Edinburgh Branch Meeting

7pm, Thursday, May 2nd
The Quaker Hall, 
Victoria Terrace (above Victoria Street), 
Edinburgh EH1 2JL

The Socialist Party has clearly stated is that to achieve socialism requires a clear understanding of socialist principles with a determined desire to put them into practice. 

For socialism to be established the mass of the prople must understand the nature and purpose of the new society. Our theory of socialist revolution is grounded in Marx's - the position of the working class within capitalist society forces it to struggle against capitalist conditions of existence and as the workers gained more experience of the class struggle and the workings of capitalism, the labour movement would become more consciously socialist and democratically organised by the workers themselves and would require no intervention by people outside the working class to bring it. 

Socialist propaganda and agitation are indeed necessary but would be carried out by workers themselves whose socialist ideas would have been derived from an interpretation of their class experience of capitalism. 

The end result would be an independent movement of the socialist-minded and democratically organised working class aimed at winning control of political power in order to abolish capitalism. Marx’s concept of the workers’ party to be was a mass democratic movement of the working class with a view to establishing socialism. This the Socialist Party still aspires to become.

We challenge capitalist apologists and pseudo-socialists in the battle of ideas. Our fellow-workers' acceptance of capitalist political and social ideas, like other beliefs are learned from other people - parents,  schoolteachers,  workmates, and the influence of the mass media and social media.  It follows therefore that the struggle against capitalist ideology must  also be a campaign to spread socialist ideas - a role taken on by ourselves. 

Socialist ideas arise when workers begin to reflect on the general position of the working class within capitalist society. The socialist view have to be communicated to other workers, but NOT from outside the working class as a whole. They have to be communicated by OTHER workers who, from their own life experiences and/or from being imbued with the past experience and knowledge of the working class, have come to a socialist understanding.

 It's not a question of enlightened outsiders bringing socialist ideas to the ignorant workers but of socialist-minded workers spreading socialist ideas amongst their fellow workers. We see socialist consciousness as emerging from a combination of two things - people's encounters with  capitalism and the problems capitalism inevitably creates but in addition, also the activity of socialists voicing the case for socialism as a part of peoples' experience.

We regard socialism not as a purely political theory, nor as an economic doctrine, but as one which embraces every phase of social life. The fact of the longevity of the Socialist Party as a political organisation based on agreed goals, methods and organisational principles seems to suggest that we indeed represent some strand of socialist thought that some people are drawn towards.

The Socialist Party does not minimise the necessity and importance of the worker keeping up the struggle over wages or to resisting cuts. There are some signs that union membership and general combativity are rising. And let's not forget that this is vital if our class is to develop some of the solidarity and self-confidence essential for the final abolition of wage slavery.

 We fully acknowledge the necessity of workers' solidarity in the class struggle against the capitalist class, and rejoice in every victory for the workers to assert their economic power. But to struggle for higher wages and better conditions is not revolutionary in any true sense of the word; and the essential weapons in this struggle are not inherently revolutionary either. It demands the revolutionising of the workers themselves. If there were more revolutionary workers in the unions—and in society generally—then the unions and the host of other community organisations would have a more revolutionary outlook. But the Socialist Party also cautions that participation in the class struggle does not automatically make workers class conscious. Militancy on the industrial field is just that and does not necessarily lead to political militancy, but ebbs and flows as labour market conditions change – and militants in the work-places can in no way count on their supporters on the political field. 

We do not say workers should sit back and do nothing, but that the struggle over wages and living conditions must go on. But it becomes clear that this is a secondary, defensive activity. The real struggle is to take the means of wealth production and distribution into the common ownership. Only by conscious and democratic action will such a socialist system of society be established. This means urging workers to want something more than what they once thought was "enough". The Socialist Party can be accused of wanting "too much" because our aim is free access and common ownership. The task of the Socialist Party is to show workers that in fact it is a practical proposition and to transform this desire into an immediancy for the working class.

The Future Lies with the Workers

The Marxist Materialist Conception of History tells us never judge phenomena from the surface of things and outward appearance, but to delve deeper down to the economic, social and political foundations. If we perform this critical task in the case of political demagoguery of the Left and the Right, we discover that in spite of their apparent differences, in spite of the divergent polarised social composition of their support, there are nevertheless similarities. Demagogues adapt their policy and propaganda to the prejudices of the audience to which it is hoped to appeal, without regard to the truth or correctness or workability of any given proposal. The pandering to prejudices and build on them. Such demagogy of populist parties is not accidental. All promises of material betterment, of peace, prosperity and security, are necessarily demagogic as they are formulated within the framework of the capitalist order, and none of these are possible under capitalism. That is why their claims AGAINST capitalism can be nothing but demagogy. Each in its different way presents a platforms which presupposes the continued existence of capitalism. Each of these parties are basically dedicated, however indirectly, to the maintenance and defence of capitalism. For sure, the Left and Right differ profoundly in the ways and means they propose; in their social composition of their supporters; in the manner and direction of their campaign. But these differences are secondary to this basic similarity.

