Money must go

Money is the universally accepted means of exchange. It is a universal equivalent. Instead of me giving you three toasters for your armchair, I pay in an accepted, legal currency. Sounds sensible. Who wants to return to the awkward system of bartering goods? So the alternative to money would not be a return to barter, nor even equal shares for all, but free access for all to what they needed to live and enjoy life.

Imagine that all the things you need are owned and held in common. There is no need to buy food from anyone--it is common property. There are no rent or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to all of us. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers). We possess an advanced industrial economy so that free access is technically possible. Science and technology –scientists and technologists or technicians –have in their hands the knowledge and the wherewithal to take humanity in any direction they choose to take, but like the rest of us they are constrained by the system we live in. They are not directed by the wishes, needs and aims of society as a whole but have to follow the logic of their master, the market. Everything becomes possible when the tools are in the right hands, the hands of the producers. It becomes a matter of organisation to bring in the new society.

The alternative to monetary calculation based on exchange-value is calculation based on use values. Decisions, apart from purely personal ones of preferences or interest, will be made after weighing the real advantages and disadvantages and real costs of alternatives in particular circumstances. When you remove money out of this equation, the motivation to do work suddenly changes. Without money, people are motivated to work for each other. It essentially means that the business mentality that has shaped most societies for thousands of years will cease to exist.

Imagine all the things that you need were owned and controlled in common. By everyone. All of us—you included. There is nobody to buy food from—it is common property. There are no rents or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to us all. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers). You would not need money. In a society of common ownership, money would have no role. No longer would money exist. In a society where the earth's resources were owned commonly and controlled democratically — socialism — wealth will not be bought and sold. Envisage a money-free world community where production is for use and access to the common wealth is the equal right of every human being.

Marx identified money as one of the two main manifestations of human alienation (the other was the state) and looked forward to its abolition in a socialist society where human values would apply: where the standard by which something would be considered ‘valuable’ would be human welfare. Marx also fully endorsed the slogan “Abolition of the Wages System!” Marx's vision of a socialist society can be fairly summed up as a world-wide system of social organisation based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by, and in the interests of, the whole community. In other words, a universal class-free, wages-free and money-free society wherein human beings would voluntarily contribute in accordance with their mental and/or physical abilities to the production and distribution of the needs of their society and in which everyone would have free and equal access to their needs. It does not mean we'll use some sort of barter system. Goods will be voluntarily produced, and services voluntarily supplied to meet people's needs. People will freely take the things they need. As Marx says it will be a “society organised as a conscious and planned association”.

In the early days of socialism, there might not be able to be full free access to everything. In which case, there would have to be some sort of "rationing" of the goods and services in short supply. Certainly, Marx considered the temporary use of "labour-time vouchers". But these should not be regarded as "money" or as any other all-purpose circulating vouchers that could be used to acquire anything (though we wouldn't be able to stop people calling it money). In these early days of change, the only point of debate might be on what basis might such coupons be distributed to the populace, such as distribution perhaps ought to be effected in a way that takes into account the inequalities which we will inherit from capitalism, for example, in respect of housing since housing constitutes easily the most important component of quality of life.

William Morris said: "One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman; two men with the same idea in common maybe foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and why only a hundred thousand?  Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth?  You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question."

Glasgow Branch 1962 election campaign

Party News from the January 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Excellent work was done during October and November in the Glasgow Woodside By-Election. The campaign commenced with canvassing the Socialist Standard. This produced good results. Some members were disappointed that sales did not reach the results of the Municipal election in Kelvingrove last April. This was probably due to the time of year and bad weather.

 However, 307 Socialist Standards and 57 pamphlets were sold. When the election campaign really got going 18,500 manifestos were distributed also 500 leaflets introducing the Party. Six indoor meetings were held in addition to outdoor meetings. Glasgow Branch were pleased by the large amount of press publicity, although they regretted that the candidate's remarks were not always correctly reported. Radio and television reportage was good although the time allowed was very restricted. 

83 votes were polled for the Socialist Party of Great Britain and a quote on the result from the Glasgow Herald (23/11/62) stated: "With 83 votes to his credit. Mr. Valler of the Socialist Party of Great Britain was not downhearted. 'There are,' he announced proudly '83 politically mature people in Woodside'".

Glasgow Branch learned much from the campaign and their experience will help them when they next contest an election in Glasgow. The Branch are grateful to comrades, other branches and the London members (who went up to help on the spot) for their financial and physical help.

Socialism is liberation

Instead of an economy driven by profit and greed, a rational economic system would be based on fulfilling human need with the least amount of effort. In this socialist economy, all individuals would engage in socially productive labor and all jobs would be recognized as equally valued and equally important. Socialists believe that for socialism to truly thrive we must establish democratic control of every aspect of the economy. Workers must begin by democratically controlling their immediate workplace. Instead of managers appointed by profit-driven corporate bosses or government bureaucrats, workers must exercise self-management. Decisions concerning everything from what is produced to how it is produced can be made in regular meetings in which every worker has a vote. In short, workers will exercise worker control.  Once democracy is established on the most basic levels, workplaces and entire industries can federate upward using a system of instantly recallable, rotating delegates to plan for the larger economy.

On a practical level, socialists, after expropriating the owning class and all its property, would seek to abolish all unproductive toil. All individuals could then gravitate toward the work they find most rewarding. If, after all of this, ‘undesirable’ work still existed, it could be democratically divided between all able bodies. Socialism will be a society where production, distribution, and consumption is collectively and consciously run with the goal of minimising necessary labour time and maximizing leisure time, in order to allow maximal development of needs, first and foremost the need of sociality.

Socialism is the realisation of a world human community in our everyday lived experience so involving the disappearance of the distinctions that exist in today’s society between 'economics' and 'politics', 'work' and 'play', 'town' and 'country'. Direct human relations unmediated by the 'commodity' form or any equivalent exchange between separate 'enterprises' (whether mutual, self-managed, worker controlled or whatever). It is the reconciliation of individual and community.

Capitalism is an inhuman force which governs and restructures social life. Socialism is about seizing back control of society from this inhuman force and initiating social relations based on human beings and our needs. Socialism means the abolition of wage labour, property, the state, the commodity form, and exchange. Everything would be held in common, rather than public or worker ownership and everything would be free, given without anything in exchange and without any expectation of any reciprocity from the particular individual(s) involved.  Socialism would be a society where we do not have money or other means of valuing goods and services, and where production, distribution, and daily life is democratically organised on the basis of our collective and individual desires and needs. Therefore the various aspects of control, power, and hierarchy we inflict on each other would be eliminated or greatly reduced.

