Life Sentences

Scotland, Prof Van Zyl Smit said, is now proportionately sentencing more people to life than any other European country, including England and Wales. The professor, who is at the law department of Nottingham University, was speaking ahead of a speech to the Howard League for Penal Reform in Scotland.

In absolute terms, Scotland has around 1,000 life prisoners and England about 5,500. By comparison, Russia has 1,800 prisoners serving life whereas France has 500.

Countries like Russia and France only sentence the most serious killers to life, such as terrorists or child sex murderers. Germany gives life to all murderers but has a very narrow definition of the crime of murder.

Other nations such as Uruguay and Norway have abolished lift sentences altogether but can keep someone locked up on public safety grounds.

Professor Dirk Van Zyl Smit said Scotland had a get-tough penal system which was increasingly out of kilter with the rest of Europe. He insists “not all murderers are equally dangerous” and urged Scotland to follow the example of places like Norway — where far right terrorist Anders Breivik was given a maximum sentence of 21 years for killing 77 people.

The Scottish Government in recent years has been accused of adopting "soft-touch" justice policies by right-wing opponents and commentators. However, figures show it has one of the highest incarceration rates in western Europe.

Professor Van Zyl Smit said: "Scottish people often have an idea of the criminal justice system as not being as harsh as elsewhere. At the top end that is not true.

"The UK has the highest rate of life sentencing in Europe and Scotland sentences more prisoners to life, proportionately, than England," he said. "The UK and Turkey together have more lifers than the rest of Europe put together, including Russia. There is a hard question about what you do with your worst offenders. The main concern is that numbers are burgeoning here, while some countries do not have life sentences at all." He added: "More than 30 countries have neither the death sentences nor life sentences," he said. "Others use them more sparingly. People who defend the system say we reflect the seriousness of the offence in a life sentence and the minimum period lifers have to serve before they are eligible for release." His said: "You need to look at mandatory life sentences for murder – not all murderers are equally dangerous – and at what sort of minimum period is being set. After that minimum period are you releasing people? And more and more people are being recalled to prison.”

One of the reasons life sentences are controversial in Scotland and the UK is because they do not usually mean a prisoner remains in prison for the rest of their life.

Scottish judges must sentence for life but they also add a minimum tariff that a convicted killer must serve. Analysis shows these tariffs have been creeping up with Prof Van Zyl Smit suggesting a growing number of lifers behind bars was "storing up" problems for the future. The longest so far was 37 years. All released lifers, however, are out on licence for the rest of their life regardless of the length of their sentence.  The Scottish Conservatives have called for life to mean life whole life sentences. Prof Professor Van Zyl Smit said such policies were "arguably illegal" in terms of European human rights law.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/16079679.Scotland_told_to_scrap_automatic_life_sentences_for_murderers/

How About A Massive Improvement In Everyone's Life For All Time.

 Justin Trudeau was jubilant when he signed Canada up for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has joined Canada to a trade deal with ten other Pacific region countries. To quote, ''Our government stood up for Canadian interests and this agreement meets our objectives of creating and sustaining growth, prosperity and well paying middle-class jobs today and for generations to come.''

 Not everyone was quite so ecstatic; Unifor prez. Jerry Dias fears Canadian auto workers will have to compete with ''cheap labour'' in Asia and the Canadian car markets will be swamped with Hondas and Toyotas.

 Christopher Monette, a spokesman for Teamsters Canada, said Canada is giving away some of their dairy markets and claimed the labour protections in the TPP were weak. 

It is too early to say how things will play out concerning the details, but of one thing we can be sure - the best that can happen is that some sections of the working class in Canada will find a slight improvement in their lives for a short time. 

How about a massive improvement in everyone's life for all time?

For socialism,
 Steve, Mehmet, John
 & all contributing members of the SPC.

Capitalist Economics Assert Themselves.

For several months Stats-Canada had been saying there were slight declines in the unemployment rate, which was probably due to production for the Christmas market, but things have sure changed as the iron-clad laws of capitalist economics have re-asserted themselves. 

Stats-Canada reported record part-time job losses in January that gave Canada's labour market its biggest one month loss since the recession of 2009. 

137,000 part-time jobs were lost, including 50,900 in Ontario. Harsh weather, (to put it mildly), affected the construction industry, (down 14,900 jobs), and the transportation industry, (5,900 jobs). 

So folks, enjoy the good times while they last, 'cos under capitalism it won't be for very long.

For socialism, 
Steve, Mehmet, John &
all contributing members of the SPC.

