Lunatic Economy

Here's another marker of capitalism – the same issue of the paper reported on Donald Trump and his former debt. In 1991, Trump had $900 million in personal liabilities and his corporate debt ran into the billions. The New York Times noted, "Having billions of dollars of debt is a powerful bargaining chip." 

One could only say that in a lunatic economy! 

John Ayers.

Pimping for Capitalism

"I love my country too much to be a nationalist" - Albert Camus

It is rare to meet anyone whose world view is not framed by nationalism in one way or another. This is hardly surprising. The world is constructed on national lines: nation states, national languages, national education systems and national laws. And from a very early age, we are taught about our shared national culture and encouraged to embrace “national identity”. We reflexively support “our” country, “our” military, “our” national sporting teams. Nationalism is not a coherent argument. Nor could it be, because, while the sentiment is in part a reflection of how the world is structured, its purpose is to obscure, rather than clarify, the nature of society.

“National interest” and “European unity” are disguises donned by various vying groups of capitalists in order to lead the workers to abandon resolute defense of their own interests.  The working class has no interest in strengthening its own class enemy whether it is those defending “national sovereignty” or those who call for a stronger European “superstate”. Virtually every political party, regardless of ideological stripe, has to varying degrees been complicit in the closing of minds. Even the Left, can maintain a deafening silence when unpopular views and ideas are under attack. Nationalism is the natural enemy of dissent. Nationalist thinking lies at the heart of the difficulties in managing the migration crisis. Nationalism is an outdated idea, a relic from bygone times. We are living in a globalised age, where collaboration between people across the geographies is what’s helping us solve problems of poverty and disease etc. The evolution of human civilisation is about discovering that there is more to the world than what our ancestors believed. In such a context, we should be looking for ways to connect through concepts of shared values, rather than shared national identity. We need to look beyond our borders to allow a free flow of ideas, no matter how much they offends some people and as long as they don’t call for violence. We need to shed the idea of nationalism.

We have a Hungary whose Prime Minister says he intends to build an “illiberal state,” a Czech President who attends anti-Muslim rallies with the far right, a Polish leadership that declares the media should do the government’s bidding, and a Slovak neo-nazi prime minister. There has been an upswing in xenophobic rhetoric and oligarchs are capturing politics and media. In Czech politics is the rise of Andrej Babiš, the second richest man in the country. He founded his own political party ANO in 2011, “to fight corruption and other ills in the country’s political system.” He is now Finance Minister in the coalition government and bought a significant percentage of Czech media. There are worrying trends in Germany too. Launched at the end of 2014, the social movement “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West” (Pegida), quickly gained momentum, especially in its birthplace of Dresden and other east German cities such as Leipzig. Pegida’s demonstrations against the perceived Islamisation of Germany, have attracted tens of thousands of protestors. Pegida especially benefited from the refugee crisis, but wasn’t the only far-right movement to do so: the right-wing populist “Alternative for Germany” has now become the third most popular party in the country, and will likely enter the Bundestag after the federal elections in 2017.

Nationalism should be placed alongside a range of other taken-for-granted capitalist ideas. It is part of the reflection in people’s consciousnesses of the experience of living in a capitalist world. Just as living under capitalism makes the great mass of people take for granted that commodity production, alienated wage labour and competition are more common than co-operation, so it makes them take for granted the necessity of the nation state. And nationalist consciousness makes sense so long as they do not challenge the system as a whole. As the rich of every country get richer, they are forcing a race to the bottom on the rest of us. Everywhere, workers are being told to expect less, not more, to work harder and longer with fewer social protections and a continually eroded welfare state. The super-wealthyhave constructed their own way of life that excludes workers. Those at the top – whether Chinese, US or British capitalists, top government bureaucrats from poor African states or Middle Eastern oil sheiks – stay in the same international hotels, enjoy meals from the same top restaurants, live in similarly fortified gated palatial estates and send their children to elite private schools where they mix with others of the same class background. At the same time, workers around the world today more than ever share similar conditions of life: tempos of work, patterns of consumption, forms of recreation and leisure, increasingly cut across the old national barriers. Struggles between workers and bosses in one country often combine with struggles in other countries.

If we want to overcome the real divisions between rich and poor, we need to break down the invented divisions between peoples across the globe. Marx and Engels recognised that “working men have no country” and it was a call for overcoming division and uniting working people across borders. No one would suggest that this is an easy task. But all workers have an interest in adopting this spirit, rather than succumbing to nationalist arguments. Working people often will find that their views accord with those of other workers of different nationalities around the world. Starving people could be fed by mobilising the world’s extensive transport networks to get the 1.3 billion tonnes of food that are produced each year to those who need it. There is no technological or logistical barrier to this: every day McDonalds already supplies millions of Big Macs and fries to its 35,000 outlets in 118 countries without too much trouble. But because there’s no money to be made in getting food to poor people, it doesn’t happen. In terms of climate change sufficient wind farms and solar panels to supply the world’s energy needs. These could be built in a matter of months if there was the political will. Poverty could be alleviated without too much trouble in a socialist society. We need to resurrect Marx and Engels’ call to arms: “Workers of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

Introducing the Socialist Party (short version)

Socialism is common-sense

Commodity prices wobble and economic disaster looms. We have been here before, if we could but remember. We are not the first – or the last – to feel that market is beyond our ken and beyond our control but which shape the realities of our daily lives. We live in an impoverished age. Not only a relative and extreme material poverty but a poverty of ideas, a poverty of possibilities. We need to exert democratic control over the complex economic activity that governs our lives. Poverty is almost like a prison, where freedom of choice is heavily constrained, surveillance and monitoring is endless, social services’ red-tape directs daily life, “professionals” act with authoritarian condescension and criminal anti-social behaviour and criminal fraud being assumed. Many see people in poverty and seek to try to help. Others, though, see people suffering from poverty and seek to profit. Making money off poor people is a booming business.