Simply put, a socialist economy is to ensure that all people have enough of everything they need to live secure, comfortable and happy lives. Socialism doesn’t exist anywhere. It could, but it doesn’t. It is the hopeful belief of the Socialist Party that by education and rational persuasion men and women can be brought to decide on the formation of a free society. We do not aspire to be a party of permanent protest but one that seeks to accomplish our goal – socialism.

The purpose of socialist revolution is not to restore a “natural order of things”. How can the billions of people who inhabit the earth today live from hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants? It ignores the progress made by science in general and the many positive ways this progress affects man’s living conditions, even if scientific progress also has some negative effects. Despite the environmental damage and pollution, it is nevertheless true that the life expectancy today – in some of the most polluted countries of the world – is 70-plus years. It is also true that there is a steady drop in the infant mortality rate because of modern hospital rooms. We cannot return to primitive society’s way of life except at the price of a disaster worse than any of the problems that plague the world today. The purpose of socialist revolution is to provide today’s society with a form of social organisation that corresponds to the material possibilities open to us today.

Caged hamsters

The Left is and always has been a part of capitalism, albeit, in some instances a state-controlled version. Labour in government has sent troops in to break strikes, backed all of the major wars engaged in by the UK this last century (and has initiated a few of them), and has repeatedly attacked working class living standards to ensure the profitability of British industry. The welfare state was a capitalist “success”. It distracted workers with 'cradle to the grave' promises and staved off any social revolution.

There is nothing to suggest that either Corbyn or Smith, despite their radical phrases, would behave any differently in office – all national governments are there to administer their particular section of world capitalism, and as Syriza in Greece found out soon enough, have very little control over the market economy as events unfold. Looking to government is infantile, as governments exist to govern over you in the interests of the dominant economic parasite class in order that you attend to being a dutiful Uncle Tom wage slave ‘Thank you, master’. If you vote for a government over you, you will get governed over. Politicians supply demons. They supply a singular address for evil upon which you can blame everything. Where the economy is a mess, where people’s mortgages are underwater, it is much easier to find one single person or group of people to blame for all their problems than it is to analyse the extremely complex subject of, for instance, mortgage-backed Wall Street securities, which most people can’t understand. So, you blame taxes, or you blame the bankers or you blame individual politicians themselves.

People are like caged hamsters running endlessly on a proverbial spinning wheel. The media go about the business of misinforming, disinforming, and diverting the people from the source of their misery—which is the system itself. In other words, it’s all about controlling the minds of the masses.

“If those in charge of our society—politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television—can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power...” explained Howard Zinn.

Or as Steve Biko said, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

For power to be lodged in the hands of the people does not mean merely that they are to have the widest possible franchise and equal voting power. It implies that the people are to have control of all social institutions, a say in all social activities, the self-management of social life. Such a condition of affairs presupposes at the very outset the common ownership by the people of all the means of life.

Momentum activists will no doubt argue that Corbyn is a decent man with a track record of opposing wars. But this misses the point about how capitalism entraps those who seek to administer it. And while Corbyn may have opposed the senseless butchery of the Iraq War, he is a man (along with John McDonnell) who has sought to apologise repeatedly for the nationalism and terrorism of organisations like the Provisional IRA and Hamas. Men like these who commemorated IRA terrorists and who refused to condemn some of the most anti-working class atrocities in UK history (such as the Birmingham pub bombings and Enniskillen) are men whose peaceful and socialist credentials deserve to be viewed with quite some scepticism. Workers have no country or nations but the world to win for a commonly owned free access socialist society. Nationalism is a curse on the working class and leads them to the slaughter in the interest of the dominant economic class. When the slaughter ends it is back to the same old wage slavery regardless of the nationality of the employer.

What is of importance now is that people who may identify with wanting to create a genuinely socialist society of common ownership, democratic control and free access to wealth, don’t get suckered in by a radical-sounding, ‘populist’ reform movement that has yet to prove its popularity anywhere beyond the already like-minded. The attempt to reform capitalism by so-called benevolent governments has always been a disaster and there’s nothing to suggest it would be any different next time under either Corbyn or Smith.

Real socialists have always been content to leave the Labour Party to the reformists – and the more we think about it, the more they are welcome to it.

Wee Matt

Remember Maxton?

The Red Clydesider, James Maxton, accused the Conservatives of being murderers. Maxton complained, in a debate in June 1923, that cutting grants to child welfare centres in Scotland would lead to an increase in the death rates among children: "I call it murder ... a cold, callous, deliberate crime in order to save money . . .” As a notably crusty Tory defended the cuts, Maxton and three other Clydesiders were suspended. 

There was prolonged uproar in the House; Honourable Members, after all, did not expect their complacency to be disturbed so abruptly. Macdonald, the Labour leader, sat pale with anger at the outrage — not at the suspensions nor the protest nor even the cuts which were depriving the needy children but at the misbehaviour of the Clydesiders who were his supporters and who needed to learn how to behave among their betters.

Well, the Clydesiders are all dead now, with little to remember them by apart from their protests. Capitalism has weathered their disruptions, their impatience, their demands. The railways and the rest of the means of wealth production and distribution, still do not belong to the people.

There are no short-cuts

“Capital is dead labour that vampire-like only lives by sucking living labour and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” - Marx

In socialism, labour power is no longer regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is not purchased at all. There will be no wages. Goods will be produced for the use of men and women and NOT for the profits which they bring to bosses. Humanity will have been freed from the capitalist system.

For the global capitalist ruling classes and  the corporate elites who actually run the system, to the extent that anyone is actually running it — things couldn’t be going much better at the moment. While for the vast majority of us, the future is looking increasingly miserable. The Socialist Party has never resorted to conspiracy theory and suggested the capitalist class consciously plan their domination and hegemony – the worldwide socio-economic-political situation is a bit more complex for the Bilderberg conferences to fix and rig. The capitalist ruling classes have imposed their control on more and more of the world, commodifying and absorbing what little is left outside the market. They are transforming the entire planet into one giant shopping mall/labour camp is. JPMorgan Chase, ICBC, HSBC, Berkshire Hathaway, Royal Dutch Shell, AXA Group, Toyota, Exxon, Pfizer, Novartis … does anyone believe these transnational banks and corporations have any real allegiance to the “sovereign nations” they nominally reside in, or to the citizens of those “sovereign” nations?  It is the interest of these corporations, and the global capitalist ruling classes (including government and deep state elites), that we do not perceive the world this way, and that we continue to believe in the sovereignty of nations, and that we think of ourselves as citizens of these nations, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