The Choice Before Us

Religion has been around for a long time.  The traditional answer is that humans evolved religion as a means of coping with the death of loved ones, which is true, as religion preys strongly on the personal crisis in helping cope with the deaths of loved ones by promising that they will see their loved ones again. Another reason often put forward is for a means of explaining the world around us as being created by an all-powerful deity, because it was only until quite recently that we have had any real clue as to the nature of the forces at work around us that have crafted our environment and state of existence. As humans discovered agriculture and started to settled down, populations tended to grow far beyond the small hunter-gatherer groups. Human societies started to independently evolve religious ideas as a means of controlling the behaviour of members of society of how people should behave which were  said to be laid down by an all-knowing and powerful deity, the creator, rules such as thou shall not kill, steal, and one man one wife, and of course to pay homage to the creator/s and follow the teachings and instructions of the deities prophets and priests, that were to be repeatedly recited and ingrained in all members of society. 

All religion's seek to exert total control over every member of society as it was/is believed that all events that happen are as a consequence of the pleasure or displeasure of the Gods such as natural disasters in which respect societies even went so far as to sacrifice fellow humans to please their gods, and sacrifice remains at the fundamental core of all religions i.e. that humans sacrifice independent free will in this life for freedom in the next life, and to a achieve entry into the afterlife humans need to obey the will of the Gods as set down by those that purport to represent the deities such as kings and queens and priests under the fear of what would happen to them if they did now obey the will of the Gods as their representatives on earth. Complete religious control even up to the point of self-sacrifice (martyrdom). Over time this control of the masses has continued to develop and intensify the hold on the general population's actions, making it far easier for the elite to control every aspect of life. 

Religion is not simply a jumble of confused ideas. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of the capitalist class. It divides us and blinds us to the class action that is required to overcome the menace of capitalism. Religion is the ideological expression of a long-gone world and its ancient social conditions, a world of superstition, slavery and little education. Far from providing an answer to today’s problems, it tells us to put our faith in the supernatural hopes of a past age. Instead of uniting us as a class we are to become meek and mild, and to submit to the whims of an ancient god. From the dawn of civilisation religion has been a weapon of political domination. The working class though not as yet hostile to religion, are nevertheless becoming increasingly indifferent to it. Religion is dying but not yet dead. None of us is born Christian or Muslim or anything else. We’re born with no knowledge or beliefs in any god. In fact, we’re all born into a state of atheism. Wherever the accident of birth sees each child born, each individual is born totally dependent and without language or religion. A child develops speaking the language of its home. A child raised in a religion-free zone will not acquire religious knowledge. For this to occur it would need to be exposed habitually to ideas, concepts, and beliefs by those around it. How many people make a conscious choice of religion and how many simply continue with what they were born into as part of their traditional culture, religious or not?

Belief in religion – any religion – hampers the ability to think objectively, particularly about social and political issues. The disappearance of all religious beliefs should be seen as an essential part of our struggle for socialism and not just as a fringe irrelevance. It isn’t simply a question of religion being false, or brutal or divisive; it is a weapon of the ruling class, a bulwark in the way of the emancipation of the working class, a hurdle to be overcome in the progress to socialism nor could it be overcome while the conditions that nourished it continued to exist. Thus, the socialist sees religion as an integral part of the class struggle.

Despite occasional public pronouncements that the West had no quarrel with mainstream Islam, there is no doubt whatever that, with help from the media and repeated insinuations from various officials, the widespread impression has been created that opposition to, hatred of and terrorism against the West is essentially “a Muslim thing” and that the Islamic faith itself carries the seeds of violence and terrorism. Thus we see that a difference in religion has offered the opportunity for capitalism to denigrate as scapegoats the Islamic world: and to drive a wedge of suspicion and distrust between western workers and their eastern counterparts – a good present-day example of the old imperial dodge of “divide and rule”.

An awful lot of people try to impose their false beliefs and certain antiquated social traditions on other people by falsely pretending to be speaking for a god without any good evidence of the existence of any god in the first place and even on the basis of pretending that ancient texts written by men came from that god despite the real world facts which unequivocally demonstrate that these ancient texts teach all manner of false empirical ideas and notions of morality that are primitive and barbaric. Christians who pretend that their ideas are from a god, without any good evidence of even the existence of any such god, and despite extensive evidence that their ideas are false. Christians can't even agree with each other on what it means. There are only several hundred different Christian denominations! 

Materialism, or science, on the other hand, comes from the objectification of the real world outside of the emotions and desires and limited perceptions of humans, from the recognition through rational thinking that the world exists completely independently of the human psyche, and that how we feel about reality is utterly irrelevant to determining what the facts of the real world are. Reality is what it is regardless of how we feel about it. The universe is far more vast and more complex than anything comprehended in the primitive cosmogony of the Bible. Man is not the purpose of creation. The earth is not the centre of the universe. Even our galaxy is but one of a trillion observable galaxies in the universe, and those are merely the ones we are able to observe.

