Friday, April 03, 2015

If Not Now, When?

Although previous societies have inflicted local environmental damage on the planet which sometimes was so severe that it led to their extinction, as in the case of the Easter Islanders, the present scale of degradation is of an entirely different order. It is global and affects everyone. The world’s ecology is currently in a dire condition and capitalism is at fault. It is clear that capitalism, as an economic system, cannot save the planet from global warming and the consequences of climate change. We must lay to rest that capitalism can solve these problems. It must be apparent that we face an urgent crisis yet the ruling representatives of capitalism have greeted all the above with indifference. Environmental lobbies, such as Friends of the Earth, think that capitalism can end the destruction to the Earth’s eco-systems without any fundamental change to capitalism if only our political leaders would wake up. This is a common view amongst environmental activists; a view which sees capitalism moving towards sustainability and zero growth. The idea that capitalism can be reformed to become the charitable and green system is fairly typical of the environmentalist movement. In this model of capitalist society the basic structures of capitalism remain intact but the distribution of the social product is changed to end inequality. Institutions of capitalism, such as multi-national corporations become social organisations. Lifestyles change and social structures are reformed while technical green advances are applied worldwide. The market becomes harnessed to sustainability. Some sort of world ‘government’ under the main international institutions of global capitalism, UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO or whatever is brought about to police the system. This is all shallow wishful thinking.

We argue that such a scenario completely ignores the way capitalism operates, and must operate, as a system and is therefore hopelessly utopian. The present world system is driven by the struggle for profit which leads to competition, nationalism and imperialism. These are the characteristics of capitalism. Yet all of these have been eliminated in the green capitalist world. The present system’s need for infinite growth and the finite resources of Earth stand in contradiction to each other. Successful operation of the system, which in the terms of capital means growth, or accumulation of capital, means that on the one hand nature as a resource is to be exploited ruthlessly. There is a clear causal relationship between global capitalism’s search for profitable accumulation and global warming and it is for this reason that reformers aim to create a “no growth” capitalist economy. On the one hand they admit that the present order of states, dominated by an economy exploiting the working class, struggling for profits, operating with relentless competition and backing all this up by imperialism, cannot possibly lead to their utopia, since it specifically excludes these things. On the other hand by excluding these key characteristics of capitalism they admit their utopia is in certain fundamental respects non-capitalist, admitting this utopia is not achievable without a break from capitalism. Yet this is something they are not prepared to countenance. They maintain their humane capitalism is a type of capitalism worth fighting for. The present destruction of the planet is rooted in the capitalist system of production and cannot be solved without a complete break with capitalism. We need to create a higher form of social organisation before the present system destroys us all. The entire system of production based on wage labour and capital needs to be replaced with a system which produces for human needs. All the half measures of converting aspects of capitalism to social purposes, while the fundamentals of capitalism remain in place, are just wishful thinking; and to pretend they could solve our problems is pure deception.

The capitalist class, of course, appoint their top economists, rather than environmental scientists, to advise them on the ecological crisis. What these economists do not appear to realise is that, while starting from the assumption that the ecological crisis can be solved within the capitalist system, their calculations, which show the required costs would be unsustainable, prove the opposite, namely that this crisis cannot be solved within capitalist relations of production. It is obvious that the demands of the capitalist system, namely profits via cheap energy are being followed in preference to any strategy which could ensure the long term survival of life on the planet. Why are we doing exactly the opposite of what rationality should dictate? Capitalism is a productive system which produces for profit not for human needs. The capitalist system requires continuous accumulation of capital. If capitals do not accumulate they will collapse, and there is therefore a general struggle for accumulation of capital, which means growth and expansion of markets, throughout the entire system. This drive for accumulation is derived from the internal functioning of the system and cannot be avoided. As Marx noted, for capitalism, the watchword was:
“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”

The means of production need to be converted from capitalist class property to social property before an equitable system of distribution can be achieved. Instead of the present system in which workers are alienated from the means of production and from the products of their labour, a free association of producers producing for the needs of humanity, is required. Instead of the interchange with nature being determined by capitalist profit, this interchange needs to be collectively planned and regulated by all. Only after such changes can we achieve a balanced exchange with nature. We call a society of socialised property and freely associated producers, producing for human needs, “socialism” or “communism”. It will be a society which will inscribe on its banners:
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

A society where the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all. Such a society will differentiate itself from capitalist in a myriad of ways, but the principal differences will be that it is a society without state, without money, where the mass of humanity participate in the planning and running of society. It will be a society without wage labour and commodity production and without classes. For the first time in human history it will be possible to collectively plan the future of the human species. Humanity will have a common interest and will be able to work towards achieving it. Working time will be reduced and the mass of the population will be drawn into the running of that new society. All will have a common interest in solving the ecological problems inherited from capitalism. With the abolition of capitalist society, all its waste, its cruelty, its wars, together with the misery, agony of toil, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation it inflicts on the working class, will be ended. Socialist society will draw on the abilities of all and produce for the needs of all. It will be able to balance these needs with sustainability. It will then be possible to roll back and repair the dreadful damage capitalism has inflicted on the planet in the few centuries during which it has been the dominant system of production.

The choice facing the world is one of the ruin of civilisation or the construction of world socialism. We address ourselves to those who agree that the capitalist society must be replaced with a free association of producers and citizens. We, in the Socialist Party, are committed to building a world that prides itself on having a sustainable environment and society that co-exists in relative harmony with undeveloped areas of the planet. We insist that our environment not be sacrificed on the altar of profit — either in the form of corporations devouring our forests and waters, or in the form of urban sprawl and unnecessary development. We, in the Socialist Party, seek to build a society where the barriers between rural and urban are broken down through the reorganization of society for the benefit of all life on the planet. We, in the Socialist Party, understand that we are not isolated from the world community. On the contrary, our internationalism allow us to understand how what we do has an effect on what happens across and around the world. We, in the Socialist Party, are committed to building a society that will be beacon of democracy and social justice.  The demands the Socialist Party put forward are based on what working people need if they are to live any sort of a decent life. They are not based on what the capitalist system says it can afford. Our intention is to provide a guide and plan of action, and, at the same time, assist working people in becoming aware of their power to reconstruct society so that it serves the interests of humanity. Our demand  is the aim of revolution and the establishment of a democratic socialism. The tactics, methods and forms of struggle may necessarily change over time, depending on the development of the conditions. But, at all times, these tactics, methods, forms, and aims employed by the Socialist Party are developed with the same objective— the advancing of the struggles of working people for their immediate and historic interests.


Thursday, April 02, 2015

Sky Spies And Nose Dives!

 Drones are going mainstream in the US. According to an Associated Press release, February 27, civilian cousins of the unmanned military aircraft that have tracked, spied on, and killed terrorists in the Middle East and Asia are in demand by police departments, border patrols, power companies, news stations, and news papers, all wanting views that are too dangerous for planes and helicopters to get. It matters nothing to these groups that the ordinary citizen may object to being spied on. The only worry that the US government has is that they could collide with planes or come crashing to the ground. Better that capitalism takes the nose -dive! John Ayers.

A world in chaos

Within today's society, capitalism simply creates scarcity and competition and this in turn creates many problems, such as starvation, homelessness, increased crime. You too are conditioned and molded, only more subtly. You are relentlessly bombarded with pro-establishment propaganda, images and emotional appeals all your life on every front. The narrow limits of your freedoms make you as broadly conformist as any army drill team. Socialism is a doctrine which threatens to pull the plug on their perverse system before it succeeds in destroying us, the environment, and the future of humanity.