But people aren’t so easily deceived although they seek false solutions in a resurgent nationalism and divisive xenophobia. When we are marginalised, ignored and silenced, some of us become desperate and are tempted to turn on each other. Across the world nationalist parties have been making gains.  In Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Switzerland, and elsewhere such as in Russia and the Ukraine. In Germany they have their AfD (the Alternatives for Germany party) In France, it’s Le Pen and the Front National. In the Netherlands, it’s Geert Wilders and the PVV (the Party for Freedom). In the UK it is UKIP and in the US it is Trump even though the most vocal for the claim of American exceptionalism is Clinton.  None of them pose any real serious challenge to the reign of world capitalism. Nationalism grows because we fear the absence of our “identities”. The racists and patriots have been driven to extremes by delusions. Economic anxiety and inequality are contributing, as it always does, to the rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant, xenophobic and racist politics. Many of the people most hurt by austerity and the recession are turning to the very politicians who created the conditions that fostered the social problems or who wish to use discontent as a ladder to power. Despair and desperation can cause people to do things that are against their self-interest and make them resent people who seemingly are doing better than they are – public sector workers and unionized workers.

The corporate media is working hard to convince us that these is no alternative and too many of us embrace a utopian capitalist future in which each and every one of us can be a thriving entrepreneur. An alternative is unimaginable … literally unimaginable, in the sense that we are not yet capable of conceiving a credible alternative system, or a way to get there. Those of us who do have a vision of a better future fully realise our present impotence. We have been traveling very fast in an unknown direction, unsure who is at the steering wheel. Now humanity is awakening.

Today, activists are divided into dozens of single-issue campaigns. Many fail to understand the kind of power required to change society we need to build the workers’ movement into a robust force.  It is a strategy anchored in a deep belief in the capacity of ordinary people to understand the goal and to organise for it without a widespread and clear idea among workers of what a socialist society entails, it will he unattainable. The reason is simple. The very nature of socialism necessitates understanding. There is absolutely no way in which such a sweeping fundamental transformation of social relationships could be thrust upon an unwilling, unknowing majority by some minority, no matter how enlightened or well-meaning.

An understanding of socialism will not come by the spontaneous and automatic blossoming of this knowledge in the bosoms of millions of isolated workers. Mass socialist consciousness will develop out of the common experiences of workers and the interaction of ideas drawn from those experiences and through unity on the basis of socialist knowledge. This means the growth of socialist parties around the world, armed with the strength that comes from unity, able to meet and vanquish the divisive ideology of capitalism by clearing away the smokescreen it creates between the worker and the recognition of his real interests.

The job of the Socialist Party is clear—to put the case for socialism, to encourage workers to reject capitalism and start organising for the conquest of political power.

What we say

“Socialism, for Marx, is a society which permits the actualisation of man's essence, by overcoming his alienation. It is nothing less than creating the conditions for the truly free, rational, active and independent man; it is the fulfillment of the prophetic aim: the destruction of the idols.” - Erich Fromm

What will socialism be like? We cannot provide a blueprint as the precise details of its organisation will be democratically decided by the majority who in the future will establish that society and live in it. But we can make certain general statements about its nature. Socialism is exclusively the expression of the interests of the working class. Socialism is the political expression of the recognition by the working-class of their suppression and oppression under the present form of society.

We can say that it will mean the end of buying and selling, the end of money and the wages system.

We can say that, with the disappearance of such factors as cost and competition, it will mean people planning production democratically according to their wants and taking what they need to consume from the abundance of resources made available by modern technology.

We can say that it will mean voluntary cooperation, work as pleasure not toil, and all men and women as social equals.

We can say that it will mean complete democracy in all departments of life with freedom to choose one’s activities and occupations without being pushed around by decisions from above or by any kind of arbitrary authority. Socialism is not government ownership or state control of industry.

We can say that socialism will be world-wide—it cannot be anything else and anyway the world is now so closely united in terms of communications, fashions and the rapid flow of ideas that if people in one place were ready for socialism the rest of the world could not be far behind.

We can say socialism is practical. Socialism is a type of society in which all the members of the community collectively determine their conditions of life and their way of living. In order to do so, they must control, collectively, the use to which machines, factories, raw materials – all the means of production – are put. Unless the means of production are effectively in the hands of the whole society there can be no question of the collective control of the conditions of life.

We can say socialism is a social system under which the necessaries of production are owned, controlled, and administered by the people, for the people, and under which, accordingly, the cause of political and economic despotism having been abolished, class rule is at end.

We can say socialism is not the conquest of the state by a political party: it is the conquest of society by the working class through political and industrial action.

What we say is socialism is the future.

New Possibilties For Increasing Profit

The Toronto Star of July 21st ran an article about the latest drone technology. On July 12, in San Francisco, a patent was filed by Amazon for a "Multi-use unmanned aerial vehicle docking system." Its purpose would be to deliver packages to a docking system near a purchaser's house.

The most recent prototype weighs about 25 kilograms and can carry packages up to about two kilograms.

These would fly under 120 meters and use "sense and avoid" technology to dodge potential obstacles. The docking stations will be able to accommodate multiple drones and be located high up and out of the way of cell towers and other vertical structures. With solar panels, they could generate their own power.

All this means, so far, is Amazon has a patent on it. The Federal Aviation Administration doesn't allow package delivery. But let's look to the future and be realistic – if the capitalists can make money on it, the F.A.A. will change its rules; and if docking stations are near someone's house, (or even on a purchaser's property), it will be less people needed for delivery, hence bigger profits for the company.

This doesn't mean socialists are against new technology – we are against the system that uses it to make some rich and screw the rest. 

 John Ayers.

Let’s change the world

Some of the larger problems of our planet is the destruction of eco-systems for the profits of the capitalist class who’ll do anything to keep their profits rising. They are despoiling the land and poisoning the rivers and seas for the benefit of their investment returns. Why aren’t people doing something about it? Surely, most people on our planet want a hopeful future for their children and their children’s children. Of course, challenging the way things are is scary. But we must know that capitalism doesn’t work, because everybody is fending for themselves to try and survive, regardless of the damage it conflicts upon others and upon nature and the society as a whole. Profit margins and stock exchange values prove more important than consequences for people, nature and the planet. It is clear is that the small minority of capitalists are willing to lie, cheat, manipulate all others for power and wealth. Everything is commodified, which means if you don’t increase profit to the system you are a “burden” to society.