Socialism, as the science of society, is an essential part of a scientific view of all phenomena regarded as an interdependent whole; and such a monistic view of the universe, with each part in inseparable causal relation to the rest, can leave no nook or cranny for God or Gods. The concept of God as an explanation of the Universe is becoming entirely untenable in this age of scientific enquiry. The laws of the persistence of force and the indestructibility of matter, and the unending inter-play of cause and effect make the attempt to trace the origin of things to an anthropomorphic God who had no cause futile. The physical laws of the known universe cannot logically be held to cease where our immediate experience ends, to make way for an unscientific concept of an uncaused and creating being. The Creation idea is unsupported by evidence and is in conflict with every scientific law. Socialism is consistent only with that monistic view which regards all phenomena as expressions of the underlying matter-force reality and as parts of the unity of Nature which interact according to the laws of physics.

The consistent socialist, therefore, cannot be a Christian, or Muslim or Jew or Hindu. As a belief, religion is a manifestation of man’s ignorance of Nature’s working. The great theoretic weapon of the workers in their fight for emancipation is science, not religion; and religion and science are as incompatible as fire and water. Religion is an instrument of domination which cannot be used as an agent of emancipation at this stage of history and social development. The working class, moreover, though not as yet hostile to religion, are becoming increasingly indifferent to it. Workers find little basis for belief in divine interference.

The decay of religion is, indeed, a measure of the advance of humanity, for the height of man’s superstition is at the same time the depth of his ignorance. The socialist can see, accompanying the decline of religion, humanity emerging from the darkness of ignorance and fear into the clear daylight of science and power, spurning the priests who had duped them, dispossessing the class that had robbed them, and moulding society to their needs, ordering and perfecting the social forces they have inherited. Socialists can picture the people, no longer slaves, but free: no longer in fear of phantoms of their own creation, but looking proudly out upon a harmonious and rational social world, harnessing giant natural forces to industry, and intensifying their relationship with Nature by a wider knowledge of Her laws. Socialists see a social organisation adapted to give all people health and happiness by freeing them from wasteful drudgery and by stimulating healthy emulation in a new birth of science and the arts. And so the community of brothers and sisters, that Christianity professed but could only retard, becomes, at last, a reality through the complete harmony of interests brought about by the co-operative commonwealth; a made inevitable, because the social organisation makes the highest welfare and happiness of each immediately dependent upon, and producible only by the promotion of the like well-being of all. 

The Road to Socialism

The Socialist Party’s conception of revolution is often criticised for its lack of credibility since it is assumed that people have to wait for the overwhelming majority necessary to “enact” socialism before doing something about their immediate problems. The Party does argue that the work for socialism must be the building up of a majority of socialists who will then be in a position to remove the capitalist features from production as a conscious political act and that until a socialist majority is achieved, the class monopoly of the means of production, the wage-labour/capital relationship, commodity production, the operation of the market, and the state, will continue to be both the form of social production and its administration by governments. The Party’s theory of revolution insists that socialism can only be established by the democratic, conscious political actions of a majority of socialists and it is not just any theory culled from a textbook of bourgeois sociology. The theory is based both on the class struggle as the motor of social change and on an understanding of the economics of capitalism and the limits it places on what can be done within the framework of the capitalist system.

Members of the Left reject the Party’s theory of revolution as “impossible”. Their argument was that without a majority of socialists, and prior to the formal enactment of common ownership, a working-class government could set society on a course of change in the direction of socialism. In control of the state and all legal processes, such a government would grant the widest freedom of action to the trade unions and thus set up a partnership with the trade unions pursuing working class interests on the industrial field and a government doing the same on the political field.

The unions would maximise the workers’ share of the social product at the point of production. The government would provide housing, health care, and education, etc. At the same time, such a working-class government would begin the process of establishing common ownership through the nationalisation of the means of production and through “taxing the rich out of existence”.

The Party rejected this gradualist policy at the beginning of the century and this rejection has been vindicated by experience and has led to the Party’s traditional case for abolishing class ownership by one short, sharp political act. With a growing socialist majority, the class struggle will take new forms, not least because the ruling class will become ever more cunning and ruthless as its hegemony is more and more threatened. Critics have accused the Socialist Party with some foolish ideas which we do not hold such as the use of Parliament alone. The Party is aware that the use of parliament by a socialist majority is just one part of a much broader movement for change in which the revolutionised ideas and activities of millions of class-conscious workers will be rather more important than the actions of delegates in parliament. 

 The Socialist Party presents our objective as an immediate solution to the problems of the present and not as a futuristic utopia. All serious socialists do this. What on earth would be the point of proposing an alternative to capitalism which will only be capable of liberating workers after they are dead?  Our appeal to workers is upon the basis of class interest and our appeal will be successful because the class struggle generates class consciousness in workers. Most people who like socialism as a “nice idea” but despair about its achievements are utopians, and as such, they lack a sense of liberation as an historical phenomenon—a product of victory in the class war. 

