Fight for the Future

We live in unhappy times and the solutions appear not to be evident to many of us. Few offer a vision of an alternative future, let alone a path towards it. The Socialist Party’s goal is clear: a socialist world in which sharing, not competitive struggle, prevails. Capitalist growth leads to the depletion and degradation of natural resources. The technical fixes, government legislation and regulation and market incentives are unlikely to significantly mitigate the environmental emergency. The prognosis for a healthy planet is not at all promising.

First, the Socialist Party maintains that our society is divided into classes based on groups of people standing in the same relationship to the means of production.

Secondly, the Socialist Party holds that the interests of these classes are antagonistic and irreconcilable and that a constant struggle goes on between them over the division of the wealth that society produces.

Thirdly, the Socialist Party agrees that the owning class is the ruling class because it controls the government. The government protects the capitalist class by protecting the source of its economic strength private property. It is the will of the capitalist class that the rights of private property be protected. It uses its control of government to write down its will and call it law. It uses its control of government to enforce its will, the law. The law is the voice of the ruling class.

For a capitalist, the right to private property means first and foremost the free and untrammelled ability to own and use in any way he may see fit the instruments of production. It means that he shall have at all times free access to these instruments, and that he on his own decision shall be able to grant or refuse such access to others: that he himself shall decide whether or not to employ the instruments to turn out goods; that the entire product of the instruments shall belong to him. He and his fellow-capitalists have constructed their state to defend this right by all necessary means. However, in the course of the development of capitalism, the original right to private property suffers some modification and limitation. These limitations are roughly of two sorts: one type is a concession forced on the state by the strength of the workers (for example, the workers’ right to strike and picket, both of which are limitations on the capitalist’s right to private property); the other and more frequent type is imposed by the bourgeois state itself, acting as representative of the entire capitalist class, in order to protect the system of private property against being undermined by the too anarchic practices of individual capitalists. Capitalists, as individuals, usually resent both of these types of limitation, but it is only against the first that they carry on and must carry on a bitter and decisive struggle. The second type is in the final analysis a mode of self-preservation for capitalism. If they are ever to achieve their own emancipation, working people must throw off the shackles of bourgeois law. Socialism is transforming the means of production from individual into common property;

At present the processes of government by which the capitalists of this country rules are called the democratic form of government. Democracy literally means “Rule of the people”. We live in a class society in which one class maintains its favorable economic position because it controls the rule by the people, since the capitalist class is a small minority, of the emulation. The majority of people support the present system and therefore the capitalist class controls the government only as long as the majority of the voters permit them to.

Mankind’s progress cannot resume its upward climb until civilisation is rescued from capitalist barbarism.

The Socialist's Task

We live in a world in which many people recognise that things have gone terribly wrong. For socialists, the central feature about the ownership of wealth is that it gives the capitalist not only unearned income, but control over the whole productive system. The fact that some workers own their homes, a car and a few other assets in no way alters this monopoly of the means of production. Capitalism remains a system for pursuing profits and limitless accumulation, amidst wage-labour. The faults of capitalism are endemic, built in — and so to target them, an opposition must challenge the system as a whole. Piecemeal social reform is useless against a structure sustained by competitive inequality. Many in the workers’ and environment movement possess anti-establishment politics, but do not consciously wish to overthrow capitalism itself. They fail to understand the nature of the system they oppose and the sorts of social revolution necessary to radically change it. They view capitalism not as the system that runs our lives, but merely as a set of policies pursued by the elite currently at the top. We have to understand capitalism if we want to have a better world.

Marx’s account of capitalism provides an account of the growth of economic inequality. The fundamental tendency for inequality to increase under capitalism is built into the exploitative structure of the capital-labour relation. Effectively separated from means of production and consumption, the mass of wage workers are forced to sell their ability to work (labour-power) to those who own productive capital. Capitalists consume labour-power by compelling workers to toil in excess of the time needed to reproduce the value of their wages. This unpaid surplus-labour — surplus-value — is the source of profits under capitalism, creating the structural inequality in incomes between capitalists and labour. As competition among capitalists produces the concentration and centralisation of capital, increasing mechanisation, and a reserve army of unemployed (and underemployed) workers, the capitalist class becomes numerically smaller while appropriating even larger portions of total social product. The necessary tendencies towards periodic crises of profitability, rooted in increasing capitalisation of production, lead to even greater inequalities as capital becomes centralised into even fewer hands through waves of bankruptcies of inefficient firms; and the workers’ share of total output is reduced through wage cuts, speed-ups and the like. The dynamics of capitalist accumulation necessarily produce growing inequality.

