Socialist Principles

The reason very few of us can imagine a system that’s sustainable and fair is due to our education, which has been tuned to perpetuate the dominant economy of permanent growth. It’s ridiculous to think that we can’t create a sustainable ecological sound system. However, it’s also about how we can go from the present destructive profit system to one that is just.

 Even though we all live in a capitalist economy, few people seem to understand what this means. The situation is even worse for socialism which seems to be a label thrown onto random policies without any understanding whatsoever.

The easiest way to understand this is to imagine a factory and ask yourself “who owns it?” In capitalism, it is owned by its shareholders. Shareholders are a group of individuals (or just one person) who provide money to set up a business and receive a share of the profits in return (they hold a share of the business, hence their name). So the car factory is owned by the people who provide money (also known as capital). It should be obvious from this that pretty much every country on Earth is capitalist. Capitalism is an economic system in which the person or body owning capital—productive resources like raw material and labour—has the power to make decisions as to the use of these resources and who benefits from them. The capitalist is in control, not the workers, not the community members, not the government. It is a system in which capitalists seek to gain for themselves the highest possible return on their investment.  What most people think of as socialism is really state capitalism (where the state owns everything). This confusion came from the fact that places like the Soviet Union called themselves socialist when they really weren’t (if this sounds strange remember that they also called themselves “democratic” when they definitely were not). A key difference between the two systems is that capitalism is individualistic while socialism is collectivist. That is to say, capitalism views the world on an individual level and aims to get the best outcome for an individual. Socialism on the other hand views the world on a group level and aims to get the best outcome for society as a whole. It is paradoxical, then, that we see capitalism and democracy as best buddies when in reality they are driven by opposing principles: Democracy is about the wide dispersion of power so that everyone has a voice. But capitalism, merely left to its own devices, inevitably concentrates wealth and therefore power, so “capital’s” voice carries vastly more weight than citizens’. What if, from now on, every time we read or hear someone use the terms capitalism or socialism, we simply ask: How do you define it? At least, we’d be igniting conversation that takes us beyond slogans.

 Most socialist parties aren’t actually socialist. For example the French Socialist Party has no intention of removing ownership from shareholders to workers. Every major political party in the world is capitalist. It should also be clear how ridiculous the claim that Obama is a socialist or how little sense Margaret Thatcher’s much repeated quote “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” is. No matter how high you raise taxes or how many regulations you impose, as long as businesses are still owned by private individuals, it is not socialism. Socialism is not Robin Hood economics (taking from the rich to give to the poor) rather it is only way the workers own the business. 99% of the times someone is called a socialist they probably aren’t and a large number of “anti-capitalist” protesters are no such thing.

Is it possible, today or in some future time, to maintain a system of nation-states, which could manage a market economy in such a way as to either suppress the accumulation of capital or, given continued capital accumulation, resist domination by big capital or a return to capitalism, as so-called "market socialists" maintain? And is such a project possible without thoroughgoing political repression? And is there any reason to suppose that life under such a regime would be better than what we have now?  The answer is negative. 

Is it possible to envisage a world in which production is planned and regulated on a world scale by a state which outlaws the accumulation of capital, financial markets and so on.  In what way would such a situation differ from that which pertained in the Eastern Europe and China and so on? Is such a situation possible? Would it not be the height of utopianism to suppose that astate-ownership system could succeed today where it failed last century?

The average person are unable to see any alternative to the profit system. The view of the capitalist as the individual owner of an enterprise has long been out of date. Many thousands of individual owners of capitalist enterprises remain, but this is not the general way in which the enterprises are now owned. Marx had this to say about the capitalist: "As a capitalist he is only capital personified. His is the soul of capital." (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 233); "...capitalist - who are actually but the personification of capital." (Vol. 3, p. 261); "Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power whose agent is the capitalist." (Vol. 3, p. 259); and "These (capitalists) are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they all pocket the proceeds of the trusteeship." (Vol. 3, p. 261). It is capital which is the fundamental thing. Capital is, as Marx continually stressed, a social relationship; on the basis of this social relationship the capitalist can put on a wide variety of disguises. The management of each enterprise is becoming increasingly the effective controller of its own production. Private ownership includes joint stock companies (corporations) and syndicalistic workers councils and co-operatives as well as the government bureaucracies. Nor can the workers own the means of production when the state owns them.

Marx showed that the fundamental condition for wage labour is that a section of the population is entirely cut off from ownership of the means of production and will starve unless it agrees to sell its labour power to the owners of the means of production. The threat of hunger and privation is a very powerful material incentive to toil for others. It is well known, Marx provided no explicit model for an alternative to capitalism, no "recipes for cook-shops of the future," is his phrase. He was a "scientific" socialist. Although there were sufficient data available to him to ground his critique of capitalism, there was little upon which to draw regarding alternative economic institutions.

With socialism, there will be no wages at all and there will be no prices. Goods will be produced for the use of men and NOT for the profits which they bring in to bosses. Labour power will no longer be regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It will not be purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. Men and women in socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs and for their mutual development. Men and women no longer fettered by the necessity of working not only for their own material maintenance, but for the bosses’ even more material profits, will be freed to live more fully. The time that each must work will be small, yet the goods produced for all to enjoy will be plentiful. That is why, instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” workers must inscribe on their banner the REVOLUTIONARY watchword: “Abolition of the wage system!” Socialism is the ONLY answer! Marx wrote:

“Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism” He was talking about socialist/communist revolution happening simultaneously in the advanced capitalist countries. Today, we would have to talk about this happening globally since capitalism is now a global system of production.

Socialism is about radical democracy. To stress "democratic" is fundamental to our principles for no system would deserve the name socialism at all if it isn't democratic. When that democratic system is achieved, the people will determine how it will be run. What structure they will then choose will not be the condition for democracy, but what they will be using the democracy for. The democracy is in the processing of choosing itself, not in the specific choices. It would give people democratic control over political as well as economic matters, rather than the system we have now that concentrates the control of these areas into the hands of a small group of people at the top of the socio-economic ladder. It means giving you control over your workplace rather than in the hands of some board of trustees, the stock holders, or the bosses who are only interested in profit and not your livelihood. Socialism means collective ownership, and democratic control by the people, of the factories, farms, mines, mills, and all other industries and services, a classless, moneyless, wageless, stateless commonwealth based on common ownership and democratic of the means of wealth production. Socialism is, simply, power to the people. People will manage a certain amount directly, but find it necessary to manage the rest indirectly, that is, to delegate responsibilities to various local and regional elected committees. By default, the workers should manage all workplace matters until such time that the general public overrides a workers' decision. If the general public takes an affirmative step to declare that something other than the workers' choice is more convenient, more healthy, more ethical or more aesthetic, that decision should be a higher power than workers' self-management.

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what socialism is or is not about. So a little explanation is always helpful. Words have histories. Socialism before the twenties in the United States represented the ruling philosophy of Eugene V. Debs. It had a fair amount of popularity among workers. Then came the Bolshevik Revolution and socialism became conflated with Russian “communism”--and the media made sure that socialism was marginalised. Capitalism, on the other hand, was rarely used, "free enterprise" being the preferred term. Any word ending in "ism" was considered a term used primarily by intellectuals and therefore suspect. The term "free enterprise" contains two words both with positive connotations, "free" and "enterprise." No suggestion in here that making profits is the sole criterion for success. Maybe we need a replacement term for socialism-- how about "community" or something like that? Socialism after is just an inclusive economy that wants well-being for the entire community.  