Changing leaders will change little. When politicians are replaced, others take their place and nothing really changes. So don’t expect any new president or prime minister to be any solution. We can assume that political leaders are aware of the problems which plague capitalism yet clearly they are powerless to eliminate those problems. If leaders were successful, each one would be part of a progress towards a safer, abundant, stable world. In truth, each new leader is confronted with the same mess as their predecessors. It is not to state the obvious — because to most people it is not obvious — to say that leaders exist only by virtue of their followers. They exist because the overwhelming majority of the working class shrink from recognising their own knowledge and experience of society, preferring to put their faith in others who, it is assumed, have some special knowledge and ability. Capitalism cannot exist without its inevitable problems; it traps its leaders just as surely as it does those who are led. Even if a leader may wish to be different, to stand out for some apparently novel policy, they are similarly ensnared and quickly exposed for their inability also to escape the trap. Because people are cooperative and collaborative on the whole they assume what others promise them is to be trusted. But we quickly learn not all promises are in our interest. We are sold cures that only heal some the effects of the system, but never really remedy the root of the trouble. Environmentalists protest pollution, charities help the unfortunate. Neither address the real cause.  Let's focus on eliminating the system.

All of us who struggle for a better world are disheartened that so many advances of the 20th century have been lost but sadly we weren’t surprised in the slightest. The crises of the environment and the global economy are unmistakably moving humanity toward the cliff’s edge. And yet social movements, for all the victories here and there, fail again and again. Resistance has stopped short of revolution. Although there exists a multitude of grassroots movements, there is no one unified movement toward a better society. Knowledge exists within the people but it is through the fusion of this knowledge which brings a mass socialist organization. People can only solve their problems by freely discussing them, without coercion or manipulation, and then freely acting through coordinated activity based on the results of their discussion. In turn, there must be a larger organization that connect the many particular struggles into a broad movement, one that enables activists to see the links and commonalities between these struggles and the common enemy that they face. Discussion of the socialist alternative to capitalism must become more serious, free from the forms of thinking imposed by capitalist ideology. We must go beyond simple demands for economic and social reforms. We need to start seriously discussing how we are going to build an effective movement for a post-capitalist world.

As the world’s resources are wasted to almost depletion, the environment destroyed almost beyond repair and ever more people are thrown into despair and desperation, the path of humanity will be towards barbarism in the future. If that is not the future we want, we’ll have to change it ourselves.

None of us possess a blueprint on how to build an effective mass movement. But one thing that ought to be clear, yet often isn’t, is that simply replicating the models of the past is a dead end.

Taken from 

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/goodbye-democracy-and-capitalism/

Capital does not build anything

"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois." (1879, Marx and Engels)

We are with Marx and Engels for the abolition of the wages system.

Workers run and manage capitalism from the top to the bottom and even police themselves. The PC or laptop you are using, the clothes you are wearing the food you eat and the money you shift about is the product of waged workers selling their commodity, labour power at less than its value to produce a surplus value.

 This is a vast inter-relationship of labour globally which adds value to the capitalist’s commodity via socially necessary labour time. This is everything you can think of from infrastructure building to shithouse manufacture and installations, to children mining in less advanced capitalist nations. Workers have no capital worth mentioning. Capital on its own can do nothing, it can't light an oven or dig a ditch, until it is invested in an exploitative opportunity and it is the labour of the working class globally whether by hand or by brain, which is utilised to this end of producing a surplus over and above the invested capital. Capital itself is dead labour. In times of economic uncertainty such as presently financial capital reserves, may be used to speculate and create bubbles but this is just gambling until markets pick up.

One of the amazing things about capitalism is that whereas machinery creates abundance millions are in want.

As always, Marx hit the nail on the head.

“It is not the case that too much wealth is produced. But it is true that there is periodical over-production of wealth in its capitalist and self-contradictory form. The limitations of the capitalist mode of production become apparent:

1) In the fact that the development of the productive power of labour establishes, in the falling rate of profit, a law which becomes, at a certain point, hostile to this mode of production itself and which can only be overcome by periodical crises.

2) In the fact that the expansion or contraction of production is decided by the appropriation of unpaid labour and by the proportion of this unpaid labour to materialized labour in general, or in the language of the capitalists, by profit and by the proportion of this profit to employed capital, by a definite rate of profit, instead of being determined by the relations of production to social needs, to the needs of socially developed human beings.

Consequently, the capitalist mode of production reaches its limit at a level of production which would be wholly inadequate in terms of the second proposition (production for needs) it comes to a standstill at a point determined by the production and realization of profit, not by the satisfaction of human needs.” -Capital Volume 3

Poverty is also relative to the surplus it creates. Poverty absolute or relative, and war (business by other means) are inevitable concomitants of capitalist competition over raw materials, markets, trade routes and geo-political interests. The export of the absolutes of poverty and war does not change the fundamentals of this system. Workers are all in this together and have a collective social class interest. How many echo their master's voice in responding to people who are worse off than themselves. The separation of 'poor' into categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Or the notion that there is a 'middle-class', when even the majority of high-earning workers are under no illusions as to themselves being a few salary cheques away from a food-bank.

Capital does not produce anything. It is only invested when a profit can be realised by the workers in extraction, refining, distributing, researching etc. Who flies the helicopters? Who builds the helicopters, makes the overalls, cooks the meals, educates the workers?  Workers do this. Capital cannot drill holes or build rigs or move ships. It is the worker who conceives, plans, builds the push button, auto machines and relative to the surplus produced is collectively exploited by virtue of not owning the product of their collective labour, as its realisable value torrents upwards to the parasite class, who own the stolen surplus value (capital) which is only required in a production for sale class system. Indeed he may not personally be exploited like a kid in a Welsh mine, but the kid extracting the raw earth materials in a less developed country is a part of the exploited chain in his/her tools for the job.

The rules of engagement are very simple. It matters not if machines can replace human drudgery if production is for sale with a view to realising a profit for the private, corporate or state owner of the means of production. Ownership and control by a minority class is subjugation of the majority. It requires social control over the majority. It matters a great deal, indeed is a revolutionary, post -capitalist solution, if ownership is common, in a production is for the use of all, in a free access, democratic, commonly owned world,

Freedom from waged slavery will also free workers from work in this instance and enable the application of the operating tenet, "From each according to their ability to each according to their needs". It is the ownership and control of robotic resources along with everything else in and on the planet which must be made common, to enable a free access post-capitalist society. Costs, as expressed in economic monetary calculation will be irrelevant in a commonly owned society. We will have calculation-in-kind and production-for-use with free-access.

It is workers presently who run capitalism from top to bottom. They will be more than capable of running the new society without any parasitical economic elites or governments 'over' them.

The Socialist Party is against a mythical past. We are for the future, opposing capitalism in all of its incarnations. We say a plague on all attempts to reform it, as impossible delusions and include state capitalism as per post-feudal Russia and state-capitalist nationalisation variants, as per successive Labour and Conservative governments. All doomed to failure, as too, the Thatcherite neo-conservative and Blairite governments 'over' us.