The reason why the Socialist Party rejects the gradualist theory and policy is that the Party’s theory of revolution was formulated from an application of Marxian economic theory to the workings of capitalism on the one hand, and from the nature of socialism on the other. This established a framework of limitations and possibilities of what could be achieved by the working class acting in its interests. From this work, it became a political premise that the economic operation of capitalism could not be controlled in a manner which would allow for any gradual realisation of working-class interests amounting to the gradual establishment of socialism. Moreover, a society which would be consciously and democratically controlled by its members in the interests of all its members could only be established by the conscious political act of a majority. This is what the Left reject—thoroughly and out of hand—even in face of the fact that the force of the Party’s arguments has not diminished with the passing of time; on the contrary, as capitalism has continued to develop as a world system, it has become more compelling.

 It is highly demonstrative that the contemporary Left has failed to offer strategies for the struggle other than reformist ones: struggle for minorities’ rights, for women’s equality, for the rights of immigrants and homeless, defending the environment and so on, that is they have offered actions aimed at improving capitalism partially (which helps to make capitalism more attractive to a greater number of people and thus decreases the number of socialist fighters) not at destroying it. And certainly all this, does not pose any threat to the rule of capital. A socialist revolution, which can only be worldwide and which will not run in the same pattern common for the previous bourgeois and state-capitalist revolutions is not a matter of the distant future.

The  Left, at best, talk of the need to "transcend" capitalism in general, in some distant future but do not call for an immediate struggle for social revolution. There are those (although few in number and weak in influence) and who do. But somehow their calls fail to ring the bell with wide, and even narrow, masses of the workers. When the ruling classes are forced to take such a measures against the workers that will inevitably blow up the class peace, i.e. to refuse to limit the working day, to terminate the dole system, to actually eliminate the social infrastructure of the welfare state, to crack down on protests, these circumstances may lead to the class organisations of workers (such as trade unions) radicalising, to the capitalist society betraying its class nature, to the general public opening up to the revolutionary propaganda, and consequently, to the class struggle reviving and then to a social revolution.

The Socialist Party's aim is a revolutionary change in society. Socialism does not mean a different kind of government or State control of industry. It means a completely different social system, based on the ownership of all the means of life by everybody. Socialism means a world where the things of life will be produced solely to satisfy the needs of mankind, instead of for the purpose of realising a profit for your bosses; a world where the whole of humanity will own and control the means of living and where wars and international strive cannot exist: a world where people will no longer be subject to the threat of unemployment and to the perpetual struggle to make ends meet—in short, a world where everyone will freely and equally associate and enjoy all the fruits of their labour. We're talking about a world community without any frontiers. About wealth being produced to meet people's needs and not for sale on a market or for profit. About everyone having access to what they require to satisfy their needs, without the rationing system that is money. A society where people freely contribute their skills and experience to produce what is needed, without the compulsion of a wage or salary.  There is no need for the food we eat, or the clothes we wear, or the houses we live in, to be restricted by the size of our wage packets. There is no need for the output of factories and farms to be restricted by having to make a profit. The productive resources are sufficient to make it possible to abolish buying and selling and thus money and to go over to free distribution of the things people need.

How is the Socialist Party is going to do all this? The answer is that it is not. YOU are going to do it. No politician can help you.

The Flim-Flam Man

Richard Leonard, the Scottish Labour Party leader, who the BBC calls “a proud man of the left”,  told conference delegates in Dundee that "our economy needs less market and more planning". He also said: "Our party's mission under my leadership is not simply to secure a fairer distribution of wealth from the existing economic system, it is to fundamentally change the existing economic system."

We have heard this “radical” talk all before from the Labour Party's politicians and each time we have had a Labour Party government, such stirring words are never heard of again.

There Is An Answer To This Mess, But Not By Tinkering With Capitalism

At a meeting of the Toronto city council on February 9, some members got their bowels in an uproar when listening to the findings of a city-commissioned study on rents. 

In 2017 apartment rents had their biggest increase in 15 years. A two bedroom unit costs, on average $1,426 a month. Two bedroom condos also had a big jump, with rents being $2,400, on average. The vacancy rate is less than 1 per cent, the lowest its been in 16 years. 

The study found that if low-income residents spend 30 per cent of their annual income on housing and receive a $250 monthly housing subsidy through the city, they still can only cover 60 per cent of the rent based on average market prices.

 Councillor Gord Perks said,''Toronto has to make an investment in affordable housing and can use its hundreds of millions of dollars in land transfer tax revenue to do so. The land transfer tax is wealth captured in a booming real estate market.''



  It may be the city has other uses for that money that have nothing to do with cash-strapped residents well being. 

There is an answer to this mess, but it won't be found tinkering with the effects of capitalism

For socialism, 

Steve, Mehmet, John &
all contributing members of the SPC.

Socialism is not reforms, it is revolution.

