole place is awash with ’em!’” Everyone falls about at his impersonation. “I would say you were somewhat volatile at times,” says Stuart.
“I might’ve been,” replies Bob, in a voice softer than falling snow.
“I told Bob, ‘Right. That’s it. We’ll black the fuckers.’” Blacking entailed attaching labels with the word “black” on them to each contested part, warning everyone in the plant to steer clear of them. The four engines – which had likely come from the Hawker Hunters involved in the attack on the presidential palace in Santiago – were eventually dumped outside in crates. Without protection from the elements, they were useless within a year.
In theory, the men could have been sacked for their protest, but the strength of the unions made that unlikely. “The only reason we could do what we did was because we were organised,” explains John. “We took strike action for the NHS, the Shrewsbury pickets, you name it.” But this was something different: a high-profile international case that brought hope to people 7,000 miles away.
Precisely how much hope, and to what end, had remained unclear until Felipe started researching his film six years ago. It was widely known that Hortensia Busside Allende – the widow of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president killed in the coup – visited Glasgow in 1975 and expressed publicly her gratitude. Hundreds of letters of thanks poured in over the years, too, and Robert helped to resettle Chilean refugees in Lanarkshire as early as 1974.
“It was perfect, perfect,” he says now of the community’s reaction. “The amount of help we got – from the council, who gave them houses, and Rolls-Royce, who asked for people to help out by donating white goods.” It sounds a world away from the hostility that can accompany the arrival of refugees today. “Aye,” says Stuart sadly. “There was no trace of what you see now.”
The men always felt the story was unfinished, though, not least because of the way the boycott ended: after four years, the engines were mysteriously stolen in the middle of the night by vehicles with false licence plates. “It was as if the SAS had done it,” says Bob. “Obviously the government, no question,” says Stuart. “But personally, I’ve always seen it as a victory. They can only fly so many hours before they need to be overhauled – and we stopped that, didn’t we?”
Indeed, the film tracks down Fernando Rojas Vender, the unrepentant former commander of Chile’s air force, who makes clear the extent of the damage done. The entire squadron of 29 Hawker Hunters was close to being grounded by the boycott. Although India, Israel and South Africa came to Pinochet’s aid, probably with spare parts, East Kilbride was the only place in the world where those engines could be properly repaired.
The boycott was familiar to Felipe: as the son of a journalist exiled to Belgium after the coup, he remembered hearing East Kilbride mentioned at solidarity meetings. “I’d been told that many of the original guys had passed on, so I was intending the film to be fiction not documentary. Then, when I met them, I realised they’re natural born storytellers. That matches the way Chilean solidarity has been told over the years, as oral history.”
Robert was wary of revisiting the boycott, though, having been stung in the past by inaccurate reporting, while Stuart harboured little affection for those days. “I was about as interested in anything to do with Rolls-Royce as I was in the location of my last shite.”
When I ask Stuart what changed his mind, Felipe jogs his memory: it was the footage of Chilean political prisoners remembering how the protest saved their lives. Most government records were destroyed, but the film argues convincingly that members of the air force who had been sympathetic to Allende – and were imprisoned and tortured under Pinochet – may in fact have had their freedom granted in exchange for those Hawker Hunter engines.
“I remember watching that with you,” says Felipe, “and you kind of lost your sense of humour a bit.” Stuart agrees: “When those guys discussed the impact it had, I was impressed. Some people would be broken after what they’d been through. But they had got up again. I was touched by that. And I make an effort not to get touched too much.” Bob is more forthright: “It was a bit emotional watching all that. I think it’s a cracker of a film.”
Felipe says one of the first questions he was asked by the men was whether he could find out what happened to the engines. And one of the offending items does make a cameo appearance near the end of the film. How did it feel to see it again? “It was a good feeling,” says Stuart. “Ah, it was just an engine,” sighs Bob, to much laughter, though he brightens at the news that it will soon be on display permanently in East Kilbride. “I think it has affected Chileans more than these guys,” Felipe tells me, “because so much from Chilean history has been destroyed. Finding tangible evidence is quite a rare thing.”
