Against the anti-electoral purists

Turn universal suffrage from a means of trickery into an agent of emancipation

With the general election now fast approaching and the media reporting on it daily, this blogger has decided to concentrate the themes of his posts on democracy and elections until after polling day. Apologies if this adds to your feelings of a general world-weary ennui and apologies if the separate posts tend to repeat similar arguments although there was an endeavor to focus on different issues.

 The series begins with a defence of the Socialist Party against those who are anti-parliamentarians who have had a strong influence in the Scottish workers’ movement in the past.

Against the anti-electoral purists

The SPGB of today are not the socialist "party" that its founding members envisaged it becoming i.e. the mass of the working class organised politically for socialism. At the moment the SPGB are not much more than a socialist propagandist educational club and can't be anything else (and nor should we try to be, on principle). Possibly we might be the embryo of the future mass "socialist party" but there's no guarantee that we will be (and some think it’s more likely we may just be a contributing element). But it is such a mass party that will take political control via the ballot box, and since it will in effect be the majority organised democratically and politically for socialism , thus it will the majority, not the party as such as something separate from that majority, that carries out the socialist transformation of society. Without having any delusions of grandeur, we try to organise ourselves today in our small party in the same way we think that a mass socialist party should organise itself: without leaders and with major decisions being made democratically by a referendum of the whole membership ratifying decisions made by conferences of mandated delegates or by elected committees. But who cares? As long as such a mass socialist party eventually emerges. At some stage, for whatever reason, socialist consciousness will reach a 'critical mass', or in your words "when militancy becomes the norm" , at which point it will just snowball and carry people along with it. It may come about without people even giving it the label of socialism.

The Socialist Party strategy does not ham-strings the workers’ movement. The growth of the socialist movement would have profound and perhaps unpredictable impacts. The Socialist Party does not hold that the growth of the socialist movement will leave capitalism completely unchanged until a cataclysmic revolution occurs. But we cannot now predict in any meaningful way the various ways in which capitalism will change as socialist ideas spread, so we do not think it is possible or advisable to incorporate some version of these changes into our political position. We can determine, however, that all aspects of our daily life, from neighbourhood to work, will be re-organised democratically and assuming control over Parliament is complementary to that process. It has always been the established SPGB position to be organised on the economic front as well as the political front so to ensure the smooth change-over of production and distribution from capitalism to socialism.

But an important part of our case is that political organisation must precede the economic, since, apart from the essential need of the conquest of the powers of government, it is on the political field that the widest and most comprehensive propaganda can be deliberately maintained. It is here that the workers can be deliberately and independently organised on the basis of socialist thought and action.

When people want something and where elections exist they will organise to contest elections as well organize outside of Parliament. Where there isn’t a democratic opportunity to capture the state machine via elections and parliaments, then, of course, some other means would have to be used, probably mass protests, demonstrations, civil disobedience and political strikes. In Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s there was no possibility of voting the rulers out, so mass street demonstrations were the only alternative. Despite the fact of nominally having at their disposal powerful means of suppression (the armed forces, Stasi, etc) the hard-line rulers in East Germany and Czechoslovakia decided to face the fact that a majority of the population were against them and to give up power without firing a shot (or rather without ordering a shot to be fired). Only Ceausescu in Romania tried to resist and he ended up before a firing squad within a week. There is a lesson here for those who insist that, faced with a mass movement for socialism whether or not also expressing itself as a victory at the polls, the ruling class would resort to violence to crush it. Unless they are suicidal or fools we wouldn't have thought this was likely.

In an anecdote recounted in Desmond Greaves's biography of James Connolly about what happened when Connolly left the De Leonist SLP of America (which was committed to using the ballot box) to join the IWW (which wasn't): “He was asked if he approved of its repudiating the principle of political action. He laughed, 'It will be impossible to prevent the workers taking it'.”

And in case we are accused of cherry-picking second-hand hearsay, here is another Connolly quote

"I am inclined to ask all and sundry amongst our comrades if there is any necessity for this presumption of antagonism between the industrialist and the political advocate of socialism. I cannot see any. I believe that such supposed necessity only exists in the minds of the mere theorists or doctrinaires. The practical fighter in the work-a-day world makes no such distinction. He fights, and he votes; he votes and he fights. He may not always, he does not always, vote right; nor yet does he always fight when and as he should. But I do not see that his failure to vote right is to be construed into a reason for advising him not to vote at all; nor yet why a failure to strike properly should be used as a gibe at the strike weapon, and a reason for advising him to place his whole reliance upon votes." 

Our “wise” counsel for fellow-workers is put not your trust in leaders - be they trade union or left-wingers - but strive for that goal which can only be brought about by your own efforts. The necessity for the industrial struggle and organisation of the workers as against the employing class and its organisations, is not denied by the Socialist Party. Being workers, socialists are also trade unionists, and engage in, and support all worthwhile trade union action, struggling side by side with their fellow workers on this battle-field. To the nationalists we say why help to change a flag and leave the old enemy, capitalism, with its poverty and exploitation and class-borders ? Why should socialists assist a clique that are forever eager to speculate with the blood of workers in the markets of international catastrophe.

Marx in 1852 “But universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but only landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England would, therefore be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the continent. Its inevitable result, here is the political supremacy of the working class.”

His meaning is clear - a working class majority in Parliament, backed by a majority of the population, can bring about the real transfer of power. Marx reaffirms “the way to show political power [in Britain] lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work.”

Several decades later Engels still argued for its use commenting that in the USA the workers "next step towards their deliverance" was "the formation of a political workingmen's party, with a platform of its own, and the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal." This new party "like all political parties everywhere…aspires to the conquest of political power."

In Britain Engels continued to argue that the task of the British working class was not only to pursue economic struggles "but above all in winning political rights, parliament, through the working class organised into an independent party" (significantly, the original manuscript stated "but in winning parliament, the political power").

It is indeed a long and winding road, but all the supposed short-cuts that have been proposed over the decades led to cul-de-sacs. The Socialist Party will plod on until persuaded of another more viable route. So far, many of the previous road maps to an emancipatory society have been proved to be as fictitious wrong turnings and our party has been confirmed correct holding to its own compass.

Our position on workers councils and parliamentary action is not an either/or one but that there will be overlaps and parallel movements taking place. Its ideas that are vital not simply just organisational forms. The way to achieve it, the means to the end, certainly is important but one particular road should not exclude other paths. We all have the same compass that points the same direction, however, some are going to opt for the bus and others the train or plane to get there.It is to be expected that there will be some dispute over which is the best form of travel.

Ultimately, the Russian and German workers councils lost out to the party that held state control and could impose its political power and dismantle any class independence. The capitalist class rule, i.e control the state, because they have been able to deceive workers into voting for their representatives. But what if workers see through this and are no longer deceived? Incidentally, they exploit via capital but rule through the state. The ruling class cannot simply turn on and off political democracy just like that.  Political democracy is not just a constitutional matter. It's also, more so in fact, a sociological, even a cultural fact, the product of historical evolution reflecting past struggles. It can't be done away with by decree. It is not because they own the means of production, otherwise it would be the Confederation of British Industry that appoints or directs the government. We suggest that they own the means of production because they control the state. It is the state that grants and upholds their right to own. Without state backing their ownership titles mean nothing. Certainly, their (state-backed) wealth gives them power to influence the great mass of the people including how they vote. At present most people, holding or influenced by pro-capitalist ideas, vote for pro-capitalist politicians and it is this that gives the capitalist class control of the state. In other words, they rule (control the state) indirectly through universal suffrage and pro-capitalist politicians and parties. They don't rule directly by (somehow) appointing the government and the top state officials. The capitalist class do not own and control the means of production through physically occupying them or even own them personally as they once did. Nowadays they own them through limited liability companies or corporations but these are legal constructions created by the state. Without state backing they are nothing (a statement you found meaningless, I don't know why). In other words, it is because they control political power that they have economic power. Without that they have no economic power. It follows from this that if they lose control of political power they lose everything. They would be unprotected and there'd be nothing to prevent the workers, if they wanted to, taking over and running production. Hence the prudent strategy of trying to first take political power away from them.