George Orwell noted in A Road to Wigan Pier “genuinely revolutionary socialism” would have no chance of reversing the tide unless its supporters put aside their factionalism, ceased using jargon that few people could understand, and mobilised around propaganda stressing justice, liberty, and the plight of the unemployed. To win mass support, he wrote, “All that is needed is to hammer two facts into the public consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.” 

To bring home to the mass of workers the true facts of the situation will be a formidable but vital task for the Socialist Party.

Social Change and the Socialist Party

To change the world and to create a better one is the aspiration of the Socialist Party. Our organisation is intent upon building a better world and a better future. Tomorrow’s socialist world will be free of today's inequalities, hardships and deprivations. Instead, our goal is human happiness and social progress, freedom, equality, justice and prosperity. We are not utopian reformers nor heroic saviours of humanity. We are the expression of a social movement arising from within modern capitalist society itself, a movement that reflects the vision, ideals and protest of our fellow-workers. The class struggle goes on between the exploiting and exploited, oppressor and oppressed. This class struggle is the chief source of social change and transformation. Socialist ideas and the Socialist Party emerges out of this class struggle for the purpose of overthrowing the capitalist system and creating a new society without classes and exploitation. 

The immediate aim of the Socialist Party is to organise for the social revolution of the working class. A revolution that overthrows the entire exploitative capitalist relations and puts an end to all exploitations and hardships. Our policy is for the immediate establishment of a socialist society; a society without classes, without private ownership of the means of production, without wage labour and without a state; a free human society in which all share in the social wealth and collectively decide the society's direction and future. Socialism is possible this very day. 

But the socialist revolution that brings about this free society does not happen just because of the Socialist Party. This will be a vast social  movement that has to be organised in different aspects and forms. All kinds of barriers must be swept out of its way.

The capitalist system is behind all the ills that burden society today. Poverty, deprivation, discrimination, inequality, bigotry, unemployment, homelessness, economic insecurity, corruption and crime are all products of this system. Brutal dictatorships, wars, repression and genocide define the lives of hundreds of millions of people today draw their rationale from the needs of the system that rules the world today and serve specific interests in this world’s ruling class. The capitalist system itself that continually and relentlessly resists people's effort to eradicate and overcome these ills becoming an obstacle to the struggle to improve living and working conditions, civil and human rights. There is no doubt that capitalists stand in the way of millions of people to change the system to a society worthy of human beings. 

Capitalism is based on the exploitation — the appropriation of a part of the product of workers’ labour by the owning employer class. Under slavery not only the slave's product but the person belonged to the slave-owner. In the feudal system peasants either handed over part of their produce to the feudal lord, or performed certain hours of forced and unpaid labour. Under capitalism, the the workers, are free; they don't belong to anyone and nor in the bondage of any lord or appendages of an estate. They own and control their own body and labour power. But workers do not own the means of production, and so in order to live, they have to sell their labour power for a certain length of time, in exchange for wages, to the capitalist class. The workers have to then buy their means of subsistence — the goods they themselves have produced from the capitalists. The essence of capitalism and the basis of exploitation in this system is the fact that, on the one hand labour power is a commodity, and, on the other hand the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class.  

Thus, exploitation in capitalist society takes place without yokes and shackles. This is the fundamental feature of capitalism which distinguishes it in essence from all earlier systems. The surplus value obtained from the exploitation of the working class is divided out among the various sections of the capitalist class. Profit, interest and rent are the major forms in which the different capitals share in the fruits of this class exploitation. By its work, the working class pays the costs of the ruling class while ever increasing the accumulation of capital.

Until all are free, we are all imprisoned

They are not criminals yet they are behind walls, bars and razor-wire. 

More than 1,800 people in the UK are set to spend Christmas locked in immigration detention centres

Remember Christmas?

The Nativity scene depicting Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus as a separated family held in cages at the U.S. border because of Trump's immigration policies.

A Day to be Jolly?

 From the December 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today Christians celebrate the birth of their Christ. It is therefore appropriate once again to examine the Christian religion and its relations to socialism and the working class.