Any conception of socialism must include the empowerment of the working class to be the master of its own destiny. Whilst we can debate and sketch visions of what a future society might look like, all these discussions will prove meaningless unless we can find away to acquire the power required to make them concrete.  Given the seeming powerlessness of the working class at present what means can the working class be elevated to power?  In a sense the working class already has a massive latent power over society just waiting to be realised, the task then is unlocking this power. When workers are organised in accordance with their class interests they are better able to wield their latent power. The working class is the real agent of change. The slogan of “revolution” has been misused so blatantly that it has lost its meaning.  The workers’ movement is lacking political  clarity. The problem is the lack of of consciousness. Why don’t workers put an end to capitalism – given its destructiveness to humans and the environment. If you don’t know where you want to go, then no road will take you there.

To be a socialist means first and foremost to be on the side of the working class. Socialists are not against reforms but oppose reformism as a political practice. Socialists support any reform that will help the cause of the working class and the poor. The working class can win concessions but only for a certain period before the ruling class tries to take these reforms and concessions back. In a class society, the struggle between workers and the capitalist ruling class is of a permanent nature. The intensity of this class conflict and struggle can vary and there can be lulls at times. Both classes have different interests and clash with each other to protect and further their interests. The capitalist ruling class wants to exploit the working class to the maximum. On the other hand, the working class has no other option but to fight back for their survival.

Marx  explains that:

“The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of this mode of production as self-evident natural laws”, that “the organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance”. 

Marx added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed:

“sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker”.

Accordingly, the capitalist can rely upon the workers’ “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them”. 

Of course, by necessity workers will often struggle, over wages, working conditions and the defence of past gains. We support workers’ struggles for reforms, but we do so without fostering the illusion that reforms will solve the harm to humans and the earth that is intrinsic to capitalism—let alone will they ever make work anything other than drudgery.  But as long as workers look upon the requirements of capital as “self-evident natural laws”, those struggles occur within the bounds of the capitalist relation. Sooner or later the worker will accept his subordination to capital and the system keeps going. People commonly think that there is no alternative to the status quo. To go beyond capitalism, we need a vision that can appear to workers as an alternative common sense, as their common sense. 

The struggles of workers against capital transform “circumstances and men”, expanding their capabilities and making them fit to create a new world Marx argued. Even though their goals in these struggles may be limited to ending the immediate violations of norms of fairness and justice and may be aimed, for example, at achieving no more than “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”, people change in the course of struggle. Despite the limited goals involved in wage struggles, Marx argued that they were essential for preventing workers:

“from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production”;without such struggles, workers “would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation”.

People struggle over their conceptions of right and wrong, and what socialists attempt to do is to explain the underlying basis for those struggles. The moral campaigns for "rights" while acknowledging its importance to the working class there is also to go beyond them by articulating and showing what is implicit in these concepts and struggles are only to be contained within a new society.

 Marx pointed out, the root of exploitation under capitalism is not insufficient wages per se, or the depredations of finance. The process of exploitation under capitalism necessarily implies that for accumulation to take place on one end, the worker must be paid less than the value of their labour-time on the other. The more capitalist production expands, the less time the workers has for themselves. The struggle over exploitation is fundamentally the question of whether the worker has the time to fully develop her intellectual, social, and creative powers, or must devote this time instead to the reproduction of a hostile, alien, and benumbing society, with no time to call their own. This is a ‘bread and butter’ question in its own right. Socialism is to create a world where labour-time for all workers can be reduced to a minimum to leave the  maximum time for leisure pursuits, socializing, sports, art, music, writing, debating, and all those things that have been considered the good things in life. There is no known process of capitalism that can achieve this aim. 

The establishment of socialism involves workers taking power themselves and exercising collective and democratic control over workplaces, and resource allocation through democratic planning, the complete democratisation of society.  Socialism is "a movement of the immense majority, acting in the interests of the majority".

Ineffective No Doubt, Profitable Certainty

It has recently been revealed that the morning sickness drug Dicletin is ineffective, its only beneficiary being its manufacturer Duchesnay.

 It is obvious that Health Canada took the so-called findings of the clinical study financed by Dushesnay at face value. 

Just think of the profits the company reaped during the 40 years the drug was on the market. They got away with it because though the drug didn't do any good, it didn't do any harm.

 In a socialist society a drug would be tested for its effectiveness and impact on the environment and not made if it failed either test; the profit motive wouldn't exist.

For socialism,
 Steve, Mehmet, John & all contributing members of the SPC.

Humanity still has a future

By definition capitalism can only function in the interest of the capitalists, no palliatives can (nor ever will be able to) subordinate capitalist private property to the general interest. So long as class exists, any gains will be partial and fleeting, subject to the on-going struggle. What we should be opposed to is the whole culture of reformism, the idea that capitalism can be tamed and made palatable with the right reforms. Over decades, millions of workers have invested their hopes in so-called ‘practical’, ‘possibilist’ organisations and policies, hoping against hope that they would be able to neuter the market economy when, in reality, the market economy has successfully neutered them. They turned out to be the real ‘impossibilists’. Demanding the unattainable humanised capitalism is one of the greatest tragedies of the last century and it is made all the greater because it was all so predictable. Many held and still hold such as the authors the idea that capitalism could be reformed into something kindly and user-friendly. It couldn’t and it can’t.