"The workers must organise for their emancipation. They can do this, and only they can do it. I cannot do this for you and I want to be frank enough to say I would not, if I could. For, if I could do it for you somebody else could undo it for you. But, when you do it yourselves, it will be done for ever -and until you do it, you have got to pay the penalty of your ignorance, indifference and neglect." (Eugene Debs)

Wee Matt

Who owns the North Pole (Part 90)

The United Nations is currently assessing Russian, Danish and Canadian claims to own sizeable chunks of the Arctic seabed. One thing is clear. The Arctic is heating up in meteorological, political and environmental terms as nations fall over themselves to exploit the region.

“The Arctic is opening up, and all sorts of flashpoints lie ahead,” said Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. “If the central Arctic Ocean is freed of ice for several months a year, who will control the fishing and the dumping of waste there? The Russians have also made it clear they want to drill for oil and gas.”

This point was also stressed by Professor Chris Rapley, of University College London. “An increasingly ice-free Arctic is a geopolitical game changer,” he said. “…The Arctic nations are jostling for advantage, and the economic and ecological consequences of new trade routes opening up have yet to unfold. The changes that have occurred have been greater and faster than predicted….”

There are moves by China to invest in mines in Greenland, where declining ice cover is exposing vast outcrops of ores, including minerals crucial to mobile phone manufacture. It views the opening Arctic seas as an opportunity to maintain its access to the world’s most important resources. Some of the Earth’s major stocks of fish are migrating north as the planet heats up while the Arctic’s mineral resources are being exposed by retreating ice. “The Chinese have made no secret that they have their eyes on the Arctic’s fish and minerals,” said Dodds.

Similarly, drilling companies are eyeing seabed reserves of natural gas and oil while travel companies are preparing to send huge cruise liners into the region. The first of these trips, by the Crystal Serenity, has just been completed.

Enormous forces, political and commercial, are bearing down on the region although all have a common root – as was also highlighted last week. Summer sea ice, which once covered 7.5 million sq km around the North Pole, this year dropped to 4.13m sq km, its second lowest figure on record, it was announced. The rate of annual change – brought about by soaring fossil fuel emissions and rises in global temperatures – is now equivalent to a loss greater than the size of Scotland.

“Loss of sea ice has local to global effects, from animals and ecosystems to encouraging further warming by exposing ocean water,” said Twila Moon, at Bristol University. “We should all be shocked by the dramatic changes happening in the Arctic.”

Most scientists now expect that, at current emission rates, the Arctic will be reliably free of sea ice in the summer by the middle of the century. By “free” they mean there will be less than 1m sq km of sea ice left in the Arctic, most of it packed into remote bays and channels while the central Arctic Ocean over the North Pole will be completely open. And by “reliably”, scientists mean there will have been five consecutive years with less than 1m sq km of ice by the year 2050. The first single ice-free year will come much earlier than this, however.

Of all the Arctic nations, Russia has been the most determined to exploit the region as it warms, however. “You can see that determination in the way it responded to the Arctic 30 incident,” said Duncan Depledge, Director, All-Party Parliamentary Group for Polar Regions Secretariat. In 2013, Greenpeace activists attempted to scale the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform as part of a protest against Arctic oil production. Russians arrested them at gunpoint and charged the activists initially with piracy and later with hooliganism and only released them after two months of detention. “That is an indication of how seriously they take the Arctic,” added Depledge. This point was backed by Dodds: “The Russians are hell bent on showing the world they mean business here.”

Could that determination lead to an outbreak of hostilities? Byers suggests not. “The Arctic is a very expensive region in which to operate and Russia is not a wealthy country. The cost of militarising the Arctic would be prohibitive. They might want to police it so that they can control outfits like Greenpeace but I don’t see them having a war with another Arctic nation.”

The Antarctic Treaty bans all mining, oil drilling or the presence of the military and strictly monitors all environmental hazards around the South Pole. By contrast, although no nation owns the North Pole, the Arctic nations – Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark – have very different ideas about how to run the world’s most northerly regions.

“Arctic environmental protection is currently determined by individual nations, by politicians who often meet far from its borders: in Moscow, Copenhagen and Washington,” said Professor Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia. “They have very different levels of commitment to protecting the environment – with Russia at the bottom and the Nordic nations at the top.” Relations with indigenous people are one of the flashpoints that may trigger serious disputes in the region. Byers said. “I have enormous sympathy for the local peoples in the Arctic but they are few in number and have limited resources. They are trying to insert themselves into the decision-making of some of the most powerful companies and countries in the world.” 

The Revolutionary Vote

"You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist one second without you. You would begin to live without him. You DO everything. Some of you imagine that if it was not for the capitalist you would have no work. Really he does not employ you at all. You employ him to take from you what you produce, and he sticks faithfully to his job. If you can stand it – he can – and if you don’t change it – he won’t." (Eugene Debs)

Specifically, capturing the state apparatus has to be, in a bourgeois democracy, by the ballot box -"capitalism's Achilles heel". Certainly, it is essential for to win the battle of ideas outside of parliament but this won’t be done by selling them a lie that capitalism can be reformed, by well-meaning or careerist, Left, Centre Left or 'riding two pro-capitalist horses' with one-arse politicians. You are the dreamer, along with the Corbynites, if you think a Labour government which from its earliest incarnations bent to the will of the dominant economic class in society while making worker-friendly noises.  To continue repeating the same historical folly of trying to reform capitalism is by definition an insane reaction to capitalism's madness. The Labour Party is very much a party of capitalism, albeit a reformist one which  has the delusion that capitalism can be reformed and made more equitable. No matter how the Labour reconstitutes itself, it can only run capitalism in the interests of the capitalist system, which means waged slavery for the vast majority and wealth, ease and luxury for an economic parasitic, capitalist class, living off the wealth created by the immense majority.

Anything else, which occurred during the 20th century has little to do with socialism and more to do with minority-led revolutions to overthrow feudalism.

Socialism is the work of and has to win the support of the immense majority. It is not something which will come, "Like a thief in the night", (Keir Hardie) by gradualist 'baby steps' of reforming capitalism, or by nationalising the commanding heights of the economy, state capitalism.

But misrepresenting a capitalism reformed as socialism as the Corbynites seem to be doing won't get socialism either. The task of creating the socialist post-capitalist, production for use, free access, commonly owned, a world is that of the working class itself. The people need to sack the parties of capitalism and elect themselves into running a production-for-use world. There is no short cut to this.