Members of the Socialist Party are “commoners”, advocates for common ownership of the means of production and distribution such as factories and transport. We seek the democratic association of society, based on the self-organisation of people. Our perspective is the view of human society that is for the shared good – a commonwealth – which we shall shape together to satisfy our needs. However, at present, humanity seems to be very distant from this aspiration. The Socialist Party is a democratic organisation of people united on certain basic beliefs. The Socialist Party has always held that the widest possible discussion of conflicting views is desirable. Our case for socialism is based on the proposition that the socialist-conscious working class, once they want to change society, are capable of establishing a Socialist system and running it without any orders from above. In other words, will run society without leaders, bosses, managers or any Party claiming to speak for them or represent "their interests". Socialism means no more elitism. The view that workers can only learn the futility of reformism or the limitations of trade unionism by their own personal experience is not one we fully concur with. We point out that by far the greater part of what people knew came from being taught the experiences of others. Of course, strictly speaking this learning is also experience. The task of the Socialist Party is to see that hearing or reading the socialist case is part of workers’ experience. It is not just experience of factory life (after all many workers do not work in factories), but of generally having to live on a wage or salary and all the problems which lack of money brings in housing, education, health, transport and the rest. It is their general social experience, rather than their narrow experience at the point of production, that can bring workers to a socialist understanding.

The idea of socialism as a solution to working class problems arises out of capitalism partly because it is the solution and partly because people’s experience of capitalism teaches them that it is. The role of a socialist party, at the present time, is to put socialist ideas before the working class to ensure that hearing the socialist ease is a part of their experience. This is our participation, as a party, in the class struggle. Later a socialist party will be the instrument which the working class can use to win power for socialism and will disappear as soon as socialism has been established.

Members of the Socialist Party, as workers, are engaged in the day-to-day struggle to live under capitalism. They could not avoid this even if they wanted to. In so far as this struggle is organised our members are active mainly in the trade unions but also in unofficial workers committees, tenants associations and  environmental anti-pollution groups. We see it as having the practical aim of protecting workers’ living and working conditions under capitalism. The effectiveness of this struggle, we might add, is limited not only by the economic workings of capitalism but also by the ideas of the workers involved (which is why the spread of socialist ideas, in which we are engaged, helps the day-to-day struggle.) If we are to appreciate how the revolution in ideas (a necessary precondition of the social revolution) will occur, we must first rid ourselves of the simplistic fallacy that people change their minds only when they burn their fingers.

Under capitalism production is not just a technical question; it is also a question of exploitation. Thus, in varying proportions, a manager’s function is partly technical and partly disciplinary (“order-giving”, as some put it). In socialist society production will just be a technical question; there will be no “discipline”. Work will be voluntary and democratically-controlled — though of course we cannot now give a blueprint of the way this will be done. The division between “order-givers” and “order-takers” arises out of the capitalist exploitation of the workers through the wages system. This is why genuine democratic control of work demands the abolition of the market and working for wages. To retain these is to retain the same economic pressures on the workers even if exercised through a workers’ management committee rather than a capitalist-appointed manager.

Socialists are hardened by now to meeting the opinion that the system of production for profit is essentially sane and efficient. The opposite is true. Capitalism wastes its wealth and its abilities. The profit motive cannot work efficiently. Capitalism cannot cater for the needs of its people. It produces waste and it produces want and both are profitable only to the minority who hold positions of privilege. This is now a world of potential plenty. Yet all but a few are deprived in some way and many starve. Common sense would suggest that, to take full advantage of this world-wide productive system, it should be owned and controlled as a unit. That it should belong in common to all mankind and be controlled by them for their own benefit. But of course, this is not so. The means and instruments for producing wealth are not owned in common by us all. They are the property of a few. Nor are they used to make what we need. They are used to make things to be sold. This is what is behind the paradox of waste amidst want.

The truth about Trump

In this race for the White House, Trump, the billionaire, is the candidate who reminds us that money has the magical power of turning things into their opposites. 

“Gold! Yellow, glittering, precious gold”, can, as Shakespeare said, “make black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.” 

The person without artistic taste can buy and hang pictures in his mansion, or put them in a safety vault, while the creator and the genuine appreciator cannot view or enjoy them. 

The meanest scoundrel can purchase admiration from sycophants while worthy individuals go scorned and unnoticed. 

Under capitalism, where everything enters the field of exchange and becomes the object of buying and selling, a man’s worth comes to be estimated, not by his really praiseworthy abilities or actions, but by his bank account. A man is “worth” what he owns and a millionaire is “worth” incomparably more than a pauper.

 Isn’t this the message we receive from the Trump campaign as he tries to buy the presidency? 