Marx's coined the slogan "Turn universal suffrage from a means of trickery into an agent of emancipation". Of course it won't be the only such agent, but it can/will be one. Why not? What objection can there be, since we've got the choice, to voting out pro-capitalist politicians and replacing them by socialist delegates (in addition to whatever else is decided should be done)?

The Socialist Party advocate the revolutionary, not the reformist, use of elections. As part of the revolutionary process during revolutionary times and to capture a tribune from which to spread socialist ideas in non-revolutionary times, but not to try to get reforms of capitalism as leftists like Sawant in Seattle does. That only encourages the illusion that capitalism can be reformed to work in the interest of the working class (it can't be reformed to do this by "direct action" either, as some "electoral pessimists" seem to imagine). To free itself from wage-slavery and capitalist exploitation, the working class should organise as a political party that contests elections and not just in industrial unions or one big union or workers' councils.

Socialism is not possible without a mass communist consciousness, and the members of the Socialist Party cannot understand why this would not or should not express itself electorally as well as in the other ways people here have envisaged, e.g. organisation in the workplaces to take over and run them. In fact, it is inconceivable that it wouldn't.

If people were prepared to stage a general strike to try to overthrow capitalism then (if this would work) there would be no need to stage the more risky armed insurrection (if that would work). In any event if people are not prepared to even cast a ballot for revolution they are not likely to do anything else for it. Even from your perspective a ballot would be useful to measure the degree of likely support for your insurrection. If people in America are not prepared to vote for revolution. That must mean that they are even less likely to support an armed insurrection against capitalism and its state.

Of course the modern state has evolved to defend capitalism. So it has to be dealt with, but how? In today's conditions it cannot be smashed in an armed insurrection. So, what's left but two realistic possibilities. Ignore it and proceed to organise independently of it in the hope that it will collapse of its own accord. Given a mass communist consciousness, that might work as once this exists nothing is going to stop socialism coming into being. As Victor Hugo pointed out, “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.” But it seems the long way round. The other way is to proceed to organise independently of the state but at the same time to organise to win control of it electorally so as to neutralise it.

Let us set a scenario.

The population in general has seen through capitalism and is in favour of replacing it with a stateless, classless, moneyless, wageless society based on productive resources being the common heritage of all and the application of the principle "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" i.e socialism or communism (depending on which term you prefer. We use them interchangeably) They have also self-organised themselves on democratic lines in the places where they work and where they live with a view to bringing about this change and ready to implement it on the ground.

Given these circumstances, the revolutionary use of the ballot would be one where they also voted to send mandated delegates to the elected central law-making body (aka Parliament, Congress) and to local municipal councils. Being the majority outside these bodies, they would also be the majority inside them. The majority could therefore declare all stocks and shares, all bills and bonds and all property titles and authorisations to form limited liabilities companies or corporations null and void. These would become useless pieces of paper and there would be nothing to prevent the population outside parliament proceeding to take over and run industry and services.

The second thing it would have to do is lop off the undemocratic features of the existing state. "Smash the State", if you like, but from the inside. The government and top state officials would be dismissed and replaced by committees of mandated delegates. What would remain would be a fully democratic central administration. What would the point be, however, in smashing existing current non-coercive parts of the existing state such as those dealing with the organisation of health, education, transport, energy, agriculture, industry, etc. At the start, some coercive powers including armed force (suitably re-organised) might have to be retained in case there was to be a "slave-holders revolt" by the ex-capitalist class, but if there was, it could easily be dealt with as the vast majority of the population would be against it.

This is what a revolutionary use of the vote might look like. The Socialist Party argues that the vote to acquire control of the State still possesses a revolutionary value. It is not the X itself but the person behind it at the ballot box which is more important -  knowledge is power.

Can You Spot The Difference?

 Recently the New Democratic Party elected a new leader, a former Liberal. That means that while the NDP is led by a former Liberal, the Liberal Party is led by a former NDP provincial premier. Can you spot the difference? John Ayers.

Partners In Crime, No Change.

On March 14, Greg Smith quit his job as a director of Goldwyn-Sachs (GS). He said, "It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off." GS was rescued as part of the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street in 2008-9. If the executives at GS and their partners in crime won't change, there's no hope for the financial system and every reason to believe the experts who say it will crash again soon. There is every reason to work for its abolition.

Simpler is Better

Why are capitalists so obsessed with making more money than they started with? This isn’t just due to their greedy personalities, but because of competition. Competition forces capitalists to "accumulate capital"– they have to buy more and more labour power and more and faster machines to stay ahead of their commercial rivals. Thus, the driving goal for the capitalist is not production for use, or production simply as a means to increase his personal consumption. It is production for the sake of money, as a means to further accumulation–every capitalist must accumulate capital or go under. As an executive at U.S. Steel once famously declared, "we’re not in the business of making steel. We’re in the business of making money."

Under capitalism the economic organisation of society is determined by the requirements of profit accumulation. Work, the essential relationship between human energy and the natural environment, is transformed into a commodity. To work within the capitalist economy is to be employed, and employment is an alienated labour process in which one's mental and physical abilities are appropriated by an employer. Work is an activity performed at the behest of the buyer of wage labour. It is an activity characterised by a tense and antagonistic relationship between buyer and seller, producer and possessor, profit-maker and profit-taker. Like work, distribution takes a specific form under capitalism. Goods and services are not distributed solely because they are needed. They must be purchased. If one is incapable of buying in order to satisfy a need, then one must be deprived; one is free to buy in excess of any explicable need if one has the buying power to do so. This process of distribution is known as market allocation, and defenders of capitalism, usually well-trained economists, refer to it as the most rational method of resource allocation available - probably the only one. The control of the capitalist economy is linked directly to ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. Such control is not democratic, is highly centralised and bureaucratised, and leaves non-controllers (who constitute the majority of the population) with the status of secondary economic citizens. 

Technology Can't Solve Poverty

Russell Hancock, whose Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Group produces an annual State of the Valley report said, "Something has changed here, something fundamental, because the technology we've invented here in Silicon Valley has rendered a whole class of jobs obsolete." In other words, technology can't solve poverty and unemployment. John Ayers.

The Lord Will Protect?

Not even 'the lord's work' is free from lay-offs. The Billy Graham organization, that only brought in $91.6 million in 2011, announced job cuts owing to a need to emphasize its 'airline ministry and other priorities'. Fifty-five were let go in February but the company said that the move, "…in now way reflects the financial health of the organization…and the Lord will protect."

Wealthy People Are More Likely To Steal!

A new study shows that rich people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than poor folk – like cutting off motorists, lying in negotiations, and cheating to win a prize (really!). These were the findings from researchers at the universities of California and Toronto that were published in the proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences of the USA. They also found wealthy people were more likely to steal valued items than poor people. Another good reason to abolish a system that creates rich and poor. John Ayers.

