Educate the Educators

The education of the people, not the few alone, but the entire mass in the principles of industrial democracy is the task of the people themselves. The socialist’s is to set them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal based upon mutual interests. A capitalist world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand secure. Such a world is full of strife and hatred and such a society can exist only by means of repression and domination.

The Left has often advocated state capitalism, sometimes misleadingly designated as “state socialism”. Whenever the state nationalized an industry, whenever the state imposed its control over industry, the Left naively accepted this as an abandonment of capitalism, as a symptom of the growing importance of socialism and the transformation of capitalism into Socialism. State capitalism emphasizes the fact of the state, of government, being an economic agency of the ruling class. State and capitalist industry, government and ruling class, become one and indivisible. State capitalism, accordingly, is not an abandonment of capitalism: it is a strengthening of capitalism. What came about was not socialism nor a step towards socialism but merely another expression of capitalist power and supremacy. Socialism is not state ownership or government management of industry, but the opposite: Socialism’s earliest act is to abolish the state. State capitalism is not socialism and never can become socialism. State capitalism attempts to regulate and direct capital and labor. State regulation may, to some measure, prove onerous to the capitalist, but is accepted as the necessary condition for the progressive promotion of his interests, however, it proves much more onerous to the employee. Socialists rejects “co-operation” with the capitalist, in industry as in politics and the policy of trying to maintain industrial peace by coercion and cajolery. One means of cajolery is an arrangement by which the workers may “co-operate” with the employers in the consideration of matters affecting a particular industry or factory. It brings the workers under the sway of the capitalist in ways that weakens the independent action of our class by offering a sham democracy in the factories and offices. Industry is not transformed into a state function ruled through a ministerial department, but transformed into new administrative norms of the organized associations of producers. The Socialist Party rejects state ownership, rejects state capitalism as a “phase” of “socialism” that can “grow” into “socialism”.  This concept of transformation in practice doesn’t transform capitalism, it transforms the socialist movement into a caricature and a prop of Capitalism. The Socialist Party insist upon the social management through industrial democracy.

For sure, there is still some room for reform and betterment of conditions in the present social system, but this is of minor matter compared to the need for industrial and social reorganization. The real great change in history must be the socialization of the means of our daily life. Privately owned production for individual profit are no longer compatible with civilisation’s progress. With all its tremendous technology through invention and discovery this capitalist world of ours has not yet learned how to feed itself. There is no longer any excuse for hunger. All the materials and all the forces are at hand and easily available for the production of all things needed to provide food, clothing and shelter for every man, woman and child, thus putting an end to the poverty and misery which sicken humanity. But the technology must be released from private ownership and control, socialized, democratized, and set into operation for the common good of all instead of the private profit of the few. Common ownership and democratic control are inseparable. To the working class belongs the future.

There is no room for misunderstanding among us as to what our position means and requires. It requires a clean break with all the perversions and distortions of the real meaning of socialism and democracy and their relation to each other, and a return to the original formulations and definitions. Nothing short of this will do. Only a revolution that replaces the class rule of the capitalists by the class rule of the workers can really establish real social democracy. Socialists seeks to inaugurate a system of industrial democracy in place of capitalist autocracy and control. Like capitalism itself industrial democracy knows no boundaries, color, race, creed or sex. As capitalism knows only profit, industrial democracy knows only the exploitation by which profit is possible. Socialists organize to make exploitation an impossibility. Socialism is not about getting more wages, less hours and better conditions, but achieving social power. It means solving social problems and of making the workers themselves representative of a new society working for the good of all and the profit of none. The workers ensuring their own free development, their own liberation—is the liberation of all society, for the workers are society, in fact and numbers. The capitalists as a class, are a useless parasitic minority that can be dispensed with. Workers have no interests in common with capitalists and in fact, their material interests are in conflict. It is declared purpose of the Socialist Party to abolish the wage-system, and supplant it by a system of industrial co-operation in which the community shall have full control for its own benefit. The social revolution becomes a fact when people have acquired sufficient consciousness of their control over society to establish that control in practice. The capitalist state will weakened by socialist parliamentary criticism and action. The capitalist state will be undermined by the developing class power and struggles of workers’ movement by all the means of action at its disposal. But for parliamentarianism to be of value it must relate itself to other forms of struggle and abandon its policy of reformism.

This is our planet. We want it back

Capitalism can no longer operate in the interests of the majority of humanity. These days people are so suspicious of capitalism that the supporters of it stress more and more upon the necessity of reforming its abuses, until finally they are falling over each other to show that they are really in favour of some sort of “socialism.” Needless to say what they call socialism is only capitalism in disguise, but the trick works. They all in greater or lesser degree adopt as their slogan “We are all socialists now.” Capitalism is a social set up which produces goods for sale. Socialism will be a society which makes things because people need them. Capitalism has competition, the wages system, the state. Socialism will have cooperation, free access to wealth, democratic freedom. Remember this, the next time somebody airily holds forth on a so-called socialist platform or programme.

To talk of a socialist state is to talk in contradictions. For the state is a machine designed to maintain the subjection and exploitation of the large mass of the people by a few. It developed when the production of wealth surplus to the needs of the producer became possible. Its function was to protect the system of the expropriation of that surplus wealth. Thus, it is a very old institution—and now that we live under capitalism, with its exploitation of the working class under modern industrial conditions, it still carries out the same function. Today, as ever, the state is there to preserve and protect the private ownership of the wealth, power and privilege of the relatively small dominant class in society. Part of the state’s work is in the organisation of the military machine. This is a world in which wealth is produced with the object of a profitable sale. This means that nations are always in keen competition for markets and so forth. In continually seeking to outdo their foreign competitors, they land themselves into all manner of risky situations. These in turn cause the perpetual crises, diplomatic wrangles and international tensions which we all know so well. The armed forces, run by the State, are there to push each nation's interests in these disputes.

Millionaires devote money to a political party that they think will uphold their interests. The only thing that can undermine the power of the ruling class is working-class political knowledge; the only way in which the political control can be wrested from the ruling class is by political action based upon sound working-class political knowledge. Workers throughout the capitalist world, support a society which impoverishes and degrades them. It is painful for them to face the reality of their support for capitalism — to face their own responsibility for all the wars and for the global destitution. Yet to face reality, and to live up to our responsibility, is all that it needs. The world has everything now to make it a place of peace and abundance except the political will to make it so. At the moment there may appear to be nothing serious to disturb the tranquility of the capitalists. But that means little. The modern working class inherits the lessons of history, half-formed ideas of the goal towards which historic evolution is relentlessly marching shape themselves in the minds of millions of workers. The seeds of generations of propaganda have been sown, and who knows when and how events which neither capitalists nor workers can control will develop rapidly those half-formed ideas into socialist convictions and bring to maturity the seeds sown in past generations? Political catastrophes, like those in Nature, appear to occur suddenly, but they are not sudden to those who understand that they are the culmination of the innumerable past factors in historical development. Events will show clearly to workers that socialism is the only logical outcome of the class struggle and the only solution for their poverty and insecurity.