Socialise Our Democracy

What is socialism? If we are socialists, what are we actually fighting for? The aim of socialism is to take the means of production and distribution out of the hands of the capitalist class and place them into the hands of the people. This aim is sometimes spoken of as common ownership. This should be distinguished from ‘public ownership’ or nationalisation or municipalisation which is the ownership, i.e. the right of disposal, by a public body representing ‘society’, by government, state power or local authority or some other political body. The persons forming this body, the ministers, civil service department heads, appointed managers, are the direct masters of the production apparatus; they direct and regulate the process of production; they command the workers. Common ownership is the right of disposal by the workers themselves; the working class itself — taken in the widest sense of all that partake in really productive work, including employees, farmers, scientists — is direct master of the production apparatus, managing, directing, and regulating the process of production which is, indeed, their common work. Under ‘public ownership’ or ‘state ownership’ the workers are not masters of their work; they may be better treated and their wages may be higher than under private ownership; but they are still exploited. Exploitation does not mean simply that the workers do not receive the full produce of their labor; a considerable part must always be spent on the production apparatus and for unproductive though necessary departments of society. Exploitation consists in that others, forming another class, dispose of the produce and its distribution; that they decide what part shall be assigned to the workers as wages, what part they retain for themselves and for other purposes. Under public ownership this belongs to the regulation of the process of production, which is the function of the bureaucracy. This was the case in the old Soviet Union where bureaucracy was the ruling class, the masters of production. Those who work the most and hardest are still deprived of all say in the organisation of their industry, just the same as in all private enterprises. Working people, which means the vast majority of people, should rule society in their own interests. Socialism unleashes the creativity of working people, who are capable of tremendous advances when not toiling under a system of exploitation.

One of the most significant signs of our times is the readiness with which the capitalist class turns to schemes of State ownership and control, for relief from the economic pressure under which it is struggling. We had Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland being taken over by the government but there has been many more examples before them. Therefore, to repeat, state ownership and control is not socialism. What we merely have a trend towards state capitalism, a despotism that might be worse for the workers than the status quo. State capitalism’s control of the industry will not make it any less ugly than it is under ‘free enterprise’capitalism. Indeed, the direct intervention of the government in its affairs will increase workers’ difficulties. Reforms galore are, of course, promised by the left-wing and right-wings of capitaism, but when it comes to carrying them out, that will be a different question. Reforms that are out-with the framework of capitalism, under the pressures of big business and capitalist reality, are dropped and reversed. Socialists are alert, however, in pointing out the great distinction between "government" or "public" ownership and “common” ownership or “collective” ownership in reiterating the socialist demand for the complete social ownership of all the means of production and distribution as the only cure for the evils of the competitive system. Another way of expressing the socialist aim is to call for a cooperative commonwealth by democratic means of a cooperative commonwealth in which the supplying of human needs and enrichment of human life shall be the primary purpose of our society. Such an economy will yield the maximum of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs.  

The Socialist Party aims to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social system from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality will be possible. The present order is marked by glaring inequalities of wealth and opportunity, by chaotic waste and instability; and in an age of plenty it condemns the great mass of the people to poverty and insecurity. Power has become more and more concentrated into the hands of a small irresponsible minority of financiers and industrialists and to their predatory interests the majority are habitually sacrificed. When private profit is the main stimulus to economic effort, our society oscillates between periods of feverish prosperity in which the main benefits go to speculators and profiteers, and of catastrophic depression, in which the common man's normal state of insecurity and hardship is accentuated. We believe that these evils can be removed only in a planned and socialised economy in which our natural resources and means of production and distribution are owned, controlled and operated by the people.

The Socialist Party will not rest content until every person in all other lands is able to enjoy equality and freedom, a sense of human dignity, and an opportunity to live a rich and meaningful life as a citizen of a free and peaceful world. This social and economic transformation can be brought about by political action. We consider that the other political parties are the instruments of capitalist interests and cannot serve as agents of social reconstruction, and that whatever the superficial differences between them, they are bound to carry on government in accordance with the dictates of the big business interests who finance them. The Socialist Party aims at political power in order to put an end to this capitalist domination of our political life. It appeals for support to all who believe that the time has come for a far-reaching reconstruction of our economic and political institutions and who are willing to work together to end capitalism.

Switching Water Sources!

In Flint, Michigan, the city decided to switch water sources from the Detroit system to use the Flint River instead for financial reasons. Unfortunately, there was inadequate water treatment for water from the river and lead leached from the old pipes. Officials of the city were aware of the problem long before it became obvious but kept quiet! Not surprisingly, lead levels in children were found to be elevated. Municipal services around the world continue to deteriorate while profits continue to rise. 

In other words, our economy is ever larger and the portion going to the vast majority is ever smaller. 

John Ayers.

Living In A Gas Chamber

Maybe not an overstatement – The Toronto Star (Jan 2 2016) contained an article, "In China, India, Pollution is the Price of Growth." New Delhi's highest court gave a directive on December 3, ordering the Indian capital to immediately devise a plan to reduce severe levels of air pollution in the city, saying, "It seems like we are living in a gas chamber." 

In China, an estimated 1.6 million die prematurely each year from air pollution, or 4,400 people a day, seventeen per cent of all deaths. 