People and Planet Instead Of Profit

We're closer to apocalyptic disasters than ever before. It is no secret that our planet is in deep trouble and that capitalism is to blame. Every problem we face as human beings is either caused  by the normal operation of our money-and-profit system (i.e. "capitalism"), or exacerbated by it. In fact: it is the natural, normal operation of our private property system that causes, or worsens, each and every social problem we face. Thus, if we really want to eradicate these problems, we must begin to work towards organising our society in a manner that reflects the reality of who and what we are: brothers and sisters in the one human family.  Just knowing this won’t get us very far. Words are cheap. We have to transform this knowledge into action to change the system.

Imagine ALL humans living in peace and in accordance to Nature. Technology, energy and world resources can sustain our world populations: rid the world of hunger, drastically lessen disease and provide for all its inhabitants. Imagine for a moment a society without money. Imagine a world without the pressure of bills or the stress of budgeting and all that goes with our present system. It all sounds impossible to achieve but a possible world of peace and prosperity is worth thinking about. It would be a dramatically new and different society, offering a way of life we can only dream of under our present system.

The moment we realise that a society based on money and profit, has become counterproductive we have made a break-through. The moment we realise that the apex of our development as a species is far higher than that which presently characterises us, we have already made an advance. When we ask why our global society, and its economy, is controlled by just a small group, (whether that elite is the tiny corporate ruling class of capitalists, or totalitarian bureaucrats of "The Party") and not by everyone, together, engaging in cooperatively in economic activity as one human family to satisfy human need and want, we have raised our consciousness. 

Calling for the abolition of money as such, i.e. while leaving everything else unchanged and even the isolated slogan "abolition of money" could misleadingly suggest this would lead to chaos. To be clear we should say that what we want is to see set up a system for producing and distributing wealth which doesn't require money. Which would be one based on the means of life being owned in common, social ownership – communism/socialism in its proper sense. If the means for producing what we need are owned in common so would be the product and the "problem" would then be not to sell it but how to share it ought: giving and taking would replace buying and selling and so money would simply become redundant and disappear.

A society based on exchange is one in which relations between individuals are indirect. Exchange and money go hand-in-hand because you need a medium that represents the abstract form of the worth of those goods, which can persist between exchanges between private producers, is universally recognized as nothing other than the bearer of value. Exchange is nothing if not the ability of A to sell to F to get money to then buy something from B, who sold something to E to get something from D, who bought something from F and sold something to A, etc. Exchange is the negation of A having to have what B wants in order to trade one use-value for another. Where this process becomes the dominant social form, where labour and the means of production themselves take the form of commodities, i.e. items produced to be exchanged, money must also be omnipresent and developed to its final form, as universal medium, as pure representation of value. Only at this point do we see the development of the highest form of value: capital.

To abolish capital is to abolish exchange and money because it is to abolish the ability to buy and sell human labour, the product of human labour, and to abolish human labour as private labour, asserting directly and consciously social labour as the new form of labour, hence freely associated producers. Exactly the "automatic" nature of money indicates its dominance over us, the dominance of a thing, a social product of human activity, over human beings.

The word "exchange" implies that one thing is given in return for something else. This can only happen when the two things are separately owned. In other words, where there's some form of private property. Money implies exchange and exchange implies the sectional or private ownership (if I exchange my apple for your orange we are really exchanging property title to these things). Therefore money is incompatible with common ownership and hence socialism. So, exchange is essentially an exchange of ownership titles. With communism (in its proper sense of the common ownership by all of the means of production and their products) this doesn't arise. So, abolishing exchange does not mean that everyone has to consume only what they produce (an impossibility anyway since all production demands a degree, often a high degree, of cooperation and so is a collective effort). What it means is that the means of production and the products are there to be used and taken. That's why there will be no need for money in communism. It is possible to say that the only exchange that would take place in communism/socialism would be to take "according to needs" in exchange for giving "according to ability".

Socialists don't agree that you can't abolish exchange, or, rather, that exchange is an eternal feature of human existence (as taught in economics textbooks). Exchange is not the simple use of some product that you didn't produce yourself. Nobody produces anything themself or ever has - production has always been cooperative and a collective effort; it's only ownership that's been individual. As the word itself implies exchange is the handing over of something in return for something else. Which implies that the things being exchanged are owned by those exchanging them. In other words, that private property exists. So, exchange is the exchange of property titles and a feature only of societies based on private property. In a communist society (in the proper sense of the word as one where the means of production and the products are the common property of all) what is produced is commonly owned and there won't be - can't be - any exchange. Once things have been produced they don't have to be exchanged for something else. Some way does have to be found of sharing them out or of giving people access to them, but that's distribution not exchange.

Although he dropped some of the more flowery philosophical language, Karl Marx never abandoned his view that money should be abolished through the establishment of a society based on common ownership and production directly for human need. Workers, black, white, male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, employed, unemployed; the normal operation of the economic system of capitalism is the cause of almost every problem you've got. Under capitalism, literally everything is for sale including human beings. Those members of the ruling class who are even less scrupulous than the rest of this class see no moral difficulty in holding people in slavery, if profit can be made through such an endeavor. In a system that glorifies, and indeed requires, profitmaking, it is little surprise that many persons take this ethic fully and pathologically to heart and act accordingly.

 One of the key problems with the profit system, is that it is based on competition. Because it is based on competition, companies must keep costs low, so competitors do not undersell them. What do you think the largest cost of doing business is? That's right - labour. In other words, our wages, what our employers pay us. So each and every employer - including yours - has an irresistible compulsion to keep wages as low as possible. Moreover, capitalism encourages corporations and business owners to try and earn as much profit as possible, no matter what. The less the corporation pays you, the more profit it earns for itself. These are the two principal reasons your wages are low. As you know, politicians go around in endless circles discussing this problem, when its cause is extremely straightforward--the normal, natural, and routine operation of capitalism. Fortunately, the solution to this pernicious problem is equally straightforward—the abolition of wage slavery. With socialism there are no wages and instead free access to goods and services based on need! We, the people, are not stupid. Under capitalism we have only partial democracy:  we have political democracy, in that we vote for our political representatives but we do NOT have economic democracy. Which means that we have no control whatsoever over issues of jobs, working conditions such as hours, intensity of work, frequency of work and similar issues. We have few rights, and we do what the "boss" orders us to, or we lose our job, which means we lose our income. Which means we lose our ability to survive as human beings. All of which means that we are, effectively, slaves.

It has long known that this planet already produces enough food to feed everyone on it. Hungry or otherwise ill-fed persons do not receive the food they need primarily because even food is seen as, and reduced to, a "commodity" under capitalism, and like every other such commodity, is grown, created, manufactured, processed, distributed, and sold not to feed people, but to produce profit for the tiny group of people who own food-related corporations and other businesses, from the largest agribusiness concern to the smallest corner-shop. In other words, under capitalism the food industry is an industry like any other. It operates by the same rules, and for the same reasons. Understand this reality, and you understand exactly why hungry people go hungry in a world of obvious abundance, in Africa, Asia, the United States, and elsewhere. Access to food is the first order of the day for any decent and moral society. Indeed, the entire capitalist system works just like this; its very operation is predicated upon the routine practice of denying people what they need, unless profit can be made. This is the case, whether the needed resource is food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, transportation, education, entertainment, or anything else. The fact that the emperor has no clothes, meaning the fact that this is a blatantly immoral, socially and economically illogical way to treat our brothers and sisters in the human family, goes unnoticed or unreported. Whatever one says about it, it is certainly not a method of social interaction that is rooted in real community. As Erich Fromm has pointed out, under modern capitalism the values and behaviours of the marketplace become and are the de facto values and behaviors of the larger society. Without question, capitalism brings with it and engenders across and throughout society its own severe set of social values, and corresponding social environment. As you might guess, this social environment is not one of cooperation and mutual aid, but of compulsive and institutionalized greed, corruption, and impersonality, as well as pathological individualism on one side of the coin, and on the other, superfluous poverty, misery, and desperation, manifold addictions, and artificial scarcity and want. All which is underscored and in good measure fueled by the grinding necessity for economic survival by any means necessary. Given these realities, wouldn't it be foolish and naive of us not to expect the full range of human aberration, certainly including all manner of criminal and anti-social activity? Thus, actions such as robbery and even murder, moral transgressions as well as legal infractions are and will remain an over-arching fact of life in capitalist society.