The men are long retired and the sprawling plant has fallen silent: it closed in 2015 and was demolished the following year. But the question raised implicitly by the film is whether something like the East Kilbride boycott could ever happen again. “Anyone today who wants to mirror what these guys did is taking a much bigger personal risk,” says Felipe, citing the lack of trade unions. “But considering what’s happening now, some of us are going to have to take that risk.”
Bob gives it some thought. “I’m not sure. It would have to be very specific circumstances.” These men were responding, after all, to a coup that focused the world’s attention on Chile, whereas anyone wishing to obstruct, say, Britain’s sale of arms and torture equipment to countries on its own list of human rights abusers, faces a more diffuse task.
“It wouldn’t be so simple now,” says Stuart. “But never underestimate the power of someone standing up and speaking the truth.”
Well worth a visit to the cinema to view solidarity in action List of showings http://naepasaran.com/upcoming-screenings/
Throughout its existence, the Socialist Party continually refers to capitalism as being the main cause of the evils which exist to-day. Those evils are almost too well known to need recapitulation. They are widespread poverty and semi-starvation in the midst of an abundance of wealth, lying advertisements—part of the enormously wasteful method of distribution, with its myriads of shops and salesmen and deliverers, the colossal waste of human effort in the building of battleships, aeroplanes and armaments, the fussy and useless activities in the circularizing of letters and the faking up of news as an adjunct to the advertisers, the waste of valuable human labour in ministering to the whims and caprices of wealthy idlers—these, and the evils which arise directly from poverty itself, such as prostitution, robberies and murders. If capitalism is the cause of these evils, then it is obvious that any party which maintains that this is the case must constantly refer by name to that order of society. In all sciences, there are words which indicate certain basic ideas or principles, and if any discussion upon any section of that particular science is to be understood at all, those words must be used whenever that particular idea or principle is referred to. For instance, in physiology one constantly has to refer to the heart and the circulation of the blood. In the same way, in sociology, one has to refer to the elements which constitute a particular society, and the particular form of society in which we are living at the present time, and which therefore interests us the most, has been given the name of capitalism. It is, therefore, frequently necessary to use this word, and no apology is required for doing so.
That capitalism is the cause of the evils enumerated above, besides many others, has been abundantly proved in the previous posts of this blog. It is not proposed to go into this in detail here, but it is sufficient to point out that the characteristics of capitalism are—the private ownership of the means of production and the production of articles for profit. It is not very difficult to perceive that those evils arise from this fact of private ownership and the efforts of the few people who own them to dispose of those commodities. Does it not logically follow that if the means of living are owned by one class, then any other class can have no other relation to the first class than that of slaves? But if a logical deduction is not sufficient, then what are the facts? Unless he or she steals or begs, a person without capital has to work in order to live. We have to find a master. That master is generally some big corporation or other. During the time that we are with that company we have to work hard, we have to do what we are told, we frequently have to smile back when we are insulted, humiliated and bullied, and if we dare to stand up for ourselves, we endure the torments of unemployment. We are now “free,” but as it is difficult to live upon the dole, quick as though we have to start searching for another master. Whilst on the dole we are constantly being summoned to interviews for our case to be “reviewed”; an investigator comes round to see if we have managed to put by any savings or if he has earned a few pounds surreptitiously, and if we have and has not disclosed it, then woe betide us. Is this person not a slave to the class which employs him or her and which, when out of work, administers the relief and the unemployment benefit?
Letter to the Editors from the November 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard
Sirs,
While agreeing entirely with your aims of socialism, I would quarrel with the idea, enshrined in your declaration of principles, that society is still clearly divided in such a way that everyone is a member of either the “master class” or the “working class”, or as you put it those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. There are now a vast number of people who, for example, work and own shares. It seems to me that the idea of a divided society is no longer valid: all the other objections to capitalism are in themselves more than enough, but the concept that everyone can be put on one side of the fence or the other is not acceptable. In particular, this would suggest that anyone who, for example, receives interest on a bank account, or who is partly paid in shares of the firm he works for, cannot support the SPGB' as “all political parties are but the expression of class interests.”