The goals of our socialist society is a life free of exploitation, insecurity, deprivation; an end to unemployment, hunger and homelessness.  An end to racism, national oppression, anti-semitism and  of all forms of discrimination, prejudice and bigotry. An end to the unequal treatment of women, the young and the elderly and all those of another sexual orientation. The creation of a truly humane and rationally-planned society that will stimulate the fullest flowering of the personality, creativity and talent of the individual. We stand for socialism, a society that is run by and for the vast working-class majority, a society in which the needs of the mass of people come first, not the greed of a handful of mega-millionaires. The advocates of capitalism hold that such goals are utopian; that human beings are inherently greedy and selfish. A society based on satisfying human need is totally realistic. Others argue that these goals can be fully realised through reforms under capitalism. We are confident, however, that such goals can be realised - but only in a socialist society. History is a continuous story of people rising up against those who exploit and oppress them to demand what is theirs.

Capitalism has been fatally flawed. Its inherent laws - to maximise profit on the backs of the working class - gives rise to the class struggle. Capital is simply money and commodities assigned to create a profit and be reinvested. Profit is made by the “magical” addition of surplus value to the value inherent in the product. The “added value,” the profit, is produced by workers. And this capital is born to expand or die. To be useful, the investment must result not only in a profit but in a growing rate of profit. The value of a commodity comes from the labour invested in it, including the labor that manufactured the machinery and extracted the raw materials used to create the item. And the boss’s profits do not come from his smarts or his capital investment or his mark-up, but from the value created by labour—specifically, surplus-value. Surplus value derives from unpaid wages. The worker is never paid for the value of the product, only for the value of her or his labour time, which is considerably less, and which meanders widely depending upon the historical, cultural and social conditions of a country. Labour-power is miraculous, like the Virgin Birth. You get more out of it than you put in. Workers produce a commodity which has more value than what they get in wages to keep them functioning. This differential is surplus value, which is the source of capital. Marx pointed out the truly anarchistic nature of modern industrial capitalism—an irrational, disorganized hodgepodge operation that enormously rewards price-fixers, crooks, gangsters, exploiters, con artists, gamblers, stock manipulators, and all manner of corruption.

The secret of value, the labour theory of value, that was unearthed by the classical economists and by Marx is what the money barons fear and hate. It is the secret that will set the world free. People will learn how to control the supposedly sacred, eternal, inscrutable method of production and distribution that now controls us. Socialists will produce for use according to a reasonable plan and without a thought for the odious notion of profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain, socialist society will produce abundance for all. In place of this conspiracy of chaos, socialism offers rational, democratic planning. In the place of the sham democracy offered by capitalism which maintains the dictatorship of the bosses over all of the most vital aspects, socialism demands the complete democratisation of social production. To the problem of homelessness, socialists propose a radical solution: allow the homeless access to the homes. How many people lost their job while factories stood idle and raw materials were dumped or allowed to rust? Another “extremist” solution: open the factories, let the workers in. Let them make the things that people need, let the people who need them acquire them.

This requirement to maximise profits, resulting from inter-capitalist competition, in turn unleashes an inexorably antagonistic dynamic between the capitalists, on the one hand, and their workers on the other. All of the things that workers want for themselves and their family – higher salaries, health benefits, lengthy, paid vacations, sick leave, pensions, etc. – can only be won at the expense of the capitalists’ profits. The more the workers succeed in pressing their interests, the lower the capitalists’ profits. Consequently, capitalists and workers find themselves in a perpetual state of war with one another. Sometimes this war is waged quietly, almost invisibly, as workers simply leave work early and let someone else punch them out on the time clock. But at other times these antagonistic relations erupt violently where workers battle police in order to defend their picket lines, defy court injunctions, and halt production until the owners are forced to their knees and concede to their demands. Tired of watching their real wages fall, tired of being told the company will leave the country every time they ask for a raise, tired of monotonous work, long working days, short vacations, and tyrannical bosses, tired of watching politicians pander to every whim of the rich at the expense of the public welfare, working people will rise up, seize society at its foundations and overturn the entire system with the overpowering strength that comes when the immense majority of the population, act in their own interests and in the interests of all the oppressed members of society. “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” (Communist Manifesto)

We say that it may be possible to bring socialism through peaceful means through the ballot box. We stand in elections but we are different to other parties. Join us for a better world. We believe that the people — in the workplaces, on the streets, in our communities — have the power to fundamentally change the way society is run. This dream is not only possible but necessary if our planet and its people are to survive. Under capitalism, we waste half our waking day frustrating our creative powers, degrading our abilities, and just plain bored. All our lives are spent shackled to the profits of the 1%. Imagine a world dedicated instead to human joy. A life in which most of our waking hours are devoted to acquiring the necessities to survive will give way to a life in which our physical needs are satisfied and we can proceed to develop our more spiritual talents: art, science, philosophy, literature, etc


“Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor power in full self-consciousness as one single social force.”Marx (Capital, Vol. 1) 

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

Time Is Running Out

Capitalism is presented as a ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’, formed like mountains and the oceans by forces beyond human control, that it is an economic system ultimately resulting from human nature. However it was not established by ‘natural forces’ but by intense and massive violence across the globe. At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit. While some people own means of production, or capital, most of us don't and so to survive we need to sell our ability to work in return for a wage, or else scrape by on benefits. This first group of people is the capitalist class and the second group is the working class.

For the majority of us, most of our lives are dominated by work. Even when we are not actually at work, we are traveling to or from work, worrying about work, trying to recover from work in order to get back to work tomorrow, or trying to forget about work. Or even worse, we don't have work and then our main worry is trying to find it. Paradoxically, while millions of people are overworked, barely able to cope with high workloads and long working hours, millions of other people are jobless or work on part-time contracts and desperate to work. And while automation, mechanisation and productivity continually increases, working hours and working lives don't fall. In fact, in most places they are rising, as retirement ages are put up and working hours are increased. For many of us, we don't care about the work we do, we just need money to get by and at the end of the month, our bank balances are barely any different from the month before. We spend our days checking our watches, counting down the minutes till we can go home, the days till the weekend, the months till our next holiday.

Even those of us who have jobs in areas we enjoy, we do not control our work. It controls us, we experience it as an alien force. Most of us do not control what time we get to work or what time we leave. We do not control the pace or volume of our work, what products we make or what services we provide, or how we do it. For example, nurses may love helping people. But may still be frustrated by bed shortages, insufficient staffing, punishing shift patterns and arbitrary management targets.

And then much work, which may be extremely difficult, boring and dangerous for workers and destructive for the environment, is not even socially useful. Globally, millions of people every year are killed by their work, while scores of millions are made ill and hundreds of millions are injured. From built-in obsolescence causing products to break down making people buy new ones, to entire industries like sales and marketing existing only to persuade people to buy more products and work more to buy them. And much other useful work is squandered in supporting socially useless industries.

Why is it like this?

The reason is simple: we live in a capitalist economy. Therefore it is this system which determines how work is organised. And our work is the basis of the economy. Money - capital - is invested to become more money. And this happens because of our work. Our work adds value to the initial capital, and the value we add comes to more than our wages. This surplus value results in the growth of the initial capital, which funds profits and expansion. Capitalism is based on this simple process – money is invested to generate more money. When money functions like this, it functions as capital. For instance, when a company uses its profits to hire more staff or open new premises, and so make more profit, the money here is functioning as capital. As capital increases (or the economy expands), this is called ‘capital accumulation’, and it's the driving force of the economy. The wages we get roughly match the cost of the products necessary to keep us alive and able to work each day (which is why, at the end of each month, our bank balance rarely looks that different to the month before). The difference between the wages we are paid and the value we create is how capital is accumulated, or profit is made. This difference between the wages we are paid and the value we create is called "surplus value". The extraction of surplus value by employers is the reason we view capitalism as a system based on exploitation - the exploitation of the working class.

The lower our wages, the harder we work and the longer our hours the bigger this surplus value is. Which is why employers in the private and public sector continually attempt to make us work harder and longer for less pay. For this reason our jobs are made dull and monotonous, as then unskilled workers can do it cheaper. The products we produce or the services we provide are also often substandard to cut costs. Mass unemployment functions to keep wages of overworked employed workers down. As workers who are not afraid of being replaced by the unemployed can demand higher wages, better conditions and shorter working hours. Enterprises which extract the most surplus value and so profit and expand the most, succeed, while those which don't, fail. So if a company or an industry is profitable, it grows. Regardless of whether it is socially necessary, whether it destroys the environment or kills its workers.