We have no objection to workers and socialists getting involved in fights for partial demands but don't believe a Socialist Party should do that. We regard the strategy of transitional demands as elitist and manipulative. The party's task is NOT to "lead the workers in struggle" or even to instruct its members on what to do in trade unions, tenants' associations or whatever because we believe that socialists and class-conscious workers are quite capable of making decisions for themselves. To those who still say that, while they ultimately want socialism, it is a long way off and we must have reforms in the meantime, we would reply that socialism need not be a long way off and there need not be a meantime. It is only when people leave reformism behind altogether that socialism will begin to appear to them, not as a vague distant prospect, something for others to achieve, but as a clear, immediate alternative which they themselves can - and must - help to bring about. Most on the Left believes class struggle militancy can be used as a lever to push the workers along a political road, towards their "emancipation." How is this possible if the workers do not understand the political road, and are only engaging in economic struggles? The answer is the Leninist "leaders in-the-know" who will direct the workers. But these leaders lead the workers in the wrong direction, toward the wrong goals (nationalisation and state capitalism), as the workers find out to their sorrow.

One of the great strengths of the Socialist Party is our opposition to leadership and our commitment to democratic practices, so, whatever weaknesses or mistaken views we hold or get accused of, they cannot be imposed upon others with possible worse consequences. The history of Leninism/Trotskyism blames all on the lack of leadership or the wrong leadership or a traitorous leadership. The Socialist Party are not going to take the workers to where they neither know where they are going nor, most likely, want to go. This contrasts with those who seek to substitute the party for the class or who see the party as a vanguard which must undertake alone the task of leading the masses forward. The crucial part of the Socialist Party case is that understanding is a necessary condition for socialism.

The Socialist Party’s job is to make a socialist society an immediacy for the working class, not an ultimate far-off ideal. Something of importance and value to people’s lives now, rather than a singular "end".  There is no point in drawing up in advance the sort of detailed blueprint of industrial and social organisation. For a small group of socialists, as we are now, to do so would be undemocratic. We also recognise that there may not be one single way of doing things, and precise details and ways of doing things more than likely vary from one part of the world to another, even between neighbouring communities. Nor can we determine what the conditions will be when socialism is established. As the socialist majority grows, when socialism is within the grasp of the working class, that will then be the proper time for making such important decisions. It is imprudent for today’s socialist minority to be telling people how to administer a socialist society. When a majority of people understand what socialism means, the suggestions for socialist administration will solidify into an appropriate plan. It will be based on the conditions existing at that time, not today. At this point some will no doubt say "cop-out" but no. We can reach some generalised conclusions based on basic premises and can outline broad principles or options that could be applied. We do not have to draw up a detailed plan for socialism, but simply and broadly demonstrate that it is possible and therefore refute the label of “utopian”. Never forget that socialist society is not starting from a blank sheet and we are inheriting an already existing production system. Workers with all their skills and experience of co-operating to run capitalism in the interests of the capitalists could begin to run society in their own interest.

For years we have witnessed the “success” of a procession of practical efforts to rally workers to “socialism” by clever politics. We have seen the transformation of these advocates of “socialist goals” into supporters of the status quo — rebels who have been converted into supporters of the system. Their trademark has become the reforming, improving and administering capitalism. Rebels become transformed into administrators of capitalist states, recruiters for capitalist wars. From Social Democrats to Bolsheviks, from Castro's Cuba and Bolivarian Venezuela. When in office they have actually administered capitalism in the only way it can be administered, in the interest of the capitalist class, even to the extent of supporting capitalist wars and crushing workers on strike, compromising every “socialist” principle.

We have been confronted and challenged by those who fight for something “in the meantime” and who are actively participating in the “workers’ struggles.” The lure and fascinations of protest demonstrations and making demands is very attractive. (In a sense, it indicates how deep-rooted discontent with capitalism really is, and it demonstrates the latent strength of socialism once the masses wake up to the need for changing the system instead of adjusting to it.) But — and this is the vital point — these activities are not in harmony with the immediate needs of our time: the making of socialists. Where are the convinced socialists they were going to make? Where are the socialist masses? Their practical, pragmatic policies have proven worse than illusory. They have failed to make socialists! Yet they continue to heap scorn and sneer at the Socialist Party for our small numbers. With smug omniscience, we are dismissed as “ivory tower utopians,” “dogmatic sectarians,” “impossiblists,” etc. The real question is: — Who have ignored the lessons of experience?

Where are the socialists you have obtained by your efforts? Their vaunted “fresh approaches” prove to be very stale indeed. For years their antecedents — the Fabian socialists with their gradualism, the Labour Party with their enthusiasm for policy promises, the Bolsheviks with their “revolutionary” programmes and plans — actually gained victories on such policies and programmes. But on their hands is the recruiting of workers for capitalist wars and the crushing of workers on strike. All those “socialist governments” merely wound up administering capitalism for the capitalist class. We in the Socialist Party say to them: “If it is a movement you want, take a laxative!”