Don’t blame newcomers

Capitalism is a system based on divide and rule, male versus female, young against old, employed pitted against unemployed and successive governments in Britain have played the race card (in Northern Ireland it was religion) or resorted to xenophobia to try to set workers against one another. The slogan of “British jobs for British workers” deflects from the possibility of solidarity and reflects a “divide and rule” situation in which fearful workers turn on “foreigners”. One section of the ruling class does not benefit from migrant workers and therefore does not want to bear the costs, while another section has been keen to defend the benefits of immigration. Political parties in Britain have once more begun to talk about immigration during this 2015 general election campaign. Unfortunately the debate is usually an ill-informed one and typically just a cover to introduce nationalist notions about the impact of immigration.

Migrant workers play a distinct role in capitalism as a “reserve army of labour” Employers use special schemes in agriculture and the so-called “hospitality” sector to import workers on a temporary basis. Advanced capitalist economies regularly poach workers with particular skills, such as nurses, teachers and social workers, from developing countries.

 The use of migrant workers also allows the receiver country to externalise the costs of renewing the labour force. The state uses migrant workers to fill gaps in the labour market but does not pay any of the costs of them or their families settling.

 Migrant workers are especially useful as part of the reserve army of labour because they can quickly be expelled. Nigeria expelled two million immigrant workers from other West African countries in the wake of the collapse of the oil market in the early 1980s, for instance.

 Employers do not simply want to obtain additional labour. They also want to get workers who can be used under specific conditions to raise the rate of exploitation. In some cases bosses will try to employ migrant workers even when indigenous workers are available because they assume that migrants’ status will make them easier to exploit. The vast majority of migrant workers have been used to fill the worst and most badly paid jobs. The use of migrant workers is inextricably linked to increasing labour “flexibility” to ratchet up the rate of exploitation. This is driven by increased competition between capitals.

Research puts a strong case against linking immigration to depressed wages or increased unemployment and suggests little or no evidence that immigrants have had a major impact although it is conceded that there is a limited negative effect on the lower skilled and the lower paid. While there is pressure on the wages of the worst paid workers, it is not the case that migrant workers are responsible for this. The drive for “flexibility” and lower wages goes back much further than the influx of workers from Eastern Europe. Privatisation, outsourcing and subcontracting have intensified competition over the past two decades in industries such as cleaning and other badly paid service sector jobs as well as construction. It is expensive for employers to invest in the infrastructure to train workers, so the exploitation of an already highly skilled labour market is utilised. When there is contraction in the market, the pushing back of migration occurs and vice versa. During these times the scapegoating of migrants and refugees is prevalent. Worker's fears are stoked by an austerity driven government, successfully deflecting people’s attention away from a lack of job prospects and cuts to services by pointing the finger at migrant workers.

Undoubtedly some employers in individual workplaces have sought to employ migrant workers on poorer pay and conditions of service. It is easy to see how employers could seek to employ workers on worse pay and conditions. The lesson to learn is in the importance of uniting indigenous and migrant workers, and of the role of trade unions. Not to organise these workers would weaken the movement as a whole. We are rightly fearful that migrant workers will be used as scapegoats. It is bosses who try to hold down pay to make bigger profits. They want workers to blame each other because it keeps them divided. Workers who resist this division can win better pay for all. It is crucial to argue in their workplaces and unions that blame does not lie with the migrant workers but with the cut-throat competition of capitalism that sets one person against one another in dog-eat-dog rivalry.  The most successful way to defeat low pay and conditions is to unite and organise against exploitative employers. When workers unite for fair pay and conditions, it strengthens the position of all workers.

Many of the above arguments are a rehash of ideas which opposed the movement of women into the work-force and even supported pay differentials, restricting their wages relative to men. Same with the employment of younger workers who once were placed on a pay-increment scale based upon age. Migrants and refugees are the scapegoats for people’s anxieties and fears about their livelihoods and quality of life. Migrants are not only being blamed for unemployment, but they are also being blamed for taking advantage of free healthcare and other welfare benefits.

Immigrants are also being blamed for the housing shortage. Rents are going up, and homes are becoming harder to find. But who is to blame? It’s certainly not migrants, who end up with some of the worst and most overcrowded housing. There is a shortage of housing because not enough is being built. And those being constructed are luxury flats aimed at the well-off and unaffordable to those on average wages.

“Health tourism” and “benefit tourism” are myths. The NHS would grind to a halt without migrant workers. It has relied on migrant labour from the time Enoch Powell as Health Minister invited West Indian nurses to staff the wards. Many say Britain is already “full up” and this seems to chime with a certain common sense—surely, more people means less to go round. But that isn’t how it works. Wealth is not shared out either fairly nor rationally. And the pot of wealth is not fixed. Our labour creates wealth. Yet the rich get more than the rest put together.

 In reality the debate on immigration in Britain is not about the economic causes and consequences of immigration at all. It is overwhelmingly a ‘debate’ that allows politicians and others to whip up xenophobia while posing as being concerned about the interests of workers or the poor. Borders are designed to control workers in the interest of capitalist accumulation. Immigration laws turn people into criminals.  Threats by employers who use immigration status to keep workers from organizing unions or protesting illegal conditions should be a crime. We have many big cities with scores of different nationalities living within them and as socialists we celebrate that rich tapestry of life. Some of us are waking up. We are finding out what is wrong with the world. We are going to make it right.

Soup Kitchen Scotland

CAPITALISM IS HELL

The number of people using food banks in Scotland has risen by two-thirds. A total of 117, 689 people - including more than 36,000 children - received a three-day supply of emergency food from the organisation last year. That was a 65% increase on the figures for the previous year.

In 2011, there was one food bank in Scotland operated in partnership with the Trussell Trust. The charity said that as of April 2015, it had 50 food banks in 27 Scottish local authorities. The main reasons behind people being referred to its food banks were due to a benefit delay, low income or a benefit change.

18,000 people in Glasgow using one of its food banks in the financial year from 2014/2015, In Edinburgh, the figure was about 14,000 people and in Fife more than 10,000 required an emergency food supply.

Low income showed the biggest numerical rise, with 24,609 people referred for this reason in 2014/15 compared with 13,552 the previous year, an increase of more than 80%.

Ewan Gurr, Scotland network manager at The Trussell Trust,said: "Despite welcome signs of economic recovery, hunger continues to affect significant numbers of men, women and children in Scotland. The full extent of the problem could well be much wider as the Trussell Trust figures do not include people who are helped by other food charities [they account for only 20% of all food centres in Glasgow] or those who feel too ashamed to seek help."

I Spy

Israeli is considered a world leader in security and surveillance equipment, because of expertise developed in the illegal occupation of Palestine. Israeli Army Brigadier General Elkabetz – speaking at a US conference on border security – told an audience of potential customers for Israel’s surveillance technology:

“We have learned lots from Gaza. It’s a great laboratory.”

Every time you walk through Glasgow City Centre, or take part in a demonstration, CCTV cameras can try to detect your mood and, using facial recognition technology, will cross-check with any social media or police and even medical records while following your every move.