John Ayers

Introducing the Socialist Party (video)

For people who want to change the world

The American presidential election process is an elaborate, staged event which creates the sense that opposition is futile. It is corporate brainwashing many times a day telling us that we are powerless and the Party machines are invincible. We are presented with two oppressors and our choice is the lesser evil of the two.  It is time to stand up and fight for the greater good. Someday, people tell us, we will have socialism, but the world and its people are not ready for it yet. They argue with us that they are being “realistic.” We say they’re not being realistic; they’re being idiotic. That their position isn’t even coherent. Other critics of our position are merely cynics. The cynic thinks everyone is stupid. They accuse their fellow workers of never being ready for socialism because they’re mean spirited as well as stupid. They don’t want other people to have decent lives, they want people to suffer, they want it so much that they will allow that desire to over-ride their own individual self-interest. Most people don’t realise the socialist ideas they oppose are in their own interest. Believing that one day we will get socialism even though people who like the idea but nevertheless are unwilling to vote for the Socialist Party is not simply unrealistic – it’s fantastic. It’s downright delusional. For the proponents of lesser evilism, winning is everything. There is hardly anything more shameful after all, than losing. Even cheating is acceptable if the cheater manages to win. Lesser evil supporters are cowards, people who are incapable of seeing the incoherence in voting for someone who opposes things they profess to want, while persisting in believing that we will one day get these things anyway, without having to vote for the party who seeks them. If people want socialism, then they’re going to have to vote for candidates who advocate it, rather than for candidates who oppose it. It takes more than one person or one party to change the world.

The vision of the world’s future appears completely dystopian and has descended into the dark abyss where the unimaginable has become imaginable. The politics of terror and the culture of fear legitimises the militarization and regimentation of public life and society and fosters the criminalisation of social problems. Brutal modern-day capitalism has released corporate and military power and throughout the globe we witness particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regimes of oppression. The planet itself is now under threat. Capitalism has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit of material wealth. Capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. Money now engulfs everything in this new age of disposability. Moreover, when coupled with a weakening of movements to counter the generated power of capitalists, the result has been a startling increase in the influence of predatory capitalism, along with inequities in wealth, income, power, and opportunity. Such power breeds anti-democratic tendencies. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable. Concentration of wealth and income generate power for the financial elite. Capitalists are no longer willing to compromise and have expanded their use of power to dominate economic, political, and social life. There is the deepening of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the working class to the ranks of the precariat. The emergence of new technologies create a large pool of more or less unemployed people. Moreover, as new technologies is also is being used as a repressive tool. Capitalism is a pathological economy. It creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos buttressed by a discourse that is morally insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a hatred of those whose labor cannot be exploited, do not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are considered other by virtue of their race, class, and ethnicity. Capitalism is slavery, exploitative usury of labor to enrich capital holders via violence and subjugation of people, nations and the globe. ALL capitalism is predatory violence, wasteful production and consumption and human subjugation.

There is no need to attach an adjective to the word "Capitalism", as in "Casino Capitalism" "Crony Capitalism", "Neo-Liberal Capitalism", "Financial Capitalism", "Disaster Capitalism", "Shock Capitalism", "Unregulated Capitalism", "Private-Equity Capitalism," or that old standby, "Greedy Capitalism". It is Capitalism, pure and simple, and there can be no confusion. What we see is what it is. Capitalism has brought depression and fragmentation. The idea of capitalism is force fed to all of us at the same level of religion. It's never associated with war, exploitation, oppression, lack of opportunity, discrimination or poverty. It's sold to us as the producer of peace, prosperity and plenty. Instead of bringing democracy and prosperity to the world, it has wrecked societies where they hung on by a fingernail. No extended criticism is needed because criticism itself - social, political, and economic - has become a criticism of capitalism. It has been this way for a long time. In the 19th century, capitalism was that which ripped small holders from the land, chained children to machinery, and pushed entire populations, on threat of extinction, across the surface of the earth. They told you that capitalism changed? They lied. There are no forms of capitalism that aren't damaging to society. There is no such thing as “Compassionate Capitalism”.

Our socialist goal is what some have called the “community of goods”; everything is to be made common property, everything will be everybody’s. “The association of free men who work with the means of production and who employ, following a concerted plan, their numerous individual forces as a single force of social labor … the work of freely associated men who act consciously and are masters of their own social activity”; “free and equal association of the producers”; such was for Marx and Engels the form of socialism. Association—this is the key word of socialism: individuals, instead of acting, as in capitalism, each for himself, associate with one another for the purposes of common labour. This simple definition of socialism already allows it to be distinguished from certain false socialisms. The variety of “self-management socialism” making the workers the owners of the enterprise has no trace in the Marxist conception of any kind of “communitarian social order.” It has changed nothing: the enterprise is still autonomous, and therefore competes with other enterprises in the same sector; for this reason, it is the market rather than a “concerted plan” that regulates production, and is therefore subject to all the fluctuations of the market; finally, as in capitalism, there will be enterprises that will be “winners” (the workers in the competitive enterprises) and “losers” (the workers in the less profitable enterprises who will be laid off). This is not socialism: there is no real association of producers that supersedes the limits of the enterprise.

The other major type of false socialism is the one that, for its part, also expropriates the owners of the enterprises, but this time in favor of a State outside the control of the workers. This State is in the hands of a State bourgeoisie that, by enjoying a de facto possession of the means of production, decides what must be produced and in what quantity, while also imposing the logic of profit. Such a bourgeoisie undoubtedly plans production, but not in order to satisfy the needs of the workers, but for the purpose of capital accumulation, by means of the systematic exploitation of the workers’ labor power. Such a system, which makes the nationalization of the economy synonymous with “socialism”, was already denounced in his time by Engels as a false socialism, because, as he wrote, “the transformation into State property does not suppress the character of the productive forces as capital”. But it is quite clear that Engels had not yet seen anything like State capitalism. This was to be established on a grand scale during the 20th century in the Soviet Union. If socialism is undoubtedly a planned economic system, this cannot be confused with State management of production that escapes the will of the workers: “. . . united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production....”

