Wolves in Workers' Clothing

 

While the Socialist Party support sound trade union action they have to point out, too, that trade unions, though necessary and useful organs of working-class resistance, cannot emancipate the working class from capitalism—that can be done only by a socialist working class politically organised to take control democratically of the machinery of government, for the purpose of abolishing capitalism and introducing socialism. Equipped with sound socialist knowledge, and the will to unite for victory, the working class will achieve its emancipation, in spite of the confusion and disillusion spread by office-seeking political opportunists.

The occasional reference to socialism from the so-called revolutionary left-wing betrays the historical irony that those who now adopt the terminology of socialist revolution are deeply committed to the maxim of the German reformist, Bernstein, that “the goal is nothing, the movement everything”. For them the goal is everything, the movement is never more than a means to it. They care more for movement than for direction; more for growth than for principle; and more for the tactics of a struggle than for the nature of victory. 

The Socialist Party refuses to sacrifice our socialist goal for reformist demands and as a result, it is labelled utopian. This universal slur from the left is reserved for those clear-sighted workers who enter the historic battle of the classes because they look forward to the fruits of victory and not the ‘reality’ of repeated defeats.

The Socialist Party aims to establish a system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. Those who reject that aim are the idealists, stumbling among the chaos of capitalism, searching for new brick walls to bang their heads against.

It would be extreme arrogance for socialists to devise detailed plans for the lives of emancipated humanity after they have carried out the political act to establish socialism. Like Marx, we are not the designers of a Utopia, but we do not fear prediction and speculation regarding life in a socialist society.

In socialism, a baby will not be destined to accept the label of class. Male or female, black or white, mentally and physically normal or abnormal, it can expect the freedom to develop as a social individual in a world based upon the practice of co-operative equality.

The capitalist-style family will not exist if indeed the family is retained in any form. Certainly, there will no longer be imposed sex roles, indoctrination in the name of education, and repression in the name of discipline. Now, a child must learn to become a wage slave — or, if lucky, a supposedly cultured parasite. In socialism, children will learn from experience over which they will have control.

No society can operate without work, and neither will socialism. Not employment, which is simply the capitalist word for slavery, but useful, self-imposed, creative work. Production in a socialist society will be for use, not profit; with each member of society giving according to his or her ability and taking according to self-determined needs. There will be no wages as a price for a worker’s labour power, nor money as a barrier to the world’s wealth. Free access will be the basis of wealth distribution.

Without the compulsion of wage labour, men and women, if they are able to, will contribute to the tasks of production and distribution. Work will be transformed by socialism; no more dull conditions, no more master-slave relationships, no more shoddy production of cheap commodities, no more need to do one job for life. The aim of work will be the production of the best and the satisfaction of the producer. The latter is an important qualification. There will not be a producer-consumer division in socialism, but satisfactory lifestyles both inside and outside the production process.

A Socialist society will be a political and economic democracy. Everyone will own everything' since private property will not exist. Does that mean we shall have the right to take each other’s coats? No: it means that men and women will use what they need, sometimes permanently as in the case of a coat, sometimes temporarily as in the case of a library book. There will be no rights of property. If someone takes another’s coat — either by accident or because they are acting irrationally — then there will be free access to as many new coats as are needed. Economic democracy will mean that decisions about production and distribution will be made socially, either by the whole of society — which would be no problem even today, with current methods of world communication — or by those involved in the processes, if society is prepared to leave the decision to them. We do not aim to replace the present capitalist elite with a new bureaucratic elite. The socialist revolution will be a permanent revolution in the sense that once enacted, people would have to participate in running society.

Free mobility will be available for everyone in a socialist society. Today, workers are born and they die in one country, usually without travelling far out of its borders. No boundaries, nations or provinces will divide socialist society. The world will be one. That is not to say that we aim to create a monolith, devoid of cultural, language and other variations.

Social organisation in socialism will not depend upon governments, leaders or parties. These only exist in a class society, where laws are the expression of the ruling class's interest. When the socialist working class take power, they will use the law to dismantle capitalism and build socialism. Once that has been done, there will be no laws created by one section of society in order to control another.

