Scottish Nazis

Matthew Collins, a researcher with Hope Not Hate, said the most active National Action faction is the Scottish Nationalist Society.

Repeating its predecessor’s tactics, the group has targeted universities and city centres with racist stickers directing people to a website describing members as “ultra-nationalists who want to protect the progression of our people”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/national-action-neo-nazi-terrorist-far-right-uk-ban-a8878466.html

Some refuse to learn. Some refuse to remember

A socialist is not the ordinary average person-in-the-street who is saturated with ignorance and prejudices pumped into him or her on a daily basis. The socialist thinks about social problems and comes up with explanations and the solution. In the struggle between capitalism and socialism we have a struggle between two different social systems. Socialists have no intention or desire, nor need, to abandon the fight for socialism. We fight for the workers and oppressed peoples everywhere who are sick to death of insecurity, exploitation, subjection and increasingly abominable wars, who aspire to freedom, peace and equality. We never promised that we would bring policies to their relief but only be able to help organise them into an independent movement, acting in their own interests and not of the capitalists. The only way we know how to do this is: tell the truth about capitalism and socialism; help make those we can reach conscious of the problem of society today and how to solve it, and increase the clarity of those who are already partly conscious of it. We will do everything we can do to deepen the understanding of capitalism and become rallying point of resistance. We will continue in our way even if we are alone for a time. To build the foundations for hope in the future required not only opposition to capitalism but also exposing those who falsely claim to be standing for socialism. You can spot the fake from far off, for sure. He will always say, in one way or another, that the working class must follow the leadership of somebody else; that the working class is not really suited to make decisions and need someone clever for them to follow. He teaches the workers NOT to rely on their own class strength, NOR to rely on their own class organisation. “The emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself,” said Karl Marx. Workers are not academic theoreticians and they are not Utopian dreamers but practical people, well capable of control themselves. You can’t replace the old order with the new society of socialism unless the people are freed from dependence on leaders and as a class.

We will try to teach the misguided and mistaken this principle better as they deserve to be answered. The voice of socialism among the left-wing is silent or reduced to a whisper. Within the Socialist Party, it remains clear and resolute. It will be heard, and it will be echoed. To declare that world capitalism is overripe for socialism is to repeat a fundamental truth. Not democracy but private ownership and profit are the basis of capitalism and the capitalist class. But while democracy is not indispensable to capitalism, it is absolutely indispensable to the working class. The world socialist movement cannot even hope to be reborn without democracy.

State-capitalism is command economy based on the state ownership of the means of production. The state owns industry and either government officials “own” the state as a bureaucracy or controls it on behalf of the government bond-owners. Socialism, on the other hand, is the common ownership of the means of production under the democratic control of the working people themselves. A vast difference. When the state is asked to take over industrial enterprises and to plan economic activities as just another capitalist state, surrounded by a competing and hostile rival trading nations, it could plan and administer enterprises only in order to strengthen itself on the world market as an international strong competitive power. Such social reforms, where they were effected, had nothing to do with socialism. If attained, they could only be maintained to the extent to which the nation became a successful economic power and could take advantage of the global capitalist market.

We will not be issuing pious platitudes about “democratic socialism” (as though there were any other kind of socialism) and promoting a list of palliatives for making capitalism operate better (if that is possible.) We ill not present a programme of class collaboration, class “peace” and surrender to the capitalist exploiters, the working class. The Socialist Party proclaims its adherence, without apologies or compromise, to the platform of class struggle, to socialist revolution, to Marx and Engels. Our immediate demands are to free humanity from war, starvation, ignorance, and misery. We seek a working class that stands erect on its feet; refusing to be forced to its knees. A working class resorting to class war. A working class fighting for socialist freedom for all mankind. The aim of the socialist movement is a just one: it expresses the legitimate aspirations of the people for political and economic freedom from exploitation and oppression. Reformists and gradualists often sneer at what they call the “utopian”, “impractical” aims of the Socialist Party. We are not impressed. The results of the “feasible” politics pursued by the reformers are all around us, poverty, hunger, disease and wars. The results of the same policies in the future will be no better. The only war to end wars is the class war of labour against capital. The Socialist Party possesses a sure vision and steadfast conviction of its eventual victory. We strive, brothers and sisters of the world for that not distant day when, over every land, one single flag, the red banner of socialist freedom, will fly high. When this day comes – and never doubt for a moment that it will come – we shall declare from the depths of our hearts: The Day has Arrived

Nationalism - heads they win, tails we lose.