If the form assumed by socialism is an “association of producers”, its content is production that is not undertaken for the market. Since the goal of production will not be profit, that is, money and capital, but the satisfaction of human needs, it is clear that the market will no longer have any reason to exist: the market is not, as it seems at first sight, the showcase of use values offered to the customer, but the network of sales that allow the surplus value seized from the workers in production to be realized in its money form by means of the sale of commodities; in other words, the market is the place where capital realizes its profit, since use values are nothing for capital but exchange values. Hence, Marx explains “within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production the producers do not exchange their products; similarly the labor spent on the products no longer appears as the value of these products....” Engels was just as explicit: “The seizure of the means of production by society eliminates commodity production and with it the domination of the product over the producer. The anarchy within social production is replaced by consciously planned organization.” From this point on, if the producers do not exchange their products and do not have to measure their exchange value, it is clear that socialism has suppressed money.

Running Out Of Breath

A member recently attended a party where a guest was showing on his computer that, because of the CO2 we are putting in the atmosphere, the air could be unbreatheable in fifty years (try telling that to the inhabitants of Beijing or New Delhi – its unbreatheable now!) 

It may have been an overstatement but the message is clear – abolish capitalism before it abolishes humanity! 

John Ayers.

Train For No Job?

An SPCer recently asked a friend whose daughter had graduated from Ryerson University, Toronto, how she was doing. He said she works in human resources and is the only one in her department that the company has not yet fired. Each individual is required to train someone in India through the internet to do their job. When training is completed, the trainer is fired. However, the company isn't all bad – they send the ex-employee home in a taxi. 

The moral is to expect the worst under capitalism and it will happen! 

John Ayers.

The Need for a New Economic System

We have imprisoned ourselves by not looking at making the post-capitalist commonly owned future. It is a question of seizing the present ownership and control of the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth, in combination with production for sale on a market, in conditions of waged-slavery, for the immense majority, from minority, private, corporate or state ownership and control. By making them the common property of all, with production for use, in conditions of democratic re callable delegated organisation with free access and doing away with wages and prices altogether, whether social wages or any other rationing of access we can make a society of relative superabundance. It is in our own hands. We don't need leaders to lead us up the garden path, but thinkers. We have a world to win.

Capitalism cannot be made nicer and reforms will always be clawed back as the busts are just as much a part of capitalism as the booms. Unions are a part of capitalism. Necessary though they are, they are not yet revolutionary until we become revolutionary, in our outlook and begin to realise the building of the post-capitalist future we wish to see. We need to move to a genuine commonly owned society, not some top down nationalised statist relic of the past, retaining waged slavery, but one where all wealth production and distribution is for use and owned in common, not privately, by corporations or by the state, with democratic control of resources in conditions of free access. Real common ownership is effectively non ownership. In a production for use society money will be redundant, as wages and prices are a part of the market system of production for sale. Money will be unnecessary in a commonly owned, post-capitalist, production for use society.

Away with your capitalist catechism of received absolute truths. Capitalism inevitably divides humanity through wars, racism, sexism, and class antagonism Poverty, absolute and relative, is entrenched within the capitalist system in the enrichment and service of the economic parasite capitalist class whose watchword is Accumulate, accumulate!. War in capitalism, is 'business by other means', a consequence of capitalist competition, and arises out of competition between rival capitalist entities organised in nations, trade blocs, spheres of geo-political interest in the battle for , raw materials, securing of trade routes and economic and politically dominant privilege to further, all those ends. Nothing is forever, there is no absolute truth, social systems come and go, just as chattel slavery gave way to feudalism and feudalism in turn was superseded by capitalism , so too will capitalism's obsolete excrescence of waged slavery perish in arrival of its post-capitalist nemesis. The revolutionary antithesis of capitalism is a post-capitalist society, 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.

The post-capitalist revolution will be the task of the immense majority, using the flawed , 'representative' democratic means available, (democracy, capitalism's Achilles heel, if you like) to usher in the new society and as it is a commonly owned one, seizing all the advances of capitalist technology and communications structures, with an educated, politically aware working class, (who already run capitalism from top to bottom) then proceeding to delegatory democracy, without ruling elites with free access to the social product, we eliminate the flaws which characterized minority led revolution. We have a productive capacity capable of feeding clothing and sheltering and protecting all of the inhabitants of this planet in conditions of superabundance deployed in the service of a minority parasite class. Capitalism is based on exploitation, on paying workers less than the value they produce, and pocketing the difference, the surplus value.

Wee Matt

The Rich Lie, the Poor Die

Britain's oldest socialist party (SPGB) has always thrown open their platform to debate with opponents however distasteful their views. Over the decades we have challenged the British Union of Fascists, the National Front and the British National Party on the platform.

The idea that immigrants can only have a negative effect on wages and living standards is a common one. Nigel Harris in ‘The New Untouchables’ quotes research that argues that ‘modern econometrics cannot find a single shred of evidence that immigrants have an adverse impact on the earnings and job opportunities of natives of the United States’. And he gives the example of the Los Angeles economy which expanded in the 1970s, largely as the result of increased demand caused by legal and illegal immigration.