The UK Government is paying an Israeli company for a powerful surveillance system that is being installed in Glasgow City Centre. Accordingto Glasgow City Council, “a one-stop shop City Dashboard” will monitor, by CCTV and “integration of data…everything from foot and vehicle traffic to council tax collection and hospital waiting lists”. CCTV cameras in Glasgow City Centre will be linked to a central operations room where ‘emotional recognition’ software identifies the name and mood of pedestrians, including demonstrators, and can then link the person on the camera with social media postings, phone calls, emails, police records, and more. Details are not being made public,

The technology was developed by NICE Systems, an Israeli company with links to the military. NICE Systems uses data from “multiple sources, including phone calls, mobile apps, emails, chat, social media, video, and transactions”. The full extent of surveillance being carried out by Glasgow City Council remains unclear but NICE Security Group Vice-President Chris Wooten highlighted their “expertise in helping cities around the world manage day-to-day life, as well as large-scale events, from both a security and operational perspective. We…look forward to a continued partnership with the city of Glasgow…fully utilizing the capabilities that NICE Situator can provide.”

The only alternative to capitalism is socialism

 

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITED

Climate change is here right now and it will only get worse. Extreme weather events are happening more and more frequently around the world —forest fires, heat-waves, hurricanes and super storms, droughts in one region and floods in another, melting glaciers, unprecedented cold freezes and rising sea levels. Runaway climate change caused by soaring greenhouse gas emissions threatens the survival of life on the planet. If we're not worried by all this, we're not thinking straight.

One thing that is clear is that there is no realistic way to reform or control capitalism. The capitalist response to these challenges is business as usual. The solution to climate change is known and simple: rapidly phase out the use of fossil fuels and make a mass-scale switch to renewables. But gigantic economic interests at the heart of the capitalist system have massive investments in coal, oil, gas and nuclear power and will not change. The switch to renewable energy across the board is being blocked by those who profit from the polluting industries. The sole operating imperative of the big corporations is to secure the greatest possible profits — regardless of the consequences to the planet and its people. It is the Green Party’s view that through legislation the excesses and abuses of the system can be reined in. However, there is absolutely no evidence that this will ever really happen. Even if there are reasonable well-intentioned laws on the books, they are flouted, ignored or simply not enforced.

 Fewer and fewer ordinary people have any confidence about the future — how could they? The all-pervasive ruling-class propaganda machine is ceaselessly promoting scapegoats in an effort to divide ordinary people and forestall or weaken any effective resistance. Refugees, Muslims, benefit claimants on welfare, public housing tenants with a 'spare' bedroom, petty criminals — all are pressed into service by the media and the politicians to distract ordinary people and displace their anger away from the actual system which is destroying our lives.

The labour of working people creates the wealth of society. The rich are wealthy not because of their genius but because they are able to appropriate the toil of the masses. The bosses are able to do this because they own the means of production. We have no alternative — we have to work for them. We get wages, they get the surplus — the profits. The economy is a social enterprise, a product of the work of the mass of the people yet it is controlled by a handful of people the 1% and is run solely to make profits for them. That is the source of all our problems and it has to be confronted. We can't duck or fudge this issue. The corporations control the economy, on which we all depend. Bringing capitalism under social control is the big unspoken taboo. Shouldn’t the means of life be owned by society. As someone once said, people can more readily envisage the end of the world than they can the end of capitalism.

We need a system of social democracy that empowers people. Apologists for capitalism have long devoted enormous efforts to campaign against socialism. They constantly try to prove that it is a completely utopian exercise, flying in the face of human nature; that it will never work. Of course, the idea that society will only function if we have a system of organised, institutional greed — that is, capitalism — is completely ludicrous. Our current problems have arisen precisely because we have such a society. To save ourselves we need change. Fighting to get rid of this rotten system and replace it with a socialist society of peace, solidarity and plenty remains the most urgent task facing progressive humanity. Socialists argue that the only way this can happen is if the economy is brought under social ownership and control.  With the economic levers in our hands we could elaborate a conscious plan focused on meeting human needs. Combating climate change and building a sustainable economy would be the most urgent priority. Plans would be democratically decided. Workplaces would be controlled by producers. This is the socialism. Capitalism, on the other hand, treats the workers like possessions — things to be used like other machinery in the factory in the process of making a profit. In the process, the workers humanity is sucked out of them. It destroys the ability of the workers to live a productive life with love. They live the life of a commodity, or an animal, to be exploited, used, and discarded.

Elections are always a very important moment, a time that encourages discussion on the future. Socialists participate in the electoral process to present socialist alternatives. By fielding Socialist Party candidates in elections at all levels of office, we educate the voters about socialism and its radical solutions. We also promote the independent political organization of working people in direct opposition to the capitalist parties. Our party knows that a socialist revolution is necessary when workers become conscious that the power of the capitalist bosses must be replaced with the power of the people. This is the message that the Socialist Party has promoted in its 2015 election campaigns. Our participation in the elections has given people the opportunity to question our candidates and to vote for a party that is already fighting in their interests. There is access, albeit limited, to the media which enables us to show that we are here. Despite all the difficulties and inequities of the electoral process, in terms of time and coverage we are managing to gain an audience.

Most Green activists want to keep the market. They accept that private property and competition for profit are natural and good even though they add many of their own caveats to that. There is nothing ecological about private property, capitalist competition, or the profit motive. Naturally, human beings, their work, their societies, are communal. Primitive, tribal society was communist. As human society developed the capacity to create a surplus, various forms of property and privatization arose, so that an elite class could claim that surplus for itself, and thus exploit the labour of the rest of us. In primitive society, human beings recognized the simple fact that since we all work together, since we are interdependent, we ought to share the fruit of our labour.

Private property is a story of exploitation and oppression: even though you worked to create the surplus, “I get to keep it. It is mine, not yours, because my class owns the state”. In ancient society “I own you, your body itself, as a slave.” In feudal times because “I am lord of the manor, because of my aristocratic social status, I have the right to collect, from my serfs, a substantial portion of the agricultural surplus.” In capitalist society, private property comes into its own, so to speak, as the culmination of this historical process of class exploitation. It meant, first, that aristocrats and the gentry got to enclose the commons as their private property, and kick the serfs off of it. When they lost their land the peasants moved to the cities in massive numbers. Thus they became prey to the industrialists. Because the industrialists owned the factories, they were the only people who could give workers any livelihood. So they could force the workers to work for very low wages in horrible conditions. “I am the robber industrial baron, now, your new master, and you are a wage-slave to furnish me with the surplus value you create”

Propertarians would argue that this gives small businessman a bad rap—that many employers are kindly and benevolent. Perhaps so. But to be sustainable, every single small capitalist would have to be a saint, would have to give away his profits to his competitors and to the community if he started winning too much at their expense. That is impossible. And if we talk about workers' cooperatives, or the various utopian schemes put forward by the left reformists the same problem applies. With competition for profit, most such cooperatives will eventually go under, while a few will survive. Competition always intensifies, because the rate of profit tends to fall. Capitalists, big or small, cooperative or corporate, compete with each other on the market, and they do so by cutting their prices. The best way to do this is to replace their workers with machines. This works out for the first capitalist who gets the new technology: he can undercut his competitors. But then his surviving competitors get the same technology. Since profit is based upon human labor, profits, in general, fall, as they get squeezed between falling prices and higher technological costs. As profits fall, competition for profits intensifies. As competition intensifies, there will be a strong temptation for relations even within cooperatives to become hierarchical, for a few "elite" members to drive the rest to work harder, so that the cooperative can compete better, externally. In the case of both small businesses and cooperatives, as they compete with other concerns for survival, their decisions will be based upon profit and survival rather than upon what is good, in the long term, for the environment, the larger community, or even for their own workers and their smaller shareholders.

The only alternative to capitalism is socialism. And we will use every forum to keep saying that until our message begins to sink in.

Why Socialism?