On Sunday the 28^th, Lambhill Cemetery in Glasgow is to be the scene of a wreath laying ceremony and commemoration for some of those who took part in Dubln's Easter Rising rebellion and are buried in Glasgow. There may well be in addition to Irish nationalists attending, some who call themselves socialists and seek to remember the memory of James Connolly and the Irish Citizens Army. Let Socialist Courier disillusion you.

The conditions for revolutionary action expressly did not exist in 1916. They did not exist in Ireland and they did not exist in Europe. In Ireland, the Citizen Army were only relatively few in number. As a self-avowed Marxist, Connolly forgot that it takes the working class to change society, not a handful of individuals to do it for them.

Connolly used his charismatic authority as a party leader and a trade union organiser, to drag his men behind him into an alliance with their class enemies from only a few years earlier during the Dublin Lockout because his sights were set on action, no matter how futile.

A large section of the workers’ movement was destroyed and into the vacuum stepped the nationalist opportunists, happy to lavish praise Connolly, but even happier to divert the working class struggle. Connolly had not fought for workers’ demands on the question of hours of work, of wages, of factory conditions, or of the ownership of the land and industry but for a purely nationalist proclamation. 

Those who advocate alliances between workers’ organisations and pro-capitalist political parties on the basis of Connolly’s participation in the 1916 rising should heed the consequences.

Post-war Ireland saw the Limerick Soviet in the south and, in the north, the Belfast 40-Hour Strike where “Bolsheviks and Sinn Feiners” were leading astray many “good loyalist protestants” to the dismay of the Orange Lodge, where the composition of the strike committee was a majority of Protestant, but the chairman was a Catholic. Sectarianism was being challenged. Working class militancy had entered the Shankill Road and Sandy Row. The National Union of Railwaymen in a resolution at a conference in Belfast stated:“without complete unity amongst the working classes, (we should not allow either religious or political differences to prevent their emancipation) which can be achieved through a great international brotherhood the world over, no satisfactory progress could be made.”

Instead of a James Connolly to make the most of this opportunity for working class unity and solidarity, we had De Valera declaring his policy of “Labour must wait”, the interests of the nation must come first (read “the interests of the capitalists”). It was to be national unity, not class unity. By pressing their interests the workers were said to be “endangering” the unity of the republican forces! On the land where the tenants were seizing the estates, they found themselves being held back by Sinn Fein and the IRA, who even went to the lengths of carrying out evictions in order to break the back of the land-seizure movement.

The labour movement and working-class unity were the real victims of the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising when James Connolly subordinated their class interests to the nationalist interests of Ireland's aspiring capitalists.

In “The Story of the Irish Citizen Army”, Sean O'Casey rightly explains that, in participating in the 1916 insurrection, Connolly was not acting as a socialist.

“Connolly had stepped from the narrow by-way of Irish Socialism on to the crowded highway of Irish Nationalism”.

He gave “fixing on the frontage of Liberty Hall a scroll on which was written ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’” as an example of Connolly’s “determined attachment to the principles enunciated by Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers, which were, in many instances, directly contrary to his life-long teaching of Socialism”.

As a result, O’Casey went on, “Liberty Hall was no longer the Headquarters of Irish Labour, but the centre of Irish disaffection”.