Likewise the increase in immigration in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s did not lead to increased unemployment – rather the massive explosion in unemployment levels in the 1970s and beyond was caused by the boom-bust cycle of the capitalist system itself. Secondly, immigrants and refugees are not a drain on the social security system – in fact, as Harris shows, they contribute far more to the ‘system’ than they receive in return. Whether you look at Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain in the 1960s, few of which drew retirement pensions, or whether you take Mexican migrants to California, where a 1980 study found that less than 5 percent received any assistance from welfare services, and in all sectors, except education, they paid far more than they received – a net balance sheet shows that the ‘host’ nation gains far more than it gives in return.

Furthermore, migration has another very favourable benefit for the ruling class in the ‘host’ country – namely that they don’t have to contribute to the cost of raising and educating the immigrant worker.

It is the system of capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and crumbling health services, – not workers, be they ’indigenous’ or foreign. The bosses hope to keep the worst-off sections of workers fighting with each other over shrinking pieces of a small pie instead of uniting to fight for a decent life for all.

The rationale of immigration control is that such chauvinist legislation is founded on the nation state and the feverish competition in which that nation state is engaged. It splits and divides workers from their main objectives, and, in the long run, weakens their strength all over the world. It cannot be contemplated by a world socialist. The only possible attitude of progressive workers, is opposition to immigration control. We have to reject all laws that divide the working class into legals and illegals. It is the height of treachery to our class and we would do well to remember that the working class stretches far beyond Britain’s borders. It is blatant racism, and opportunism to opt for a policy of blaming the immigrant for all British workers’ woes, even if this will strike a chord with the basest instincts of many workers.

War and poverty existed before capitalism but the forms they take are different. They were previously as likely to be waged by the ruling class themselves, participating in dynastic conquest and getting arrows in their eye, or rewarded with kingdoms.

The means of eliminating poverty did not exist then, so famine and shortages will have a bearing upon the precarious state of the largely peasant population, but they would have had their own parcels of land or commons, upon which they could subsist. Capitalism was an advance upon this, as it made possible the vast production capacity upon which we can presently draw, but it is stifled within its potential by private, corporate and state ownership of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, with its market system dictating production for profit for the benefit of the new aristocracy, the capitalist class. This is also further exacerbated by the need for waged-slavery, to keep the wealth being produced by the productive underclass, from whom all wealth springs, they can only gain access to a waged ration of the social product in order to keep them showing up for employment. Therefore exploitation takes place at the point of production. Poverty inevitable as a consequence. This is further exacerbated by the intense competition between rival capitalists over market share, leading to alternating booms and busts of the business cycle. Leads to lay-offs with the capitalist taking the spoils and the worker subsisting upon whatever hand-outs, he has won during the boom times from capitalist government. Thus poverty, absolute and relative, is entrenched within the capitalist system in the enrichment and service of the economic parasite capitalist class, whose watchword is Accumulate, accumulate!.

However, war in capitalism, is 'business by other means', a consequence of capitalist competition, and arises out of competition between rival capitalist entities organised in nations, trade blocs, spheres of geo-political interest in the battle for , raw materials, securing of trade routes and economic and politically dominant privilege to further, all those ends.  The nature of war has changed in this regards. The last two world wars evidence of this decadence of capitalism, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the 'good guys', for the sake of science.

War and poverty are 'essential' features of capitalism. Socialism is a post-capitalist system which has still to be brought into being.

Wee Matt

More Water Crisis

In Western China, scientists are busy tracking the melt rate of the Mengke glacier. Between 2005 and 2014, the glacier melted 16.5 meters a year, twice the average rate of the previous decade. This is causing the opposite effect to that in Iran, i.e., too much water causing floods, erosion, and mud slides. Temperatures in China are expected to rise 1.3 to 5 degrees Celcius by the end of the century, faster than the global average. Between 2008 and 2010, sixty-two per cent of Chinese cities experienced flooding.

As above, the solution is well beyond the scope of one country. 

John Ayers.

Water Crisis

While business interests may be salivating over Iran's re-emergence into the world economic community, especially over oil and the aircraft industry, a large area in southern Iran is experiencing a severe seven-year drought. Seventy per cent of Iran's ground water has been used up in the last fifty years and drying rivers and desertification of lakes is common.

 While much will be made of the oil and its potential for profit, little seems to be done about the water crisis. It is a problem that needs urgent world-wide attention, the type of solutions that can never materialize in a divided and competitive world. 

John Ayers.

A Movement for the Many

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor" - Voltaire

Why should workers, who produce all the wealth in the world be denied the right to go where they please to engage in economic activity, or be restricted in their movements, while the parasite capitalist class can export their capital or exploit workers in wealth making opportunities for their self-enrichment, anywhere they damn well please without let or hindrance? Why should workers on benefits (reserve army of wage-enslaved labour for future exploitation by the capitalist class) have to jump through bureaucratic red-taped hoops, for the basic human need of a place to live, while the capitalist parasite class can have luxury homes all over the world? Why should the world’s workers, who produce all of the wealth, have to put up with inferior housing, while the leeching class live in mansions? Immigration is hardly the reason why governments, Labour and Tory stopping building council houses and encouraging their sale, with no 'like for like' new builds.  Immigrants are not the cause of the housing crisis. They suffer the consequences just the same as we all do. The problem is capitalism's production for sale with private, corporate and state ownership of resources by the minority global and national capitalist parasite class. Food, housing, heating and clothing could be freely available as tap water used to be in a sane, democratic, production for use, free access, commonly owned post-capitalist society. We should not need to afford housing. It is a human need and should be a right.