 “If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you’re going east, and you will be walking east when you think you’re going west. This generation, especially of our people, has a burden, more so than any other time in history. The most important thing we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.” – Malcolm X

We live in a deeply destructive world and the Socialist Party exists because of a trust in the potential of the working class to change that. We, the workers, have much more power than we realise. Common action has won great things for humanity in the past and now it is time again to carry that legacy forward, to take it to the next level. We do not need reforms, but a whole new system. Obama has been accused, among many things, of being “socialist” If Obama—who spent obscene amounts of money bailing out criminal financial institutions, who staffed key government positions with former Wall Street executives, and who expanded covert military operations beyond Bush—can seriously be classified as a socialist then it truly distorts socialism’s message of solidarity to the detriment of the average working person. Socialism suffers the burden of the past. The Soviet Union proclaimed itself both democratic and socialist yet it was neither. The right-wing media ridiculed the USSR’s claims to democracy, but saw fit to accept its supposed socialism to discredit the idea. From another quarter, supposedly dissident progressive academics and intellectuals, tied the public’s perception of socialism to the brutal Russian regime, declining to mention the fact the average worker was just as abused in Russia as in the United States.

The world about us is falling to pieces. The need for revolution is widely realised. Today humanity faces a global crisis stemming from the incredible rapaciousness of the capitalist system. Catastrophic climate change threatens to end life on our planet, then there is endemic endless wars plus mass poverty and hunger accompanied by a ruthless assault on working people everywhere. Capitalism will destroy the human race. It is absolutely clear that the wealthy will continue to put the drive for corporate profit ahead of everything, even our own future as a species. It is incapable of changing. Even when it recognises the danger it cannot stop doing what it does. Under capitalism, the working class is a ground-down, deeply divided mass — it is simply fodder for exploitation by the bosses in the workplace. Workers are forced to compete against each other for jobs. They are divided by nationality, ethnic background or skin colour; by skill and type of work (blue collar, white collar, etc.); by their wage and general conditions of work; and by age and gender. These divisions are skilfully exploited by the capitalist class to keep the workers disunited and turned in on each other. And, of course, through the all-pervasive mass media workers are constantly inundated with consumerist advertising, offering a fantasy view of what is desirable and never actually possible for them of acquiring. If capitalism is not overthrown, humanity is most likely doomed. The only question is the time-table of this apocalypse. The only way out is the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.

Socialism is rule by the people. Working people will decide how socialism is to work. This was how Marx and Engels defined socialism. The task of the Socialist Party therefore is to help take power from capitalists for working people to have. Marx and Engels made no attempt to proclaim in advance how a socialist society is to be developed but declared that the builders of a socialist society will be the workers and it will be they who will decide what a classless society is to be like. Capitalism is maintained by class power and will only be displaced by other class power. If the working people want power they will have to take it. It will not be given to them. We have to remember that all politics is about power. The revolutionary calls for power for the working people while the reformist hypocrite prepared to exercise power on behalf of the oppressor, and who claims to do a little good on the side. Capitalism is always shadowed by its nemesis — its gravedigger —the working class. It is the sole authentically revolutionary class. It has no interest in setting up a new system of class oppression but can only end its alienation by destroying the whole edifice of class domination.

To use the word “socialism” for anything but working people’s power is to misuse the term. Nationalisation is not socialism, nor does this constitutes a “socialist” sector of a mixed economy. Nationalisation is simply state capitalism, with no relation to socialism. Nor is the “welfare state” socialist. Socialism will certainly give high priority to health, education, the arts, science, and the social well-being of all. That is why it exists, that is its purpose. But “welfare” under capitalism is simply to improve the efficiency of the government as a creator of profit. It too is not socialism but a form of state capitalism. It can be an improvement on capitalism with no welfare, just as a 40-hour week is an improvement on a 60-hour week. But it is not socialism. The “Welfare State” inevitably turns into the means-testing.

The working class is essential for the operation of the social means of production but itself owns none of it. Its conditions of life make it cooperative and collectivist in outlook. Its objective interest is to collectively appropriate these means of production and establish a classless society. This makes it revolutionary — at least potentially

What truly is socialism? The socialist revolution is unlike anything ever before seen in history, something radically different. The oppressed class — the class at the very bottom of the social pile— struggles for political power in order to construct a socialist society where all forms of oppression and exploitation are eliminated.

Socialism is the greatest thing in all the world today. It seeks to undo capitalism’s many wrongs, which are becoming more severe and threatening. As we look about us today we see that the world is filled with suffering and despair. Socialism implies that the means of production are under the control of the community, and people themselves democratically shape the community in which they live. In these hard times especially does socialism show itself to be not only agreeable but necessary. The Socialist Party says there have got to be change. We say that the world is big enough for all the people that are in it, with plenty of room to spare, there is land enough to go around without crowding; that there are farms enough, or can be easily provided, to raise all we can eat, so that no child in all the world need to go hungry; that there is plenty of natural resources in the earth; that there are forests and mountains and water galore; that there are mills and mines and factories and ships and railways and the power supplied free by nature to run them all; that there are millions of men and women ready to do all the work that may be required to build homes, raise crops, bake bread – and cake too –and everything else that is necessary for everybody, and have time enough besides to build schools and hospitals to make this earth a  paradise.

Why should not just these things come to pass and why should not you not help us speed the day when they shall come to pass? Everything you can possibly think of to make this earth sweet and beautiful and to make life a blessed joy for us all is within our reach. The raw materials are at our feet; the forces to fashion them into forms of beauty and use are at our finger tips. We have but to put ourselves in harmony with nature and with one another to sing loud and clear the song of life. Socialists not only dream of the good day coming when the world shall know that men are brothers and that women are sisters to each other, but they are at work with all their hearts and all their heads and hands to make that dream come true. If you want to know what the plans of the Socialist Party are in detail attend our meetings and study their literature. If you're upset about the way things are going — then do something. Get active in the socialist movement, get involved — or get more involved. You'll feel better and — far more importantly — what you do will make a difference. Nothing is more worthwhile and more satisfying participating in the struggle for the communist future of humanity. People cannot live without hope for the future. 

The Socialist Party inspires workers with confidence that the future will be better if only they strive to make it so. The power of the socialists derives from the fact that they give a rational basis to the impulse of the masses to make a better world, an assurance that social evolution is working on their side; that the idea of socialism, of the good society of the free and equal, is not a utopian fantasy but the projection of future reality. When this idea takes hold of the people it will truly be the greatest power in the world. When you organise, you can win. Our power is in our numbers. We will use that strength to wrest our world back from the capitalist class, from the bankers and billionaires who put profits before people. Hope can inspire a bottom-up grassroots movement to make the world a better place to live and work in. No child should go hungry. Health care should be a right, not a privilege for those able to pay for it. Catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger. The power of food production systems is concentrated in few corporate hands. But another way—a better way—is possible. Locally-produced and affordable agro-ecological food should be the backbone of a food system that increases our food sovereignty. The 'business-as-usual' model can no longer be considered an option for a well-functioning food system in the future.

Money Counts, People Don't.

Every second of every day a river of poison consisting of mercury, iron, aluminium, and nickel flows down the hillsides of San Carlos Creek, twenty miles south of San Jose, California. This is from the now neglected New Idira mine, once the second largest mercury mine in the US. The Environmental Protection Agency has measured the mercury that flows into the creek at levels that are toxic to wild life for more than thirty kilometres. It is five times more than the safe level for humans and affects the nervous system, the brain, kidneys, lungs, and the immune system. During the rainy months, the creek's water flows into the San Joaquin River that flows into the San Francisco Bay, a source of drinking water for two-thirds of California. The EPA and the state have been pressured for fifteen years to clean it up but the first stage alone would cost $10 million. Money counts, people don't. John Ayers.