The only way of salvation for the workers lies in the transformation of private property into commonly owned property and the organisation of industry on a co-operative basis of production for use and not for profit. No capitalist party will legislate for this— they dare not, on the pain of self-extinction. The only party that dare go to the legislative assemblies to do this is the Socialist Party organised on the lines of the class war, with its tactics and policy in accord with its principle, with a clear knowledge of the fact that rent, profit, and interest exist because the workers—the wealth-creators—are robbed of the wealth they produce, whether taken from them by private capitalists or by the capitalist state. A revolutionary socialist party can act in the real interests of the workers, and for the workers of this country that party is The Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Beyond Protest

Capitalism creates many problems and subjects the working class to all kinds of pressures. What is somewhat puzzling about the whole painful business is that, despite so much experience in protesting and all the accompanying disillusionment, people still persist in trying to deal with individual issues in isolation and make little if any attempt to relate either one problem to another, or to relate all the problems to a common cause. It seems that for every outrage committed by capitalism, and for every inhumanity and frustrated need, there is a group of people ready to mushroom into an organisation and start protesting.

Socialists are not opposed to the idea of protesting as such. There was certainly plenty to protest about — there always is. What concerns us is to get it into its social perspective so as to achieve a more fruitful form of expression. The fact that the horrors of capitalism do produce some response in terms of protest demonstrations is more hopeful than an attitude of indifference. But, unless workers learn from previous fruitless experiences to avoid going over the same ground again, nothing is gained.

The widespread ignorance of class interests among workers offers no permanent hindrance to our socialist policy. That ignorance is due to certain causes, and the lack of interest in revolutionary ideas among the masses. If a collapse of conditions causes vast discontent, can anything be hoped for if the working-class are ignorant of socialism? Discontent in itself is not sufficient. Without working class action based on socialist consciousness, there can be no social transformation. That conditions are likely to develop anti-capitalist views among the workers is so well-known to the capitalists there that they have spent fabulous sums in controlling almost every agency of education and opinion, including the labour leader. The open and constant use of the wealth of the few to control affairs by so-called corruption is inevitable. This, however, will not prevent or influence the awakened worker once be realises that economic and political action are essential for him or her, and that neither political or economic action are in themselves corrupt or need ever be corrupt once the workers understand and control the economic and political organisations for themselves and in their own interest.

The alternative to capitalism is seen as a society in which all forms of exchange and money will be abolished and all land and property will be taken into the control of the community. Capitalism is the system of minority private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution, the majority having only their labour power to sell to earn a living—only the profit of the privileged class is maximized. Socialism is the system of society, never yet established anywhere because it requires a majority of convinced socialists based on common ownership and democratic control, and production solely to meet human need. What is usually called “socialism” (government ownership) is state capitalism. Capitalism means capitalists compete for markets and workers have to compete for jobs, whereas socialism means that all individuals have free and equal access to the wealth the world is capable of producing. Why should anyone fear a system that means abolishing war, poverty, privilege and exploitation of the majority by the minority? Nearly everything that we need to-day— food, clothes, and the rest—are produced by businesses, and therefore with the object of making a profit. That is why bad food is often produced, shoddy clothes are often made, houses that you can nearly blow over are often built, and the workers who produce the needed goods are paid such low wages that many of them spend the whole of their lives in a state of poverty that often takes away the wish to remain alive. The Socialist Party intends to have all this altered. Instead of somebody, or some company, having to buy the machinery and other things before food and clothes can be made, we say, let the land and machinery belong to the whole of the people, and let us arrange things so that some will make machinery, others will plough the land, some will go down in mines, others will drive the trains, and so on. As each took an equal part in making what we all needed so each would take an equal part in using what was made.

Now if we had such a state of affairs we would only make the best things we could, and we would make them in the best way. Everyone that could would take his part in making things, so that they would be neither rich unemployed nor poor unemployed. Some will say the idea of everyone working together in such a manner is impossible—each will want to get the lion's share of what is made and do as little as he can. When, however, everyone understands that by not doing his part either in the work or the consuming he is only hindering the producing of things, and therefore, in the long run, doing himself an injury, then there will be, in the main, neither slacking nor greediness. Besides, there will be so little work for each to do and such an abundance of things to be got that these inherited vices will soon disappear.

Grass Roots (1968)

Grass Roots (1968)

Book Review from the September 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Constituency Labour Parties in Britain by Edward G. Janosik (Pall Mall Press, 45s.)

Edward Janosik has produced here a study of the organisational and political nature of constituency Labour Parties. The blurb on the dust jacket claims that the book contains “a body of reliable data from which sound generalisations could be made". Unfortunately, the author, an American who spent a year in Britain, has little or no experience of his subject and his data has been acquired by interviewing what he calls  “key leaders" of thirty six CLPs.

Before joining the Socialist Party of Great Britain I was a CLP secretary—a “key leader”—for some years and my own impressions of the Labour Party are very different from those gained second hand by Janosik. He must really be naive if he thinks that the party machine (Transport House) isn't all that powerful in the selection of parliamentary candidates. True, there is a procedure laid down which appears to give the “grass roots" a great deal of independence in the matter, but the machine, through its local paid officials, can and often does see that the dice is loaded in favour of nominees acceptable to it by turning a blind eye to blatant irregularities in the delegations to selection conferences.

Also, Janosik's claim that there is little evidence of organised factionalism in the CLP's is to anyone who has ever been active in the Labour Party, sheer nonsense. Before such events as the election of office-bearers, the choosing and instruction of delegates to national and local conferences, the selection of parliamentary and municipal candidates, each faction will normally meet in conclave to decide a course of action against the others.

Janosik does admit that his studies were carried out at a time when a general election was pending. Such an event is always a great unifier as CLP's are basically an electoral machine whose function is to secure the return of candidates representing a very broad viewpoint of how British capitalism should be run. Not that the "unity" ever lasts very long. After the votes have been counted the various factions, left and right, will cheer their heads off together if Labour wins but it is only a short while before the back-stabbing begins again. If Labour loses then, of course, it commences right away.

The book does reveal, in passing, some of the skeletons in the Labour cupboard. For instance, the fact that candidates are sometimes chosen with an eye to the religious prejudices of the electorate. Also dealt with is the degrading "pulling out” of the Labour vote on election day. This consists of the party activists plaguing everyone suspected of Labour sympathies to come out and vote. Fleets of cars are provided for this spectacle and no wonder, for if the average Labour voter were left to vote of his or her own accord then there would be a lot less Labour MPs in Parliament.