The disgusting and unforgiveable reality is that untold numbers of people around the globe, have no health care. The single reason is simply that it can't afford it. And remember, under capitalism, if you cannot afford a product or service, you simply won't get it--no matter what it is, how badly you need it, or how immoral it would be to deny it to you. Food, clothing, shelter, health care, transportation, anything and everything; if a corporate owner or other businessperson can't make a profit on your need, they will not fill that need. Sorry, buddy; tough luck. “Can’t Pay – Can’t Have.” This is the iron law of capitalism. In contrast, socialism would distribute goods and services based on need, as capitalism most decidedly does not do. Thus, every person would receive free access to health care, as they would receive free access to everything else. Walk into the clinic, get your health care. No payment of a fee, no stress of receiving a medical bill or losing insurance cover. Furthermore, we would actually require less health treatment, since the elimination of capitalism would eliminate so many of our present physical and psychological maladies that are caused by capitalism in the first place. Under a system like capitalism, that is so viciously and ruthlessly opposed to fully, properly, and consistently meeting human need, and that presents such a wide and obvious disparity between its character and method of operation, and the genuine physical, psychological, and emotional requirements of the human species, why would we expect that individuals would not lapse into this or that mental or psychological abnormality? Would not develop this or that mental illness behavior? The reality is that human beings require a social and economic support system, and capitalism simply does not provide it, save in perhaps a fashion that is unpredictable, unreliable, piecemeal, and wholly dependent on rickety impersonal mechanisms. Compare the behaviour of people and its effect on others, of our modern-day society, with that in society where individuals would be inculcated from birth with the principle of solidarity and sharing and which would act with sensitivity toward their fellow human beings at all times. It doesn't take much how radically it would differ from modern capitalist society.

Because capitalism is an economic system that operates in a fast, aggressive, and predatory manner, to accumulate as much profit as possible with little thought given to much of anything else, whether the health of the environment, worker or consumer safety, or anything else. In contrast, development, industrial production, and economic activity generally in a cooperative social system would never have permitted such an assault on our environment. Unlike capitalism, the initial development of our many processes of production inside socialism would have included environmental impact as a core consideration. Under capitalism, by contrast, such concerns are of secondary or even tertiary importance, relegated in consideration or perhaps to be worried about or worked out "later"--taking a clear backseat to profit maximisation. We're not asserting that the corporate ruling class pays no attention at all to concerns such as the environment. In the modern age they have finally come to pay some attention. But it is simple economic reality that the reason they do so is because they are continually forced by the government, and by fear of litigation by consumer or environmental groups, or the government, itself; moreover, corporations generally do the minimum necessary to satisfy government regulation or avoid litigation. One of the reasons they take this approach is that addressing environmental concerns represents significant cost, and one of the fundamental rules of success under capitalism is to keep costs down, indeed to cut them to the bone, whether those be the costs of paying workers, or the cost of maintaining the natural environment. Thus, as with every other problem we're suffering today, we need look no further for the root cause of our environmental degradation, generally, or global warming, specifically, than the normal operation of capitalism. In socialism there would be no money or profit to worry about, and the only factors to be "maximized" would be those such as safety, the well-being of the environment, and the health and self-actualization of people.

Politicians are only able to tinker around the edges of the economy; they cannot effect any sort of dramatic and permanent change. We all know this. Clearly, in the modern age the important questions--the ones that affect our lives most profoundly--are the economic questions, not the political ones. Yet, our power as citizens is still based on the long-outdated notion of political power and control, NOT economic power and control! This must be changed, to bring our power as citizens in line with the present-day character, nature, and reality of the modern, global economy. In fact, the extension of power and control from the political to the economic is exactly what we will have in a socialist society! It is part of the very definition of this radically new, powerful, and liberating kind of system!

Establish a society that is informed by cooperation, brotherhood, and love, and a consequent sensitive regard of all toward all, underscored by a decent and generous sharing of resources. Such a society is called a Cooperative Society. The only solution which is permanent, comprehensive, and realistic is the replacement of capitalism with a classless, moneyless, cooperative commonwealth. Establish a society that is informed by cooperation and a consequent sensitive regard respect of all toward all, underscored by a decent and generous sharing of resources. Such a society is socialism.

Understanding People

Consciousness changes in struggle, but there is no preordained level, or particular content, that rising consciousness automatically takes. Socialist consciousness emerges as the movement matures. Until then consciousness takes many different forms, including ideas that turn out to be dead-ends, or which can derail a movement before it ever attains socialist consciousness. There are no inevitable lessons people mechanically learn from class struggle. There has to be discussion, debate and a discourse over lessons of past fights and what is the best way forward, in which various arguments contend for influence. Workers are not blank slates whose heads are waiting to be filled up. They carry ideological baggage from their past and they are influenced by the clash of contending opinions. Different political currents, from left and right, contest for the direction of the movement. Whether or not their ideas are appropriate or beneficial, most believe that what they are proposing is in the best interest of the workers’ movement.

The Socialist Party is one contender among others to prove their ideas and perspectives of the movement. If socialists don’t struggle for a set of political ideas to shape that movement, others will. Political movements, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Our ideas are based on our principles. Socialism can only occur by people determining their own fate. We reject elitism and vanguardism yet we do not bow down to the current level of struggle nor opportunistically flatter the movement, by saying: “Whatever you’re doing, that’s alright, that’s fine.”

The task of socialists in this situation is not simply to offer an alternative ideology, a total explanation of the world, but to draw out the class consciousness that makes such bigger ideas realistic. We do not proceed from some faceless idea of the working class. The roots of worker self-activity and self-organisation in opposition to the employer lie, in the first place, in the reality of exploitation; i.e., the wage relationship—the very heart of capitalist accumulation, expansion, and growth. It is in the workplace, in the basic social relations of production, that the fight over the extra product of productivity occurs most sharply on a regular basis, and where even perceptions of bigger events can be shaped in a class perspective. The workplace is also, of course, where workers have the most power to act on their class consciousness, whatever its source may be.

Imagine a society in which the worker, instead of working for the profit ends of a private owner, works instead for the benefit of other people. In socialism, the products of social labour are enjoyed directly by the community themselves as a class. So, rather than working for someone else’s profit ends, or competing for more bread-crumbs than your neighbour, you are working for your own benefit in the context of broader society. Why is this so? It is because your work (along with everyone else’s) will work to increase overall production in society, whose rewards will be enjoyed by the society as a whole. As a member of that society, as a worker in socialism, you are entitled to work and share in the products of that work. It is in this way that socialism will work to meet the needs and wants of all members in society in a way that capitalist exploitation cannot.