Just as there will be no secular laws, so there will be no laws of the phoney creation of primitive man - god. Socialist society will have no need for religions and utopias beyond the grave. What if a minority within socialism want to continue their religious lifestyle? Then they shall be free to do so, and those who want to walk across the Red Sea or jump from a high building without a parachute may do so too.

The morals of socialism will be fashioned by common ownership and free access, and by the sovereignty of democratic decisions. Taboos about sex will be as laughable as taboos about witchcraft are today. To those conditioned by the popular prejudices of capitalism, socialism seems amoral. In truth, it will be a society which will reflect human urges — the imagination and the self-interest of humanity.

Hanging on the wire (music)

 

The Socialist Party Aim

 

The society we aim at building in the future is one where all will have a free and equal hand in the ordering of affairs. How can such a society be built on foundations such as blind worship of the leaders?

We repeat, the lesson we have been repeating for years: no leader, no matter how honest, clever or well-intentioned, can lead the workers out of slavery. No person or group, regardless of how clever, can build a new society which depends for its success upon the knowledge and understanding of the bulk of the population.

Socialism can only be attained by working men and women who know what socialism means and how it is to be obtained. Therefore it is necessary for working men and women to do the comparatively small amount of thinking that is necessary to understand socialism. When they have done so they will know the steps to be taken, and will no longer need to rely on the weak basis of leadership.

In the long run, production under capitalism expands. The accumulation of capital, the self-expansion of value, is, after all, the economic logic of capitalism. The expansion of production, however, does not proceed smoothly at a steady rate but is interrupted from time to time, so the graph of production under capitalism has the appearance of a series of peaks, each generally higher than the previous one. The troughs in between represent periods variously described as crises, depressions, and recessions.

World capitalism is now in one of these troughs. But sooner or later it will recover from this depression, just as it has from all previous ones. This is because depression itself creates the conditions for a re-expansion of production.

In a recession, three things occur which tend to raise the rate of industrial profit.

First, a number of capitalist enterprises go bankrupt and their assets are sold off cheaply to their rivals. The result is a fall in their capital value or a depreciation of the capital invested in them so that fewer profits are needed to maintain the same rate of profit.

Secondly, increased unemployment tends to depress wages, and this once again tends to raise profits.

Thirdly, the cutback in productive investment means that the demand for money-capital is reduced while at the same time the supply (from capitalist enterprises who are not re-investing) is increased, resulting in a fall in the rate of interest and so a rise in the proportion of surplus value going to industrial profits.

These — depreciation of capital, lower wages, lower interest rates — eventually raise the prospects of making profits high enough to encourage those capitalists who have not been re-investing to begin investing again. Business confidence returns. Production begins to pick up and, through the chain reaction effect of more money being spent both by capitalists investing in new means of production and by workers now earning wages again, at an increasing rate.

So begins the process of economic recovery which develops into a boom . . . and eventually ends in a crisis and another depression. This is because boom conditions lead to ‘over-investment’, to too much wealth being devoted to expanding the means of production. This is inevitable due to the anarchy of production under capitalism, to the fact that production is not socially controlled and planned but is decided by hundreds of competing enterprises — and, on the world scale, states also — acting independently and in isolation. Capitalism will continue going through its cycle of depression, recovery, boom, crisis, and depression until the working class consciously decide and act to end it by bringing production under the conscious democratic control of society on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production.

Armed force, within and between individual states, is inescapable under the social system of capitalism. States often disagree over their mutual boundaries; each, in normal circumstances, wishes to preserve, or to extend if possible, its frontiers. The larger the territory, the greater the chance of profit. The ideas of ‘race’ or nationalism, of separate language groupings or cultures, or the traditions of such groupings, are often called on by both sides in such disputes. So also religion. 

Once again it is members of the working class who are dying on both sides. They die not in their own interests, nor to build a world fit for human beings, but in the interests of their own ruling class.