In order to accumulate capital, our boss must compete in the market with bosses of other companies. They cannot afford to ignore market forces, or they will lose ground to their rivals, lose money, go bust, get taken over, and ultimately cease to be our boss. Therefore even the bosses aren't really in control of capitalism, capital itself is. It's because of this that we can talk about capital as if it has agency or interests of its own, and so often talking about 'capital' is more precise than talking about bosses.

Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways. While from the workers' perspective, our alienation is experienced through being controlled by our boss, the boss experiences it through impersonal market forces and competition with other bosses. Because of this, bosses and politicians are powerless in the face of ‘market forces,’ each needing to act in a way conducive to continued accumulation (and in any case they do quite well out of it!). They cannot act in our interests, since any concessions they grant us will help their competitors on a national or international level. So, for example, if a manufacturer develops new technology for making cars which doubles productivity it can lay off half its workers, increase its profits and reduce the price of its cars in order to undercut its competition. If another company wants to be nice to its employees and not sack people, eventually it will be driven out of business or taken over by its more ruthless competitor - so it will also have to bring in the new machinery and make the layoffs to stay competitive. Of course, if businesses were given a completely free hand to do as they please, monopolies would soon develop and stifle competition which would lead to the system grinding to a halt. The state intervenes, therefore to act on behalf of the long-term interests of capital as a whole. The primary function of the state in capitalist society is to maintain the capitalist system and aid the accumulation of capital. As such, the state uses repressive laws and violence against the working class when we try to further our interests against capital. For example, bringing in anti-strike laws, or sending in police or soldiers to break up strikes and demonstrations. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout history, have always woken up to throw off their chains.

Raising the minimum wage is no solution, as it doesn't get anywhere close to solving the root problem. If our work is the basis of the economy, and the basis of growth and profits, then ultimately we possess the power to disrupt it, not to mention ultimately take it over for ourselves. It is entirely reliant on us, the working class, and our labour which it must exploit, and so it will only survive as long as we let it. By taking direct action like stopping work - striking - we stop the gears of production, and prevent profits from being made. In this way we can defend our conditions and leverage improvements from our bosses. By organising together we do not only improve our lives now but we can lay the foundations for a new type of society. A society where we don't just work for the sake of making profits we will never see or building a so-called ‘healthy’ economy but to fulfill human needs. Where we organise ourselves collectively to produce necessary goods and services not for exchange but for use. Where we get rid of unnecessary work and make all necessary tasks as easy, enjoyable and interesting as possible. A socialist society. We need to free ourselves from this wage slavery which robs our pay-checks every month and keeps us in debt and forever in the rat-race and on the tread-mill just to survive. Talking about class in a political sense is not about which accent you have, or if you go to the ballet or opera rather than the football match but the basic conflict which defines capitalism – those of us who must work for a living vs. those who profit from the work that we do. By fighting for our own interests and needs against the dictates of capital and the market we lay the basis for a new type of society - a society based on the direct fulfillment of our needs. Is such a society possible? You bet it is... there is simply no other way we will make it as a species but our time is running out.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

More Hard Labour?


The Labour Party, especially its left-wing, claims to stand for the workers’ interests and for socialism. Labour at one time claimed that socialism could be introduced gradually through a series of reforms using parliamentary means. In its early years many workers voted for Labour, believing that they could vote in socialism, but the experience of various Labour governments has brought disillusionment. Today no-one believes that Labour will establish a new and better political and economic system. Even Labour politicians themselves ask for votes with the promise that they will make capitalism work better than the Tories. Real power rests with the capitalist class and its state. All governments, Tory or Labour, represent this class. Tory and Labour work consistent as a team. We are all familiar with a certain police interrogation method; two policemen conduct the questioning, one bullying and brow-beating the suspect for a confession, and the second being friendly, suggesting it is in the suspect’s own best interest to admit his crime for his own good. This is just the way that Tory and Labour work together in capitalism’s service. Good cop - Bad cop.

Yet it has been a common refrain among the left for as long as we remember that “We have to keep Labour in because the Tories are worse.” The choice remains between austerity and austerity-lite. Is the Labour Party really the ‘lesser evil’ ? Or is it just a smokescreen to conceal that, yet again, this election will present us with no alternative?

Yes of course, there will be differences between a Labour and a Tory government, and the leaders’ debates will try to emphasise the important choices we face. But in reality none of those differences is sufficient to justify support for one over the others. If you are interested in furthering progressive politics and advancing the cause of serious social change, there is nothing to be gained. The exhausted ‘lesser evil’ argument can only do more damage to the prospects for creating a new politics of radical change in the circumstances of today. In the case of the Labour Party it has become increasingly more difficult for its supporters to justify their continued loyalty for a party that has abandoned its own social democratic traditions.

What remains of the left sticks to the ‘lesser evil’ mantra, although with nothing positive to say about Miliband they have to justify it by fantasising about just how evil David Cameron’s Tories really are. After every election the Labour Party let its supporters down. For sure, for those with a taste for nostalgic past, a Labour government did establish the NHS, welfare state and nationalised industries. It also imposed bitter austerity, fought dirty colonial wars, imprisoned strikers and supported the British nuclear weapons programme. Yet still the left clings to Labour. They forget that the Labour governments of 1974-1979 cut working-class living standards to meet the needs of British capitalism in the recession, slashing public spending and imposing a five per cent norm for pay rises at a time of rampant inflation and mass unemployment. The left still expounded the ‘lesser evil’ argument and turned job cuts and wage restraint into a way of ‘protecting’ the working population from the Tories. Hence did the left become complicit in Labour’s attacks – and in its own discrediting and defeat. The Labour Party proved pathetically inadequate to the challenge of Thatcher, failing to support key struggles – most notably the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85. Yet still the left dreams of ‘reviving’ Labourism, and tries to channel the widespread bitter anti-Toryism into support for the ‘lesser evil’. The left cheered Blair’s defeat of the hated Tories as if it was their own triumph. And what did they get for their trouble? Years of a Labour government that was marked by capitalist-friendly policies and ended with an economic crisis, more dirty wars abroad and the assault on civil liberties at home. Surely after all those years of humiliation and hurt, those who still think of themselves as progressives will have to face up to the truth about Labour? But no, still many of them cling to the tattered old banners of the ‘lesser evil’ in this coming election.

As another election looms the drumbeat for a Labour vote is growing louder on the Left-leaning blogs and in the offices of the trade union bosses. Labour politicians having comprehensively failed to defend the interests of workers when in power or even offer effective support when in opposition, these very same union officials want workers to do them a favour and vote for Labour. The spectre of 'lesser evil' politics rises once more on the horizon. We are warned that not voting for Labour will mean another five years of the Conservatives. You are invited not to remember what Labour did when it was in government because, apparently, it's going to be so much better this time round. Really?

 Labour apologists try to focus on the few issues where there are disagreements between the two parties, in an attempt to deceive people into believing that they are being offered a real choice by representative democracy.  The left avoid criticising Labour because that's what ‘lesser evil’ politics requires. Union leaders refrain from telling us is what Labour's core beliefs actually are because, if they were being honest, they'd have to confess that they are asking people to vote for anti-worker policies. On issues of foreign policy, both parties are willing allies of the US. Both parties count “Israel” as a very strong and "natural" ally, justifying US and Israeli aggression, explicitly or tacitly, whenever it occurs as we have seen over the last decades.

People now know that Labour is a capitalist party. If so-called ‘revolutionaries’ support Labour in election campaigns, even as a ‘lesser evil’ and despite all sorts of qualifications to their support, they are betraying the working class. This support amounts to an attempt to preserve, or re-establish, workers’ illusions that if only Labour had a more ‘left’ leadership things would be different. No party, however ‘left’ its leadership, can effect important changes to the capitalist system through parliamentary reforms. Today, to support Labour is to directly contradict the fundamental task of presenting the working class with a clear alternative to all pro-capitalist parties and to the whole system of capitalism. Through bitter experience the mass of workers has become cynical about any political claiming to support its interests. A mass party must be created which presents a clear alternative to the capitalist parties, and which is able to prove in consistent struggle that it really represents working peoples’ interests.