The immigrant workers are not scabs. It is the system of capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and crumbling health services, – not workers, be they ’indigenous’ or foreign. The bosses hope to keep the worst-off sections of workers fighting with each other over shrinking pieces of a small pie instead of uniting to fight for a decent life for all. Workers have no country. We have a world to win. Every country now is part of an integrated global economy and class structure. It is the capitalist class's country and the capitalist class's world. Before anything constructive can be done, capitalism must go and, with it, the artificial division of the world into separate, competing states. This leads inevitably to war, when the capitalist parasitic class thieves fall out. (Business by other means). War and poverty are inevitable concomitants of capitalism. We need to abolish the out-moded and old-fashioned division of the world into nation-states. Instead we need to cooperate on a world basis to meet our material needs and energy requirements. Capitalism must go and workers must make it go. A plague on all parties who wish to retain capitalism. Only workers themselves can bring to fruition the post-capitalist revolution of free-access, delegated democracy, production for use, a price-free, wageless, moneyless, society. Business is not 'people friendly'. Real socialism will do away with the business of exploiting workers in return for a wage or salary and channeling profits to the few.

Socialism should be hostile to all the parties of capitalism, Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Tartan or whatever flag they drape over their wage-slavery administration exploitative activities. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It comes into the world oozing blood form every pore. Dissolve all government 'over' you and elect yourselves into common ownership and democratic control over all the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. Don't whinge that life is not fair. Instead organise with fellow workers worldwide for the overthrow the capitalist system before we sleep-walk into the next world war. There will be no government over people in the post-capitalist commonly owned world. This is an essential feature of minority ownership in capitalist class society. In a classless, commonly owned society, government ceases to exist as an oppressive necessity, loses this feature and becomes an administration of resources. People will organise wealth production and distribution themselves, locally, regionally and globally. In a real delegatory democracy rather than a representative government on behalf of a ruling elites. All wealth will spring, as it does presently, from labour. The difference will be as it is a production for use society, utilising the technological potential capacity of the present, to produce a superabundance of necessities, instead of rationing it, stifling production through the market necessity to profit for a few. There will be no means of exchange as markets cease to exist, when all wealth is owned in common.

The socialist alternative to the profit system is:

• common ownership: no individuals or groups of individuals have property rights over the natural and industrial resources needed for production.

• democratic control: everybody has an equal say in the way things are run including work, not just the limited political democracy we have today.

• production for use: goods and services produced directly to meet people's needs, not for sale on a market or for profit.

• free access: all of us have access to what we require to satisfy our needs, not rationed as today by the size of our pay-cheque or state hand-out.

The lesson in the ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ by Robert Tressell, is we workers need to combine, stop being slavishly philanthropic and providing the wealth for a parasitic minority employer class, take all wealth into common ownership and democratic control, abolish the wages system, waged slavery and establish a free access society.

Capitalists greedis the natural outcome of capital accumulation, within an intensely competitive system, where war is 'business by other means'. It has outlived any socially useful function, having developed the means of production and distribution to its present stage, with an increasingly educated, wage enslaved class now able to run the system from top to bottom .

We can proceed to a democratic, socially equal, commonly owned, post-capitalist society where production is for the use of all, to satisfy human needs and distribution can be free, without any necessity for monetary transaction, within a super-abundance of the necessities of life. Housing to be lived in, food to be eaten, medicine to treat illness rather than as at present, commodities to be sold for the enrichment of a minority owning class, with the vast majority rationed in their access by the present wages /salary /prices system. We only have to remove ownership and control by, corporations, states, private individuals and replace it with common ownership by us all, with production for use. Then we can proceed immediately to having free access to the commonly owned wealth thus dispensing with money and all the paraphernalia which goes with money. Abolish wages and prices. Opt to work for a post-capitalist, commonly owned, (not private, state or corporation) money-free, wage slavery-free, free access, production for use, future. You are only 3 salary cheques from a food bank.

Wee Matt

Don't Fence Men In

Countries are becoming increasingly walled in. At the end of WWII, the number of borders blocked by fences and walls could be counted on one hand.

 Today, sixty-five borders are sealed off. Republican candidate in the US, Donald Trump has endorsed completing a fence between his country and Mexico, a distance of 3,200 kilometres.
Many European countries are erecting razor wire to keep migrants fleeing war, oppression, and poverty out.

In capitalism, this could be a good thing as the shares in and production of wire takes off. Let the concept of one world, one people become a reality asap.

John Ayers.

Isn't Capitalism Wonderful

A while back, many economists thought that BRIC (an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, and China) would soon be the leading and most prosperous capitalist states.

However, under capitalism prosperity is fleeting, especially for the workers, and, as far as Brazil is concerned, there is already trouble in paradise. It's economy lost one million jobs last year; police clash with students on the streets of Sao Paulo over school closings; the president, Dilma Rousseff is facing impeachment proceedings owing to accusations she used funds from state banks to cover budget shortfalls; the speaker of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha, who started the impeachment proceedings, is fighting calls to resign over undisclosed Swiss bank accounts and charges that he accepted millions of dollars in bribes in connection with Petrobras, the state oil company. Forty per cent of the 594 members of congress are facing charges of one type of or another. Four members of the highest court in the land are under investigation.