Yours sincerely,
Neil Mitchison,
Edinburgh.
Reply.
A class is a group of people who all have the same economic interest. The makeup of classes, the dividing lines between them, their functions in society, the number of them in existence, have all varied with different social systems.
One thing which capitalism has done has been to tidy up classes. There are now only two of them and, with relatively few exceptions, the whole population of the capitalist world is in one or other of them. The exceptions may be peasants living and working under social relationships more akin to feudalism, or shopkeepers and tradesmen existing in a sort of class twilight These people — and they are a small minority — may be unclassifiable but this does not affect the overall, significant class division of capitalism.
The vast majority of people can be placed in one class; they are forced to sell their working abilities in order to live. They do this to the owners of the means of production and it is only by selling their working power that they are allowed access to the means of production. It is reasonable, and accurate, to call these people the working class and to call the other class, who own the means of production and who therefore buy labour-power, the capitalist class.
Now what about the person who sells his labour power to an employer but who also owns some shares, or receives interest on savings? This does not alter the fact that he depends for his living on selling his ability to work; his relationship to the means of production makes him a member of the working class.
The division of society into classes, with opposing interests which cause so much unrest, is only one of capitalism's malaises but it is not to be ignored or minimized. The revolution for Socialism will overthrow the capitalist class and take away their monopoly of the means of production. It is, therefore, against their interests but it is in the interests of the other, subject class — the working class. That is why it is only the Socialist Party which stands for the interests of the working class and why all who oppose Socialism, or who stand for something less than Socialism, express the interests of the capitalist class.
Research shows 19% of workers in Scotland were paid less than the Living Wage. The real Living Wage currently sits at £8.75 per hour outside London, where it is £10.20 per hour. Jenny Stewart, Partner at KPMG in Scotland, said: “Scotland still has 435,000 workers paid below the Living Wage, and progress seems to have stalled with 19% of the workforce paid below the Living Wage compared to 18% last year...“If you’re one of the following – a part-time worker, or under the age of 21, or female – you are much more likely to be paid less than £8.75 per hour.” https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2018/11/04/rate-of-workers-in-scotland-paid-less-than-the-living-wage-is-below-uk-average/
Once the workers of the world take over parliaments by electing a majority of socialist MPs (actually socialist delegates) mandated to pronounce: Annulment of all property and territorial rights whereby all that is on and in the Earth becomes the common heritage of the whole humanity, just imagine how great will be the massive popular impact of this revolutionary event all over the world.
People will not just remain sitting beside televisions at home simply watching the results; instead, they will take to the streets and terraces in a gigantic delightful mood to celebrate this emancipatory historical occasion whereby the centuries-long hope of socialism is being materialised. Parliaments will actually be surrounded by workers from all walks of life, including the members of the armed forces as members of the working class, and others, even from some enlightened members of so far adversaries as well, joining them. Not hundreds, nor thousands, nor even hundreds of thousands, but millions will gather to voice support and join hands to make their own history with their victorious delegates and to enjoy the JOY OF FREEDOM forever from the clutch of the age-old class division of society.
The world will see a new humanity without alienation and competition, and the budding of humanity’s full potential of cooperation. Will there be anybody to oppose this earth-shaking occurrence that relegates to the past class-divided pre-history by initiating the real universal human history in the making? In all probability, there will be none. Yet, for argument’s sake, if there were to be any at all, will those brainwashed recalcitrant brutalized ruffians be able to face up to this human uprising the world over? Any rebellion would be appropriately dealt with by the winning workers having the necessary political power and command at their disposal. This momentous change will abolish the government over people and usher humanity into the realm of freedom by reorganising the global community into a three-tier participatory democratic organisational system – local, regional and global to administer things and the affairs of life.
Let us examine capitalism.Here we find a privileged group at the top owning the means of production and in possession of the control of government. Underneath is the mass of the population, the working class, dependent on the owning class for their means of living.In order to live workers must find a buyer for their manual and mental energy. It does not matter what the nature of their working capacity may be, they must find employment for it in order to live. With few exceptions, this is the lot of the worker from early years until old age.