The problem of how to relate to the Labour Party has dogged the British left for more than a century. The left, which crucially never managed to establish any real political independence from Labourism and still supports Labour as the ‘lesser evil’. It seems that they are the last ones left alive with any illusions (or rather delusions) in the potential for Labour to change things for the better. Once there was a clash between competing visions of society today the ‘lesser evil’ case for Labour is based on little more than cynicism, negativity and demagoguery. If you are serious about wanting to change society, there is no reason to support Labour, and doing so can lead to nothing positive in post-electoral politics. The left’s acceptance that there is no alternative to Labour has over the years become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the defeat of Labourism meaning there is no sign of any alternative in politics today. The left bears a heavy responsibility for creating the situation they now bemoan. Eduard's Bernstein's so-called 'evolutionary road to socialism' has proved a dead end. Rosa Luxemburg was right all along.

Voting for the lesser evil, voting for a party and for candidates in whom you do not believe has to be self-destructive. When we go into the voting booth, stand before the ballot and lift the pencil and then vote for something in which we do not believe, we take responsibility for destroying a little piece of our integrity, of betraying our conscience. We give our backing to something we know is not good, not right, not the best path for our class. We violate ourselves, or permit ourselves to be violated by the lesser evil argument. Don't do it.

We may not have a party political alternative and there is truth in the idea that we need power in the formal political sense. A working peoples' political party—one made up of and fighting for working people—would make a huge difference. Why, you might ask, would we want a party? Wouldn't a party inevitably succumb to the corruption of political compromise and opportunism? Ours would have to be a party with a difference. Ours would have to be a socialist party prepared to reorganise the economy, to reshape society. Ours would have to be a party controlled by ordinary workers. Ours would be the party that takes power away from the 1% and gives economic and political power to the 99%. Could we build such a political party? We in the Socialist Party think we can. In any case, we have no other choice than to try.



Monday, March 30, 2015

End Capitalism - Or the End of the World


Political and social change is scary but the alternative is terrifying. Our planet is in ecological free fall. Where will it stop? When will it stop? Is it too late to stop? There is not an issue that is more critical to our survival. We count on our elected representatives to do everything they can to reverse climate change. And what do they do? They undo what little safeguards we have and support policies that are designed to make matters many times worse. The world cannot continue on their current trajectory if survival is the goal. Our only hope is a transformation of the economic system. And it is quite possible. Those who scream the loudest about change being impossible are usually those who have something to lose when change takes place. Change is constant and inevitable. The only questions are what change will take place.

Capitalism inevitably divides humanity through racism, nationalism and sexism. Socialism is a sensible process of overcoming humanity's divisions and building economic and social democracy, where the resources and productive capacity of the world belong to its people, who use them to meet human needs rather than to generate private profits for a few owners. Reforms can never achieve this goal; the system must be overthrown, and that requires revolution. The capitalist system is designed to stumble from one crisis to the next. Thirty people own 6% of the world's wealth. Meanwhile, 80% of the world's population share 20% of the world's wealth. About 1000 people on the planet, according to Forbes, own roughly 10% of the world's GDP.

The world's richest people (a few dozen billionaires) tentatively agreed to give away to the charities of their choice half of their wealth, which amounts to $3.5 trillion, or just over one-quarter of the EU's GDP. Will global poverty end if the 1000 richest people and the next one million richest donate all their wealth? Of course not! Charity has never been the solution to the problem of unequal distribution of wealth. Philanthropy is not the solution to poverty.

One billion people do not have access to drinking water largely because a handful of multinational corporations, in which the billionaire philanthropists own much of the stock, they own water rights around the world and charge exorbitant utility rates for water that IMF and World Bank insist must be under private ownership as Tim Di Muzio pointed out in his ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us.’

Two billion people are victims of chronic malnutrition and lack of medicine, largely because multinational corporations, in which billionaire philanthropists again own most of the stock, make it unaffordable for people to eat and have medicine.

Water, food, health, education and affordable housing are among the problems that billionaire philanthropists want to address but the political economy which these very same ‘generous philanthropist billionaires, created the aforementioned problems in the first place. Inequality and poverty cannot be eradicated by business interests even with the support of the UN and World Bank whose driving goal is commercial exploitation of natural resources, labour and markets. Most of the programs introduced to combat have been band-aid solutions to patch up the victims

Our foods are polluted. On one hand our food is polluted with herbicides and on the other hand by antibiotics. And then we have hormones and pesticides. The World Health Organization has concluded that the glyphosate in Monsanto’s Roundup, a herbicide widely sprayed on GMO food crops, is a likely causes of cancer in humans and animals.

93% of doctors are concerned about the meat industry’s excessive use of antibiotics, and independent scientists have definite evidence that the growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics is due to the use of antibiotics as animal feed. 70% of all antibiotics are fed to livestock because it produces weight gain and saves money on feed costs. Scientists at the University of Iowa found Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in 70 percent of farmed hogs. A Consumer Reports investigation found that US meat, regardless of the meat’s source, is full of “pathogens, commensals, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.” Pork tested contained five resistant bacteria strains. As the drug companies have more or less stopped the development of new antibiotics, the protection antibiotics provide against infections is rapidly fading.

The FDA tried in 2008 to ban farm use of cephalosporins (antibiotics like Cefzil and Keflex) because they are needed for pneumonia, strep throat, and other serious human conditions, the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork, and cattle industries and the animal Health Institute protested The Animal Health Institute consists of the drug companies who make profits selling 70 percent of their production to meat, egg, and milk producers. The members of the “health” institute are Abbott, Bayer Healthcare, Elanco/Lilly, Merck, Boehringer, Ingelheim Vetmedica, Novartis, etc.  Congress responded not to the health and safety but to campaign donations. In other words profits come far ahead of public health.

While a severe drought in the western US is ongoing, with California reportedly left with one year’s supply of water, the fossil-fuel fracking industry is polluting the remaining surface and ground water.

Dr. Jacqueline Kasun, professor of economics at Humboldt State University in California, observes in her 1988 book The War Against Population that:
1.         No more than 1-3% of the Earth's ice-free land area is occupied by humans.
2.         Less than 11% of the Earth's ice-free land area is used for agriculture.
3.         Somewhere between 8 and 22 times the current world population could support itself at the present standard of living, using present technology.
This leaves 50% of the Earth's land surface open to wildlife and conservation areas.
The lower limit of 8 times the current population (about 44 billion) has been considered as being perfectly workable. According to Dr. Kasun,
"Better yields and/or the use of a larger share of the land area would support over 40 billion persons."
Former Harvard Center for Population Studies Director Roger Revelle estimated that the agricultural resources of the world were capable of providing an adequate diet (2,500 kilocalories per day) for 40 billion people, and that it would require the use of less than 25% of the Earth's ice-free land area. Revelle estimated that the less-developed continents were capable of feeding 18 billion people, and that Africa alone was capable of feeding 10 billion people.

In addition to the fact that many new strains of food have been developed that can boost food production, there are other indications that food would not be a problem. In the September 1976 issue of Scientific American, Dr. David Hopper asserted that the worlds "food problem" does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the environment. The limitations on abundance are to be found in social and political structures of nations and the economic relations between them.

The landmass of Texas is 268,820 sq. miles (7,494,271,488,000 sq ft) So, divide 7,494,271,488,000 sq. ft. by 6,908,688,000 people , and you get 1084.76 sq ft/person That's approximately a 33' x 33' (about 10 x 10 meters = 100 m2) plot of land for every person on the planet, enough space for a town house. Given an average four person family, every family would have a 66' x 66' plot of land, which would comfortably provide a single family home and yard - and all of them fit on a landmass the size of Texas. Admittedly, it'd basically be one massive subdivision, but Texas is a tiny portion of the inhabitable Earth. Such an arrangement would leave the entire rest of the world vacant. There's plenty of space for humanity.