Another War Is In The Making!

Nobody could be more thrilled at the melting of the polar ice caps than the capitalist class who want to get their hands on the vast deposits of oil, natural gas, nickel, palladium, and other minerals beneath the arctic ice. Though some governments have established a claim to some territories, others are disputed. Both Canada and Russia have competing claims to a patch of seabed near the North Pole. Already Russia has a system of security forces, ice-breaking ships, bases and ports across the arctic and is planning on bringing in new nuclear submarines. The Harper government has said that it will establish a new coats guard HQ in the arctic in 2013 and send eight ice-class patrol boats there at a cost of $3 billion. Another war in the making and one the working class has no stake in. John Ayers.

For our families and for our friends

What do we all want? We want to be all that we can be. And we want this not only for ourselves. But also for our families and our loved ones. We want everybody to be able to develop all of their potential but there are two points to bear in mind.

 First, how can we possibly develop all our potential if we are hungry, in bad health, poorly educated, or dominated by others?

Secondly, no-body is identical so we need to self-define our own wishes and needs as we all differ for everyone else.

 The aim of socialism is individuality, not uniformity. Our goal cannot be a society in which some people are able to develop their capabilities and others are not. We are interdependent and all members of a human family. The full development of all human potential for all is our goal. Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes focuses upon the importance of basing our productive activity upon the recognition of our common humanity and our needs as members of the human family. As long we look at one another as competitors or as customers, relating to others through an exchange relationships i.e., as enemies or as means to our own ends (and, thus, trying to get the best deal possible for ourselves), we shall remain alienated, atomised, and apart, human beings - fragmented. Socialism, if it is to be at all attractive, must promise to remedy those defects and nurture the development of each of us as the necessary condition of the full development of all.  For socialists the concept of solidarity is central. It is because we are a human being in a human society that we have the right to the opportunity to develop all our potential. Common ownership of the means of production (rather than private or sectional ownership), production for the purpose of satisfying needs (rather than for the purpose of exchange) and democratic decision-making within associations of the producers. Socialism wants to create a society in which each citizen actively and responsibly participated in all decisions because he or she has convictions and not opinions formed by media manipulation. We have created a widespread system of communication. Yet people are misinformed and indoctrinated rather than informed about political and social reality.

These are the core elements of socialism that people need to build. Our loyalty must be to the human race. Socialism is rooted in the conviction of the unity of mankind and the solidarity of all. If we believe in people, our choice is very clear: the only path is socialism. We fight any kind of worship of the state or the nation. The aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a world commonwealth. Socialism is opposed to war and violence in all and any forms. We consider any attempt to solve political and social problems by force and violence not only as futile. Socialism stands for the principle of human relations based on free cooperation of all men for the common good. It follows not only that each member of society feels responsible for his fellow citizens, but for all citizens of the world. The injustice which lets two-thirds of the human race live in abysmal poverty must be removed

Think about this capitalist world of ours. Its very essence is to expand the market, to accumulate capital, to generate more and more surplus value in the form of commodities which must be sold, constantly trying to create new needs in order to make real that surplus value in the form of money. A spiral of growing production, growing needs and growing consumption. Everyone knows that the high levels of consumption achieved in certain parts of the world cannot be copied in other parts of the world. Very simply, the Earth cannot sustain this -- as we can already see with the clear evidence of climate change. However the people in the developing regions of the globe are well aware of the standards of consumption from the media. Are they to accept that they are not entitled to the fruits of civilisation? Are they expected to be deprived of their “fair share” of the benefits of ever advancing technology? Are the poor to be denied the opportunity to catch up with the relatively more affluent in regards to the standard of living and quality of life? Socialism wants material comfort for everybody on the planet.

Capital concentration led to the formation of giant enterprises, managed by hierarchically organised bureaucracies. Large agglomerations  of workers work together, part of a vast organised production machine  which, in order to run at all, must run smoothly, without friction,  without interruption. The individual worker becomes a cog in this machine; their function and activities are determined by the whole structure of the organization in which they work. In the large corporations, legal ownership of the means of production has become separated from the management and has lost importance. They are run by bureaucratic management, which does not own the enterprise legally, but socially. The CEOs while they do not own the enterprise legally, controls it factually; it is responsible (in an effective way) neither to the stockholders nor to those who work in the company. In fact, while the most important fields of production are in the hands of the large corporations, these corporations are practically ruled by their top employees. The giant corporations which control the economic— and to a large degree the political— destiny of the country, constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those submitted to it. When mankind is transformed into a thing, and managed like a thing, the managers themselves become things; and things have no will, no vision, no plan. The democratic process becomes transformed into a ritual. Whether it is a stockholders meeting of a multinational or a political election the individual has lost almost all influence to determine decisions and to participate actively in the making of decisions. Even the voice of the unions has been muted as they too have developed into bureaucratic machines in which individual members has very little to say and many of the union chiefs are managerial bureaucrats, just as industrial chiefs are.

While our economic system has enriched mankind materially, it has impoverished it “spiritually”. As a result, the average person feels insecure, lonely, depressed, and suffers from a lack of joy in the midst of plenty. Life does not make sense. It is meaninglessness. The capitalist system offers innumerable avenues of escape, ranging from television to tranquilisers to soulless consumerism, which permit  people to forget that they are losing what is really valuable important in life. Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labour). All production must be directed by the principle of its social usefulness, and not by that of its material profit for some individuals or corporations. Socialism stands for freedom from fear and want. But freedom is not only from, but also freedom to; freedom to participate actively and responsibly in all decisions concerning the citizen and the community, and also the freedom to develop the individual's human potential to the fullest possible degree. The way in which someone spends most of his or her energy, in work as well as in leisure, must be meaningful and interesting. It must stimulate the intellect as well as artistic powers.

The Socialist Party is different from other political parties not only in its objectives, but in its very structure and in its way of functioning. It must also become the emotional and social home for all its members who are united by the solidarity of the common concern humankind and the future. The Socialist Party has developed an extensive educational campaign among fellow workers, who can be expected to have an understanding for socialist criticism and socialist ideals. The Socialist Party strives to gain the allegiance of an ever- increasing number of people who, through the party, make their voices heard throughout the whole world. Its only weapons are its ideas. It rejects the ideas of achieving its goals by force or by the establishment of any kind of dictatorship. We appeal to the true needs of those citizens will give it who have seen through the fictions and delusions which fill the minds of people today. We appeal to everybody to recognize his or her responsibility for their own life, that of their children, and that of the wider human family. People have a deep longing for something they can work for, and have confidence and optimism in. The weakness of present system is that it offers no ideals and that possesses no vision— except more of the same. We in the Socialist Party are not ashamed to confess that we are committed to a vision of a new society, and hold the hope that our fellow workers will eventually share in this vision and then join us in the attempt to realise it. Socialism is not only an economic and political movement; it is a human project. 

A case against nationalism

On September 19^th 2014, the population of Scotland voted narrowly against secession from the United Kingdom in a referendum. The No side eked out a narrow victory in an exceptionally  high turnout. Nationalism runs deep. National identity is a much debated, and hotly contested, concept. Yet despite continued national prejudice and xenophobia outbreaks, there are the growing bonds of a cosmopolitan commonality.