THE COST OF IRISH NATIONALISM

Our Future Is Up To Us

We are all on the verge of a technological revolution that can liberate the exploited. Classes,as such, will come to an end. But those in the Socialist Party are not the evangelists of a new religion proclaiming a new revelation. We simply do not believe in the permanence of capitalism and we are dedicated to the task of organising a socialist revolution a party uniting with workers in all lands for one idea, one aim. Our goal is nothing less than the workers’ conquest of the world. Socialism is the order of the day and the workers’ revolution is the means to realise it. For as long as anyone can remember, the ruling class have paraded one political lackey after another before the people promising a lifetime of peace, prosperity and the end of poverty while they have continuously subjected millions here and around the world to wars of plunder. The Socialist Party accuses the capitalists and their whole system of legalised robbery and murder. The history of humanity shows that there is another path – the path which the oppressed in every society sooner or later takes, the path not backward but forward – the path of resistance and overthrow of their exploiters.

What is socialism? First, it is the rational distribution of’ the necessaries of life according to need. A person’s needs are food, shelter and clothing. Our necessaries include education, healthcare, and culture, leisure, entertainment and other creature comforts. We cannot precisely define needs, but each level of satisfaction is bound to produce greater longings and needs. They can be satisfied with the ever expanding technology. Secondly, socialism is a system that allows every person to contribute to society, “according to abilities”, the foundation of happiness being based on social contribution.

A revolution is an historical process by which a subordinate class overthrows its ruling class,establishes itself as a new ruling class and establishes a new political system. Changes in the economy force changes in society, a social revolution. The change in society, the social revolution, forces a political revolution. These stages are interconnected.

People organise themselves around the production and distribution of the necessities of life. We call such social organisation a society. Our society's system of production is called capitalism because the capital (the means of production) are privately owned. The workers sell their ability to work, their labour power, and buy the commodities that are necessary to live. The capitalist buys this ability to work, the labour power, the brain and muscle that, once put in motion, becomes work,and sells the commodities that work produces.

People will have to decide what kind of new society will replace the old. We view the working class for what it is – the class called upon to solve the problems of society; a class called upon to refashion an economic system which has served its purpose and now can produce only economic crises, environmental destruction and war.

Our fellow workers must organise on the basis of their own interests. They must organise in a party — in the socialist party — which represents their interests, which is controlled by them and whose candidates are subject to their directions. Organised politically in the Socialist Party and industrially in the factory and offices, the workers will be invincible. 

The Socialist Party projects a vision of the possibility of a class-free society. We see that the solution of mankind’s economic and social problems lies not within the capitalist system but beyond it, in a socialist society.

"Arise like lions from your slumber,

In unvanquishable number,

Shake to earth your chains like dew,

Which in sleep had fallen on you,

Ye are many - they are few.”

Shelley

Everything for Everyone

Why must the working class, which produces the wealth, constantly fight for sufficient wages to maintain a decent standard of living? Why is there poverty in the midst of plenty? Why must we live in out-dated and run-down buildings when there is enough material and skilled labour to construct decent homes for everyone?

The capitalist class manipulate the means of production to serve their selfish profit interests. They have converted the means for potential plenty into a monstrous exploitative mechanism creating scarcity, terrible depressions, starvation wages, poverty, wars. Capitalism has turned the world into a mad-house of conflicting economic rivalries, state boundaries, tariff walls, culminating in military conflicts.

The only “management” truly capable of organising and administrating industry for full and efficient production and for the needs of the people are the workers themselves. Socialist planning, on the other hand, begins with the expropriation of capitalist property, the expansion of the productive machinery, and the raising of the standard of living. The whole possibility for socialism rests on the feasibility of enormously increasing the productivity of world society. If economic plenty is unrealisable it follows that socialism is not inevitable. Socialists have determined how this can be done through the efficient utilisation of present resources, transport and factories, the elimination of unemployment, the cessation of war, the ending of economic chaos through rational planning and the early expansion of the productive system through the intensive application of science. Many surveys have been made of the possibilities of plenty; the most modest revealing grandiose perspectives if no more were done than to run the existing machines at full capacity. So long as scarcity prevails, ruthless struggle for the major share endures. When scarcity disappears, however, then rational planning of world society not only becomes feasible, but inevitable. A planned socialist economy would rapidly guarantee a rising standard of living on the basis of an abundance of goods produced in the interests of the many and not for the profit of the few.