In America, the Republican Party appears, the party of reaction, supported by the majority of the big capitalists, and by considerable portions of the middle classes. Its leaders make clear that the future of capitalism and profits, lies in true Americanism, rugged individualism, competition, no government “interference” in business, no concessions to the labour unions and an infantile program of U. S. isolationism. They want to pursue still increased profits in in their own unhampered way and Trump promises them he is the leader to do it.

The Democratic Party differ widely – in words at any rate. It too is devoted to the preservation of capitalism and the fullest possible capitalist prosperity (i.e., profits). The Democrats believe that the method of appealing to that traditional rugged individualism is no longer the route either to protect profits or to keep the tolerance of the people for the capitalist order. They advocate an “enlightened” capitalism, tempering the harsh exploitation with soft phrases about civil rights, collective bargaining and palliative government measures.. In this way, the Democratic Party aim to oil the wheels of industry.

The ONLY issue for the working class is the CLASS issue: what class holds power? More clearly than ever before, it must be the World Socialist Party against all others, – for workers' power and for socialism. Our Party is the only party that points out that there is no alternative for the working class other than socialism. Since its foundation, the Socialist Party has consistently carried forward the tradition of revolutionary Marxism. Our perspective remains what it has been: to do its part in the great task of making our party the revolutionary party of the working class. If we maintain a clear Marxian position and at the same time build, educate, work and fight side by side with the workers in each and every phase of the class struggle we will have no reason to worry about the charge of sectarianism or to fear isolation from our fellow-workers.

Scotland's Climate Emergency

Nicola Sturgeon has said she believes the world is facing a climate emergency and pledged to speed up efforts to achieve zero carbon emissions.

However, has she heeded Greta Thunberg's warning about North Sea oil who lambasted the expansion of the North Sea fossil fuel industry or does as SNP police has decreed, continue the drilling and shaping legislation to foster oil businesses.

How many fake promises and how much false hope are we going to be fed before we realise the truth? Climate change is changing the world we know and love. Our land, homes and food are at risk. The docility of the world population has contributed greatly to keeping intact the increasingly unequal, barbaric and rapacious society that is global capitalism. Because people believe there is no alternative to capitalism, it keeps on existing. The climate school Friday strikers and Extinction Rebellion have drawn attention to this issue. The fatal flaw means the continuation of the capitalist system which is the cause of the problems of global warming in the first place. Climate campaigners are firmly wedded to a form of capitalism, holding a belief that capitalism can be reformed so as to be compatible with achieving an environmentally sustainable society. The Socialist Party place ourselves unambiguously in the camp of those who argue that capitalism and a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature are not compatible. The excessive consumption of both renewal and non-renewable resources and the release of carbon emissions and waste that nature can’t absorb which currently goes on are not just accidental but an inevitable result of capitalism’s very essence. If the environmental crisis is to be solved, this system must go. What is required is political action - political action aimed at replacing this system by a new and different one.

The Socialist Party believe that if you share our concern for the well-being of people in our society for the welfare of Earth itself then we appeal to you as members of a long-established independent democratic movement which seeks by persuasion and worlds-wide peaceful political organisation to transform our present society into one fit for humankind. The problems of our planet cannot be solved within the existing structures of production and government. Our world is divided into national areas dominated by class minorities in each country, which, either by private or corporate ownership or by state bureaucratic parties monopolise the means of production. The class interests, values and drive for profit of the world-system have been the underlying reasons for the unprecedented destruction of life and resources throughout this century. This appalling process, made worse by new forms of pollution, including the cutting-down of the rain forests. This uncontrolled madness will continue unless we take the necessary democratic action to transform our way of life throughout the planet. Today many aware of past political errors, propose different approaches to the problems of humankind. They put forward schemes which though rightly concerned with holistic, ecologically benign, locally democratic, “human scale” production are still seen as being within the framework of money, wages, prices and profit. These proposals are attractive to a new political generation, which, failing to identify correctly the process responsible for our major problems, are likely to become a new wave of reformists.