The myth that the CLP’s are bastions of militancy against the reactionary leadership also takes a knock. Actually, the vast majority of Labour Party are simply apolitical and are only concerned with humdrum fund-raising and social activities.

Janosik's book cannot fail to impress whoever is obsessed with discovering the facts relating to the average age and occupational, religious, educational background of CLP leaders and there are abundant tables dealing with all this and more. Doubtless, the Robert McKenzie, Abrams and Rose crowd will be fascinated, but really, the author has failed to get under the skin of his subject and to see it for the corrupt, undemocratic and anti-socialist organisation that it is.

Perhaps we shouldn't blame him too much for that After all, thousands who have spent a lifetime in its ranks still haven’t seen through it either

Vic Vanni

Glasgow Branch

Expropriating the Expropriators

Socialism/communism is not about taking away people's personal possessions. That's just a scare story put around by those whose property socialism will take away: those who own and control the means for producing goods and services (farms, mines, factories, etc).

And they won't be bought out, but simply expropriated without compensation when a majority decide democratically to make the means of production the common property of all, so they can be used to provide for the needs of all instead of to make profits for a few. We are merely expropriating the expropriators. All wealth comes from the application of human labour upon the raw materials in conditions of waged slavery and absolute, actual, or relative poverty for the majority, with privileged access to the means and instruments of producing and distributing this wealth by and for the minority capitalist class. The reason for their capital accumulation rather than intelligence and superior or intelligent application of opportunity. The richest 1% probably are just as likely to have their economic affairs managed for them. Generally if one is born poor, one will die poor and the converse if one is born rich, one will die rich.

Nor has socialism anything to do with government ownership. It's about common ownership, which is the same as non-ownership. The means of production won't belong to anyone or any institution, not corporations, not rich individuals, not governments. They will simply be there to be used under democratic control to provide for people's needs in accordance with the principle "from each their ability, to each their needs". All companies and corporations (which are only legal entities created and maintained by the state) were dissolved or that all stocks and shares, bills and bonds, etc were declared null and void. They'd then just be pieces of paper. Then no one and no legal entity will be able to exert enforceable property rights over means of production. They would belong to nobody or everybody (the same thing). Imagine if, tomorrow, it was made illegal to be an employer (to use terminology from British law, to be the ‘Master in a contract of service’).  That would render almost all capital worthless at a stroke, and the only way in which labour could be secured would be through voluntary co-operation. When material conditions change so to do social relationships, we've had the former not the latter. The productive forces are out of sync with social relationships. Every time too much of anything is produced, capitalism goes into 'crisis'. Too many houses, too much food, while people starve.

The great bulk of economic activity in the formal sector of the capitalist economy is completely and utterly useless from the standpoint of meeting human needs. Such activity occurs simply and solely to enable the system to operate on its own terms. The only aim of any capitalist concern is to make profit. If in making that profit they meet human need and or desire, so be it, if in making that profit it meets no human need or desire again that is immaterial.

The only realistic model of a totally non-market socialist (or communist, if you prefer) economy would be one which would be very largely self-regulating and decentralised. We see this in embryonic form today in the system of physical accounting - stock control - that exists alongside the system of monetary accounting linking business enterprises along a supply chain. Socialism will dispense with monetary accounting but will retain the physical accounting aspect of this relationship There would be no economic exchange in the quid pro quo sense since this necessarily implies private property and hence the absence of common ownership.  It would be very wrong to deduce from the mere existence of numerous planning bodies the existence of private property as such.

"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning" - Critique of the Gotha Progamme

Building socialist foundations, not castles in the sky

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” George Orwell

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell

Amid a myriad of global, regional and local social crises they say to us “We are in trouble. We all need to pull together on this.” But we have to ask ourselves upon what basis. The experts, the politicians, the intellectuals and academics are unable and unwilling to even touch the surface of the issue and activists remain paralysed and splintered. Fortunately, the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog and this one has the mission to present the inconvenient truths against the mainstream myths and to read between the media-headlines and the politicians sound-bites. To understand our world and its political-economic reality, is far from being easy, yet it remains our primary survival-tool. The capitalists’ ideology is that capitalism is the one and only economic system for mankind.

Contrary to the widespread myths about capitalism, in reality the capitalist system is theft, scarcity, austerity, poverty, servitude, inequality, unemployment, homelessness, mass refugee migration, chaos, economic crisis, state control, war and terror. To put it bluntly capitalism is hell on earth. Capitalism does not equal democracy – to the contrary. Capitalism is an anti-democratic, anti-social, dysfunctional, crisis-inflicting, inequality-generating, unstable and exploitative system. Capitalism is the modern version of slavery and tyranny: a system owned, controlled and dictated by a few billionaires. Capitalism does not equal human rights – to the contrary, capitalism elevates the rights of the capitalist class above all. Capitalism does not equal freedom – to the contrary. Capitalism is NOT a system of freedom (liberty), democracy and dignity. In the current system those who exercise power over the majority own the most capital and via capital, own most lands, resources, the means of production and governments of the world. And that group has a name: the capitalist class, the oligarchs and plutocrats of our era. The only solution to change our present and future is to remove the capitalist class. The capitalists are not irreplaceable and we can do much better without them

 Capitalism is a system driven by one single factor: profit-making. In order to keep a business up and running, the managers of the enterprise are obliged to maximise the profits for the shareholders, that is, to make as much profit as possible and as quick a time as possible despite at any moral, ethical, human or environmental cost, regardless of the consequences. Any other considerations that would reduce profits, such as refraining from environment-destroying activities, improving working conditions or reducing work-hours to employees are inherently alien to the capitalist. The capitalist class constantly seeks new cheap resources and markets where they can export their profit-making activities. When the capitalist enterprise grows, it eventually grows beyond borders and strives for new lands, resources, labour-sources and markets.

Do we really need to be buying every new thing that comes on the market? Why do we need new car number-plates every six months? To try and encourage people to buy more new cars. Is this really necessary? Why does Apple bring out a new computer/phone/watch every few months? Sure, the technology is better, but the root technology, the solid state drives and what have you, is typically no different to that in the previous model. It's just a ploy (which only makes sense in the capitalist model) to keep us spending. Capitalism is all about the cultivation of desires that ultimately cannot be met through such as means as advertising because this is the corollary of its own irrational expansionist dynamic: production for the sake of production. Looking at the impact if consumer culture on the environment, is it really the way to go in the future? Do we really need exponential growth in energy consumption? Can we afford to keep the game going? These are irrelevant questions in capitalism, because anything that turns a profit is good. Socialism offers a sane, sustainable model for the future of humanity.