The Socialist Party does not hold that our fellow-workers can be delivered from poverty, unemployment, degradation, war, by any reform of the capitalist system under which we live. That system must be abolished, wage slavery must be done away with altogether. The workers must own and control the machinery of production. As for curing the ills of the workers by reforming capitalism, we have lived through years of Labour Party governments and you know only too well what that has got us. The gains we have made have been eroded away as the Welfare State and the social services are cut back. During the recession the bail-outs were provided not for the workers, but for the capitalist class. There is always some one who promises to fix things. Isn’t it about time that the workers realised that it does not make any difference how well-meaning these capitalist saviours may be in offering salvation, there is no way out under capitalism? Palliatives has not ended the system of want amidst plenty.

Under capitalism the general trend is toward greater misery for the workers. Capitalists make their profits by paying the worker in wages a smaller value than he creates by labouring. The capitalist thus gets what Marx calls surplus value. It is the only way profit can be created. Under modern conditions expensive plants and equipment are increased, but the work is done with fewer workers. Thus they must be exploited ever more fiercely in order that surplus value – profit – may be squeezed out of their labour, the only possible source of profit. Capitalism will forever force living standards lower and again lower. Things could be better. Plenty and security might be had. But first workers must become convinced that capitalism cannot be reformed and that it must be abolished. They also must reject the idea that we can gradually replace capitalism with socialism though a policy of ameliorative reforms. The gradualism idea of running a capitalist and a socialist, a profit and non-profit, system side by side is absurd. It is like trying to ride on two horses going in opposite directions. 

The capitalist system remains under all these “socialist housing schemes” etc. and the crisis is not resolved; it gets worse. There was a time when capitalism was able to make concessions to the workers, better the standard of living, without cutting into profits which brought certain results. Now capitalism maintains itself only by taking away concessions – wage rates, welfare benefits, etc. – which it once gave. Capitalism must drive the standard of living lower all the time. There is only one solution and it is no more quack remedies offered such as wage indexation, tax indexation, designed to hoodwink the people.

Towards a Planet of Plenty

Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream. We socialists have always contended that capitalism should be abolished because it mismanaged the means of production so that a very few – those who own the means of production – reaped great profits while the masses of the people were deprived of a secure standard of living. We would often prove this assertion by demonstrating the tremendous capacities which the modern industrial machine has; how it could satisfy the needs of everyone if it were run for that purpose; and how capitalism, instead, ran the industrial machine for profits. All that was and remains completely true. It remains the great and tragic paradox of our age – poverty in the midst of plenty. When the capitalists realise there is no profit in selling their goods, there are layoffs and slashing of wage’s. Food is left to rot in the granaries and storage houses, and hungry people starve in the midst of plenty. people starve in the midst of plenty and food is dumped when people cannot buy for they may not have the jobs or the money.

Capitalism is a wasteful and inefficient system. It cannot plan on either a national or an international scale. It deprives the mass of the people of products. Socialism could plan better, provide the people with all necessities. Socialism could take the vast resources which are available and use them for constructive purposes. The inefficiency due to capitalist competition; the shortages and high prices due to capitalist monopoly; the wars due to imperialist rivalry; the inefficiency and economic inequality due to the impossibility of constructive economic planning under capitalism – all would be things of the past. In their place could arise the new society of peace and plenty. That is why socialism is the burning need of the hour. Families go without in the midst of plenty. We have the natural resources, the machinery, the labour. Modern science has made comfort and culture and leisure possible for all. Who will deny the great potentialities for good inherent in our advanced economy? The owners of production have at their disposal all these wonderful opportunities, but have they used them to end poverty, maintain security and a high standard of living and keep the peace? No. Where, then, does all the wealth go to? The 1%. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer is always true under capitalism.