Capitalists make money by exploiting labour and by externalising the costs of the waste products of the manufaturing process by dumping the wastes on the environment. The short-term time horizon of production for profit focused on quarterly profits is destroying the livability of the earth. To deny this is nothing but an apology for capitalist exploitation of labor and the earth. To ensure that ourselves and our children and their children can live through this and next century, we must do what seems impossible. And that’s to have a worldwide united action for socialism. The wealthy 1% is now focused on maximising their wealth; we must show the unavoidable disaster they will inflict upon the planet if they are permitted to pursue their goal of capital accumulation.

The current economic system is not geared toward sustaining global life support systems and is fundamentally flawed. It is clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and future generations will find it increasingly hard to survive. The current system is not concerned with human need, such as stable global ecosystems, but the personal enrichment of a tiny minority, even at the expense of the health of the planet. It is therefore up to people to fight against the exploitation and plunder of capitalism and to set up a society in which the use of Earth’s natural resources can be rationally planned—a socialist society.

Capitalism’s pursuit of profit is destroying life on earth.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Lessons of Failed Strategies


Perhaps the greatest obstacle we face in creating a new socialist world is the enormous capacity capitalists have acquired to shape and control what people think, and how they see the world and the events taking place in it. Not only has there been the church and the education system conditioning our way of thought but the mass media has become a great weapon in the hands of any ruling class. Given all this it is hard to see how an autonomous, oppositional consciousness could ever emerge, much less survive the system’s attacks if it did emerge. Nevertheless, capitalist control of consciousness and culture is not total. Opposition movements continue to be born even now. There are cracks through which human beings find outlets to prove that we have not been totally brainwashed by the doublespeak of capitalist ideology and assert our own values and perceptions. This is our hope.

Reformism
We can’t destroy capitalism by running for office and instituting various reforms through legislative acts. It won’t be done because governments don’t have the last say, they don’t control society. Capitalists do. The government doesn’t control capitalists; capitalists control the government. Modern government (i.e., the nation-state system) is an invention of capitalists. It is their tool, and they know how to use it and keep it from being turned against them. Capitalism goes rolling on no matter who controls the government. The only method is to build socialist  political parties, then using those parties to win elections and get control of the state-machine to abolish capitalism, dismantle the state and establish socialism.

Single-Issue Campaigns
We cannot end capitalism through single-issue campaigns, yet the great bulk of a great many radicals’ energy is spent on these campaigns. There are dozens of them: campaigns to defend abortion rights, to prohibit pollution, stop police brutality, stop union busting, abolish the death penalty, to protect the environment, outlaw genetically modified foods, stop the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and on and on. What we are doing is spending our lives trying to fix a system that generates evils faster than we can ever eradicate them. Although some of these campaigns use direct action, for the most part the campaigns are aimed at passing legislation to correct the problem. Unfortunately, reforms that are won in one decade, after endless agitation, can be easily wiped off the books the following decade, after the protesters have gone home or a new administration comes to power.

These struggles all have value and are needed. Could anyone think that the campaigns against global warming, to aid asylum seekers ought to be abandoned? Single-issue campaigns keep us aware of what's wrong and sometimes even win gains. But in and of themselves, they cannot destroy capitalism, and thus cannot really fix things. It is utopian to believe that we can reform capitalism. Most of these evils can only be eradicated for good if we destroy capitalism itself and create a new civilization. We cannot afford to aim for anything less. Our very survival is at stake. There is one single-issue campaign we wholeheartedly endorse: the total and permanent eradication of capitalism.
Many millions of us, though, are rootless and quite alienated from a particular place or local community. We are part of the vast mass of atomized individuals brought into being by the market for commodified labor. Our political activities tend to reflect this. We tend to act as free-floating protesters. But we could start to change this.  We could attack the ruling class on all fronts. There are millions of us, plenty of us to do everything.

 Politics is Personal
The social movements, based on gender, racial, sexual, or ethnic identities, cannot destroy capitalism. In general, they haven’t even tried. Except for a tiny fringe of radicals in each of them, they have been attempting to get into the system, not overthrow it. This is true for women, blacks, homosexuals, and ethnic groups, as well as many other identities - old people, people with disabilities, mothers on welfare, and so forth. Nothing has derailed the anti-capitalist struggle during the past quarter century so thoroughly as have these movements. Sometimes it seems that identity politics is all that remains of the Left. Identity politics has simply swamped class politics.
The mainstream versions of these movements (the ones fighting to get into the system rather than overthrow it) have given capitalists a chance to do a little fine-tuning by eliminating tensions here and there, and by including token representatives of the excluded groups. Many of the demands of these movements can be easily accommodated. Capitalists can live with boards of directors exhibiting ethnic, gender, and racial diversity as long as all the board members are pro-capitalist. Capitalists can easily accept a rainbow cabinet as long as the cabinet is pushing the corporate agenda. So mainstream identity politics has not threatened capitalism at all.
The radical wings of the new social movements, however, are rather more subversive. These militants realized that it was necessary to attack the whole social order in order to uproot racism and sexism - problems that could not be overcome under capitalism since they are an integral part of it. There is no denying the evils of racism, sexism, and nationalism, which are major structural supports to ruling-class control. These militants have done whatever they could to highlight, analyze, and ameliorate these evils. Unfortunately, for the most part, their voices have been lost in all the clamor for admittance to the system by the majorities in their own movements.
There have been gains, of course. The women's movement has forever changed the world's consciousness about gender. Identity politics in general has underscored just how many people are excluded while also exposing gaps in previous revolutionary strategies. Moreover, the demand for real equality is itself inherently revolutionary in that it cannot be met by capitalists, given that discrimination and division are two of the key structural mechanisms for keeping wages low and thus making profits possible.

Leninism
Leninism cannot destroy capitalism by taking over the government by capturing the state apparatus by force of arms. This has been the most widely used strategy by national liberation movements during the past century in countries on the periphery of capitalism. Dozens of "revolutionary parties" have come to power all over the world, but nowhere have they succeeded in destroying capitalism. In all cases so far, they have simply gone on doing what capitalists always do: accumulate more capital. They inevitably become in spite of their intentions just another government in a system of nation-states, inextricably embedded in capitalism, with no possibility of escape. Generations devoted their lives to this strategy but now, after nearly a century of trials, it's painfully clear that the strategy has failed, and more and more people have come to this conclusion. The few remaining die-hard Leninists/Trotskyists/Maoists, who are still struggling to build a vanguard party to seize state power, are definitely and thankfully a dying breed. National liberation movements in colonial countries in order to capture the governments there is a form of Leninism. Capitalists have learned how to defeat it. Capitalists have been delighted to have a new enemy - namely, "terrorists" now that "communists" are gone. But more importantly as a tactic for socialism it will not work because it doesn’t contain within itself the seeds of the new civilization.