National independence is a much exaggerated myth. Every country is dependent and many vested interests welcome globalisation of their economy. They have twisted their nationalist arguments to justify getting the trade unions to help capitalists become "more competitive". National chauvinism has divided the workers, and undermined the class struggle in the face of ever more sweeping attacks on wages and jobs. It’s no accident then, that in a period of a global crisis of capital, old and new nationalisms are rearing their heads—and many of them in a most virulent and violent fashion despite that many independence movements have been thoroughly discredited by their failures to meet peoples’ hopes. Instead, memories are short and nasty, divisive, increasingly ethnic nationalisms are being promoted in one part of the world after another. In an atmosphere of anger and despair, right-wing ethnic nationalisms, particularly of right-wing ethnic varieties, quite often seize the political initiative.

Every day, the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems try to outdo each other as to how they would restrict immigration further. Political leaders are promoting myths, mistruths and lies simply to win votes. We should welcome immigration, not try to restrict it. We definitely should not be making it more difficult for new immigrants. The influx of eastern Europeans is nothing new to the labour movement, particularly in Scotland. There has been an absence of a class response, and particularly a trade union one, to foreign workers. Instead there is an expectation that the capitalist state will protect the ‘privileges’ of the native-born worker.

At the beginning of the 20th century in Lanarkshire, there was much vitriol against Lithuanian incomers. They were employed in the iron works and the coal pits, and they too were accused of wage-cutting and scabbing. Nevertheless, the Lanarkshire County Miners’ Union, in the space of some 15 years, went from offering support to miners willing to strike against Lithuanian workers to demanding that Lithuanian miners in Lanarkshire should not be deported. During those 15 years, the Lithuanians had joined the union in large numbers and were active in it. Unionisation was the key to improved relations between the Lithuanian labour force and the LCMU.

Once the Lithuanians began to respond positively to local strike demands, the other allegations made against them were simply not an issue. The adoption of a more class-conscious attitude and the strength of their newfound loyalty to the union was in part due to the fact that the union had taken some very positive steps to encourage Lithuanian membership, such as printing the rules in Lithuanian and offering entitlement to claim full benefits.

We suggest fellow workers refresh their class-struggle credentials with a read of ‘A Voice from the Aliens’ from 1895 and one of the earliest appeals against immigration controls.

Fear-mongering and divisive politics play well in creating more xenophobia and it has a long history, as we have shown. But those who fall for the propaganda should know that keeping out immigrants with a ‘fortress Britain’ (or a ‘fortress Europe’) has not and will not solve our problems and make us better off. It is not migration which weakens the working class: it is immigration controls. Immigration controls are weapons by which the capitalists can discipline the working class. By deeming a group of people ‘illegal’, you create a section of the class who risk everything if they raise their head above the parapet and attempt to fight for a decent wage and conditions of work. By creating a variety of ‘legal’ groups of workers, but with different, limited rights, immigration controls create what they hope to be a more malleable and exploitable section of migrant workers, which in turn undermines all workers. We can only address this by fighting for equal rights for all workers - which means no immigration controls, along with demands for secure contracts and a living wage.

The plea that immigration controls should be imposed and certain foreigners excluded should have no place in a workers’ movement that is calling upon the exploited of all the world to unite for their emancipation. Any policy for the exclusion of other suffering wage-slaves is more consistent with the attitudes of the callous capitalist class rather than of the movement whose proud boast it is that it stands uncompromisingly for the oppressed and downtrodden of all the world. Immigrants have just as good a right to enter this country as British workers have in exiting it.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain will not sacrifice principle and jeopardise our goal for some immediate advantage. We will not spurn fellow workers lured here by the glimmer of hope that their burdens may be lightened by the promise of some improvement in conditions. If revolutionary socialism does not stand unflinchingly and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretence.

If the Socialist Party risk losing support because we refuse to call for the border gates to be closed in the faces of our own brothers and sisters, we will be none the weaker for spurning such tactics to acquire false friends. All the votes gained would do us little good if our party ceases to be a revolutionary party, yielding to public opinion to modify our principles for the sake of popularity and membership numbers.

In the centenary year of when other supposed socialists abandoned the workers’ internationalism and embraced national chauvinism - with one group under HM Hyndman going as far to demonstrate their patriotic ardour by setting up a National ‘Socialist’ Party - we in the Socialist Party are the party of all workers, regardless of place of birth. We stand resolutely for world socialism and if this is too encompassing for some despite them paying lip-service to the claim - so be it. We shall leave them to their various national ‘socialisms’.

Marx didn’t advocate open borders because at the time he wrote border controls didn’t exist. So no-one can definitively assert what he would have said then which is true enough (and fortunately for him nor was there any asylum-seekers rules and restrictions for political refugees), but Eleanor, his daughter, was particularly active in distributing the statement, “The Voice of the Aliens’, which we recommended as a read. We will quote from it:

 “To punish the alien worker for the sin of the native capitalist is like the man who struck the boy because he was not strong enough to strike his father.” 

Anyone is free to continue to see things from the point of view of market-town parochialism. But there are consequences. You start by defending national borders against the incoming tide of cheap labour, motivated by the purest of socialist principles, and one day you find yourself patriotically supporting your country’s right to defend its front line trenches in some far-off country.

We think we can definitely say what Karl Marx’s views on immigration controls would have been. His programme was for the abolition of nation-states and the international unity of the workers. He saw with his own eyes the effects on the British working class of mass Irish immigration and argued for their incorporation into the working class, not their exclusion. His analysis of capital was that it always creates a reserve army of labour, constantly pushing workers out of jobs and pulling workers into exploitative labour relations. Ireland is a good example, losing a third of its population. Living standards went down for the masses because the reserve army of labour was maintained, so profits went up. Capital cannot serve the interests of the working class. Successful resistance to capitalism makes it malfunction. But the campaign for immigration controls will turn out to be a campaign to attack benefits and restore capital to rude health. It is not enough to reform capitalism; that only makes it malfunction. We have to replace it with the economy of the working class: an international task.

It has been asked what Marx would have done today. We can easily answer by describing what the First International, of which he was a member, did. They organised!

The International announced that “the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries” and that “Each member of the International Association, on removing his domicile from one country to another, will receive the fraternal support of the Associated Working Men”. Furthermore, “To counteract the intrigues of capitalists - always ready, in cases of strikes and lockouts, to misuse the foreign workman as a tool against the native workman - is one of the particular functions which our society has hitherto performed with success. It is one of the great purposes of the Association to make the workmen of different countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army of emancipation.”

The International consequently addressed fellow workers: “Help us, then, in the noble enterprise, help us to bring about a common understanding between the peoples of all countries, so that in the struggles of labour with unprincipled capitalists they may not be able to execute the threat which they so often indulge in, of using the working men of one country as instruments to defeat the just demands of the workmen in another. This has been done in the past, and seeds of discord and national antipathies have been thereby created and perpetuated. A part of our mission is to prevent the recurrence of such evils, and you can help us to achieve our aims.”

Marx, in the name of the International, writes: “If the Edinburgh masters succeeded, through the import of German labour, in nullifying the concessions they had already made, it would inevitably lead to repercussions in England. No-one would suffer more than the German workers themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of all the other continental nations. And the newly imported workers, being completely helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs. Furthermore, it is a point of honour with the German workers to prove to other countries that they, like their brothers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, know how to defend the common interests of their class and will not become obedient mercenaries of capital in its struggle against labour.”

There is never an appeal to the capitalist state to impose immigration laws, but a call to the workers to unionise.