 Scarcity, Poverty, Hunger. The capitalist class constantly creates scarcity to keep demand and prices as high as possible. This is why large amounts of food has been and is being wasted while millions have no access to food. Scarcity is to maintain the capitalist establishment and hinders all areas of research and development in green and abundant energy sources, affordable housing, etc. Capitalists discard products in massive quantities rather than feeding the hungry and provide for the less fortunate. Austerity, unemployment, debt. The capitalist class constantly seeks opportunity to keep the vast majority in a non-bargaining position, so that the capitalist class could keep their economic power– price and wage-fixing – position. Those who are unemployed can’t negotiate with a potential employer and those who are employed can’t negotiate for higher wages since there are many unemployed to replace them any time. The capitalist interest is to keep competition as low as possible, to reduce the scope and strength of any existing or potential competition, in order to maintain their market-leader position and in order to maintain a labour market with over-supply of the cheapest labour possible. Capitalists attack the unions and force employees into a race-to-the-bottom contest to compete for jobs by accepting lower and lower wages.

War is one of the most profitable businesses hence one of the most attractive enterprise for capitalists. In addition to the mega-profits made by the military industry complex, wars deliver additional benefits to the capitalists such as the opportunity to seize new lands, resources, markets and cheap labour. In addition via the extreme poverty, scarcity that wars create on immense scale and the need only the capitalist class, as the owners of means of production, is ready to meet. If there is no apparent reason to start a war, they create reasons for a war. They organise terror as pretext for wars. Capitalism is a system that uses techniques of covert aggression.

Many still believe that socialism has been tested and found wanting during the so-called “communist” period of the USSR and is satellite states so it is concluded that the only option we are left with is the current system, regardless of its tragic failures. Socialism, the way how Marx and many early proponents envisioned it, never has been realised. Soviet-type Socialism was in fact state-capitalism, a yet another form of the orthodox master-slave relationship. It was just another form of unbridled exploitation. There is no socialist state in socialism.  In the classical definition of socialism the state disappears since it is an instrument of class rule whereas with socialism classes cease to exist in the Marxian sense.  Hence, Engel’s observation:

“The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear.”

It is not part of the socialist case that the billionaire class consists of the lazy and the idle. Actually, even if they all worked their socks off 24/7 and 365 days of the year it would still be the case that overwhelmingly the money they have acquired to invest in business or give away to charity would have come from the efforts of the working class, not them  They have acquired this money simply by virtue of the fact that they have ownership rights over the means of production and are thus able to exploit the excluded property-less  majority by paying the latter significantly less in wages and salaries than the value of the goods and service the latter provide or make. Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world said, "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned." Erick Schmidt, CEO of Google says, "Lots of people who are smart and work hard and play by the rules don't have a fraction of what I have. I realize that I don't have my wealth because I'm so brilliant." Do you imagine for one moment that the world that exists is one that correlates with the pro-capitalist’s hypothetical dream-world of a level playing field? Do you really think that the 62 multibillionaires who  currently own between them more wealth than half the world's population - 3,500,000,000 people - have contributed as much to humanity as the latter?  We would put it to you that the "rewards" that these 62 individuals have received has very little, if anything, to do with their own effort but overwhelmingly has to do with efforts of those who produce their wealth for them - the working class.  The workers in effect run capitalism from top to bottom but are largely excluded from the means of production However  hard they work it is the owners of capital that reap the benefits simple because they own capital and not because they merited or worked for what they receive.

On the question of work incentive, it is a complete myth to suggest that without monetary incentives individuals will be less inclined to work.  Actually there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that monetary incentives (so-called) actually have the effect of undermining the intrinsic motive to work. Most of the work that we do even in capitalism is unpaid.  This is what constitutes what is called the grey economy which is counter-posed to the official white market economy and the unofficial black market economy. Studies undertaken by social researchers and bodies like UN  have shown that in terms of total hours worked , the grey economy is marginally larger than both the white and black economies combined.

The administration required for a socialist society to operate will be a tiny fraction of the size of capitalism’s sprawling bloated bureaucracies. What will need to be kept track of is not what individuals consume but broad patterns of consumption in respect of the aggregate demand for specific lines of goods to ensure there is an adequate supply to meet future demand.  This is something that is already done today in the guise of a self-regulating system of stock control based on calculation in kind e.g. numbers of tins of baked beans on the shelves.  However, alongside calculation in kind we also find today, monetary calculation.  Socialism will dispense with the latter but retain the former so simple logic will tell you that in terms of its administrative apparatus socialism will be vastly more streamlined than capitalism. What we argue for is a democratically run economy, run to benefit humanity. Socialism is not about painting a pretty picture. Socialism is not about building castles in the sky. Socialism is democratic control. Socialism is common ownership.

If you stand for nothing, you will get defeated by anything

“At the parliament of animals, the rabbits demanded equal rights, and the lions replied, ‘But where are your claws?’”

If you thought you were in charge - think again.

“Living in poverty” is one of those phrases that rolls easily off the tongue. We all tend to glaze over the full meaning of the phrase, the grinding day-to-day misery of hunger, insecurity, worry, discomfort, exhaustion, and despair. The grim reality is that people are working hard and yet remain impoverished. Too many of our neighbours are being destroyed by poverty. We must demand better than that. Whatever fear, grief, anger, disbelief, or horror you are feeling in a personal crisis, imagine those feelings expanded to planetary scale. Socialists today give voice to the future generations. Even the most educated have not the slightest inkling of the false history they have learned. The intellectuals have been thoroughly co-opted by the ruling class with university tenure and prestige trinkets. Many activists have addressed different areas. But few link them up.

 The lesser of two evils is not the quick way to die, but instead a slow deliberate bleeding to death. Sure Republicans or the Tories are worse. But that most assuredly doesn’t mean that Democrats or the Labour Party are the solution. Real change will not come from them. Your elected leaders are working for themselves and their puppet-masters. They couldn’t care less about you. Certainly Left and Right use different language and reasoning but they both come to same conclusions. There will be no change until the American people wake up and realize that no politician will deliver it to their door. For the self-actualized worker not looking for a hero/leader there is just a vision of a world that could be. Revolutions need commitment. As The Who once sang – “we won’t be fooled again”. But sadly this is exactly what happens every election. We get the governments and the presidents we deserve. Take a look at the mess we are in around the world. Capitalism is a wrecking machine, scorching and scouring the Earth of its resources, increasing its profits plundering the people. The viciousness of capitalism engulfs us ever more.