The capitalists would be quick to denounce such a thing as Utopian because according to them people are too motivated by self-interest to be interested by these abstract altruistic benefits. To them, the only way to encourage hard work is to have a carrot and stick, with material wealth being the carrot and abject poverty being the stick. Their understanding follows that capitalism is a true meritocracy; that the wealthy are wealthy by virtue of the value of their work, and if their ability to accumulate wealth is harmed, they will have no incentive to contribute this work to the social good. The example of a doctor is frequently given. Why work hard, go through many years of education, to become a doctor if you won’t make more money doing that?

But studies of human behaviour reveals remuneration is not the sole incentive for hard labour, in that many undertake care work without the same monetary incentives enjoyed by your average doctor. In any hospital, there are technicians, nurses and other workers who are not as well paid as doctors (yet do the same work, if not more work, than your typical doctor) that do their jobs very well without this fiscal incentive. In addition to paying the bills and providing some funds for personal maintenance and enjoyment, people undertake such jobs to reap other benefits, in that they may actually enjoy the work that they do or the feeling they get for helping others. These benefits fall under the meeting of human needs for production, in both the material and social sense. There is another force which will compel workers under socialism: the broader social need for certain types of labor to be done. In capitalism, where the profit ends of an ownership class decide what work is done for what pay, compensation and the social need for work rarely coincide. For instance, teachers are vastly more important to all members of society than models, actors or television spokespersons. Education is a vital social need, yet educators are paid very little for their work being that they aren’t in the more lucrative position of advancing a capitalists profit motive. The very people who build society are very meagerly compensated for their essential work, while those who aid the parasites in their exploitative adventures make a king’s ransom.

In socialism rather than capitalism’s carrot and stick, the necessary risk of unemployment under capitalism to force workers to take on work which is inadequately compensated (and therefore, undesirable) compared to the decadence enjoyed by those who best help advance the ends of capitalist profit, the emphasis in socialism is on the work that it needed for the betterment of social conditions. The bottom line is that every worker in socialism has their individual interests invested in the success of socialism. In order to protect these individual and collective interests, the worker is encouraged to take up that work that best suits current social needs. The force which would provide this encouragement is socialist consciousness, the understanding that one’s personal ambitions coincides with those of other members of society if anyone is to meet their needs.

It is here where the capitalists assert the “self-made man” theory and argue that it is irrational to put any other person’s needs above one’s own. This argument completely ignores the entirety of the human experience. It ignores the fact that human beings are social creatures, who fundamentally depend on one another’s labor for mutual survival. It ignores the fact that we have a fundamental relationship with the all the peoples of the world simply by living in it. Consider the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the car we drive. Where did these things come from? What force made them possible? The answer is labour; the labour of our fellow human being. To defend ourselves from exploitation, we must be willing to defend one another. It is only rational to do so, being that we depend on one another anyway for our continued material and social production, to protect oneself and one’s fellow person, compromises will need to be made between individual and social desires and needs. Yet, such compromise is already a fact of social life. We already accept on some level that we need to limit ourselves and make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Consider the situation of a crowded subway car, where a pregnant woman is in need of a seat. Will not two or three people stand in order to allow the woman to get off of her aching feet? Now, consider a more serious sacrifice, say in the face of a natural disaster. Aren’t there always those people who sacrifice their own time, efforts and even safety to help one’s fellow man and woman? This socialist consciousness is already, in one form or another, a component to our social selves.

Just as the ruling class works tirelessly to maintain their dictatorship over the workers, workers will work every bit as hard to maintain the social order in which workers control. They will work to defend the gains of their revolution, to defend themselves and every member of society from exploitation by working to meet collective needs and advance social ends. We already work to defend ourselves and our loved ones from poverty and the worst forms of exploitation, yet in socialism, the products of that labour will go to defend all people collectively.

The essential reality is that in a system construed around the profit motive, the success of the few is predicated on the suffering and loss of the many. We need one another, yet the current mode of production requires that the vast masses of workers be subjected to some of the worst conditions imaginable. Can we continue to live in a world characterised by such oppression? Can we call ourselves human if we can look away? The answer should be no. In order for anyone to be free of the forces of exploitation and alienation, everyone must be free of these forces.

It is these benefits that will guide the individual worker in what he/she desires to do for work in socialist society, rather than the avoidance of poverty. The question changes from “how can I make a profit” or “how can I make ends meet” to “how can I help, while enjoying what I do?” This change in the essential question that guides work is brought about through the construction of socialist relations to the means of production, as well as the consciousness of workers in society. As people no longer have to worry about going hungry doing the work they do, they are allowed to decide for themselves what work they want to undertake.

A socialist party is measured by the enemies it makes and the friends it makes.

Power to the People, Not Politicians!

The Socialist Party strives to establish a social democracy that places people's lives under their own control - a classless society where working people own and control the means of production and distribution through democratic control and where the production of society is used for the benefit of all humanity, not for the private profit of a few. We believe socialism and democracy are one and indivisible. These are strange days indeed for socialists and all those who fighting for a better world. Social movements are, in general, at a low ebb. It would be easy to be despondent. But we should not be. There is widespread cynicism about capitalism, yet virtually no discussion of any other perspectives.  Socialism is not, at this point, rising from the ashes. This is a time when the relevance of socialism seems almost self-evident, and yet it is, in practical political terms, more marginal now than at any other time.

Election activity provides voters with choices – an essential component of any system that seeks to portray itself as democratic.  Deeper than that, socialist candidates offer other working class people a vision of themselves as possible candidates.  Socialist Party candidates are not career politicians.  We have no spin doctors, no public relations consultants and no corporate funders who will pull our strings after the election.  We offer independent voices advocating socialism. Electoral campaigns offer fertile ground to bring a fresh vision of democratic socialism. For other political parties, elections, including this one, have as their aim to get “our guy” into a place of power – the government – and to “educate” the public on issues of importance. But what kind of power is this? And what are people being taught?

Reform is the idea that the system can be successfully modified and improved through legal means and especially through participation in its official channels like lobbying and elections. Reformists argue that this is the realistic and peaceful approach to change. The problem is that the system, while very adept at incorporating and co-opting reform efforts, is also incredibly resistant to any fundamental structural change from within. It is built to administer class division – not to end it. Those that accept the logic of helping run the system are rewarded. Many more reformists have been changed by working within the system than vice versa. The Socialist Party is not about defending past gains or making limited demands but calls for a social revolution that expropriates the rich, dissolves the State apparatus and builds decentralised, directly democratic, ecological self-governance from below. Our goal is revolution not reforms. Socialism points beyond capitalism, towards another way of organizing human life based on unleashing our creative capacities through genuine democratic control of the key productive resources of society. Socialism shows the way to another possible world, even if it is way over the horizon and invisible from our present location. Socialism provides a unique perspective on capitalist society and allows us to see the everyday world in a new way, bringing new light to aspects of life, work and politics that we usually take for granted because they seem fixed and unchangeable.

 Right now, socialism is highly marginalised and many on the left suggest that struggles should concentrate on finding “practical” solutions, leaving aside any transformation of the system. This ultimately means limiting the horizons of change to what is possible within capitalist social relations, as this power structure will be there until it is deliberately overturned. Socialism rests on the conception of overturning the capitalist system through the activity of the majority of the working class, rather than liberation being the act of some small elite. People who labour every day in factories, offices, schools, mines and a variety of other settings will take over their workplaces.