Isn't capitalism wonderful?

John Ayers.

Towards A Better World

The capitalist system is behind all the ills that burden humanity today. Poverty, deprivation, discrimination, inequality, political repression, ignorance, bigotry, unemployment, homelessness, insecurity and crime are all inevitable products of this system. For sure those problems that ails society were not invented by capitalism and existed before capitalism but importantly they have found a new meaning in this society and found a new lease of life, corresponding to the needs of capitalism. The draw their rationale from the needs of the system that rules the world today and serve specific interests in this world. The capitalist system itself has continually and relentlessly resists people's effort to eradicate and overcome these ills. Whenever people rose to take charge of their lives, the first barrier they face was the capitalist who stand in the way a society worthy of human beings and thwart efforts to change the system. Present society is based on the exploitation of direct producers — the appropriation of a part of the product of their labour by the ruling classes. Exploitation in capitalist society takes place without yokes upon the shoulders and shackles around the ankles of the producers. It is through the medium of the market and free and exchange of commodities, the fundamental features of capitalism.  The surplus value obtained from the exploitation of the working class is divided out among the various sections of the capitalist class essentially through the market mechanism and also through state fiscal and monetary policies. Profit, interest and rent are the major forms in which the different capitals share in the fruits of this class exploitation. The competition of capitals in the market determines the share of each capitalist branch, unit and enterprise. Violence and coercion have driven the expansion of capitalism from its start, and continue to be an indispensable glue holding together what has become a world economic system. Yet no level of brutality can itself keep a system, or any ruling structure, in place for a long period of time, much less for centuries, unless there is some level of cooperation.

That cooperation must rest, at least partially, on belief. Why did so many people in the past believe that God picked one dynastic family to rule in perpetuity? What peasants believed helped keep monarchs on thrones. Today, with education so much more available, such a belief would be laughed at. Ideology accordingly must be much more sophisticated. We must distinguish between governing and ruling. Presidents and prime ministers may govern for set periods of time, giving way to new officials, but these men and women do only that: govern. They manage the government on behalf of the dominant social forces within their borders, and those dominant social forces are in turn, depending where on the international capitalist pecking order the governed space lies, connected to and/or subordinate to more powerful social forces based elsewhere. It is capitalists — industrialists and financiers — who actually rule. The more power capitalists can command, the more effectively they can bend government policy and legislation to their preferred outcomes. More aspects of human life are steadily put at the mercy of “market forces.” Those are not neutral, disinterested mechanisms sitting loftily above the clouds, as the corporate media incessantly promotes. Rather, market forces are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers. Thus capitalist fundamentalism is telling us that a handful of exceedingly powerful industrialists and financiers should decide social and economic matters; that wealth automatically confers on them the right to dominate society. Not so different from feudal beliefs in monarchs. Without people believing that the rule of capitalists is a natural law, capitalism would not endure. When people ceased to believe in monarchs, that system of rule crumbled. With capitalism it is no different. “Socialism,” is no longer a bogey word. But capitalism is as strong as ever today, the mantra “There Is No Alternative” still prevails in the popular psyche.

Capitalism is what people know and believe in  and until that belief is broken through persuasion and people are compelled to confront the cause of their deteriorating living conditions capitalism will be nearly impossible to dislodge. Even allowing for the rise of the Internet, and the better ability for dissenting news and viewpoints to be circulated it is indisputable the corporate media remains dominant and allows only a narrow range of perspectives to be given a hearing. So many different media outlets report the same news item in a nearly identical way, that “spin” can easily gain wide acceptance as truth. The same dominant set of presumptions underlie them, those dominant presumptions, products of ideologies widely propagated by elite institutions, serve as ideological reinforcement. Public opinion is shaped by repetition, and not repetition in a handful of obviously biased publications or networks, but rather repetition of viewpoints, reporting angles and underlying themes and assumptions, across the entire corporate media. This propaganda does not fall out of the sky; its seeming pervasiveness flows from the ability of capitalists to disseminate their viewpoints through a variety of institutions, those they directly set up and control. Something as fundamental as who generates the wealth of society, and how wealth is generated, is obscured as part of this process of opinion formation. It can’t be otherwise, for this is the building block on which capitalist ideology rests. Incessant spin claims that profit is the result of the acumen of the capitalist and the capitalist’s magical ability to create profit out of thin air, when in actuality corporate profit comes from the difference between what an employee produces and what the employee is paid. Many people must be poor for one person to be rich, because the private profit of a few is taken from the underpayment of work to the many.

Can “socialism” be part of the mainstream political vocabulary? Can it displace the “There Is No Alternative? Is it a term we can fight for. The only way we can be true to our principles is if we are willing to fight for them. If our goal is to change the world then we work to create a new one. It comes down to a choice:

1) Work to change the personnel of the oligarchy

2) Work to create a new structure that represents people/planet over profit

It is time to stop tinkering around with a deeply broken system and time to now pursue radical transformation. Many more eyes will need to be opened, with a concomitant willingness to struggle and organize, if a better world is to be created. A better world is not only possible but can be created once a sufficient portion of society comes to believe in ourselves and that cooperation rather than dog-eat-dog competition is the route to a sustainable economy with enough for all.