Where are we going?

The Socialist Party platform is for the abolition of the system of capitalism and the establishment or a socialist system of production. All the material resources for a socialist economy are present in abundance–raw materials, industrial plants, energy-producing enterprises, transportation, highly developed agricultural resources. The Socialist Party is accused of being dogmatic. We are dogmatic in so far as we hold ideas that make us strive to end capitalism, not to patch it up. We are dogmatic because we explain economic theory such as surplus value, the source of rent, interest, dividends, etc. We are dogmatic because we preach the class war, asking our fellow-workers to cut adrift from the capitalist parties and reforms. We fight for nothing short socialism, because we believe that nothing short of that will save the workers. It is a platitude that the struggle for socialism requires the broadest possible working class unity. But unity on what basis, unity for what ends

The vast majority live by, or are dependent on, the sale of labour power to industries and businesses owned or dominated by the few. The natural resources and the means of production now in the hands of the few, and which are the source of their economic and political power, must be taken from them and become common property.

In a capitalist society, the ruling class not only controls the productive and state apparatus but also shapes and moulds the ideas, attitudes and very sentiments of the people with remarkable success and their ideologies suffuses whole of society. The more successful the capitalist class, the more deceived the working class. Workers must break with the patterns of thought and conduct which help to maintain capitalist class relations. Reformism is based upon the belief that there is no irreconcilable contradiction between labour and capital and that compromise and the gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism is possible. Socialism can only come about through a successful overthrow of capitalism by a self-organised working class. The Socialist Party will take possession of the means of production (land, mines, factories, means of transport and communication), which in the hands of the capitalists are the means of exploiting and oppressing the working masses, and will make them into social property. By suppressing the division of society into classes, it will put an end to the exploitation of man by man. The victory of the working class, the destruction of the economic and social bases of the possessing classes, the putting into practice of the principles of the planned production – all these will lead to the creation of the class-free society, where there will be no exploited or exploiters, nor class struggles, and all the efforts of society will be deployed to the common good. Society will determine for itself the forms of its confederations and its organisational structure. The victory of socialism means the emancipation of all humanity. Socialism will create not only the new economic and social order, but also the higher civilisation of free mankind.

Our party, which must still strive to get a hearing from the as yet indifferent working class. Socialism has nothing in common with violence practiced by individuals or of small groups, where individuals or minorities attempt to substitute themselves for the the working class. Engels wrote, in his Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France:

“The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of the unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisations, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for, body and soul. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that.”

A socialist party which lacks a mass base as we ourselves presently do, must reach out to our fellow-workers with patient explanations, and pay no attention to premature demands for “action.” We confine ourselves to campaigning designed to win over the majority. We do not represent ourselves as pacifists. We are not pacifists. But we have adopted the age-old maxim of the Chartists, “peacefully if possible, forcibly as necessary.” We are organising, speaking, writing, and explaining; in other words, carrying on propaganda with the object of winning over the majority to our case for social revolution and socialism. The Communist Manifesto, defined the movement of emancipation as follows:

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”

The Socialist Party aims to make the social transformation with the majority and not for the majority.

We are the future

The world today is a place of stark and bewildering contradictions. Possessing the greatest industrial and agricultural resources in history, it cannot feed, clothe and provide a decent livelihood for millions. People toil relentlessly away just to barely to survive. Poverty exists alongside opulence. This is an irrational and unjust system. But life does not have to be this way.

The Socialist Party strives for political and economic democracy throughout the world. Our conclusion is abolish profits and take production out of the hands of those who are governed only by considerations of profit. What we mean is not taking over of a single industry by nationalisation, but of expropriating from the ruling class each and every factory, office and farm in every branch of production. It means the wresting ownership and control from the capitalist class and transferring the social wealth to the producers of that wealth, the workers, replacing economic dictatorship with economic democracy. The Socialist Party argues that all reconciliations and palliatives are temporary, and that this is a class struggle to be fought out to a finish. The system is to be preserved or the system is destroyed. High wages and full employment are desirable things but the amelioration of working conditions under the capitalist system is limited by the necessities of capitalist production. You have to accept the economic laws of capitalist production, or abolish the system. The stock market gamblers may be swilling down their champagne, but these exploiters will discover that, for them, the party will soon be and the fruits of labour will belong not to the few but to the entire human race.