The capitalist system won’t work, for the very root of capitalism is all wrong. It is based on a contradiction, namely, that the man who owns the tools of production (the capitalist) does not work them, and the man who works them (the worker) does not own them. The working people themselves should own and operate the industries cooperatively, through common ownership. This would end production for profit and the waste of competing businesses. There would be planned production for the first time, increasing the output of wealth so that there would be plenty for all. We have all the means necessary to a high standing of living, shorter hours and certainly full employment for every able-bodied person. The kind of planned economy we envisage would, for the first time, make possible an end to wars between nations. Because the planned economy would include all countries. The aim of the working class would be to end capitalism and all forms of exploitation everywhere; and everywhere introduce a planned economy. The Socialist Party's aim is to create a socialist world. Science and new technology can make all the wheels of industry turn to produce the things people need. We must make this come true.

In the final analysis, the solution is that the profit-grubbing obstructionism by the capitalist class must be ended and it is unattainable only for those who think in terms of capitalist profits and the perpetuation of capitalist power. Workers cannot obtain plenty and security, deliverance from misery and war, by trying to reform the capitalist economic system. We have to abolish it. Then and not until then, can working people use the productive forces to provide plenty and security. The capitalist system, though the development of productive forces makes plenty possible yet it presses the standard of living of people ever lower.

Socialism is a system which is based upon plenty for all. Its aim is to raise the standard of living of all humankind far higher than that reached in the most advanced capitalist country. It means, therefore, the utilisation of the most modern and advanced means and methods of production. It means the most scientific utilisation of all the natural resources of the entire world. It means the closest cooperation of the peoples of the entire world. Socialism cannot be based on scarcity and want, for these breed inequality, rivalry, class divisions. Socialism seeks to eliminate these forever from the face of the planet. The capitalist system came into being only after a number of revolutions and half-revolutions. The period of its birth lasted for decades, The change from the feudal system to capitalism was not as drastic as will be the change from capitalism to socialism, for the latter implies not the change of one system of exploitation for another, but the elimination of all exploitation and class rule.

For world socialism. To this inspiring task, we summon all the workers oppressed by capitalism. Only a socialist world can give us peace and plenty. Look how the capitalist world totters on the brink of climate change destruction. The myriad evils of capitalism will disappear only with the destruction of capitalism and the building of socialism. We, socialists, refuse to join the reformists in leading the workers into the camp of capitalism. The working class must overthrow capitalism and that road does not lie through support of palliative reforms. The only road is the socialist road. It is the ballot that we use against capitalism. Vote, then, for socialism. Vote for the Socialist Party, the only party that keeps the revolutionary banner unfurled. The working class can organise and run society in the interests of all the people; the working class, and the working class alone, can and will open the door to the new socialist society of peace, plenty, freedom and security.

Towards A New Freedom

This is an era of change. Automation and robotics are in the hands of the ruling class, and are replacing the workers and impoverishing the people. The coming social revolution must place the new technology in the hands of the people to lay the foundation for a whole new world. Abundance, created by robotics and people working for the common good rather than the profit of the few, will forever end poverty, exploitation, oppression and war. It is up to us as socialists to realise that we do have a vision to offer. Socialists ask why we have the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, and scarcity in the midst of abundance. For the first time in history, scarcity – with all its endemic misery, starvation, wars and pestilence – is no longer an inescapable part of human life.

Socialists at the present time are in short supply but now is the real possibility that the socialist movement can be reborn. Our numbers are small, but the potential is huge. The myth of an ever expanding economy with the trickle down of wealth to the poor is over.

Equality of distribution is possible only in two circumstances—starvation conditions and supreme abundance. The age of abundance belongs to world socialism. In this world we have vast regions of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvellous productive technology , and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labour to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes. It cannot be blamed nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of all humanity. The Socialist Party holds that the people ought to own and control its own industries, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all. The Socialist Party seeks to help implement the greatest social and economic change in history, to establish the universal commonwealth—the harmonious cooperation of every person with every other person on the planet. , the dawning of the better day for humanity.