To whom does the worker apply for a job? To the masters individually or collectively. It is true that it is not to the masters in person that the worker applies for a job as a rule because nowadays the masters are usually hidden behind a company, a trust or a state concern. It is to a paid representative of these concerns that the worker must apply.All the while the worker is at work he or she is haunted by the fear that he or she may lose his or her job and perhaps not get another one, or be thrown among the wreckage of the industrial system. Consequently, we humble ourselves in ways that sometimes make us squirm. We are respectful and subservient to those above us and to the wealthy class in general. We fear and jump to the call of “the guv’nor.” Like the chattel slave, we depend for our living on the will and the whim of another. Consequently, we are slaves. It is true the worker is personally free, which the chattel slave is not, but this is cold comfort when the hooter goes, calling us to our daily toil.
The capitalists as a class own the means of production and are therefore in a position to determine when, where and how the worker shall live. There is no escape from the shackles under present conditions apart from death. The workers depend on the wage we receive in order to get the necessaries of life, and we are rightly described as wage slaves to distinguish us from other kinds of slaves.Hypocrisy is a leading characteristic of modern times, and one often reads remarks of satisfaction over the fact that slavery is long since dead and that freedom is the right of all people to-day. Unfortunately, the victims of the system are themselves only too ready to accept this view, even though they occupy abominable slums, hurry in harassed and turgid streams over the bridges in the morning, haunted by the fear of being late on the job.
Within the ranks of the working class itself, there are many who suffer from the illusion that they are in a class apart from and above the common worker; in fact, that their interests are identical with those of the masters as against the rest of the workers. Amongst these are scientists, managers and salaried workers of various kinds.These types of workers would be under no delusion if they would apply to their condition the test of a slave. On what do they depend for their living? Are they dependent wholly or mainly on selling their energies for wages or salaries in order to live? If this fits their economic condition then they are members of the working class, slaves, always in fear of losing their jobs and suffering accordingly.The point always to be borne in mind is the frailty of the hold upon that on which the living depends, and the ease and swiftness of operation of the power of the job-controllers. Many in exalted positions have had this very cruelly impressed upon them, and although they scorn the suggestion that they are enslaved, yet they take good care to placate and dance to the tune of those responsible for the salaries.There is no escape, therefore, from the conclusion that the fundamental interest of all who depend upon wages or salaries is identical, and is opposed to the interest of those who own the means of production and pay their slaves wages or salaries. It is a slave interest opposed to an ownership interest.
The slaves of old tried to release themselves from their bonds by bloody revolts, which, however, were always suppressed, because the masters controlled the political machinery, the instrument of power. The slaves of to-day have had passed over to them the means to obtain control of the political machinery. Thus they are able to mould society to suit their needs when they know what those needs are and how they can be satisfied.
One thing above all is essential to ensure the triumph of socialism, and that is the enthusiastic advocacy of our principles and policy by those who accept them. Given this enthusiastic support then there is every reason to believe that Socialism will be a matter of our life-time. It is just because Socialism is a practical question of to-day, and not an ideal of a hundred years ahead, that we are organised in the Socialist Party. Consequently, we urge all really practical workers to give our principles and our policy their serious consideration. The more convinced and enthusiastic advocates we have the sooner will socialism be here and with it an end to our economic troubles.It should be an inducement to waverers to know that there is a Party whose principles are so soundly based on facts that they have been a safe political anchorage for many years, through peace and war and post-war troubles.
The Socialist Party alone can look at the world without pessimism or despair. Socialists never built up false hopes, and have not been disillusioned. Seeing the world as it is we know how great the task is, but we know what can be done by determined, organised work towards a clearly-outlined goal. The world is out of joint because the social system is faulty at the foundation. The private ownership of the means of production and distribution is no longer necessary or desirable. It produces the evils of poverty, unemployment, competition, war and class hatred. It has got to be abolished. Instead of an anarchistic war of private owners seeking profit and permitting the workers to produce wealth only when profit is to be obtained by so doing, the social system needs to be refashioned on the new basis of common ownership. Society must assume possession of its means of life. The private owners must be dispossessed. Their private interests and their class privilege must not be allowed to stand in the way of social progress and the welfare of the whole community. The Socialist Party has taken on the great task of organising for that end. We concentrate on the one vital question, capitalism to be replaced by socialism, private ownership to give place to common ownership, privilege to give place to equality.