The reclamation of socialism is crucial for people’s future. Socialist ideas are more relevant than ever. An understanding of socialism must start by recognising that it a society of "bottom-up" participatory co-operative communities. Socialists reject the notion that individual self-interest and competition are the sole motivating factors in human behaviour and hold that other human characteristics may be fostered by a co-operative society. This has implications for how we respect and treat the environment and value other people. The Socialist Party does not accept an attitude of passive resignation to the status quo and actively works towards reclaiming the socialist vision. Our problem today is to figure out how best to reach out. How to encourage our fellow workers to work together to revive the socialist movement. What can our party, with finite resources, do to make a difference? How can we help bring humanity out of capitalist purgatory and into a sustainable future.

We live in a global capitalist system, which is why we have seen crisis and austerity around the world. Under capitalism the needs of profit and big business will always be put ahead of those of working people. An economic recession destroys millions of jobs and undermines the security of the working class. The gap between wealth and poverty is greater than ever. An environmental and climate catastrophe threatens our way of life. The inherently wasteful capitalist cycle of expansion and contraction is undermining the planet’s ability to sustain human society. The bottom has fallen out of people’s lives. These crises presents new challenges for socialists. Capitalism has exhausted itself but it will not pass into the pages of history without a ceaseless struggle by the working class. New social movements have arisen across the world to challenge capital’s domination. The interconnected crises of social life, the economy and the environment makes the solution of any one crisis dependent upon solving the others. The unity of the many currents of struggle is a prerequisite to attaining democratic control of our society. The political and social democratic power of the majority is the basis for building a socialist society.

 Articulation of the needs and demands of the people is essential. Rebuilding and re-energising the labour movement are fundamental. Socialism cannot emerge from sentiment or wish fulfillment. Socialism arises because the working class, as it struggles around the crisis of everyday living comes to recognise socialism as a necessity. Socialism’s fundamental building blocks are already present in society. The means of production are fully developed. There is an enfranchised electorate. The workers for the most part, are highly skilled at all levels of production and management. There exists a widespread mass means of communication. Many earlier attempts at socialism lacked these advantages. Socialism will be gained by the class-conscious working class winning the battle for democracy in society at large.

Socialism will be a society in harmony with the natural environment. The nature of global climate change necessitates a high level of planning. We need to re-design communities, transform transportation, introduce healthier foods and sustainable agriculture — all on a global scale, but on a human scale with participation of diverse communities.  A socialism that simply reproduces the wasteful expansion of an earlier capitalism creates more problems than it solves.

Socialism is the solution to the intractable problems of a capitalism devoid of all hope. The Socialist Party stand for a fundamental change in society, not based on nationalism but worldwide socialist revolution. We are fighting for socialism, the only way forward for humanity. The working class is the major force worldwide that can lead the way to a socialist future - to a real radical democracy from below. We will oppose the soulless ghouls of the capitalist system.

THE COMMONWEALTH OF TOIL

In the gloom of mighty cities

Mid the roar of whirling wheels

We are toiling on like chattel slaves of old,

And our masters hope to keep us

Ever thus beneath their heels,

And to coin our very life blood into gold.

But we have a glowing dream

Of how fair the world will seem

When each man can live his life secure and free;

When the earth is owned by labor

And there's joy and peace for all

In the Commonwealth of Toil that is to be.

They would keep us cowed and beaten,

Cringing meekly at their feet.

They would stand between each worker and his bread.

Shall we yield our lives up to them

For the bitter crust we eat?

Shall we only hope for heaven when we're dead?

They have laid our lives out for us

To the utter end of time.

Shall we stagger on beneath their heavy load?

Shall we let them live forever

In their gilded halls of crime,

With our children doomed to toil beneath their goad?

When our cause is all triumphant

And we claim our Mother Earth,

And the nightmare of the present fades away,

We shall live with love and laughter,

We who now are little worth,

And we'll not regret the price we have to pay.

RALPH CHAPLIN

Where they jail the innocent

The Home Office said it only detains people for the shortest period necessary but dozens of asylum seekers have been held at Dungavel immigration removal centre (IRC) in South Lanarkshire for months, new figures releasedto BBC Scotland reveal. In some cases detainees were held for more than a year.

"The difference between prison and detention is that in prison you count your days down and in detention you count your days up," ‘Sol’ told BBC Scotland.

"It's mental torture. It's so scary. You don't know when you will be released. You don't know when you'll be deported. You are in limbo." explained “Sol” who had spent two and a half years in Dungavel, and a total of three and a half years in detention, more than three times as long as his initial prison sentence.

Dr Katy Robjant is a psychiatrist found that those who were detained for more than 30 days had higher instances of mental health problems than those held for shorter periods. She told BBC Scotland: "Research has shown that long term detention is linked to mental health problems including anxiety, depression and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

"From my clinical experience, clients often report PTSD symptoms that are directly linked to the experience of detention. For example, nightmares or intrusive memories about being in detention or about experiences they witnessed while in detention such as seeing other detainees injured whilst resisting removal attempts, seeing other detainees on hunger strike or self-harm."

Campaigners welcomed the cross-party parliamentary committee’s call to end indefinite detention and added that the practice should be stopped altogether. Jerome Phelps of Detention Action said: "The inquiry is right that it is not enough to tinker with conditions in detention. Only wholesale reform can address the grotesquely inefficient and unjust incarceration of 30,000 migrants a year."

According to the Home Office, the average cost of keeping one detainee in an IRC in 2014 was £97 per night. Dungavel is the only detention centre in Scotland. There are 12 others across England. Previously, children have been held at the centre, and in 2012 a newspaper investigation found that victims of torture had been held at Dungavel, despite this being against Home Office rules, unless in exceptional circumstances.

$1.5 million per hour!

Alan Greenspan, former golden boy of the monetarist camp until that is, the recent financial meltdown, advises us in all his glorious wisdom that capitalism is not to blame for the growing and obscene income inequality. No, what is to blame is innovation and globalization (?). As if all the capitalist class, or any of them, were great innovators or workers. George Soros reputedly made $3 billion in a recent year, that's just $1.5 million per hour on the average forty-hour week, or about two minutes to earn the average worker's wage! That's some innovation! Some hard worker! John Ayers.

Our need is socialism

The capitalist system causes wars, disease, famine and misery and is killing our planet. Capitalism is threatening the very future existence of the planet. It is incapable of providing for the needs of humanity or of protecting our fragile planet. By contrast, a socialist society would be able to harness the enormous potential of human talent and technique in order to build a society and economy which could meet the needs of all. Growing numbers of people are taking part in anti-capitalist demonstrations. Many people do not like the way the world is at the moment. It is not just only the arguments of socialists that are changing peoples’ outlook, it is their experience of the system we live under - capitalism. Today socialism remains the only viable alternative in an increasingly unstable and brutal world. This ensures that socialism is not a spent force but the wave of the future.

In a society where all of the means of production are socialised, blind market forces would be replaced by democratic planning. A blind system based on profit and competition will never be able to be planned beyond a certain limit. The working class exerts its power, first through its ability to shut down production—the strike weapon. But if it is to assert its collective interests on society as a whole and against the employers as a class, it must seize political power. Only after the working class has seized political power can it begin to reorganise production and distribution in such a way as to abolish the market and production for profit’s sake, and replace those relations with a purely socialised system of planning. Even on the basis of current production, measures could be taken to meet the needs of the majority. A democratic, planned economy could develop production to much greater levels than is possible under capitalism. It is simply common sense.