Syndicalism
Nor can we destroy capitalism by seizing and occupying the factories and the farms as the syndicalists advocate we should do. Syndicalism (federations of peasant, worker, and soldier councils) did have a faint chance of success, and even came close in the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s. Unfortunately, that revolution was defeated. In fact, all syndicalist revolutions have failed so far. But again there are serious flaws inherent in the strategy itself. For one thing, the syndicalist strategy excludes old people, young people, sick people, prisoners, students, welfare recipients, and millions of unemployed workers. To think that a revolution can be made only by those people who hold jobs is the sheerest folly. Perhaps immediately after syndicalists seize the factories and make a revolution, this exclusion could be overcome by having everyone join a council at home or in school, but this is no help beforehand, during the revolution itself. The whole image is badly skewed.
Moreover, syndicalists have never specified clearly enough how all the various councils are going to function together to make decisions and set policy, defend themselves, and launch a new society. In the near revolution in Germany in 1918, the worker and soldier councils were for a few months the only organized power. They could have won. But they were confused about what to do. They couldn’t see how to get from their separate councils to the establishment of overall power and the defeat of capitalism. In the massive general strike in Poland in 1980, factory, office, mining, and farm councils were set up all over the country. But these councils didn’t know how to coalesce into an alternative social arrangement capable of replacing the existing power structure. They even mistakenly refrained from attacking ruling-class power with the intent of destroying it. Instead, the councils merely wanted to coexist in some kind of uneasy dual structure (perhaps because they were afraid of a Soviet invasion; but a strategy that has not taken external armies into account is badly flawed).
Workplace associations would have to be permanent assemblies, with years of experience under their belts, before they could have a chance of success. They cannot be new forms suddenly thrown up in the depths of a crisis or the middle of a general strike, with a strong government still waiting in the wings, supported by its fully operational military forces. It is no wonder that syndicalist-style revolts have gone down to defeat.
Finally, syndicalists have not worked out the relations between the councils and the community at large, and to assume that workers in a factory have the final say over the allocation of those resources (or whether the factory should even exist) rather than the community at large, simply won’t do. Nor have syndicalists worked out inter-community relations. Syndicalism, in short, is a strategy that has not been capable of destroying capitalism, although it has been headed in the right direction.

General Strikes
The weapon often promoted by the syndicalists and the industrial unionists – the General Strike cannot destroy capitalism. There is an upper limit of about six weeks as to how long they can even last. Beyond that society starts to disintegrate. But since the general strikers have not even thought about reconstituting society through alternative social arrangements, let alone created them, they are compelled to go back to their jobs just to survive, to keep from starving. All a government has to do is wait them out, perhaps making a few concessions to placate the masses. This is what Charles de Gaulle did in France in 1968.
A general strike couldn't even last six weeks if it were really general - that is, if everyone stopped working. Under those conditions there would be no water, electricity, heat, or food. The garbage would pile up. We couldn't go anywhere because the gas stations would be closed. We couldn't get medical treatment. Thus we would only be hurting ourselves. And what could our objectives possibly be? By stopping work, we obviously wouldn't be aiming at occupying and seizing our workplaces. If that were our aim we would continue working, but kick the bosses out. So our main aim would have to be to topple a government and replace it with another. This might be a legitimate goal if we needed to get rid of a particularly oppressive regime, but as for getting rid of capitalism, it gets us nowhere.

Strikes
Strikes against a particular corporation cannot destroy capitalism. They are not even thought to do so. The purpose of strikes is to change the rate of exploitation in favor of workers. Strikes have only rarely been linked to demands for workers’ control (let alone the abolition of wage slavery); nor could capitalist property relations be overcome in a single corporation. The strike does not contain within itself any vision for reconstituting social relations across society, nor any plans to do so.
In recent years, strikes have even lost most of the effectiveness they once had for gaining short-term benefits for the working class. More often than not strikers are defeated: their union leaders sell them out; the owners bring in scabs, or simply fire everyone and hire a new work-force by out sourcing or exporting jobs abroad; the owners move their plants elsewhere; and/or the government declares the strike illegal and financially cripple the union. Strike breaking is a flourishing industry. Decades of anti-union propaganda by corporate-controlled media has destroyed a pro-labor working-class culture, which in turn helps management break strikes. Nowadays, for strikers to get anywhere at all, entire communities have to be mobilized, with linkages to national campaigns. Even so, strikers are still aiming only at higher wages, health benefits, and the like; they are not anti-capitalist. So however important strikes are, or once were, in the unending fight over the extraction of wealth from the direct producers, they cannot destroy capitalism as a system.
Although unions were created by workers to help protect themselves from the ravages of wage slavery, they have long since lost any emancipatory potential. They were easily co-opted by the ruling class and used against workers as a disciplinary tool to prevent strikes, to prevent job actions, to drain power from the shop floor, to stabilize the workforce and reduce absenteeism, to pacify workers, to water down demands, and so forth. Many unions have been "business unions," working in cahoots with capitalists to manage "labor relations."
In recent years there has been a movement to rebuild unions. In some developing countries there are some strong union movements, arising in response to the industries that have moved there or to the appearance of sweatshops. With rare exception, these unions are not anti-capitalist. Naturally, it's important to fight for better working conditions, higher wages, shorter hours, and health benefits. Such struggles do often highlight the evils of the wage slave system as well as improve the lives of workers. But something more is needed if we want to get rid of capitalism. Even if current labor activists succeed and rebuild unions to what they once were, can we expect these newly refashioned unions to accomplish more than previous ones did, at the height of the unionization drives of a strong labor movement - a movement that was embedded in communist, socialist, and anarchist working-class cultures that have now been obliterated? Hardly.

To The Barricades
Insurrections cannot destroy capitalism. You can rampage through the streets all you want, burn down your neighborhoods, and loot all the local stores to your heart’s content. This will not go anywhere. Blind rage will burn itself out. When it’s all over, these insurrectionists will be showing up for work like always or standing again in the dole line. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been organized. No new associations have been created. What do capitalists care if they lose a few city blocks? They can afford it. All they have to do is cordon off the area of conflagration, wait for the fires to burn down, go in and arrest thousands of people at random, and then leave, letting the "rioters" cope with their ruined neighborhoods as best they can. Maybe we should think of something a little more damaging to capitalists than burning down our own neighborhoods.

Civil Disobedience
Acts of civil disobedience cannot destroy capitalism. They can sometimes make strong moral statements. But moral statements are pointless against immoral persons. They fall on deaf ears. Therefore, the act of deliberately breaking a law and getting arrested is of limited value in actually breaking the power of the rulers. Acts of civil disobedience can be used as weapons in the battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people, assuming that ordinary people ever hear about them. But they are basically the actions of powerless persons. Powerless individuals must use whatever tactics they can, of course. But that is the point. Why remain powerless, when by adopting a different strategy building strategic associations we could become powerful, and not be reduced to impotent acts like civil disobedience against laws we had no say in making and that we regard as unjust?

Demonstrations
We cannot destroy capitalism by staging demonstrations and protest marches. As a rule, demonstrations barely even embarrass capitalists, let alone frighten or damage them. Demonstrations are just a form of petition usually. They petition the ruling class regarding some grievance, essentially begging it to change its policies. They are not designed to take any power or wealth away from capitalists. Demonstrations only last a few hours or days and then, with rare exception, everything goes back to the way it was. If demonstrations do win an occasional concession, it is usually minor and short-lived. They do not build an alternative social world. Rather, they mostly just alert the ruling class that it needs to retool or invent new measures to counter an emerging source of opposition.
 But even if demonstrations rise above the petition level, and become instead a way of presenting our demands and making our opposition known, we still have not acquired the power to see that our demands are met. Our opposition has no teeth. In order to give some bite to our protests we would have to re-organize ourselves, re-orient ourselves then when we went off on demonstrations to protest ruling-class initiatives and projects there would be some strength behind the protests, rather than just shouted slogans, unfurled banners, hoisted placards, street scuffles, and clever puppets. We would be in a position to take action if our demands were not met. Then when we chanted, "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" our words might represent more than just a pipe dream.
Demonstrations are not even good propaganda tools because the ruling class, given its control of the media, can put any spin it wants to on the event, and this interpretation is invariably damaging to the opposition movement, assuming the event is even reported since the latest approach to these events is simply to ignore them. This is quite effective.
And what are the gains? An issue can sometimes be brought to the attention of the public, even if only a small minority of the public. Also, more people can be drawn into an opposition movement. For those participating, a demonstration can be an inspiring experience. In many cases, though, this high is offset by a sense of dispiritedness on returning home. Demonstrations can thus contribute to building an opposition movement. But are these small gains worth it? Large national demonstrations drain energy and resources away from local struggles. And even local demonstrations are costly, requiring time, energy, and money, which are always in short supply among radicals. Are demonstrations worth all the work and the expense they take to organize? No matter what, they remain just a form of protest. They show what we're against. By their very nature, demonstrations are of limited value for articulating what we are for.
We are against the World Trade Organization, but what are we for?
Rather than taking to the streets and marching off all the time, protesting this or that (while the police take our pictures), we would be better off staying home and building up our workplace, neighborhood, and household associations until they are powerful enough to strike at the heart of capitalism. We cannot build a new social world in the streets.