Socialism, and only socialism, will create a world without master and slave, a world without national barriers, without international rivalries, and, hence, a world without war. Its primary purpose will be to conduct the affairs of the world with the aim of eliminating poverty, joblessness, hunger and general insecurity. Its sole criterion would be the needs of the people. Socialism will destroy the root evil of modern society, i.e., the private ownership of the means of production, the factories, mines, mills, machinery and land, which produce the necessities of life. With socialism, these will become the property of society, owned in common, producing for use, for the general welfare of the people as a whole. With the abolition of the private ownership of the means of life and with it the factor of profit as the prime mover of production, the sharp divisions of society between nations and classes will disappear. Then, and only then, will society be in a position to become a social order of abundance and plenty for all, for socialism will create a new world of genuine cooperation and collaboration between the peoples of the earth.

In abolishing classes in society, socialism will change the form and type of governments which exist today. Governments will become administrative bodies regulating production and consumption. They will not be the instruments of the capitalist class, i.e., capitalist governments whose main reason for existence is to guarantee the political as well as the economic rule of big business, their profits, their private ownership of the instruments of production, and the conduct of war in the economic and political interests of this class. The preoccupation of government under socialism will be to assist in the elevation of society, to improve continually the living standards of the people, to extend their leisure time and thus make it possible to heighten the cultural level of the whole world.

In abolishing classes, class government and war, socialism will at the same time destroy all forms of dictatorship, political as well as economic. World socialism will be the freest, most democratic society the world has ever known, with a world federation truly representing the majority of the population and subject to its recall. A citizen of a socialist society will look back upon the capitalist era with its wars, destruction and bloody and cruel dictatorships as we now look back upon the dawn of written history.

World socialism will assess the industrial potential of the world, determine its resources, the needs of the people and plan production with the aim of increasing the standards of living of a free people, creating abundance, increasing leisure and opportunity for cultural enjoyment. Socialism will not concern itself with profits and war, but with providing decent housing for all the people.

Socialism will provide for a multitude of schools for all the people. Socialism will no longer regard schools primarily as institutions to produce trained labour to help operate the profit economy. Socialism will create a system of health preservation in which the well-being and improvement of the people would be the paramount consideration.

Above all, socialism will provide jobs for all. But this will be work without exploitation. For the aim of socialism is not the increased exploitation and intensification of labour, but the utilisation of machinery, technology, science and invention to diminish toil, to create time in which to permit all the people to enjoy the benefits of social progress. Socialism will place at the disposal of science and the scientists all the material means to help create an ever-improving social life for mankind. Under capitalism, scientists are mere wage workers hiring out their skills to private industry. The fruits of their intelligence, learning arid research become the exclusive property of the capitalists who profit from the labours of these scientists. Thus, science has become subordinated to profits rather than to the common good of all mankind. Yet the future society depends in large measure on changing this relation of science to society. Only socialism can place science where it properly belongs: in the service of the people.

Today's modern world contains all the pre-conditions necessary for socialism. All around us we observe the technological marvels which could produce the goods of life in abundance. Man has developed robots and automated production, which make it more possible to control our natural and social environment to create a fruitful life of abundance. Mankind is at a crossroads. We can travel the road of capitalism, the path towards chaos, war, poverty and barbarism, or we can take the socialist road to freedom, peace and security, the road toward a society of plenty for all which would end the exploitation of man by man for all time.

Food Bank Scotland

The Trussell Trust said its food banks provided  210,605 three-day emergency food supplies given to people in crisis by the trust last year, nearly 70,000 went to children in 2018-19.

It was a 23% jump from the previous year and the charity described the situation as "unacceptable".

Trussell Trust said the cost of living and delays to benefits were cited by clients as the main reason for them visiting the food banks. 

Scotland operations manager Laura Ferguson said: "What we are seeing year-upon-year is more and more people struggling to eat because they simply cannot afford food. A 200% increase in just five years is not right. Ultimately, it's unacceptable that anyone should have to use a food bank in the first place. No charity can replace the dignity of having enough money to buy food. Our benefits system is supposed to protect us all from being swept into poverty."