Our aim is one to which the workers of the whole world can rally, "without distinction of race or sex.” The Socialist movement is the one movement in the van of social progress, able to face the present world troubles with understanding and confidence.
No matter how sincerely a Labour government wishes to protect the interests of the workers, no matter how benignly they impose their unwanted ‘leadership’ upon us, they can do nothing other than be puppets of the economic forces of capitalism. It makes no difference whether Tory or Labour govern, the real power is that of the capitalist system and only its replacement by a genuine socialist society will do. When will the Left realise that socialism will only be achieved when we have awakened the social consciousness of the working class throughout the world? Socialism will be won by struggling to free the minds of the workers from their capitalist bonds, and never by putting in a Labour government. Decades on from the beginning of the slum clearances, when city planners thought it would be a good idea to house people in a soulless high-rise, the problems continue to exist, and the ideal of abolishing poverty has been quietly dropped. All we are left with is Labour’s ongoing attempts to administer poverty. At least that way, they can be seen to do something. The poor are fated to always be with us, it seems. The political parties just accepted, and thus condoned, that poverty would continue to exist. Poverty is the direct and necessary result of the way the capitalist system works, and nothing can be done to end poverty, so long as the capitalist system remains accepted as the first premise for action. If these communities truly want to help themselves, they will need to begin organising to end capitalism once and for all.
Political parties are bidding for your support and vote with programmes which may seem to offer some hope of easing, or even abolishing, many of the problems of this country and of the world. Millions of people find these programmes attractive enough to vote for one or other of them. The Socialist Party argues that none of them stands up to examination. Every government comes into power pledged to abolish slums and to end the housing crises. They all seem to have it all worked out, with their declarations of intent and their statistics. The result is that today’s housing problem remains a disgrace to any civilised society. It is true that sometimes a particular problem might be alleviated, but this is only for others to take its place. For example; we are told that our lives have been improved by the development of new technology, but we are also faced with the fact that these very developments threaten greater job insecurity.
What causes the problems of the world? This is a society based on the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. Private ownership at once divides society into two classes — the owning, or capitalist class and the deprived, or working class. It is the working class who suffer poverty and all it means in terms of bad housing, inadequate medical services, sub-standard food and so on.
The Socialist Party puts forward the alternative society. Socialism will be a society in which the whole of humanity, without distinction of race or sex, will own in common all we use to make and distribute wealth. Common ownership means a society without classes, without privileges, without different standards of consumption. In a socialist society, everyone will have free access to the world’s wealth and will stand equally in that respect.Socialism will produce its wealth for human use instead of for sale. This will make it a society of cooperation instead of competition. There will be no frontiers to divide the world’s people. Socialism will be one world, with one people working together for the commonwealth.Socialism will be an efficient world, in contrast to capitalism, where waste and shoddiness are profitable. For the first time, men and women in Socialism will realise their capabilities to the full. Socialism will produce an abundance and at only one standard — the best we are capable of.
The Socialist Party is not another collection of leaders telling you to trust us and promising you almost anything for the sake of winning your vote. No leader can give you Socialism, no clever politician can pull you by the nose into the new society. Neither will it happen by accident.Socialism must be your work; it needs a conscious political act by the mass of the people, opting for the new society in full knowledge of what it is.
We are a political party, hostile to all others, including those phoney revolutionaries of the Left. The Socialist Party is different — we are the political instrument to be used by the working class to transform the world from a chaos of deprivation and strife into an order of abundance and harmony. The Socialist Party has consistently argued, that the party aiming at the emancipation of the working class can play no part in the government of capitalism; they must continue building up support for socialism.