Boycotts
Boycotts have always been an extremely ineffective way to attack the system, and are almost impossible to organize. They almost invariably fail in their objectives. In the rare cases where they have succeeded, the gains are minor. A corporation is forced to amend its labor policies here and there, drop a product, or divest somewhere. That’s about it.
In recent years, boycotting has become a way of life for thousands in the environmental movement. They publish thick books on which products are okay to buy and which must be boycotted, covering literally everything from toilet paper to deodorant, food to toys. All these activists have succeeded in doing is to create a whole new capitalist industry of politically correct products. They have bought into the myth that the "economy" will give us anything we want if we just demand it, and that it is our demands that have been wrong rather than the system itself.
It’s true that it is better to eat food that hasn’t been polluted with insecticides, to wear clothes not made with child labor, or to use makeup not tested on rabbits. But capitalism cannot be destroyed by making such life-style choices. If we are going to boycott something, we might try boycotting wage slavery.

Dropping Out
We cannot destroy capitalism by dropping out, either as an individual, a small group, or a community. It’s been tried over and over, and it fails every time. There is no escaping capitalism; there is nowhere left to go. The only escape from capitalism is to destroy it. Then we could be free (if we try). In fact, capitalists love it when we drop out. They don’t need us. They have plenty of suckers already. What do they care if we live under bridges, beg for meals, and die young?  Even more illusory than the idea that an individual can drop out is the notion that a whole community can withdraw from the system and build its own little new world somewhere else. This was tried repeatedly by utopian communities throughout the nineteenth century. The strategy was revived in the 1960s as thousands of new left radicals retired to remote rural communes to groove on togetherness (and dope). The strategy is once again surfacing in the new age movement as dozens of communities are being established all over the country. These movements all suffer from the mistaken idea that they don’t have to attack capitalism and destroy it but can simply withdraw from it, to live their own lives separately and independently. It is a vast illusion. Capitalists rule the world. Until they are defeated, there will be no freedom for anyone.
A number of radicals established free schools and even a free university or two, and there was a fairly strong and long lasting modern school movement among anarchists. But these are long gone. The notion that “libertarian” education is the path to change and the way out of the mess we're in is like the tail wagging the dog. We must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live-and-let-live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere.

Luddism
As wonderful as Luddism was, as one of the fiercest attacks ever made against capitalism, wrecking machinery cannot in and of itself destroy capitalism, and for the same reason that insurrections and strikes cannot: the action is not designed to replace capitalism with new decision-making arrangements. It does not even strike at the heart of capitalism - wage slavery - but only at the physical plant, the material means of production. Although large-scale sabotage, if it were part of a movement to destroy capitalism and replace it with something else, could weaken the corporate world and put a strain on the accumulation of capital, it is far better to get ourselves in a position where we can seize the machinery rather than smash it. (Not that we even want much of the existing machinery; it will have to be redesigned. But seizing it is a way of getting control over the means of production.)
Moreover, Luddites were already enslaved to capitalists in their cottage industries before they struck. They were angry because new machinery was eliminating their customary job (which was an old way of making a living, relatively speaking, and thus had some strong traditions attached to it). In current terms, it would be like linotype operators destroying computers because their jobs were being eliminated by the new equipment. Destroying the new machinery misses the point. It is not the machinery that is the problem but the wage slave system itself. If it weren’t for wage slavery we could welcome labor-saving devices, provided they weren’t destructive in other ways, for freeing us from unnecessary toil. We can draw inspiration from Luddism, as a fine example of workers aggressively resisting the further degradation of their lives, but we should not imitate it, at least not as a general strategy.

Conclusion
We must never forget that we are at war. It is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks; it is a class war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue to do so.

Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. We do not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for totally replacing capitalism with a new civilization. This is an important distinction because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms as a system. We can sometimes, in some places, win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal. We can overthrow slavery and live without working for a wage or buying and selling the products made by wage slaves (that is, we must free ourselves from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and we can embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Destroying capitalism requires an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else.

Adapted from an article Getting Free: Creating an Association of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods by James Herod




Saturday, March 28, 2015

There Must Be Something Else

The best lies are not lies but half-truths and implied half-truths are more powerful than what is directly said. We see this in our news. Leave out the part where you provoke someone to defend themselves and suddenly you have justification for further attacks found in someones defense against the initial attack. They tell you the presence of war is peace and the absence of war is violence. Our governments continuously tell us that the people shooting and killing are the ‘peacemakers’. The political narrative is distorted by lies, half-truths and rhetoric to evoke an emotional reaction without understanding a reality. The rhetoric goes further to often justify and promote this same violence and murder by re-painting it with words of patriotism, defense, freedom and other twisted rhetoric.

Patriotism is not only a part of nationalism, it is a crux of it, and often what most call patriotism is nothing more than nationalism. Nationalism is defined by as: a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. Often, it is the belief that an ethnic group has a right to statehood, or that citizenship in a state should be limited to one ethnic group, or that multinationality in a single state should necessarily comprise the right to express and exercise national identity even by minorities. It can also include the belief that the state is of primary importance, or the belief that one state is naturally superior to all other states. When governments rally around their anti-migrant war mongering praise of the nation they choose to mask this with the term ‘patriotism’, the love and devotion to the nation that is seen as ‘number one’. The belief of the so-called patriot is very much one that embraces the idea that their governments are naturally superior to all other states. This superiority is quite often falsely defined with words such as freedom, liberty, equality or rights. There is little emphasis on what those actually mean, outside of more emotional rhetoric that tends to be vague at best. There is no defined ethic or concept that all can see under a true definition. The declared belief in equality does not apply to many people groups still to this day. You must begin to question the rhetoric you are being fed. Look for the implied messages and the half-truths.

The New World Order conspiracy analysis is painfully close to the truth. Elites do work to push their agendas without public scrutiny. The World Bank, NATO, and IMF are all global institutions which leverage their power to pursue the interests of American empire and subdue rising threats from below. Globalization, a euphemism for expansionism, continues to have devastating effects on developing nations as transnational corporations ship  jobs overseas or across the border where they can exploit the cheapest labour markets. The mainstream media has evolved to serve its own interests (and thus the interests of the status-quo power structures upon which they depend). In working to maintain their dominance as  super-powers, Western nationa has transitioned from using the communist-bogeyman to the much more effective and never-ending threat of terrorism to continually increase its military might. And an appalling 1% of the world's population owns over 40% of the world's wealth, while over 3 billion people lanquish in dire poverty.

That these things are happening is not in dispute. What we have to question is the conclusions we should draw from them. This is important because we need to make sense of all these problems so we can ultimately determine our success in solving them. Blaming a few individuals for the problem leads to one set of conclusions and strategies for change. Recognising the deeper economic forces of which these individuals are only a part will lead to another set of strategies.  So let's think very seriously about the usefulness of framing all of the world’s problems around an elite group of bankers quest for world domination. If this narrative is misleading, then it will mislead everyone's efforts who take it seriously. The problem isn't "them." They are just symptoms of the deeper cause. Kill off all of the elite today and new people would jockey to take their place.

But the good news is, people are waking up, and they are rejecting the values of rulers. Capitalism is a worldwide system that over several centuries, carried their practices to every corner of the globe, destroying and displacing other traditions, usually through warfare. World history for the last five hundred years is thus mainly the story of this assault that capitalists have thrown against the world’s peoples, beginning with the peasants of Europe, in order to seize their lands and force them into wage slavery (wealth-making propertyless labourers). You should be aware that countries that came to be called communist were just capitalist states doing what capitalists always do: enslave and exploit their populations. There was always a tradition that perceived the Soviet experiment and the colonial revolutions that aped it in these terms. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, more people are realizing that those so-called communist countries were just capitalism in a different form and had little to do with the struggle against capitalism.