In the wars of capitalism, every working-class death is an outrage, and in the war in Ukraine, as in everyone before it, all workers should refuse to take part. They have a bigger job; to live to build a new society in which war will be a black memory.

 

There has never been a time when the conditions for a transformation to a socialist society have been so ripe. Socialism has never been as indispensable and economically feasible as it is today. Whatever job a worker does, and whatever the pay for it, does not change the facts of their class position in capitalist society. Capitalism is divided; on one side are the workers, who sell their abilities for a wage, and on the other the capitalists, who buy those abilities.

The interests of those two groups have always been opposed, and that will stay as long as capitalism lasts. Only a basically different society can bring us social harmony.

The Socialism Train (music)

 

The Socialist Party Goal

 

Capitalism is a social system, not merely a form of government. State control and private ownership are simply different forms of the same thing and do not in any way touch the basic nature of capitalism. What is the basic nature of capitalism? How is capitalism marked off from any other system?

First and foremost the means of living, that is to say, factories, machinery, land and transport, etc., take the form of Capital.

This means that by government gilts and bonds, company shares, or outright personal ownership, part of the wealth created by past exploitation is invested for the purpose of further wealth production on a continuous basis of exploitation. IT IS THE UNPAID, SURPLUS PRODUCED BY THE WORKERS WHICH SERVES AS THE BASIS FOR THEIR OWN FURTHER EXPLOITATION and also provides for the rent, interest and profits for the owners of capital.

Following on from this form of ownership and indispensable to it, there must be a class which owns nothing but its ability to work, a class whose only access to life’s essentials is through wages.

Wages hide from open view the process of theft because in working for wages it appears that we get paid for what we produce, yet a moment’s thought will teach us that this cannot be true. Our wages provide our keep in terms of so much food, clothing and shelter, etc., and enable us to raise future wage workers.

The total value of wages, however, is not all we produce. The employers do not employ us just to keep ourselves, but also to keep them, too. and in much more luxuriant conditions than ourselves. When it is said that “they put up the money so they are entitled to a return,” just remember that the many thousands of millions of pounds, dollars and roubles, etc., tied up as capital all over the world today were NEVER produced by those who own them, but by workers in the manner described above. No matter how small a capitalist may be when he starts when he is big enough to live on a property income (State or private), it is not produced by him, but by propertyless wage labour.

It only remains to say that the selling of goods and services for profit is the universal means by which the capitalist disposes of the surplus in order to realise it in cash. The terms we all use in a more or less familial way, such as trade, prices, wages, world markets, finance, and everything arising from them, are hallmarks of capitalism.

The Socialist Party insists that capitalism cannot be made to work in peace and harmony. Its internal strife and conflicts are part and parcel of it. It cannot be otherwise than anti-working-class, for it rests upon their exploitation. In light of these facts the squirmings of the so-called “left” reformists to make this system run more smoothly, present to us socialists a picture of pathetic tragedy and it should be easy to see what the socialist attitude to industrial action, slogans, demonstrations, leadership and lobbying MPs must be. All of these things are merely aspects of the way workers react to the conditions of capitalism, painfully aware that something is wrong, but seeing only effects and not causes; they shoot in the dark, hoping, more by luck than judgment to hit something.

The Socialist Party's attitude to industrial action has been stated many times. It is that set out by Marx in Value, Price and Profit, namely, the recognition of the need for workers to organise into trade unions, in order to resist the downward pressure of employers upon wages and conditions and whenever possible (for instance, during a boom) to push up wages and improve conditions of work. This attitude is based on the fact of the class-struggle and the knowledge of the necessary antagonism which exists between owners and non-owners, the buyers and sellers of labour power. It is in the workers’ interest to gain as much as they can—the boss can always be relied upon to look after his end.

This does not mean at all that workers can achieve common ownership of the means of living by industrial action. It is the powers of the State that legalise and enforce the property rights and privileges of the capitalist class, and it is these powers that must be captured and abolished by the working class in order to introduce socialism - a class-free society.