Inequality in Edinburgh is unlike any other city in Scotland. The clue is in the fact it’s the “capital” city. Capital in this context being another word for money. Nearly 45 per cent of the population hold a degree or professional qualification In places like Dundee and Glasgow, social classes usually exist side by side, often just a corporation brick’s throw away from each other. In Edinburgh, it’s a little different. Areas of prosperity are fortified near the centre, while deprived communities tend to exist on the periphery. House prices in some places are enough to make your eyes water. A quarter of all secondary school pupils attend fee-paying schools. Yet social deprivation is higher than the national average, which is a bit odd considering the vast wealth so clearly on display. A quarter of all people in Auld Reekie live in poverty, including one in five children – 20,000 to be more specific. Food bank use is at record levels, with one food relief project handing out more than 9500 emergency food supplies this year. That’s an 18.5 per cent rise on last year and more than twice the number being handed out five years ago – when everyone believed food banks were a temporary thing. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/rapper-loki-edinburghs-poor-locked-13513965
If humanity is to survive a totally new vision of the way society runs is required. At the root of many, if not all, of the social ills, is our socio-economic - capitalism. The raison d’être of the capitalists is to maximise market share and generate profits, irrespective of the harm to people or damage to the environment. Capitalists actively work to curtail democracy and deny the establishment of a just economic system; they steer and direct government policy and consistently obstruct anti-business legislation.
Socialism is a shift of an unjust and unsustainable economic model to an equitable and egalitarian participatory way of living. Sharing and solidarity are at the heart of socialism. The Socialist Party is to bring about real change and alter social relationships and express positive democratic ideals, such as social justice, tolerance, and compassion. Sharing of resources, knowledge, skills, ideas that shape our lives is real meaningful participation. The Socialist Party looks beyond nationalism and seeks a movement forming throughout the world.
Socialists are not overly obssessed solely with the standard of living of the working class and increased their share of income. Our opposition to capitalism strikes at the very root of the working class condition: the need to sell our ability to work to those who own and control the means of production and distribution. The only way to ensure that the interests of the working class are fulfilled is through the abolition of the working class itself. Indeed, the working class is a class whose interests are destined never to be fulfilled. This does not mean that it must give up the struggle to improve its conditions. That would be a disastrous course of action. What it does mean, however, is that in the struggle to improve its conditions, the working class will come up against the limitations of what can be achieved under capitalism. They will necessarily confront the conditions of their existence as a class. This leaves two courses of action open to the working class. First, it can work within the limitations of capitalism to obtain what it can. But the history of the working class shows that this is precious little, and there is no reason to believe that the future will hold anything different. Or it can take the second course of action: to confront the class limitations with the determination to break them down. To abolish the condition which creates and recreates the working class: the ownership of the means of production and distribution by the capitalist class.
A reformist accommodation to capitalism’s problems, disguised as an embattled militancy, not only puts off the time when capitalism will be replaced by socialism but also postpones the discussion of why only socialism is the solution to the problems confronting the working class. But the reformist argues that something has to be done now! If this or that problem can at least be ameliorated, then this is a worthwhile goal; they cannot wait for socialism to provide a solution. When challenged to give an example of a solution to a working-class problem, the reformists will be at a loss. They will even go so far as to agree with the socialist that capitalism has no solutions. But, they will retort, at least a reform will ensure that fewer people are suffering from this or that problem: something is better than nothing, isn’t it? There is a gaping hole in this argument. The justification for supporting reformist proposals is the comparison of the position before and after the reform. Before the reform, there are, say, 60,000 people living in stinking, rotten houses, whereas after the reform there are hoped to be a mere 40,000. How could the socialist deny support for the reform? Not to support it would condemn 20,000 more people to live in stinking, rotten houses than need be.
But socialists, in not supporting the reformist programme, are not advocating that nothing be done. Far from it. We are calling for the working class to unite to introduce socialism now. In comparison with living conditions possible in a socialist society, the reformist changes are a bloody disaster for the working class. The choice for the working class is not between "Reform or Nothing". It is "Reform or Revolution."