Campbell Robb, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation charity, said: "It is just wrong that in our society a growing number of people, including children, are going hungry because of our consistent failure to get to grips with poverty."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-48043856

The Choice for All - Abundance for All

For the first time in history, humankind can produce such abundance that society can be free from poverty, hunger and homelessness. The only thing standing in the way is the capitalist system of exploitation and wage-slavery. The struggle for education and health care is the beginning of a revolution for a better world. We seek to liberate the thinking of working people and unleash their energy. We will win them to the cause for which they are already fighting with a vision of a world of plenty. New technology provides better, cheaper and more products with less and less labour. Society now has the capacity to devote the energies and talents of its people to satisfying the needs of all. The magic of robotics and automation which sprang from the inventive genius of man, has been created the possibility of fabulous abundance. But, alas, instead of blessing mankind, it has become the means of enslaving it.

Each day, increasing Artificial Intelligence is throwing people out of their jobs. Their work has become worthless to a system that values only what it can exploit to make a profit. People who until very recently trusted and defended capitalist economic structure are now searching for political direction and for solutions to their problems. More and more, people from every walk of life and every pocket of struggle against this system are looking for a plan for what has to be done. The ruling class tries to keep people confused and to keep them from fighting in their own interests. For it to continue, capitalism must retain the faith of workers and middle class; it must spread the impression that it still can work. We have to counter the ruling class’s intensifying propaganda in the class war. The day when our fellow-workers recognise that so long as capitalism exists they are doomed to degradation and poverty amid the greatest potential in the world – that day will have seen the dawn of social revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. Only with the profit system removed, can they find abundance. The arguments for overthrowing capitalism now finds ready listeners. Conditions are ripe for revolution.

Dramatic changes in the way a society produces its wealth call for radical changes in how that society is organised. The capitalist class cannot convince the people to believe in their system while they are destroying their hopes and dreams. The Socialist Party aspires to inspire our fellow-workers with a society organised for the benefit of all, built on cooperation, that puts the well-being of people above the profits and property of a handful of billionaires. When the property-less class which has no place under the capitalist system takes control of all productive property and transforms it into common property, it can reorganise production so that abundance is distributed according to need. We endeavour to empower people with the understanding of their role in striving for this new society and imbue them with the confidence that it’s possible to win. We call on you to join us in campaigning for this cause. The fight for what people need in order to live for justice and happiness is the revolutionary struggle today. Conditions are ripe for revolution.

The material and technical resources for a society of free access, a world based on the principle from each according to ability, to each according to needs, unquestionably exist today. Surely no competent enquirer doubts that everybody could have a comfortable and attractive home, abundant food, decent clothing, opportunity for recreation and education, security against accident, sickness, and old age; and the sense of independence and self-respect that goes with these things. The appalling contrast between what might be and what is, arises from the nature of the economic system – capitalism – under which we operate. A revolution in technology has occurred and is still in process. Private possession and control over it via intellectual ownership and patent laws provides the right to make profit from it and to exploit the labour of those engaged in it. This antiquated system of private ownership and profit continues to function and acts as a brake upon production so that, as the phrase goes, you have “want in the midst of plenty.” The Socialist Party seeks to end immediately private ownership and control over natural resources and over production, distribution and communication which generations of workers applied their toil and skill to build. Ownership and control would be vested collectively in society. It will be the people, not the industrialists and financiers who who will benefit. The spectre of insecurity will be removed. The despotic domination of the few over the many will be at an end. The rational and scientific use of natural resources and sustainable manufacturing will mean an immediate and substantial improvement in the standard of living of the mass of people. Capitalism can save itself only by fiercer exploitation, cutting living standards, taking away even such concessions as were previously made. Since capitalism must keep pushing conditions of working and living ever lower and lower, it must eventually undermine every vestige of democratic rights and the means of resistance workers may have, for clearly no matter how meek, peaceful, conservative an organisation might be, at. some point it will try to resist the imposition of further impoverishment and distress.

There is only one course which can save people from capitalism – revolution. We must make every struggle, on every battlefield, a step towards that end, the abolition of the capitalist system of society, based on the exploitation of man by man, and to build a socialist society based on common ownership of the means of production, with economic life planned in the interests of the masses of the people – a society which will develop material; abundance and the construction of a society based on the principle “to each according to needs”.