The socialist activists claim impressive “successes” and “victories” in every field except one. The lessons of experience and history have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that they have not remotely convinced the workers of the need for socialism. From the activities carried on in the name of socialism, the one thing conspicuous by its absence has been any mention of the socialist case. In common, the efforts of social activists have been geared to an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions of capitalism. Such groups have been guilty of disillusioning the workers about real socialism. The great indictment of these activists is that they divert the workers from the genuine socialist movement, and have hampered the growth of socialism by many years. Were all that tremendous energy and enthusiasm harnessed in the genuine socialist work of making socialists, how much more the movement would have been advanced!

If anything has been amply demonstrated over the years, it is that “reforms” by “socialist” parties have not been able to change the real conditions of the working class. These “practical realists” with their “in-the-meantime” activities have sidetracked the movement from what is truly meaningful. All those dedicated energies have diverted overwhelming numbers of workers from genuine socialism. Had all these efforts and all that enthusiasm been devoted to socialist education, just imagine how much further advanced and inspiring the movement would be today.  

Why we are socialists

Workers Must Survive On Reduced Pensions.

When Sears Canada went under it wasn't a sudden shock, people had been predicting it 4 years ago. During that time many employees had tried to protect their pensions. They wrote to Sears CEO Calvin McDonald, they met with Sears chairman Brandon Stranzl, they communicated with repeatedly with the Financial Services Commission of Ontario. They wrote to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and to every member of the provincial parliament and met with representatives from Ontario's finance industry.

All this was to no avail.

When Sears Canada applied for protection from creditors in June 2017, the deficit in the pension plan was $226.8 million. Now 16,000 ex-Sears workers face a future of living on reduced pensions, but then whoever claimed that capitalism and security went hand-in-hand?

For socialism, 
Steve, Mehmet, John & all contributing members of the SPC.

In Defence Of Socialism

After over a century of reform activity, and the sincere efforts of a multitude of reformers, the world is in a greater mess than ever it was. The Socialist Party is often accused of being opposed to reforms, social legislation designed to ameliorate some intolerable situation. Not so. We are not opposed to reforms per se, any more than we advocate them.  The position of a revolutionary is to reject reformism - the advocacy of reforms - which is not the same thing as opposing reforms themselves. Reformism is the promotion of reforms and it is this that revolutionaries should not be engaged in. Trying to mend capitalism is incompatible with trying to end capitalism. For ourselves, radicalisation entails the conscious propagandisation of the socialist alternative under each and every circumstance thrown up by capitalism. It an interactive process between thought and practice are driven by a clear and unambiguous conception of what we are to replace capitalism with. Nothing less will do. Unless we know what to replace capitalism with, capitalism will not be replaced. We will be stuck with it. It is literally a case of one or the other.

We make a very clear distinction between reformist struggle and other forms of struggle. We are 100 % behind militant industrial struggle. fully support militant struggle by workers as a class and as individuals in the economic domain to resist the downward pressures of capital. In fact, in our view, the trade union movement has largely compromised and weakened itself by blurring this distinction as for example in the UK where many unions are affiliated to the capitalist Labour Party. Trade unions should stick to the economic domain where they work much better as militant organisations of the working class.

Of course, socialist consciousness comes through struggle not just propagandising. This is not an either/or situation. It is actually mutually reinforcing. The struggle gives rise to the ideas and the ideas in turn help to clarify and strengthen the struggle. Part of my argument against reformism is that it actually weakens the position of workers. It doesn't radicalise them at all. It ties them politically to capitalism via capitalist political parties that aim to garner support through the advocacy of reforms. This is what workers need to reject. They will actually become much more militant in my view if they completely rejected the reformist illusion that capitalism can be moulded to accommodate their interests and if they came to recognise that the interests of workers are diametrically opposed to the capitalists. This is what revolutionaries should be doing - saying how it actually is not trying to dishonestly socially engineer workers into coming over to them by dangling reforms in front of them which they know full well are not going to modify the position of the exploited class. In the end, if you do not break with the logic of capital completely and in ideological terms, if you do not explicitly advocate a genuine alternative to capitalism, there is no way on earth that you will ever create an alternative to capitalism. You will remain forever stuck in the reformist treadmill going nowhere. 

Although the ultimate aim of the radical fighting for a reform may be the self-emancipation of the working class, it will never ever come to self-emancipation of the working class precisely because fighting for reforms is a trap from which you will never ever escape unless you stop fighting for reforms and raise your sights higher. Capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of workers so fighting for reforms in the interests of the workers is foredoomed. There is no real evidence that it does lead to a socialist outlook. Many radicals ultimately end up in in the ghetto of worthy liberal causes which only serve to fragment working class solidarity in a plethora of separate struggles each demanding attention at the expense of others. Or they become disillusioned old cynics in later life and join the establishment. 