What does it mean to say, as Marx does, that workers must achieve political power? Needless to say, the political and business establishment won’t relinquish their wealth, power, and privilege without a fight. Socialism represents a break with the present system and depends on the active struggles of workers and their subsequent engagement with every aspect of governing society in their own interest. There is no contradiction between developing technology and production and safeguarding the planet. What is needed if we are to save the world is long-term planning that would be able to develop alternative technologies that did not harm the environment. This could only be achieved on the basis of democratic socialism. A democratically run planned economy would be able to take rational decisions on the basis of aiming to meet the needs of humanity. It would decide what technology to develop and use, what food to produce and when and where to build, while taking into consideration the need to protect and repair our planet for future generations.

There is no way you can sustain socialism without a healthy and sufficient production of goods and services for all. Socialism would be a truly democratic society. It would be necessary to draw up a series of plans, involving the whole of society, of what industry needed to produce. Capitalism today has provided the tools which could enormously aid the genuine, democratic planning of the economy. We have the Internet, market research, supermarket loyalty cards that record the shopping habits of every customer and so on. Business uses this technology to find out what it can sell. We could use it rationally instead to find out what people need and want. At every level, in communities and workplaces, committees would be set up and would elect representatives to local and regional administrations. At every level, elected delegates would be accountable and subject to instant recall. If the people who had elected them did not like what their representatives did, they could make them stand for immediate re-election and, if they wished, replace them with someone else.

Changing economic relations, the abolition of class divisions and the construction of the society based on democratic involvement and co-operation lays the basis for a change in social relations. Society would move away from hierarchies and the oppression of one group by another. Human relations would be freed from all the muck of capitalism.

Human need, not capitalist greed

The meaning of socialism is fairly wide and often open for interpretation. Today, both "socialism" and "communism" have been wrongly associated with false definitions. The most commonly misconstrued definition of socialism is it a form of government that owns, regulates, and administrates the production and distribution of goods and services or it is a government that attempts to reduce social, economic, medical, and political inequalities among people by reform legislation. Thanks to the so-called social democrats, or reformist "socialists" (for example, the Socialist Party in France or the Labour Party in Britain), many people have come to equate "socialism" with any industry or program that is administered by the capitalist political state, be it a nationalised health service, the postal service or a welfare programme.

Frequently dictionary definitions will support such an answer yet many of those make ideological use of the terms "socialism" and "communism" based more on definitions derived from Soviet-era Russia and Maoist China, neither of which have much to do with Marxist political philosophy. "Communism" has come to be associated with the system of bureaucratic state despotism, run by the so-called Communist parties, which once prevailed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and now unraveling in China and Cuba. Further adding to the confusion is the false idea presented by those Communist parties and other Leninist organisations -- the concept that a post/capitalist society first goes through a lengthy "socialist" stage, before arriving at the classless society of "communism."

What is the difference between "socialism" and "communism"? The two terms are interchangeable: both describe the classless, stateless society of free and equal producers advocated by socialists. Marx and Engels themselves used the two terms interchangeably. The Socialist Party has established a history of fighting to uphold the correct meaning of socialism or communism. In defending and advocating Marx's and Engels' conception of the future classless society, though, we have focused on winning over workers by using the term that Marx and Engels preferred in their later years -- socialism.

Socialism as proposed by genuine Marxists and real socialists argue that workers – not "the government" -- should own everything in the community collectively; kind of like co-operatives writ large.  Governments in a socialist system would be dissolved -- they being tools of the ruling class to subjugate the oppressed subject class, after all. Contrary to popular misconception, the goal of socialists and communists is to abolish the State altogether. Basic socialist theory holds that the purpose of "the State" is to enforce social and economic disparity. According to Marxist thinking the State developed as a weapon for a minority of people to oppress other people. Socialism is NOT about the dominance of the State.

A socialist economy would replace the anarchy of the market with rational and democratic planning. For a socialist society to succeed, abundance must be the norm.  Capitalism is based on market competition between rival capitalist firms--which, in the rush to edge each other out, unavoidably embark on an irrational and breakneck expansion of production. Socialism harnesses the immense productive capacity that capitalism has brought into existence and gives the power to decide on what and how much to produce to the people who actually do the producing--the workers whose labour is essential to running every farm, factory and office. The immense technological advances in production over the last couple centuries have made such a world feasible--a world based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

But without money or some other mechanism to limit what people consume, won't there be chaos with people hoarding goods or wasting food and other resources? Water is readily available for free, or virtually free of charge. Though there may be slight waste this costs less than implementing rigorous methods for controlling its use--which itself would require significant expenditure of resources. The world can already produce more than enough cars, water, food, telecommunications capacity and shelter to meet needs. It's clear that the chief barrier to such an economic arrangement is that the social surplus is controlled by capitalists, who only have an interest in producing things if they can be sold for a profit. The people who do the work in the world's workplaces could--through a process of voting and surveys about consumption desires--decide whether they were interested in working fewer hours or having more consumption choices, or whether they'd like more ability to travel or larger places to live. One workplace or community might choose one mix of work and leisure, and another might chose differently. After all, equal access to resources doesn't mean conformity. The hallmark of a socialist society itself would not be the similarity of the individuals who comprise it, but the greatest diversity within it. The goal of socialism is the fullest possible development of the unique personality of each individual.

Under capitalism, the majority of people are coerced to work, we have no choice otherwise we would starve! We are compelled by capitalism to sell our labour and, as such, capitalism calls the shots, not the people who produce the wealth in society. In socialism, people would of course be expected to work, but for very different reasons. Instead, workers would be encouraged to work for the benefit of society and not just reasons for of survival. Despite the arguments of conservatives, socialists believe that humanity is basically good but is shaped by the society it lives in. Therefore, I believe that people that believe in a society that works for them, and is, ultimately, run by them will make sure it works. As a socialist society is run by the working class it is in our interests to make sure it works. Every effort will be made to make people’s lives easier and it stands to reason that innovation will still be needed under socialism. The technology exists for environmentally-friendly cars but capitalism will not allow this to happen on a mass scale because it cuts into its profits. Production would be based on human need not personal greed. This only touch’s the surface of the possibilities available to mankind if production was run by and in the interests of the majority rather than the minority. Of course, none of this would be possible without genuine democracy – where working people are involved at every stage of production

Human need, not capitalist greed. Socialism would use the vast resources of society to meet people’s needs. It seems so obvious--if people are hungry, they should be fed; if people are homeless, we should be housed; if people are sick, the best medical care should be made available to them. A socialist society would take the immense wealth of the world and use it to meet the basic needs of all society. There’s no blueprint for what a socialist society will look like. That will be determined by the generations to come who are living in one. But it seems obvious that such a society would guarantee every person enough to eat and a roof over their heads, free education and reorganized so that every child’s ability is encouraged, free health care accessible to all, and likewise would all utilities like gas and electricity. Public transportation would also be made free.

Socialism will be a society in which the things we need to live, work and control our own lives. Socialism means that government of the people, for the people and by the people will become a reality for the first time. To win the struggle for socialist freedom requires enormous efforts of organizational and educational work. It requires building a political party of socialism to contest the power of the capitalist class on the political field, and to educate the majority of workers about the need for socialism. You are needed to end poverty, racism, sexism and to avert the still potent threat of environmental apocalypse or a catastrophic nuclear war.

Socialists will be heard

Change is needed. The system is not working, at least, not for most people. That is one thing very clear to many. Capitalism requires profit, profit requires growth, and growth means environmental destruction. It is simple as that. Why socialism? Because the future of humanity depends on it. It is easy as that. For those who have decided to make their stand up and say, “No more”, the questions are which way forward now and how can we change the world? The majority of the population believes that future generations will be worse off than the preceding ones, where the social and ecological disasters of an unbridled capitalism plunge millions of workers into poverty, then revolt is not only possible, it is more than justified.