To all those on the Left – the Socialist Party say “Please come home!” Re-think your positions. Maybe it is the bitter truth that that none of us will see a society in which we'd actually want to live in. Perhaps the youngest of us will be the ones to create the new society. But what we can do now is to lay the groundwork for that by exposing the hoax that reformism will lead to basic changes. People require to understand that the purpose of reformers is to patch up the problems of the profit system but more importantly defuse and diffuse discontent with promises of a better future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing. Capitalism is willing to change only in ways that shore it up. It diverts potentially revolutionary energy into superficial dead ends so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down. What we can do now as socialists is weaken capitalism and build organisations that will pass our knowledge and experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our children or grandchildren can make a revolution. If we don't do it, our descendants will remain wage-slaves. Our most important aim is educating and organizing people towards a revolutionary goal, undermining the beliefs that prop up the institutions of capitalism, breaking the identification with “God, King and Country”, ridiculing their patriotic rituals. We should talk about capitalism, not neoliberalism or any other euphemism for the capitalist system. The precise form that capitalism takes in a particular era might reflect 'evolution' of a sort but, in whatever guise, capitalism is fundamentally exploitative. Capitalism like the board game Monopoly is designed to bankrupt and eliminate other 'players' from the 'game' leaving just one 'player' (the global elite) to own everything. There seems little point in shifting the focus to one or another manifestation of it. Capitalism kills people. Our task is to explain this. It is our duty to ourselves and to the future to profit by the experiences of our predecessors and by our own.

And yet, despite everything that capitalism does to destroy the bonds of human solidarity in our world, many people still act selflessly as the people of Occupy Sandy did after Hurricane Sandy and as many are doing to help in the plight of the migrants in Europe. Technology has abolished time and distance as factors separating nations from nations. On our shrunken globe today, there is room for one group only - the family of humankind. We have waited too long for real change and lost some precious time. We can’t avoid the battles of ideas. We can’t avoid the discussions about what our values. Our argument is that our case for socialism is the best chance to build a better society. We will seize the opportunity to decentralized economic power as much as we can. We must come together as a community and drop the “my issue is bigger than your issue,” pissing contest. It’s about connecting the dots and laying out an expansive vision to work towards as an aspiration for all

Chin Rōdō to Shōhin Seisan no Haishi

Trans: Abolition of Wage Labour and Commodity Production

The purpose of the Socialist Party is to create a better world than this one. Our goal is a totally new economic system that represents the interests of the majority and we say this change should happen now and not in some far-off distant undetermined future time. Putting an end to the great class divide and its conflicts is at the core for a better world. The current economic system where political leaders only listen to and heed the 1% instead of to the majority is a disaster and is failing the people and planet. Socialism put the interests of the people first on a scale never seen before. It can only happen by a people-powered movement that who shares a commitment to the common good. The Socialist Party chooses to imagine a better world than this and we believe the time has come to fight for it together. Our challenge is to persuade people to eliminate the institutions of capitalism which are a bane upon equality and justice. If we don’t, our grandchildren will inherit a world where there is greater divisiveness and destruction than what we are now witnessing. We seek a true world community.

Capitalism is a competitive hierarchy to dominate and suppress. Capitalism must have an ever  expanding economy, even if it overwhelms nature. Capitalism is powered by competition, which grows the economy until it consumes all without satisfying anyone's natural needs. The more we disconnect ourselves from people and nature the more miserable and endangered life becomes. Capitalism is malignant cancer on nature. It kills its host.

Interests are basically common. Peoples can't lose as they're part of the common. The more we cooperate the more we know and understand social interactions and our role in nature. A cooperative-based socialist system is organised to maximise well-being for all people and nature and functions within the planet ability to supply people's needs. Capitalism’s growth compulsion has damaged the ability of the planet’s and its life to maintain itself. This is well beyond government controlled by capitalism to save anyone from its demise. Socialism unleashes the human potential for creative co-operation, and shares resources and surpluses for the good of all. Evidence for the possibilities of world socialism comes from the findings of evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology and archaeology. People with vision within the Socialist Party seek a humane, grassroots democracy path towards this co-operative commonwealth. Let us all help to speed the day when this wonderful earth and its rich resources are held in common for the benefit of all humanity. The present world economic system is obsolete and long past its sell by date, let’s dump this dog-eat-dog rat-race into the trash bin of history.

Socialism may well not be perfect, idyllic, noble, or wonderful, but it will work well enough. What anthropologists have determined is that people far from being noble and wise are capable of being mean, unkind, short-sighted, selfish, insensitive, stubborn, and short-tempered. A life in socialism won’t turn people into saints. But what it does is enable ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation, not suffocated by a tyrannical State, where tradition does not dictate every action of the individual, where people feel free to express their individuality without the need to conform. An egalitarian tribe, where merit and esteem matters, not rigid hierarchy or nepotism. The only politics that will matter is how the human race uses and protects its lands and waters for the betterment of our own societies, our future children, and our fellow plant and animal species, embodying the ideal of direct, grassroots participatory democracy. A sharing society would go a long way towards healing the open wounds of our divided world and the ethnic and sectarian tensions plaguing most nations. Rather than keeping food, housing, material and intellectual property under lock and key, a world of abundance would allow unparalleled access to health, education, and appropriate technology.

As mass movements rally for social justice and direct democracy, the idea of world socialism can be will the spark for change and ignite the struggle for liberation from suicidal capitalism to the respect for universal human rights that dissolves people’s delusions that we must all be insular in our way of life. 

Will you no just go away...

Tommy ‘liar’ Sheridan has announced that he will run for election to the Scottish Parliament in May. His wife Gail is also running for Holyrood, appearing first on the party’s list for the West of Scotland region. He is urging folk to use their second vote to elect him. It is a shameless appeal to Scottish nationalists who are voting for the SNP in the constituency section of the ballot to give their second vote to him.

Sad that he will discredit the terms socialist and socialism yet once more. 

The conversation of resistance

We live in an age of crises. Their causes seem complex and diverse and indeed they are, but  capitalism’s contradiction between human needs and the needs of capital leads us to self-destruction. Britain’s best-known economists Adam Smith made the following observation about the capitalist model that ruled the world throughout modern history:

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

A century later Britain’s next best known economist, Keynes said:

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

Today, Britain is the fifth richest country in the world and we have the obscenity that every major city and town possesses a food bank to help the poor.  Capitalism has been around for centuries, and it’s still as monstrous today as it was when the popular anthem Jerusalem refers to “dark satanic mills.”

Capitalism has looted and or wrecked nearly every advance civilisation made. The stranglehold pro-capitalists have on economic thinking must be opposed and overcome. Almost everything that’s wrong in the world is wrong because of capitalism. It must go. Many have pointed to numerous events in the twentieth century as the beginning of the end, but capitalism has proven more resilient than they anticipated. It has stubbornly refused to die; it must be killed.

The word “revolution” automatically conjures up images of The American Revolutionary War.  But as the writer Dmitry Orlov points out; “The American Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all because the slave-owning, genocidal sponsors of international piracy remained in power under the new administration.”   In the end, after all the bodies had been buried, King George was out, President George was in, and it was business as usual among the wealthy upper crust, their underlings, and the slaves.  An actual revolution requires a change in ideology.  The main change here was in the profit margins.  No more pesky taxes to pay to the British Crown.  This was no revolution.  More like just a revolt against upper management.