In the real world, of course, capitalism cannot be reformed in any meaningful way, despite the pious sounding hopes of either well meaning, or opportunist politicians of whichever political persuasion

For example:

"Statisticians rate almost 7,000 areas in Scotland by standards including income, employability and health. The statisticians say "deprived" does not just mean "poor" or "low-income". It can also mean people have fewer resources and opportunities, for example in health and education. Glasgow has 56 of the 100 most deprived areas. Edinburgh has six."

...and the problem in capitalism is that some of those deprived  areas, Easterhouse, Barlanark, Carntyne were part of the solution offered by successive Labour and Tory governments in the post-war house  building boom.  Yes, we well remember the hopes of the people who moved from the slums of the east-end into Easterhouse and Drumchapel. The solution of council housing, was welcome enough at the time, inside bathrooms, hot water and so on, a luxury initially, to build new flats  and some houses in the peripheries of the city, in places like  Easterhouse, Drumchapel, Castlemilk, but these we came with fewer social amenities, the building of them provided employment for many, but when  the council housing boom ended, the dole queue beckoned for those  unfortunate enough to have not secured a place in the light engineering  factories sprung up, but soon to vanish, with the Thatcherite wind of  change, itself a product of capitals inevitable crisis-ridden system. They began to deteriorate quite early in the 70's. There really was not much to do, in a social sense, for youths.

We remember Frankie Vaughan coming up to help launch the Easterhouse Project, a youth facility. As the song went, "I'm Frankie Vaughan, jist come up tae gie yese a' a haun". Billy Connolly's characterisation of them as, "deserts wi' windaes" struck a chord. One socialist recalls moving to London to find work, (after being stabbed), which paid a bit better, but after being made redundant was quite happy to get a flat in Easterhouse again, where he was surrounded by really nice people doing their best but the closure of factories set him off wandering again in search of wage slavery, 'twas ever thus.

 It really is the counsel of despair to imagine that capitalism can be reformed. This is not to play politics but to end the pretence to yourself that government over you is in anything but the interests of the capitalist class. To lie to yourself that a different government will have different outcomes. No change at all. Workers still produced all of the wealth in return for a waged ration. Thatcher's government was just doing its capitalist masters new bidding in dismantling the 'homes for heroes', 'cradle to the grave', capitalist caring ideology which won the post-war consensus. Kinnock’s Labour would have done the same as Smiths Labour would have. Hence Blair.

Surplus wealth is not produced by the parasite capitalist class, but by workers. All wealth comes from labour. Capital is stolen surplus value.

Capitalism is not amenable to reform. The free market system requires a majority to be exploited of their surplus value. It is but one of the many paradoxes of capitalism that it has shrunk the world only to divide society into smaller and smaller fragments. That it has progressed at breakneck speed in the fields of travel and communication yet it has divided and alienated us from our true humanity. Anti-social behaviour is a result of the despair engendered by the hopelessness of capitalism a consequence of the system and not a fixable problem.

“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” Voltaire

Capitalism's profit requirements will place severe constraints on what any government can achieve and that, like their predecessors, they will have to compromise and run the economic system in favour of the  capitalist elites which they currently rail against.

"If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a  congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head  to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." Marx

Wee Matt

Leaders Need Followers

“But somebody has to lead," is the astonished declaration members of the Socialist Party invariably hear from those when we tell them there will be no leaders in socialism. The attitude of the Socialist Party toward leaders and the following of leaders seems to create a great deal of mental anguish for many of our fellow-workers. The leadership idea has cursed the working class movement from the beginning. At an earlier period those supporting the ideas had motives of benevolence, its later supporters have also benevolent motives—but the benevolence is directed towards themselves. They make stepping stones of their followers so to reach their own comfort and security.

What distinguishes the Socialist Party from the Labour Party and the host of leftist parties is our realisation that there are no short and easy cuts to socialism. No politician can help us: if we are going to improve things we will not do so by following professional politicians or leaders of any kind. We are going to have to act for ourselves to organise ourselves democratically to bring about a society geared to serving human needs, not profits. Only a party whose members understand and want socialism can work to that end and the growth of such a party cannot proceed faster than the work of spreading socialist knowledge. It is not new leaders that are needed, but a new system.

The media invariably preach the slogan of “Follow your leader" When these “leaders” sell out their followers the excuse is made that they were "bad” leaders. The simple fact is that wherever people accept “leaders” such acceptance always provides the conditions for selling out. Encouraging the following of leaders it is helping to sell out the workers, no matter who those leaders may be. Such is the lesson. "Trust and ye shall be betrayed.” The workers have still a fair road to travel before they will get rid of the superstition of "Leadership" or the dope of "good" and "bad" leaders. Workers haven't yet seen the possibility of a world without masters. The successful shepherd thinks like his sheep. So it happens that the "leader" can only lead where he is likely to be followed. Hence, so far is the leader from being in advance of the crowd, which he is only the reflection of its collective ignorance.

The Socialist Party objects to leadership because we see it as one of the biggest obstacles to the spread of socialist ideas. A leader can only offer to lead where he is likely to be followed. He is not really in advance of his followers because if he stops leading them in the direction they think is the best open to them they will soon desert him for another who will. People who are easily persuaded to think one way by a powerful personality can usually be persuaded by a more powerful one to change their minds.

Rosa Luxemburg explains, “the understanding by the mass of its tasks and instruments is an indispensable condition for Socialist revolutionary action—just as formerly the ignorance of the mass was an indispensable condition for the revolutionary action of the ruling classes. As a result, the difference between “leaders” and the "majority trotting along behind” is abolished (in the Socialist movement). The relation between the mass and the leaders is destroyed. ”

It is often asserted by the geniuses of the Left and other misleaders of the working class, that the worker to-day, and in the future, require the assistance and guidance of educated, intellectuals, both to direct their agitation and energies now, and to manipulate affairs. The workers, therefore, should not endeavour to obtain control of the political machinery themselves, but should place the professional politicians in that position of command and control and obey orders

According to your typical Trotskyist every political upheaval, every wave of strikes, would have resulted in the revolution but for the fact that workers lacked “revolutionary leadership.” The revolution is always round the corner. It is obvious that there is something lacking in a working class that is continually side-tracked. It is precisely because the workers lack socialist knowledge that reformist leaders rise to power. If the workers’ leaders do not represent the interests of workers, they do certainly reflect the outlook of the workers. When they do acquire Socialist understanding, the workers will not require leaders—revolutionary or otherwise. Unsound on basic theory, religious in their approach to historic development and arrogant in their contempt for the workers’ thinking capacity, Trotskyists believe that the intellectual few can lead the great mass of ignorant workers to socialism. But their concept of revolution is based on getting control of the political machinery without a mandate for socialism. They possess little recognition that only by patient discussion and argument can workers be persuaded to get rid of their ideas of dependence on a wages system and the institution of buying and selling and that society is run by a force outside of themselves. Leaders become identified with the ruling class—their interests are identical and in opposition to the working class, which can never be free, even in thought, while it submits to leaders.