It is impossible to defeat our ruling class by force of arms. The level of firepower currently possessed by all major governments and most minor ones is simply overwhelming. It is bought with the expropriated wealth of billions of people. For any opposition movement to think that it can acquire, maintain, and deploy a similarly vast and sophisticated armament is ludicrous. I have nothing against armed struggle in principle (although of course we don't like it); We just don’t think it can work now. It would take an empire as enormous and rich as capitalism itself to fight capitalists on their own terms. This is something the working classes of the world will never have, nor should we even want it. It means that we have to look to and invent if necessary other weapons, other tactics. But we must be careful not to fall into the nonviolence/violence trap. Is tearing down a fence a violent act or is it resistance to the violence of those who erected the fence in the first place? Is throwing a tear gas canister back at the police who fired it an act of violence or is it resistance to an act of violence? Nonviolence is a key ideological weapon of a violent ruling class. This class uses it to pacify us; it uses its mass media to preach nonviolence incessantly. Such rhetoric is an effective weapon because we all (but they don't) want to live in a peaceful world. We must never forget that we are at war, however, and that we have been for five hundred years. We are involved in class warfare. This defines our situation historically and sets limits to what we can do. It would be nice to think of peace, for example, but this is out of the question. It is excluded as an option by historical conditions. Peace can be achieved only by destroying capitalism. A major weapon of capitalists has always been to simply murder those who are threatening their rule. Capitalists (generically speaking) are not merely thieves; they are murderers. Their theft and murder is on a scale never seen before in history - a scale so vast it boggles the mind. Capitalists make Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun look like saints. This is a terrible enemy we face. Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes war, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks; it is a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue to do so.

We can turn now to a notion of how we might want to live. Let’s assume, for the moment, that we could start from scratch to build a totally new social world, building up our neighborhoods just the way we wanted. What would they look like? What would the core social forms be? In order for capitalism to be destroyed, millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise, we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.

The content of this vision is actually not new at all. The goal socialists has always been to restore community. Marx defined socialism as a free association of producers, and the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all. The aim have always been clear: to abolish wage slavery, eradicate a social order organized solely around the accumulation of capital for its own sake, and establish in its place a society of free people who democratically and cooperatively self-determine the shape of their social world.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Socialist Comment

The richest 10% of households in Scotland own half of the country's wealth, figures show. The report by the Scottish government found the least wealthy 30% typically had no savings or pensions
Labour Scottish secretary Margaret Curran said "These figures show we cannot afford another five years of failed Tory austerity. (Metro page 23 March 25)

Who are those we she means? Is it the 30% or the richest 10%? I think talk of pips squeaking or noises of that kind is in the making once more. More so if Labour loses the next election.

Together to pursue the revolution

If you are in the 1%, the capitalist system works exceptionally well. Since the financial crisis in 2008, most of the wealth created in the world has ended up in their bank accounts. By next year, they could own more wealth than the rest of us put together. The World Bank calculated that ten Africans own more wealth than half the continent. Africa is the richest continent on Earth in terms of  natural resources and agricultural potential, yet Africa's people are the poorest people on earth - and getting poorer. That is why Africans are continually leaving Africa.

Research shows lobbyists spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence government legislation for their industries benefits, saving them billions of dollars, for instance by securing the banks’ huge state bailouts. Across the world, we see that money buys power: immunity from justice; the passing of favourable laws; buying off the candidates in an election and paying a pliant media to justify it all. We cannot win under the current economic system. This is a system that sees a world possessed of huge wealth leaving most of humanity with virtually nothing at all. The vast majority keep falling behind economically while the rich get even richer. It is also a system that is leading us to runaway climate change.  Yet this situation doesn't translate into a winning politics. Working people have no effective party to champion their interests. Economic inequality translates into inequality of political influence. You'd expect people to be in the streets, but there is a cynicism about politics. A lot of social problems have been personalized and internalized with the assumption that we are all on our own. But that can be changed.

Another world is possible – it is up to us. People possess imagination, human invention, ingenuity and spirit. We need to build a world where people do not have to live in fear; where every child gets to fulfil their potential and where the planet is preserved and sustained for our children and their children’s children. This is not an impossible dream, it is a practical possibility, well within our reach. To get there we need to organise. We need to harness our boundless energy and creativity. We are many, they are few. We are the 99% and they the 1%. However, the plethora of campaigning groups can be seen mainly as a sign of fragmentation. The good news is that a growing number of different movements are joining together to demand change. If there's a group of workers that don't have rights, then that means that your rights are being threatened because there's going to be an excuse at some point to take your rights away from you. We're seeing that now with the state of labour unions and the fight that people are waging even to form labour unions.

Change can happen and is happening! But we won’t change the system until we change our politics and the economic system. We do not believe the Koch Brothers and the other billionaire oligarchs and plutocrats are more powerful than millions of people fighting for themselves and their own interests. But we require an invigorated popular democracy as the antidote to concentrated wealth. The remedies that evoke real change are far outside mainstream political conversation, and will not become mainstream until forced onto the agenda by a genuine mass movement. But without a potent socialist movement on the ground, mainstream electoral politics is likely to remain stuck in the rut with reforms too weak either to rouse public imagination and participation, or to provide more than token relief for today's extreme inequality. The Socialist Party has always argued that the low expectations and diminishing participation can be reversed, as it has been reversed at moments in the past. Just as the injustices we fight have no borders, neither should our movement. It's really hard for people to understand a movement that is full of “leaders”. That's how our homes work; that's how our communities work; that's how our workplaces work, whether or not we want to talk about it. We're just trying to reflect our own realities. We're trying to create more pathways for more people to participate and engage. If we want a full democracy, we can't just have people following one person. Everyone has to feel like they have a stake in shaping the kind of world that we live in. We want to create a different kind of political culture. We think it's important; we think we need it and we don't think we can survive without it.

 According to Frederick Douglass “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Our demands are the same as they have been  over the hundreds of years. We want quality housing that's comfortable to live in. We want a decent life-enhancing education. We want communities where people can live in dignity and in peace. We want to be able to live with our families without fear of poverty or deprivation. We want fulfilling and socially useful work for everyone who seeks it. We want all the things that we have been fighting for since people were turned into slaves. These are not a new demands, but it's certainly a new political moment where we have the opportunity to join people together across issues in a unified socialist movement and try to advance liberation. We are just getting started with that project.


Thursday, March 26, 2015

Revolution is not dead

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

When we talk about saving the world we mean saving the world as a human habitat. Accomplishing this will mean (must mean) saving the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible. We can only save the world as a human habitat if we stop our catastrophic onslaught on community for we depend on community for our very lives. The nearly universal access to radio, television and the Internet is creating a community of shared perceptions. Real Revolution can only be achieved through the power of socialist vision. Capitalism no longer has anything to offer. Capitalism can steal but cannot share. There is now widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny elite. Hope isn't blind optimism. It's a sense of possibility. We can choose to remain open to possibility and not be mired in despair.

There is no time left to be complacent. The time has come to say: enough!! The world is changing now. Not tomorrow. Be part of the change for good. The greatest discovery is that human beings, by changing attitudes and minds, can change lives. What we do and say doesn't just influence our friends, but also our friends' friends and our friends' friends' friends. Thinkers no longer continue to defend the ruling class.

We don’t want to become a vanguard, “leading” or imposing our will on others, as that would run counter to our anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchal values and commitment to full democratic decision making. “Power to the people can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people,” wrote Murray Bookchin in Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Too many think the most beautiful thing that you can do for your beliefs is to fight and die for them. But it’s not true… you have to LIVE for what you believe in. Humanity hasn’t come this far by crawling on our knees. Stand up – and reclaim the dream. A world without capitalist exploitation and environmental destruction has often been depicted as “utopian” and “unrealistic.” Yet this world is not some imagined future that comes to us from fantasy and sci-fi novels but from history books of what existed before in our past.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do as you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today”Malcom X