Today’s multi-national slave-owners know no borders. There are just two classes — slave-owners and slave laborers.  Ethnicity, nationality, and religion perform no function other than to distract the minions of slaves, playing them against each other, lest they notice their owners behind the curtain, pulling the levers and controlling media misinformation while playing patriotic songs, maintaining a constant state of warfare. Zbigniew Brezinski, once a top US statesman, described the situation concisely and accurately:

“People, governments, and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations.”  Emphasis on “must”.

Despite the warnings of its own scientists, capitalism continues to plunder the environment and cause catastrophic climactic change because the need to pursue profit and accumulate wealth trumps all other concerns. Forced by its own economic imperatives capitalists must seek to intensify exploitation and to reduce costs that don’t generate profit, no matter the social consequences. Capitalism cannot act otherwise than to impose austerity, attack wages and especially the social wage (pensions, health-care, unemployment benefits, etc) because the source of its profit is exploitation. Despite the available knowledge and means of production that make the eradication of poverty entirely possible, capitalism everyday creates ever more hunger, and homelessness, more insecurity and anxiety. New information technology has the potential to create free time for us all but is used by capitalism for the pursuit of profit and to increase the intensity of work for some as well as to make others superfluous. Religion, ethnicity, nationalism and other ideologies are used to mask the fact that the wars raging around the globe are in essence struggles for possession of capital.

Never was there such a glaring contrast between what is and what could be: on the one hand, capitalism, absurdly creating overproduction and massive hunger at the same time, causes ever more misery and threatens even the survival of the human species. On the other, today’s knowledge and technology  when liberated from the capitalist straitjacket, could free all humans from lack of food, housing, health-care and other needs, and begin to repair the planet. The necessity to end capitalism is clear. The crisis of capitalism will deepen in the years to come. The attacks on the working class will accelerate. They will meet resistance. Workers cannot defend themselves individually. They need to join together in order to gain critical weight, so unification of struggles will be pursued, the more the attacks of capital are aimed at ever-more victims. Of course those struggles will be recuperated many times. But the sheer size of the resistance may move the goal-posts. Together with a growing awareness of class power, an awareness of what’s possible can grow.

Revolution is necessary, Marx thought, “Not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way” but also because communism requires, “the alteration of men on a mass scale which can take place only in a practical movement” (The German Ideology): An alteration of consciousness that can only occur in a context of class struggle. The deepening crisis implies that workers’ resistance against capital’s attacks on its living and working conditions is ultimately doomed, as long as it stays a defensive struggle. Yet, defensive struggles will be important in that process of transforming consciousness, not only because their limits must be experienced but also because they can unify workers, bring them together, which in turn affects consciousness, increasing awareness of the class’ potential power. For revolution to be possible, there has to be a revolutionary subject, that is, a social force that has the capacity to carry it out. That social force is the working class (or proletariat.) It is the part of the population which is compelled to sell its labor power to survive. Today that is the vast majority of humankind. The fundamental antagonism between the capitalist class and the working class exists not only during periods of open class struggle (strikes, demonstrations and work-place occupations etc.), but also in the daily reality of exploitation, the extraction of surplus value from the working class. Objectively, the working class is more unified than it ever was possesses the capacity to free society from capitalism. However, this capacity is only potential. Even if capitalism were to collapse this very day and abandon its control over society, the workers would not know what to do with it for lack of revolutionary consciousness. The working class is not born with revolutionary consciousness and bourgeois mystifications and ideological fog prevents it from seeing reality as it is. Once when this fog lifts as a result of the experience of the struggle and of revolutionary propaganda will clear consciousness emerge.

Capitalism is based on exploitation, on paying workers less than the value they produce, and pocketing the difference, the surplus value. At first sight then, in order to end capitalism, it would suffice to give back the surplus value to those who produced it, so that workers get, individually or collectively, the full value of the labor time they perform. This would not end the value-form, the unspoken common understanding of the world, of work and its products, of people and things, as value, quantities of abstract labor time. People would still produce (private or state) property, to be sold and bought with money in one form or another. Only a redistribution of value would have been achieved, while the foundation of capitalist society would remain untouched. On this foundation, capitalism would survive, albeit through crises and chaos.

Redistribution of wealth is the rallying cry of the Left today. Its claim is that the economic crisis results from lack of demand which would disappear if money taken from the rich would be used to raise the buying power of the many. Given that overproduction is a fact, and that the gap between rich and poor has grown to obscene proportions, this argument is attractive. But it is based on a misunderstanding of what it is that is produced and accumulated, on a misunderstanding of value.

Real wealth is not the purpose of capitalist production. Commodities must have a concrete use-value, but this is only a vehicle to transmit abstract value, whose accumulation all capitalists are compelled to seek. That is the real purpose. Real wealth is only created in so far as it serves this purpose, in so far as it creates new value, capitalist wealth. A redistribution of wealth would not change this. It would not remove the obligation of production to be profitable, it would not end exploitation.

There are those who claim that the stark reality of capitalism’s horrors will make the choice for revolution self-evident. That it will become crystal-clear that capitalism is doomed and socialism is the only solution. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. While these horrors are visible to all, how they relate is hidden in a myriad ways.  To remove that opacity should be the aim of all revolutionary political organizations.

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." (Theses on Feuerbach)

Marx’s oft-quoted remark did not mean that philosophy was complete and workers must now simply apply it to change the world. It meant that theory is not an end in itself, that it is pointless if not tied to action that challenges the capitalist world. Theory must be where the struggle is. Therefore, the political organization must aim to participate actively in the struggles of the workers. ‘Participate’ rather than ‘intervene’: instead of making one-sided interventions, we seek to participate in the conversation of resistance, in which theory inspires and develops action, and is, in its turn, inspired and developed by action.

It is to this struggle that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is committed.

Food Wasted

An article in the Toronto Star, November 28, emphasized the shocking amount of food that is being wasted, "One third of all food produced globally either never makes it to the table or doesn't get eaten". That represents 1.3 billion tonnes of food – the weight ten thousand CN towers-worth and nearly $US1 trillion The energy that goes into the production, harvest, storage, transportation, and packaging of that food – energy that is ultimately wasted – produces more than 3.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Food thrown out from North American homes, European restaurants and Asian food markets is contributing to global climate change. 

However, it hardly makes sense to throw food away while millions are starving, but where does it say that capitalism makes sense. In a society that does make sense, food would be distributed so there would be no starvation and no waste. 