The rule of the tiny minority is supported by a vast network of ideology, myths and propaganda to justify the unjustifiable. Their message is remarkably uniform in that they claim the system of capitalism, despite its problems, is the best of all possible worlds and is based on human nature. It is humanity, itself which is corrupted, by the innate human greed or divinely by original sin and therefore exploitation of man by man is our normal state of being. Business retains all of the power. With billions in profits they have the ability to purchase the votes of MPs ensuring their riches will grow while the wages and benefits of those they employ remain near the poverty level.

What concerns the Socialist Party is that far too many either don’t see or are denying the truth. Don’t listen to the false rhetoric, look at the facts and learn for yourself. Shouldn’t adequate shelter, clothing, food and health care be universal? Shouldn’t everyone be guaranteed well-being. "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is that well-known phrase from the United States Declaration of Independence.

People ask us for our definition of socialism. The men and women in the Socialist Party seek a better world founded on common ownership, equality and democracy. Socialism is not government control of the economy. Yet in the name of socialism we saw common ownership changed into state slavery, a barrier to the very socialism which we seek as an aim. Socialists deny that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. The political State throughout history has meant the government by a ruling class. Socialism will require no political State because there will be neither a privileged property class nor a downtrodden propertyless class. The core of socialism is the vision of human beings as social creatures linked by the existence of a common humanity. As the poet John Donne put it, 'no man is an Island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main'. As human beings share a common humanity, they are bound together by a sense of comradeship or fraternity (literally meaning 'brotherhood', but broadened in this context to embrace all humans). This encourages socialists to prefer cooperation to competition, and to favour collectivism over. In this view, cooperation enables people to harness their collective energies and strengthens the bonds of community, while competition pits individuals against each other, breeding resentment, conflict and hostility.

For example, our agriculture system should be for sustaining people but today it is denuding the nation’s topsoil while poisoning land, water, workers and consumers and enriching corporations? Food should not be just a commodity, a way to make money, but instead a way to nourish people and the planet and a means to safeguard our future and we should reconfigure the system for that purpose. But without an agreement on goals, without statements of purpose, we are going to continue to see changes that are not in the interest of the majority. Increasingly, it’s corporations that are determining how the world works. Socialism challenges of us to rethink political philosophy and political economy, whose goal should be to create a society in which everyone can flourish. A society so much different from today. The big ideas and strategies for how we should manage society and thrive with the planet are not a set of rules handed down from on high. To develop them for now and the future is a major challenge, and we, ourselves, have to do. No one is going to figure it out for us.

Supporting capitalists with your votes is a vote against yourself and your family. Too often democracy has meant voting every few years for a candidate that is "the lesser of two evils." We need to think, not just who or what we are voting for, but why we should vote at all. What we are severely lacking in is genuine democracy. The concept of ‘democracy’ has been used to curtail both our freedom and our independence of thought. Politicians have told us, over and over again:

“We live in a democracy.  Now exercise your democratic right and vote for us.”

But what is the point of voting if, no matter who you vote for, what you get is the same policies but with just a different presentation. In a survey presented to the UK’s Political and Constitutional Reform Committee when people were asked what would make them turn out and vote, the most popular response was having a “None of the above” box on the ballot paper.  In other words they wanted to vote, they wanted their votes counted, but they also wanted to deliver a vote of no confidence in the current system. The party politicians will argue that we can’t have such an option because it might produce a result that was in support of no party at all; and we must have a government, even if it is one we don’t want.

Many ‘democracies’ end up being dominated by two main parties, right and left, Tory and Labour, Republican and Democrat and so on. To an outsider, there is little difference to be seen between America’s Republicans and Democrats. In Britain, the Tories, Labour and the LibDems are all claiming the centre ground.  No one seems to have realised that the centre ground itself has moved to the right. Not for nothing has the Scottish Labour Party earned the name ‘Red Tories’.  It is now hard to find a genuinely left mainstream party. The Scottish National Party, the Green Party and the Welsh Plaid Cymru are declaring themselves the true left.

Democracy comes from ‘demos’ or ‘deme’, the Greek word for ‘village’. The deme was the smallest administrative unit of the Athenian city-state.  And there, essentially, is the key.  Democracy belongs to the little people and their communities, not Washington or Westminster.  And because there are now such large populations everywhere, the administrative area has become too large to be governed by anything other than draconian methods.  The connection ‘of, by and for the people’ has been broken. Athenians didn’t vote; they chose by lot.  That did mean that sometimes they got a lousy lot of men governing, but that was balanced by occasionally getting a really good council – of men.  Of course, of men.  Only citizens’ names went into the pot; landless men, slaves and women didn’t come into it.  Not that much of a democracy, but a beginning.

Doubtless the whole matter now appear Utopian to present‑day “revolutionaries”. The point of view of ourselves in the World Socialist Movement does not coincide with the present policies of the various “radicals”. We even believe that their policies are, in many respects, reactionary, and often narrowly opportunist. World Socialists appeal to the reason of men and women who are capable of understanding, to urge them to utilise and spread abroad everything that is rational; everything that represents technical progress and helps to destroy the obstacles which impede the advance of the workers. We refuse to participate in any national fight, and recognise only the class struggle as necessary and profitable for the exploited workers, with the object of abolishing classes, national characteristics and all kinds of exploitation. We support everything which helps to annihilate differences between the peoples and which leads towards a rational economic organisation of the earth. We think that everything which mixes and welds the peoples together is good for humanity. We hold the firm conviction that only the exploited class, the workers, can be the historical force, which shall establish a society in which there shall be no nationalities and no exploitation. Not because the workers are essentially different in themselves from the members of other classes, but because their class struggle for emancipation urges them towards union on a world scale, and at the same time compels the exploiters unceasingly to perfect and rationalise the means of production.

Global capitalism is preparing a world culture but that does not mean that socialists advocate that people become all of one pattern. There will, indeed, be created a kind of uniformity in the mental outlook and character of men and women. National distinctions will pass away, but there will always be individual differences. And people, being able to come into contact with all parts of the world, having several hours free every day and the opportunity of devoting them to personal work and individual culture, one may reasonably suppose that from all this there will emerge strong personalities with original thoughts and feelings, which will find expression in various forms of art capable of being understood and appreciated throughout the entire world.

The vote is the people’s voice – Let it be heard – The Socialist Party is their megaphone

Curing the disease of poverty

The level of food poverty in Scotland is on a different scale to that experienced in parts of the developing world, but the fact that a significant number of families now rely on foodbanks remains a shocking indictment on our society.

Linda de Caestecker, director of public health in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, believes forcing people to depend on such services poses a risk to their mental, as well as physical, health. "It is dispiriting, it makes you lack hope and wonder if things will ever change," she says."If you can't feed your children, how do you feel as a parent?"

The "diseases of poverty": heart disease, diabetes, addictions, suicide, makes grim reading. So does her reminder that the 13.5-year gap in life expectancy between men living in Scotland's most poorest and most affluent areas has remained stubbornly persistent for 15 years, and that while women fare slightly better, the equivalent gap in female life expectancy has actually grown wider.

De Caestecker and her Lothian counterpart, Prof Alison McCallum, are calling for a raft of measures, including community supermarkets, improved childcare and support for lone parents to work, as well as a national healthy food policy. They also demand action on benefits and a living wage for everyone: a timely call, following the Office for National Statistics' report that 700,000 Britons now rely on a zero-hours contract for their main job.