Borders are a means by which capitalists protect their assets, which include us. It is immigration controls that give employers greater power over migrants, particularly new arrivals or those who are dependent on them for their visa status, a power they do not always have over native workers. Nationalism is a huge barrier to developing class-consciousness. Borders cause workers in countries to care less about the other workers in the world. Across the world, national states are imposing ever more restrictive immigration policies. Nevertheless, people have become more internationalised and are acquiring a cosmopolitan identity.

Making the demand, ‘No borders’, reveals the importance of border controls to capitalist social relations - relationships dependent on the practices of expropriation and exploitation. The rights of property consist of the right to exclude others, while anti-nationalism is a part of a global reshaping of societies in a way that is not compatible with capitalism or of the state. Socialists must reject the concept of borders that are used as control devices over labour. By opposing the idea of borders we begin to perceive nation-states as ‘theirs’ and not part of ‘our world’.

To end with another quote from the First International: “The poor have no country; in all lands they suffer from the same evils; and they therefore realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be, the more thoroughly to enslave the people, must fall.”

We in the Socialist Party seek an end to exploitation, an end to racism, national chauvinism and anti-immigrant discrimination. When people say we are "utopian", they mean either that it is not possible to run society truly democratically, without the ownership of practically everything by a few wealthy people. They are wrong because this society is already largely run through the collective efforts of billions of people. The whole world economy operate only on the basis of widespread cooperation between workers. But under capitalism, the direction of all this collective work and the distribution of its fruits are dictated by a few wealthy capitalists, many of whom make their profits simply through gambling in those giant casinos called stock-exchanges markets. We don't need them to run society. In fact, they are destroying society.

The left's nationalism who cannot think outside of the myth of national interest has given massive ideological assistance to the conservative right wing. It shows up in their opposition to immigration, though they have been shamed into whispering about it since the cruder message of UKIP has come to dominate. We are taking a blunt message into this election campaign: nationalism is racist and reactionary. Defeating the right politically requires a war against the chronic nationalist ideological infection in the working class. We believe that better jobs with better pay cannot be achieved by keeping out immigrants. The problem is capitalism and we see it as our responsibility to explain this to those sections of the working class that blame foreigners for job losses, low wages, poor housing and cuts. We are socialists, not social workers, and we do not aim to help workers find individual temporary relief. We are for a collective fight on class lines. We are for revolutionary change.

Dream More - Work Less

The dream of a just and classless society has a long genealogy. For centuries, it stirred the hopes of women and men, shackled by exploitation, poverty and oppression. The many slave and peasant revolts were motivated by such an idea. The most radical-minded have always been spurred to action because of a vision of an alternative way of living based on solidarity, equality, and community. The early 19th century utopian socialists constructed intricate blueprints for co-operative egalitarian societies. So we can’t claim that Marx and Engels invented the idea of a society defined by common ownership, mutuality, freedom and equality.

Many political activists believe the urgency of resisting economic austerity policies or stopping environmental destruction is a reason for socialists to press the pause switch on the socialist goal. On the contrary, we should bring our vision of socialism into the public arena; we are, after all, the Socialist Party and socialism is at the core of our identity. Pro-capitalist apologists show no reticence in shaping popular misunderstanding of socialism but socialism is slowly finding its way into political discourse. Admittedly, many people don’t yet embrace socialism as we understand it, but they do imagine a society without the hardships, oppressions, worries, pressures, and profiteering that are part of the structure of capitalism. They desire a future that brings material security and a sense of community, they insist on some power over their lives, they yearn for freedom and they hunger for a joyous life. What they want is a little heaven on this earth. In advocating socialism today, we can’t simply repeat what Marx and Engels said. To have the most fruitful discussion, we should create an atmosphere that encourages people to explore without blinkers and in fresh ways. Socialism is acquiring a new necessity.

Since its earliest days, capitalism has inflicted incalculable harm on the inhabitants of the earth. Primitive accumulation, world wars, slavery, various forms of labour servitude, ruthless wage exploitation, territorial annexation and wars, racist, gender, and other forms of oppression – all this and more. And yet as ghastly a history as this is, the future could be even worse for a simple reason: capitalism’s destructive power, driven by its inner logic to pump surplus value out of its primary producers and dominate nature, has grown exponentially compared to a century ago. Unless dismantled, this power is capable of doing irreversible damage to life in all its forms. Over a century ago, Rosa Luxemburg said that humanity had a choice, “socialism or barbarism.” Her warning has even more meaning now.

We face the prospect of unending war and possible nuclear annihilation. The nuclear threat remains and conventional wars scar the landscape and brutally extinguish the lives of millions of people.

Humanity is also gravely endangered by the deep and persistent inequalities that exist across the planet. The evidence of these inequalities is obvious: massive hunger, malnutrition, dire poverty, the worst forms of deprivation creating the breeding grounds for pandemic diseases, with daily and institutionalised brutality, the explosion of slums around mega-cities, massive migrations of workers and peasants in search of a better life and decaying urban and rural communities and whole regions. This is all embedded in the very structures, hierarchies, and dynamics of capitalist development. Unconscionable affluence and wealth at one pole and unspeakable poverty, exploitation, and oppression at the other pole.

Another threat to humanity’s future is ecological degradation. Almost daily we hear of species extinction, global warming, resource depletion, deforestation, desertification, and on and on to the point where we are nearly accustomed to this gathering catastrophe. Our planet cannot indefinitely absorb the impact of profit-driven, growth-without-limits capitalism. Many scientists say that unless we radically change our methods of production and consumption patterns, we will reach the point where damage to the environment will become irreversible. We must move in the direction of sustainability. Capitalism produced a greater variety of goods more cheaply and efficiently, integrated new technologies more quickly and flexibly into the production process, rationalized the production mechanism, and adapted production to new consumer tastes yet the price paid by the working class and the environment was steep, to be sure.

Workers are the producers of surplus value. They are strategically positioned to challenge capitalist rule. Workers keenly appreciate the need for broad unity and are well aware of the need for organisation. It is the working class that will be the main builder of a sustainable, efficient, and equitable socialist economy. The movement for socialism should seek a non-violent, peaceful transition. Some have suggested that talk of a peaceful socialist revolution is nothing but naiveté, a denial of history’s lessons. But is this true? While there are examples of ruling classes using force to block social change, there are also instances where corrupt and discredited regimes have been swept away without mass blood-letting. The brutal South African apartheid regime gave way without the country being thrown into civil war; fascist regimes were replaced with democratic governments in Portugal and Spain; dictatorships in Iran and Philippines yielded to mass movements and when Eastern Europe and the Soviet one-party bureaucratic regimes lost legitimacy they too were dismantled with minimum violence. Thus peaceful change is possible. It may take longer but people will surely feel that delays are well worth it if bloodshed can be avoided. People will move heaven and earth to find a peaceful path to socialism and we should unequivocally express this desire, too. It will be twice as difficult to build a new world if the old one is in ruins.

A dream of a better world drives us and our struggles. Work will be fulfilling and bring personal satisfaction. Leisure time will be expanded. Our skies, oceans, lakes, rivers and streams will be pollution free. Our city neighbourhoods would become places of green spaces and little traffic. Communal institutions, like public cafeterias serving healthy and delicious food, and recreation centers will become routine features of life. The whole panoply of oppressions that damage our people and nation will be on the wane and the diversity of human sexuality and sexual orientation will be enjoyed and celebrated. Culture in all its forms would be the inherited right of every person. The prisons would be emptied and borders no longer recognized. Military barracks will be padlocked and war studied no more. And, finally, the full development of each will become the condition for the full development of all.