John Ayers

Nobody owns the future

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE 

Becoming a socialist is an educational experience. It is about discovery and knowledge; and the experience changes people. Once people know and understand the essence of the socialist case—that various historical "epochs" are characterised by different kinds of class relationships (landowners and serfs in feudal societies, capitalists and workers in capitalist societies, etc.); that history is a record of class struggle; and that the economic system is prime, so that nowadays the interests of the capitalist class determine the dominant ideas and values in society—they will use this body of knowledge in analysing and responding to the world around them. Knowledge of the socialist case is like other knowledge, internalised. It affects the way that people think and behave; it changes the very essence of their thoughts and feelings. In a very real way, once people have been persuaded of the essence of the socialist case, they will never be the same again.

The capitalist world does its best, callously and indifferently to break us because we see the world as it is, but we are not content to accept it as it is and instead we see it as it could be. The questions we ask about the destructive conditions of our time has not lost their urgency. We live under the domination of a capitalist economy which functions by feeding off the common wealth of the people and by imposing restrictive and stunting conditions upon them. It will come as no surprise that the only “solution” capitalism knows to its problems will be at the detriment to the interest of the working class. In its relentless pursuit of profits capitalist enterprises have left a trail of human and environmental devastation of staggering proportions. Capitalism has turned us into an alienated and unskilled population forced into a lifestyle of abject poverty, prostitution, alcohol abuse and crime. In other words, they are forced into a life of wage-slavery at its bottom-most level. The Socialist Party holds a vision that global solidarity is the only way to bring about an end to this exploitative global system. We hear the voices of people who are aware that the capitalist system has only one driving force behind it, the profit motive, who bring to the class struggle a sense of communal responsibility to each other and the world around them. The many struggles of our fellow workers serve as a reminder that socialism is about knowing that an alternative to capitalist society is possible and that we can bring it about by understanding the source of our oppression and acting in a spirit of comradeship and solidarity with our fellow workers throughout the world. Is emotion to be rejected as futile and irrational? Not in the least. Emotion is an essential part of human experience: it is thanks to our emotions that we can empathise with others and support one another when we unite to achieve a common goal. It would be foolish, however, to imagine that a simple venting of our emotions will achieve any more than does a more impersonal approach.

One of the most frightening things about the recent recession and pending new one to large numbers of people was the destruction of their belief that “bad times” would never come back. As always, the working class are blamed for everything.

Capitalists do not invest in wealth production to give jobs to workers or to produce goods and services for needy people or to do any favours for anyone but themselves. To urge them to do so, as does the reformist Left, is like asking the Mafia to operate their criminal activities for the welfare of the public. In fact, a capitalist who ignored the aim of accumulating surplus value would soon go broke; this is true whether the role of the capitalist is played by an individual millionaire, a board of directors or the state. It is not part of the socialist ease against capitalism that it is objectionable because it is corrupt. Capitalism without corruption would be just as oppressive. The profit motive is not a liberating factor in production but one that stultifies production. The profit motive sets the limitations on what is possible in production and distribution. Against this end, the real material needs of the community take second place. Man under capitalism provides food, housing, clothing, health services, education, etc., within a tight economic framework conditioned by the prior requirements of profit. It is against this background that the enduring problems of society such as housing shortages, ugly urban environments and the fact that two-thirds of the world’s population do not get enough to eat must be understood.

Capitalism's politics seethes with organisations who trade on working class dissatisfaction with the system. Politics has plenty of people who attract brief attention with their baseless theories, write a book or two, pour out their anguished consciences in compelling speeches. Then reality strikes and the workers who were misled by them are left to still endure capitalism. What we want to change is immense. It’s getting rid of the whole structure. If we don’t use imagination nothing will change. Without change we will destroy the planet. The way things are organised is neither natural nor inevitable, but created by people. People have a wealth of skill, intelligence. creativity and wisdom. We could be devising ways of using and distributing the earth’s vast resources so that no one starves or lives in abject poverty, making socially useful things that people need — a society which is life-affirming in all its aspects.

The Scottish housing crisis

There are over 150,000 households on councils housing waiting lists in Scotland and 27,000 houses are long-term empty.

In 2014/15 there were 35,764 homelessness applications. There are 10,567 households, including 4,896 children, are living in temporary accommodation and 74,000 households are living in overcrowded conditions. 330,000 households now living in privately rented homes.

Shelter Scotland director Graeme Brown writes: “A good home is central to our wellbeing both as individuals and collectively as a nation. From improving our health outcomes to raising educational attainment, reducing reoffending and tackling inequality – all of these depend on whether or not people in Scotland have a decent home.”

Scotland risks creating a "generational gulf" between those with and without homes. Only the construction of at least 12,000 affordable homes every year for the next five could help bridge that gap, according to Shelter Scotland. Graeme Brown, explained: "Scotland's housing crisis risks creating a devastating generational gulf between the housing haves and the have nots. The high cost of housing and the stuttering supply of new affordable homes set against high and rising demand are at the heart of this crisis. Sadly, it is those on the lowest incomes and the most vulnerable people in our society who will bear the brunt of the housing crisis…” 

Back Where We Started

One reason for the above attitude is revealed in The Toronto Star, December 12. (read Pessimistic on this site) The article tells us that precarious work is now so common in the public sector that, in recent years, it has been the most unionized sector in the country. Now, this last bastion of long term jobs with benefits is disappearing. Although the provincial government vowed to tackle job insecurity, 44% of ministry postings in 2014 were for temporary positions. Province-wide, one third of all jobs are insecure. Of the 300 job postings for correctional officers, for example, not one single position was permanent. And so cutting off the workers from access to benefits and pensions. Some of the temporary jobs were for summer students and for workers to cover for things such as maternity leaves but the trend is quite clear – the public sector has taken a leaf from the private sector in reducing costs. 

So, we are getting back to where we started over one hundred years ago and start the fight for wages and benefits all over again, better, dump the whole wages system and substitute security for all. 

John Ayers.

We Wear the Badge of Socialist with Honour

Critiques of capitalism have been around since the beginning of capitalism yet mainstream society continues to operate as if “there is no alternative” to capitalism, but at the same time, the failures of capitalism are more evident than ever. Capitalism inevitably divides humanity through wars, racism, sexism, and class antagonism. Socialism not as an idealistic panacea but as 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. What’s crazier is to believe that capitalism can be saved by the capitalists themselves, like lions agreeing to hunt without claws. Since the poor are getting poorer and endless war is so good for business, war is destined to continue until the day the 99% rise up and crush the entire system of the 1% and create from the bottom up a new form of society. There is a pressing need to eliminate capitalism and replace it with a society of associated free producers oriented to the full development of human potential. It is needed because of capital’s drive to expand without limit threatens the destruction of the natural world. This means that the need to act is immediate. Certainly with the crisis of capitalism and ecological disaster in the not too distant future, the time is coming when to act may be too late.