Trotskyism simply reproduces and institutionalises existing capitalist power relations inside a supposedly 'revolutionary' organisation: between leaders and led, order givers and order takers; between specialists and acquiescent and largely powerless party workers. Even if such leaders on the Left wanted to introduce a socialist system they couldn't; they haven't the mandate and never seek it.

Despite the frustrated cravings of those wanting the "quick way" to socialism by the "right leaders", there is still no safeguard except the working class knowledge and understanding which makes them superfluous. They pray for "good" leaders, but there is no such animal. The leaders we are asked to support, and sometimes choose between, are a myth, created and maintained by--leaders. They are poor examples of honesty, integrity, even of humanity. They are not interested in truth, justice, or any of the grand notions they spout about. They exist, have always existed, will always exist, for one purpose only: to line their own pockets and empty yours. They are parasites on the social body, unwanted, unnecessary and destructive. To follow leaders is to hand over your heart on a platter, with knife and fork attached. It is an admission of defeat, acceptance that you are inadequate, in and of yourself. It is an act of submission and indeed an act of cowardice unworthy of the human animal.

To refuse to follow leaders is a liberating step, one which the working class has yet to take. When we realise that the post-scarcity world can be run very efficiently and healthily by democratic co-operation, that our own lives would be vastly better without states, governments, police, and all the trappings of leadership, we will collectively be in a position to make that step. And then we will see a revolution unprecedented in history.

One thing dreaded by the ruling class is an informed organised working class without leaders. The Socialist Party’s task is to make socialism clear to the workers, and we shall persevere with that task until the game is up for leaders—until there is no one to lead, until the “rank and file” are ready to go forward of themselves. The need for knowledge, lest we are duped, is constantly forced upon us.

You will find no “Great Men” in the S.P.G.B. The parts that its members play are varied, but no attempt is made to measure one against the other—the keynote is a co-operative effort, as it will be in socialist society. One of our objections to the existence of “Very Important Persons” is that it presupposes that some persons are accounted of little importance. We are a band of ordinary folk, but each is as unimportant (and therefore each is as important) as the other, whether chosen for speaker, secretary, organiser or election candidate. In working out his or her emancipation, the worker must study the conditions that surround and oppress them. He or she must look to "great principles." and not to "Great Men" in their struggles.

 Leaders come and go, but capitalism will go on until the very people who support and admire the leaders come to understand the social system they live under. The leaders always say that they stand for a world of peace and human dignity. But only when the system which needs the leaders is gone will their empty and cynical words become reality. Socialist ideas are not acquired merely by the experience of hardships and tragedy under capitalism. They must be propagated and learned. So long as the workers do not comprehend the necessity and meaning of a revolutionary social change they will have no choice but to leave their fate in the hands of "leaders." With the development of class-conciousness will come the realisation that they, the workers themselves, must take control of society. The Socialist Party has no leaders and argues that the only possible basis for a truly democratic society in which things are produced for need rather than profit, is the voluntary cooperation of free and independent individuals. Each of us can be our own leader. The greatest command is that over oneself.

The Socialist Party is the only political party in this country which insists that its membership understands and supports the principles of socialism. The Socialist Party is without leaders; it is a democratic party whose members cooperate and participate in the work of socialist propaganda in equal standing. Workers who despair of the apparently endless procession of cynical, futile leaders and candidates for leadership should consider the proposition that the alternative is not to switch their support from one leader to another but to join the socialist movement.

Robotic Conversations.

An article in the Toronto Metro News of July 27 focused on Ludwig the Robot, a creation by researchers at the University of Toronto and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, headed by Frank Rudzicz, assistant professor of computer science.

Ludwig's function will be to converse with patients at a Toronto care centre who are suffering with Alzheimer's. As Rudzicz explained, "Ludwig assesses cognitive function continuously as he engages elderly residents in conversations and games. Each time he interacts with a patient, he learns how to do it better, by learning to recognize voices and ask follow up questions. Ludwig can converse about nearly anything, from news to sports, or a person's childhood. If the conversation gets derailed the robot is a of recovering or starting anew."

Since Ludwig is just off the assembly line it's too soon to know to what extent he will be effective. This may seem like a wonderful invention, but since we live under capitalism, monetary considerations cannot be overlooked.

It would seem like a new way to slow down Alzheimer's, but wouldn't it be better to find out if can be cured or, better still, prevented? One can be sure of one thing – that won't happen under capitalism. 

John Ayers.

The Newcomers

Around the world, millions of people are moving between countries. Most move to find jobs and seek a better life. Many flee repression. The ruling class want fellow-workers to believe that all their problems are caused by the immigrants – people who face exactly the same problems as the local working class, like unemployment, exploitation, domination and crime. In short, the ruling classes everywhere tries to teach hate and blame people, to scapegoat people who are exactly the same as them.  They are their brothers and sisters, people with whom they should unite to fight the ruling classes, the ruling classes of every country. The rich are left alone. Their money brings them passports and visas. The ruling class of one country recognises their fellows from other countries. They have things in common: privilege, property, profits and power. They share the same interest - keeping the working class in their “place”, doing what they are instructed...working for the bosses for low wages.

Migrant workers become the scapegoat for every problem the capitalist class has created. The conditions of the immigrants make them into cheap labour, which benefits the local employers and the immigrants get the blame for the local people’s unemployment, stealing jobs and low pay, undercutting wage rates.  The working class are divided between native and foreign worker, and lacking unity are unable to fight back against the bosses who have orchestrated the whole situation by using nationalism and patriotism as their weapons. These hide the class divisions in society and presents the local capitalists as friends and allies of their “fellow-citizens”.  Their exploitation and repression against the working class is camouflaged by the nation’s flag and national anthem. The employing class and its government appear to be defenders of the local population when the opposite is true. The owning class promotes nationalism to divide and rule.

Our fellow-workers must learn that we live in a class system and know what side they are on. Either it is to support the owners of wealth or defend the working class by which we mean those who work for wages and lack control of their lives, including the unemployed. Between the capitalist class and the working class, there is nothing in common. We, the majority, are ruled by the few for enrichment. We are told where to live, what to do, even how to think, who to hate and persecute. Everything the ruling class possesses has come from the toiling class and our higher wages and better conditions mean less profit in their pockets.