To demonstrate, shout slogans and lobby M.P.’s, after having voted for one or the other parties to run capitalism, does not bother the capitalist class, who can rely on millions of workers to continue upholding the system that robs them. Only an understanding of socialism can really help the working class. 

This is what the Socialist Party works towards.

 

Bread and Roses (music)

 

The whole world is a danger zone

 Capitalism means plenty for the class who own the means of life and poverty for the working class who produce that plenty. 

The Socialist Party recognises the urgent need for socialist political organisation everywhere, aiming to gain, for the socialist working class, control of the machinery of government to inaugurate a socialist system of society. Socialism involves the abolition of production for sale and profit and the abolition of the wage system.  We are, and always have been, the only party that stands for one thing only — the common ownership of the means of production. It makes not a scrap of difference whether you call that socialism or communism. Conversely, the form of ownership in the world today is capitalism, call it what you will. It stands to reason that if you think that socialism/communism is the only answer to the evils that afflict society, then you join the party that stands for the establishment of that system. 

Now, after all these years of thinking that socialism meant a change in the system of society, from the present one of wars and class war, wages and profits, to one where none of these things would exist, a class-free world in which goods are produced for use, we discover that socialism really means—capitalism with higher benefit payments and lower rents. This kind of outlook typifies reformists everywhere. They start off not really understanding the significance of the socialist case, and then they dismiss their own misconceptions of socialism as “futuristic pipe dreams.” In the blind conceit that they know their way, they proceed to carry on the “day-to-day struggle” of trying to make capitalism with its wage slavery less burdensome to the working class whose life-blood it sucks. It is a self-evident fact to every socialist, that the evils which curse the lives of the working class CANNOT be removed within capitalism. If, as the Labour Parties claim, the problems of slums, insecurity, poverty, wars and slumps, can be got rid of bit by bit, one at a time, there is no need for socialism. It is the fact that these and other such problems are part of capitalism that makes socialism necessary. If on the other hand, they claim to know that the one solution is socialism, then to continue toying with the effects of capitalism is the depth of stupidity and the height of folly.

In order that anything worthwhile may be achieved it is no use the workers being just anti-Tory. The left-wing crowd and the rest of those who support or belong to the Labour Party are at one in wanting to swing the current anti-Tory mood in the direction of another Labour Government. Under capitalism then as now, armaments come before houses, pensions, or anything else. Pensions and housing troubles are part of the general poverty suffered by wealth producers. If the workers fail to learn from their past experiences of Labour Governments, they will go on electing strike-breakers and war planners until the obvious dawns on them and they realise their real position under this system and organise with us to end it. Movements of whatever name which do not seek the immediate establishment of socialism whilst they can never really defeat socialism they certainly help delay it.

Once again war rages in Europe. Once again men and women, deluded by the nationalist slogans of their rulers, kill and wound each other. Once again wealth is destroyed and resources wasted.

 The sight of our fellow workers serving as tank fodder in this way saddens socialists and our sympathies go to them and their families. We hope for an immediate end to this latest slaughter of our fellow workers in a cause which is not theirs, and re-affirm that only the establishment of world socialism will abolish war forever. War results in no benefit to the workers, who will be persuaded to fight the war. Whatever side they support they will be the losers, even though some of their masters may win markets, trade routes and sources of materials to enable them to increase the profits their workers turn out for them.

THE ONLY ANTIDOTE TO WAR LIES IN THE SPREAD OF SOCIALIST KNOWLEDGE.

When the workers realise the capitalist cause of wars they can no longer be misled by their ruling-class in support of them and this alone will see the end of these scourges of mankind. This is one of the reasons why the spread of socialist knowledge is so very urgent.

Socialism can only be built by the immense majority. It cannot be established by state decree. Without a clear vision of what it hopes to achieve the working class will never achieve socialism. Though it cannot take power on behalf of the working class, the Socialist Party will stand with whatever revolutionary class-wide bodies the worldwide working class creates. There are no middle ways. The abolition of classes and the end of the profit system can only mean breaking with the capitalist system. 

The Red Flag (music)