Private ownership of the means of production, exchange, communication, far from being diluted by popular share ownership, is undergoing an unprecedented concentration. There is no “trickle-down” effect. Capitalism has failed miserably to provide the basic necessities of life for hundreds of millions of workers around the world. .Older workers are discarded like garbage when they no longer have value to the boss-class. Only world-wide socialism offers people an alternative to the misery of capitalism. We can eliminate exploitation and capitalist injustice, by overturning the monopoly capitalist system. We can replace capitalism with a rational and humane system – socialism. Socialism is a social system where social wealth is genuinely controlled by society and for the benefit of society; where the common good, not profits, becomes the chief concern; where the everyday working people become the rightful masters of society. A radical solution is what it will take to end the miseries of capitalism. The socialist revolution has become a historical necessity and possibility. There is no other choice today but for the working people to organise to struggle and, one day, win socialism.

Today we must look ahead to the future where socialism will be built on the powerful productive potential now stifled by capitalism. Socialism will qualitatively improve the lives of working people. Each person is faced with the choice of either enduring the suffering of poverty, war and environmental destruction or joining with others who are dissatisfied and know that a better society is possible. Women and men, young and old, and people of all nationalities must unite to survive, to be able to work, eat and live as decent human beings. If working people, and not the capitalists, controlled the resources of our society, we could improve all our lives and guarantee a decent standard of living for all.

These are the hopes and aspirations of socialists, fundamentally changing the social system. We cannot be distracted by cynical condemnations that today's ills are because of “human nature” or just the “way things are.” Capitalism, the social system under which we live, is responsible.

Wee Rebellion

Environmental campaigners have staged a "die-in". At the Kelvingrove art gallery and museum in Glasgow, about 300 activists lay down beneath Dippy, the famous copy of a diplodocus skeleton which is currently touring the UK.

Many held handwritten signs with the question “Are we next?”, while children held pictures they had drawn of their favourite at-risk animals as part of the event organised by Wee Rebellion, a climate-change protest group for young people in Glasgow associated with Extinction Rebellion.

Twelve-year-old Lida said: “We want to raise awareness about climate change. If we keep carrying on the way we are humans may become extinct, like Dippy.” 

Aoibhìn, 7, said: “Lots of animals are dying out because of climate change.”

Organisers of the die-in said Wee Rebellion would continue to hold protests until local and central governments committed to zero greenhouse gas emissions within 11 years and established climate citizens assemblies to oversee the changes. The group said industrial agriculture, overfishing and deforestation could lead to food shortages in the UK and serious flooding in parts of Glasgow.

“...At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing over nature – but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. We are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our productive activity, and so are afforded the opportunity to control and regulate these effects well. This regulation, however, requires a complete revolution in our existing mode of production…in our whole contemporary social order...”

You could be forgiven for thinking the above quotation came from a campaigner in the Extinction Rebellion movement, commenting on impending global ecological catastrophe and drawing upon the myriad reports currently in existence, written by concerned scientists that portend cataclysmic changes to our life styles if we don’t stop abusing our natural environment immediately. The quote is taken from Dialectics of Nature, written by Frederic Engels in 1875.

The Socialist Party has been warning about the effects of capitalism’s penny-pinching production methods for well over a hundred years, and how they impact on the wider environment, and it is often with despair that we reiterate the Engels message from the 19th century of the dire effects of capitalist production. The Socialist Party have long argued that it is quite possible to meet the material needs of every person on this planet without destroying the natural systems on which we depend and on which we are party. So what stands in the way? Why isn’t this done? The simpler answer, which we must not get tired of reiterating, is that under the present economic system, production is not geared to meeting human needs but rather to accumulating profits for a few. Consequently, what we produce and the methods and the materials we employ are not decided rationally and democratically, but are dictated by market forces.

Production today is in the hands of business enterprises of one sort or another, all competing to sell their products at a profit. All of them – and it does not matter whether they are privately owned or state-owned – aim to maximise their profits. “Make a profit or die” is the law of the capitalist jungle. Under the demands of the market, businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interests, ignoring wider social and ecological considerations. The whole of production, from the process employed to the choice of what to produce, is distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits. The result is an economic system governed by market forces which compel decision-makers, whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pollute and waste.

The Socialist Party's conclusion is clear: If our needs are to be met while at the same time respecting the laws of nature, the present market-driven profit system must go and be replaced with a system capable of producing the essentials humans need, but in an ecologically friendly way. If we are to meet our needs in an ecologically acceptable way, we humans must first be in a position to control production or, to put it another way, to consciously regulate our interaction with the rest of nature – and the only basis on which this can be done is the common ownership of productive resources.

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