Only a socialist mass movement can change things. Only world socialist movement can make the fundamental changes in society: not by improving bits of our lives here and now, but challenging the whole class system, itself.  Only through a mass socialist movement can we create a new society, based on equality and freedom, a society based on production for use and distribution by need, democratic control of the communities and workplaces. It would be a global community, not a world divided into different nations, with endless recurring wars and oppression. The socialist movement does not mean in one country only, or of one nationality, or of one race, or of one gender. We mean a socialist movement that refuses to recognise the divisions imposed from above by the ruling class, a socialist movement that opposes all governments, a socialist movement that really stands for “Workers of the World – Unite!”

The Socialist Party is for class struggle. We oppose the capitalist class because it is a ruling class because it exploits and oppresses. We stand in solidarity with our fellow-workers in all countries and against the ruling elites of all countries. Instead of an endless parade of tyrants we seek a better world. We must wage a common fight against the ruling class. We must engage in a struggle for a new world - a world freed of capitalism.

Repudiating Religion

No socialist can be religious, for the former’s ideas are based on material knowledge and the latter upon idealist belief. The rational ideas which materialists have about the world can be verified by philosophical methods which can themselves be verified. That is not to suggest that materialists can establish scientific, unchanged and absolute truths but that we can make statements capable of scientific testing which can lead us to believe that a statement is probably factual. Thus, materialists argue that ideas are responses to matter and we can demonstrate our claim by analysing history. Religious faith cannot be disproved because its criterion of truth is not material, but supernatural. Belief in the supernatural force can only itself be verified by accepting the supernatural force as the means of verification. Faith is the central feature of Christian thought. A is true because A says it is true and we must not doubt the word of A because A informs us that it is sinful to do so.

Religion is an institution. It is organised. The blood of martyrs may have been the seed of churches, but the seed sprouted from the riches garnered by churches. As the Catholic Church was the bulwark of feudalism and the aristocrats, so today the evangelical churches of America justifies capitalism and shares in its fortunes. In the class struggle the dominant institutions, including the churches, support the ruling classes. Religion sanctifies capital and makes divine profit. Business and godliness go together. The capitalist does the Lord’s work.

Many churches are fully alive to the urgency of social questions, and even to the possibility of social revolution. They possess 2000 years of historical experience to know how to sway with public opinion. They have learned how to survive and even prosper. If you can’t beat them – join them as the current pope demonstrates. A world free from wars and poverty? The dignitaries of religion can no more provide the solution than could the politicians of capitalism with whom they are allied.

 To seek to abolish religion in a society founded on exploitation is futile. However, once a socialist society has been established the twin foundations of religion, ignorance and fear, will fade away. Socialism, by doing away with class exploitation and by developing to the fullest possible extent the unfathomed productive potentialities of new technology and robotics, hitherto hardly touched under capitalism, would make poverty and insecurity absolutely meaningless terms in an age of universal plenty. Whilst along with the competitive capitalism, war, the third partner in the unholy capitalist trinity, would necessarily pass into oblivion. The root causes of religion would thus disappear. The arrival of socialism means inevitably the definitive end of religion; which, deprived of all reason for existence, would become a mere anachronism in such a society. Religion is a social phenomenon in present-day society. Hence no amount of merely negative and critical propaganda can destroy it. Only the positive achievement of a classless society can do that by abolishing its causes. The war against the gods in the sky is equivalent to the class war against capitalists on the Earth.

Socialists are not atheists, insofar as we are not concerned to deny the existence of a phenomenon of which there is no proof, but materialists; our purpose is to explain the nature of the world and the position of human beings in it by means of reason and not faith. Socialists are not in favour of the banning of religions simply because they conflict with our ideas.

Radical Christianity

Whether a man called Jesus Christ lived or not is interesting, but not so vital as to destroy, or even damage the socialist case against religion and for the materialist conception of history. Workers who are suppressed and exploited under capitalism should keep their attention upon the real, material world in which they live; this is the only life we know we have and we must struggle to make it the best of all possible experiences. All religion is a diversion from the workers’ urgent task of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism. Apart from this, there is no evidence which can stand up to a scientific assessment to indicate that there is a supernatural life or any of the other mumbo jumbo associated with religious beliefs.

History doesn’t move in smooth straight lines but by fits and starts, sudden breakthroughs and new pathways. 

The preacher from the 13thC Peasant’s Revolt, John Ball declared: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty”

While widely associated with Thomas Müntzer, who was a radical theologian and rebel leader during the German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525, expressed the idea that the world belongs to everyone. It was their religious belief and they wanted to establish this principle. “Omnia sunt communia, ‘All property should be held in common’ and should be distributed to each according to his needs, as the occasion required. Any prince, count, or lord who did not want to do this, after first being warned about it, should be beheaded or hanged.”

Other quotes from early proponents of Christian “communism”

“The use of all things that are found in this world ought to be common to all men. Only the most manifest iniquity makes one say to the other, ‘This belongs to me, that to you’. Hence the origin of contention among men.” – St. Clement.

“What thing do you call ‘yours’? What thing are you able to say is yours? From whom have you received it? You speak and act like one who upon an occasion going early to the theatre, and possessing himself without obstacle of the seats destined for the remainder of the public, pretends to oppose their entrance in due time, and to prohibit them seating themselves, arrogating to his own sole use property that is really destined to common use. And it is precisely in this manner act the rich”. – St. Basil the Great.

“Therefore if one wishes to make himself the master of every wealth, to possess it and to exclude his brothers even to the third or fourth part (generation), such a wretch is no more a brother but an inhuman tyrant, a cruel barbarian, or rather a ferocious beast of which the mouth is always open to devour for his personal use the food of the other companions.” – St. Gregory. Nic.

“Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common. God beneficently has created all things that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth become the common possession of all. It is Nature itself that has given birth to the right of the community, whilst it is only unjust usurpation that has created the right of private poverty.” – St. Ambrose. (340-397 AD)

“The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.”  were also the words of St. Ambrose

“The earth of which they are born is common to all, and therefore the fruit that the earth brings forth belongs without distinction to all”. – St. Gregory the Great.

“The rich man is a thief”. – St. Chrysostom.

They Should Be Cheering Us

In late July media coverage was given what was called, quiet seriously, "a royal snub"; the decision made by, or on behalf of, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to avoid Ontario on their tour of Canada this fall.

Some folks were upset they didn't get a chance to cheer for them, but does it really matter where a couple of parasites go? Since they live on the wealth they've extracted from the working class, shouldn't they be cheering for us?

These folk and their tribe exist primarily as public relations ambassadors for the British capitalist class, and also because too many people feel a need to believe in someone "above" themselves. When one does that one gives power over themselves. It's better to work for a world where everyone can believe in themselves, where there will be no need for royalty at all. John Ayers.