History has amply demonstrated that the seizure of power by a tiny cabal, whether a political party or a clique of oligarchs, leads to despotism. Governments blindly serving their masters, acquiesce to the looting of state treasuries to bail out corrupt financial houses and banks while ignoring chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with stagnant or declining wages, crippling debt peonage, a collapsing infrastructure, and the millions left destitute and often homeless by deceptive mortgages and foreclosures. If we do not dismantle global capitalism we will descend into the chaos of failed states, mass migrations—which we are already witnessing—and endless war. Populations, especially in the global South, will endure misery and high mortality rates caused by collapsing ecosystems and infrastructures on a scale not seen since perhaps the black plague. There can be no accommodation with global capitalism. We will overthrow this system or be crushed by it. Socialists are unequivocal anti-militarists. They understand that there is no genuine social, political, economic or cultural reform as long as the militarists and their corporatist allies in the war industry continue to loot and pillage the state budget, leaving the poor to go hungry, workingmen and -women in distress, the infrastructure to collapse and social services to be slashed in the name of austerity.

Socialism is, above all, the movement of the working class for their own freedom and power in a full democracy. Karl Marx told exiled German revolutionaries in London in 1850 that the workers needed to form their own party to look out for their own interests:

“Even where there is no prospect whatsoever of them being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to bring before the public their own revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection, they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the Democratic Party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is infinitely more important than the disadvantages that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.”

Too many self-styled socialists have abandoned the socialist principle of independent political action. They argue instead that whether or not to support a Democrat or an independent candidate is a question of tactics, not principle. The political independence of the Socialist Party is a major reason why it was viable. Bernie Sanders has now gone into coalition with the billionaire class he professes to oppose and that finances the Democratic Party. Sanders won’t see the billionaire’s money. But he has made it crystal clear that he will support their candidate by promising to support the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination. Eugene Debs said:

“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. With either of those parties in power, one thing is always certain, and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle.”

 As Debs also explained:

“Where but to the Socialist Party can these progressive people turn? They are now without a party and the only genuine Democratic Party in the field is the Socialist Party, and every true Democrat should thank Wall Street for driving him out of a party that is democratic in name only, and into one that is democratic in fact.”

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders does a disservice to Debs’ legacy and his commitment to working-class political independence. By entering the Democratic primaries with the promise of supporting Clinton as the lesser evil to the Republicans, Sanders is not helping the working class to organize, speak and act for itself. By trying to get Democratic politicians to say and do what the left wants them to say and do, the left has been engaged in a pathetic and hopeless attempt at political ventriloquism. It is dependent politics, powerless politics.

Frederick Engels told socialists in the U.S. when the labor movement in New York City nominated the non-socialist but progressive reformer Henry George for mayor in 1886:

“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first program of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement–no matter in what form, so long as it is only their own movement–in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.”

We are ruled by so many “industrial complexes”—military, financial, energy, food, pharmaceutical, prison, and so on—that it is almost impossible to stay on top of every way we are getting screwed. The good news is that—either through independent media or our basic common sense—polls show that the majority of people know enough about the Afghanistan and Iraq and Syrian wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other corporate welfare to oppose these corporate policies. The elite’s money—and the influence it buys—is an extremely powerful weapon. So it is understandable that so many people who are defeated and demoralized focus on their lack of money rather than on their lack of morale. However, we must keep in mind that in war, especially in a class war when one’s side lacks financial resources, morale becomes even more crucial. Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies, victimization and oppression don’t set people free to take action. We as individuals or a society eat crap for too long, we become psychologically too weak to take action. Other observers of subjugated societies have recognized this phenomenon of subjugation resulting in demoralisation and fatalism, what Bob Marley called “mental slavery.” One should not be ashamed of having previously believed in capitalism lies; and it also helps to forgive and have compassion for those who continue to believe them. The liars we face are often quite good at lying. It helps to have a sense of humor about one’s predicament, to nurture respectful relationships, and to take advantage of a lucky opportunity—often created by the abuser’s arrogance— when it presents itself. Without individual self-respect, people do not believe that they are worthy of power or capable of utilizing power wisely, and they accept as their role being a subject of power. Without collective self-confidence, people do not believe they can succeed in wresting power away from their rulers. There are “democracy battlefields” —in our schools, workplace and elsewhere—where such respect and confidence can be regained every day. No democratic movement succeeds without determination, courage, and solidarity, but modern social scientists routinely ignore such non-quantifiable important variables, and so those trained only in universities and not on the streets can become blind to the most important meanings of human existence. A sign hanging in Albert Einstein’s office stated: “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Antonio Gramsci talked about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” This means that we should have the courage to look our social problems fully in the face and understand just how huge are the problems that we are up against. And yet, the second part of that means that we need to look for the places where a difference can be made, and put our hearts into those cracks and fissures. 

We need to hold in our hearts the possibility of a better world, not because we have candy-coated the problems or lied about what we can accomplish, but because we know that we do often win and make a difference, and that all the good things we have in the world are the results of those who have had the courage and commitment to have done this work before us.  We never really know until it happens whether or not we are living in that time when historical variables are creating opportunities for seemingly impossible change. Thus, we must prepare ourselves by battling each day in all our activities to regain individual self-respect, collective self-confidence, determination, courage, and solidarity. The way we get past capitalism is by building on the healthy non-capitalist aspects of our world while we also do pitched battle with the capitalist ones that we have a fair chance of winning against. Yes it is true that pro-capitalist forces have a lot of power. But so did slave-holding racists. We give ourselves hope.

The World Cup Comes to Glasgow

The Homeless World Cup will be played in Glasgow for the first time this summer. Edinburgh hosted the event in 2005 and Scotland's men's team won the trophy in 2007 and 2011.

The football tournament for men and women who have no fixed address will run for seven days from 10 July. Entry is free and tickets are not required.

George Square will be transformed into three football pitches with seating for an estimated 100,000 spectators.

A total of 51 countries are expected to take part in the competition, which first took place in Graz, Austria in 2003.

Pessimisic

A new poll by Fusion 2016 claims that young workers today are more pessimistic than those surveyed in 1986 (and they have good reason to be). 29% today, compared to 12% in 1986, felt that the American dream 'is not really alive', while 70% of whites without college degrees said the dream has become harder to achieve. Young Americans of colour showed no change responding to the same question despite the fact that median household income for whites age 25-34 was $58,197 compared to $43,957 for blacks. John Ayers

Environmental Damage

The November 21st issue of The Toronto Star contained three separate articles dealing with environmental damage. The new evidence from the Amazon rainforest, receding sea ice due to global warming forcing polar bears onto land where they may become a danger to humans, and vice versa. Rising sea levels are threatening to put the island of Diamniadio, off the coast of Senegal, under water. Thousand who live on the island aren't merely seeing their way of life threatened but their own safety. There is no hope that the powers in charge will be galvanized into any meaningful action. Profits have to be made quickly for them to survive in business, regardless of the long term impacts. That could well mean the extinction of us all, including the rich. John Ayers