We dont say socialists need to stand on the sidelines and tell workers to drop their illusions and follow us. Firstly we reject the whole principle of vanguardism and leadership. Secondly, we don't say we should stand on the sidelines. No revolutionary ever is on the sidelines anyway. This is a meaningless way of looking at this anyway. We are all involved in the class struggle whether we like or not or whether we are aware of it or not. As workers, we will join with our fellow workers in a union to fight the bosses in the industrial field. We are simply members of the working class who has come to communist conclusions. We don't exist in some sense outside of the working class telling the working class what to do. This is an elitist Leninist perspective. As Socialist Party members we will put across socialist ideas - about socialism, about rejecting nationalism, racism, and sexism and so on and so forth. Spreading ideas is essential. Everybody without exception believes their ideas are the right ones - otherwise, they would not hold or express them. Its got nothing to do with "leadership". Its what human beings do - talk, discuss, argue. If it is elitist to express an idea then what you are trying to say is that we really should not express ideas at all. We should keep silent about our political views. That is quite absurd. If everyone followed that advice there would be discussion about anything. People do develop their ideas as a result of hearing other ideas. This is not "idealist". Materialism does not deny the role of ideas, what it denies is the "independent" role of ideas, that social developments are completely explicable in terms of the impact of ideas alone. This is false but nevertheless, it is quite true that all social developments involve an exchange of ideas between historical actors and could not happen without that.

The Left has a fetish about "action" and that there is something latent or inherent in the acts one carries out that somehow drives one forward into becoming a socialist. This is wrong. Strikes, protests demonstrations and all these sorts of activities don't carry any necessary socialist implications whatsoever. It is the interaction of ideas and actions which is what is needed. If you ignore the importance of ideas and the necessity for a clear and explicit alternative to capitalism you will never ever pose a serious threat to capitalism. Never. Workers can be actively engaged in reformist struggles to get governments to introduce measures that they perceive to be in their economic interests. But in the end, they actually help to weaken not strengthen the working class by tying it ideologically to capitalism, fostering the illusion that capitalism can be run in the interests of workers and entrench their dependence on capitalist governments to do it for them. 

Lest we forget

Obituary from the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with regret that we have to record that our comrade Angus McPhail died on December 3rd after a short illness.

T. Mulheron, a close friend and comrade for many years writes:

“He was a supporter and member of the Socialist Party for more than forty years. From the era of Moses Baritz and Adolph Kohn, many Socialists from Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, U.S.A., New Zealand, Australia and Europe were grateful for the hospitality and generosity of Beech McPhail and his wife, Jessie.

Apart from his life-long adherence to our movement, his two largest contributions were: (1) From the outbreak of the war in September 1939, until its end, and indeed afterwards, he was a courageous and eloquent advocate of a large number of young members at C.O. Tribunals. (2) In the early years, he organised a speakers class in Glasgow, which produced a relatively large number of Party speakers.

“Beech” McPhail was always uncompromising, sometimes harsh, yet despite financial circumstances which would have permitted weaker types to forget the interests of the working class, maintained the interests of the latter. To use an old cliché, McPhail, like Cromwell (an unfair criticism to McPhail), can be painted with his warts. To those of us who have known him—he will never be forgotten.

He was cremated privately from the David Elder Cottage Hospital in Glasgow, according to his family's wishes, and his ashes deposited on Loch Awe where he and many other comrades spent many happy hours fishing, talking and drinking, and serene moments of a feeling of entire removal from the sordid realities of world capitalism.

To his wife Jessie, and his family, we extend our deepest regrets and sympathy at his passing.”

Socialist Standard Past and Present blog has posted a couple of articles by Cde. McPhail offering news about the Party

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/10/glasgow-street-scene-1943.html

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/01/our-difficulty-is-your-opportunity-1941.html

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/01/our-parliamentary-fund-1937.html

There Is Something Rotten In The States Of Capitalism.

On one newscast at the end of Jan. CBC announced the following Goodies. Yellow Pages cut another 500 jobs across Canada as it moves from print to digital directories. Campbell Soups are closing their plant in Etobicoke, Ontario next year, not that it isn't making a profit, but bigger ones could be made by sending the work to their 3 plants in the U.S. 

In Whitby, Ontario, the decline in sales in the housing market means a $75 to $95 thousand decrease in price over the last year at a new housing estate. The folks who bought last year feel like chumps. Toronto's Union Station will soon lay off their red cap porters and hire "station attendants''. 

This will probably be a young guy's they who will work for less with no benefits or pensions. Now all this on one broadcast! 

It's not a case of there being something rotten in the state of Canada, but plenty rotten throughout all of capitalism.

For socialism, 

Steve, Mehmet, John & all contributing members of the SPC.