As scientists they should understand that trying to remove symptoms and effects of a disease does not cure it. They should know they have to tackle the root cause for a solution – the capitalist system.

Socialism: Emancipatory and Liberatory

If survival as a human species is our primary long-term goal, then deep changes are necessary to the way we organise ourselves socially. Socialism seeks the end to artificial scarcity of all essential commodities.  Promoting the common good is the only way to create a sustainable future that ends deprivation of the poor and the profit-seeking of the upper-classes. Socialism replaces failed capitalism.

How has capitalism failed? The current situation is that capitalism has failed to provide the basic needs of society; even the “social welfare” state only manages to mitigate the misery and suffering of people. The rich are seen as successful by virtue of being rich and the poor are seen as unsuccessful by virtue of their poverty. This is a “Social Darwinist” view of human achievement which makes implicit that having money with little regard to how the money is made. Socialism begins with the assumption that lack of money should not be associated with lack of nutrition, health care, clothing, housing, education and the ability to pursue a productive work and social life. Universal entitlement eliminates desperation. Unlike capitalism, socialism supports the individual – no matter his or her background – in the pursuit of a better life. There will no longer be any starving artists living from hand to mouth in the garrets.

Under the economic system of capitalism, the capitalist class owns the means of production (factories, transport, etc.) as private property. Capitalists hire workers to produce commodities, which are socially produced, but privately owned by the capitalists, and then sold for profit. The state provides an infrastructure to assist the capitalist class in maximizing profit and towards this end provides some basic necessities (such as schools, unemployment insurance, and social security) to maintain a workforce and ward off starvation, social chaos, and revolution.

In socialism, the means of production are not in the private hands of the capitalists, but are socially owned and capable of producing abundance sufficient to meet the needs of all of society. The use of money disappears because commodities are no longer produced for a market, but for distribution on the basis of need. Technology has reached a stage where goods can be produced with little or no labour. This is the turning point at which we stand today. Humanity today faces the choice: will we do away with private property and build a future for all or will a system of private property be preserved at the expense of human beings and the planet?

More and more people are joining the ranks of those dispossessed by capitalism world-wide. A class that has nothing to gain from private ownership of the means of production has to take the reins of power and construct an economic system that can sustain a better world. In theory, physical labour may become totally obsolete. If every house has a decentralised energy source like solar panels and reliable energy storage, as well as an advanced 3-D printer or molecular assembler that can produce almost physical object imaginable from a few basic recyclable chemicals then human poverty will essentially have been abolished. We can just spend the vast majority of our time doing things that we enjoy, while spending only a few minutes or at most hours a day programming our machines to fulfil our material desires. That is the more optimistic vision.

In a less optimistic vision, only a small minority of people will have access to such technologies as while the technology may exist, the costs of mass distribution remain too high (at least for a time). The vast masses, will be stuck in impoverished material conditions — dependent on welfare, and charity — without any real prospect being able to climb the ladder through selling their labour. Only a lucky few — who have an inimitably good idea, or a creative skill that cannot be replicated by a robot — will have a prospect of joining the capital-owning upper class. Not man or woman but technology must be the slave of tomorrow's world.

Socialism says: "Let us go about the task of making machinery provide abundance directly. Let us begin by asking, not what price will bring profit to private owners, but how much food, clothing and shelter do we need for the good life for men. Then let us produce for the use of men, women, and children, in order to supply them with abundance."

 Clearly this requires social ownership of the principal means of production and distribution. This in order to give to the exploited workers, for the first time in the long history of mankind, the good things of life. We may make mistakes in social planning, but we can learn by our experience. Abundance is possible when we can set our engineers and technicians to planning for society, instead of planning, in so far as they can plan at all, for the profits of an owning class. The achievement of Socialism will be the result of struggle, and the successful application of socialism requires intelligence and the capacity for co-operative effort. The collapse of capitalism is inevitable. But there is no inevitability about socialism or shared abundance. We may have a long stretch of chaos, wars, dictatorships, and regimented poverty. This can be prevented only by men who will not accept poverty in the midst of potential abundance, and the eternal exploitation of workers.

It is not merely plenty that we want, but peace. Mankind is divided not only into economic classes but into nations. And nations as well as men are divided into the Haves and Have-nots. We live in an interdependent world where not even the capitalist nations with the most resources, the United States, the British and French or Germans, are fully self-sufficient. Yet each nation claims absolute sovereignty, absolute sway over its citizens, and blindly sees its economic prosperity, not in cooperation, but in shutting out its neighbors from its own markets. Meanwhile it seeks aggressively to capture the markets of the world, to obtain sources of raw materials outside its borders, and a place for its capitalists to invest more profitably than at home the surplus wealth they have acquired by the successful exploitation of the workers who are their own fellow countrymen. Modern wars arise out of the clash of nations for power and profit. Patriotism makes men blind and drunk so that they cannot see that out of this struggle for power and profit there can be neither true prosperity nor true peace. One of the hardest task for socialists, as recent history shows, is to bring about a real unity of workers across the lines of nation, race and creed. Yet it is only in the cooperative commonwealth that there is hope of lasting peace.

The Socialist Party seeks a world of freedom. This we do not have and cannot have under the shadow of war and the bondage of capitalist exploitation. All workers live in fear of those who control their jobs. There is, for a great many of us, a kind of haunting fear of a jobless tomorrow or an unwanted and unrecompensed old age. These things can be ended. They can be ended with the end of exploitation which a proper control of the means of production makes possible. They can be ended by a society of comrades. The Tree of Liberty today has feeble roots for itself except as it may grow in the soil of shared abundance. It is asserted that socialism is an end to freedom, not its beginning. Those who make that assertion define freedom only as the right to grab all you can and keep all you have grabbed.

The Socialist Party struggles for freedom, peace, and plenty and know that they can be realised in a cooperative commonwealth. Our goal is a society of abundance, of free men and women who seek life rather than death by the machinery which could produce abundance and which is so desirable that it ought to propel people to make it practicable. Members of the Socialist Party because of our examination of history and the achievements of our class convinces us that socialism is feasible. For sure, workers have made mistakes and it is far from being a perfect record but it is far better than the media and academic intellectuals belonging to Big Business would lead you to believe. Progress has been made in the face of tyranny and counter-revolution. The unions and the class struggle has not fed workers only with the bread of hope in a better tomorrow. The working class will awaken and organise itself in an orderly and peaceful revolution. Once separated from their dupes and lackeys the owning class are weak and ineffectual. The more peaceful the revolution the more priceless will its boon be. This does not imply passivism for we must have the courage to stand up against. We dare not stop with merely asking the ruling class to grant us as a concession what is ours by right. We shall never have a true cooperative commonwealth until men and women think of their reward as workers who create all wealth and not any longer of their reward as owners of property which enables them to exploit other men's labour. That is one of the reasons why our great socialist appeal must be always to the workers with hand and brain, white collar and blue collar, in city and country. It is they who have so long been exploited. It is they who can and must be free. It is only by organisation inspired by socialist principles, that we can fulfill the dreams and hopes of the people. 

Who Owns the North Pole (part 85)

The United Kingdom should select an ambassador for the Arctic or risk being left out of key decisions in the region, a House of Lords report says. It advised the UK should follow the example of nations including France, Singapore and Japan in appointing an ambassador for the Arctic.

Experts have said the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer as soon as 2020, which will give way to extract resources, open up a northern sea trade route and opportunities to “take advantage of the expansion of shipping” on Arctic routes. The committee suggests the interests of British companies need better representation.