Christianity is a comparatively recent religion but it is thick with the debris of man’s earlier superstitions. The pagan influence on the Christmas festival is especially well marked, for December 25th was a holy day long before Jesus Christ was even thought of. Primitive man worshipped the sun because the course of his life was dominated by the yearly round of that planet in the heavens. This practice was widespread but especially in northern countries mid-December was thought to be a critical time, as the days became shorter and shorter and the sun itself weaker. Great bonfires were lit to give the sun god strength and, when it became apparent that the shortest day had passed, there was great rejoicing. Thus the Roman winter-solstice festival, held on December 25th in connection with the worship of the sun-god Mithra, was known as the birthday of the unconquered sun-god.

December 25th was not generally introduced into the Western Church as Christmas day until the fourth century and it was even later before it was accepted in the Eastern Church. Several Christian sects had previously fancied the 24th or 25th of April as a suitable “holy” period—thus arbitrarily connecting Christ’s birth with the vernal equinox rather than the winter-solstice—while still other factions chose alternative solar festivals. However, St. Chrysostum (5th century) gives a very practical reason why December 25th was to be preferred. “On this day the birthday of Christ was lately fixed at Rome, in order that while the heathens were occupied in their profane ceremonies the Christians might perform their holy rites undisturbed.”

Man's consciousness is a reflection of his material environment. While he was struggling to find his feet in the universe it was understandable that he should interpret phenomena which he could not comprehend in supernatural terms but, in the twentieth century, such irrational relics from the past can be of no value to the working class.

Christians have argued against the materialist conception of history by claiming that the driving force behind the universe is a god’s will and that, while everything else may be subject to change, God and his religion remain constant. Yet the briefest examination of Christ and his theories shows him clearly as a product of his times. For example, he plainly shared the then common belief that disease was due to infestation with demons and he told his followers, “In my name ye shall cast our devils”. Again, religion has always been the willing tool of the ruling class. The church today holds chattel slavery to be immoral. But when Constantine the Great accepted the Christian religion the pope of the time received him with acclamation and no one suggested to him the need to surrender his slaves, of which he held thousands. Similarly the Christians’ god today dutifully reflects the interests of capital. Thus for hundreds of years the popes excommunicated those who put their money out at usury and denied them Christian burial because of this “grievous sin”. Yet, strangely, since Pope Benedict XIV’s condemnation in 1745, God has not moved his spokesmen to breathe one word against this practice.

We are told that the Bible is God’s word. This being the case, his laconic message could not be clearer—“Thou shalt not kill”. The record of the Christian churches in this century alone illustrates that they have never hesitated to take sides in Capitalism’s bloody quarrels. In the first world war the workers were urged to slaughter one another with God on their lips: “God of our Fathers . . . Be thou the rampart of our costs, the frontline of the battlefield”. And in the second world war Christians intoned in harmony with capitalist interests in both Germany and Britain. “You have every reason to say prayers for the Führer. May God preserve him, because we need an eternal Germany.” (Reported in the Daily Mail, May 9th. 1944.)

On the other hand in the Church of England Newspaper, February 23rd, 1940, we find a thoroughly English god rallying under the Union Jack: “It is to the living God therefore we must look for deliverance in the present hour. He it is Who delivered our fathers from the ‘Invincible’ Spanish Armada; He appeared on our behalf in 1914-18; and He will help us now if we call upon Him with a true heart.”

Capitalism is a dirty business, based as it is upon the misery of the majority of mankind. But it is well served by its priesthood, always ready with the facile lie and the glib distortion to endorse the actions of the bourgeoisie and persuade the workers that their present lot is part of some unalterable, God-given system.

Clearly then the Christian religion is a most versatile creed. Is it possible that it could be adapted again to serve the interests of a socialist society? The answer is no, for at all times Christianity and Socialism are contradictory. Socialism involves a rejection of leadership and the determination that the workers themselves must achieve socialism. Conversely? Christianity is rooted in a blind faith in leaders, both worldly and supernatural. The priests urge their flocks to remain servile and reap the blessings of poverty. They say that it is not up to the workers to consider the system which robs them, throws them into unemployment, subjects them to war and disease; that it God’s province. The Bishop of Barcelona orders: “Have confidence in your Bishops, who have received from God the mission of commanding; learn to obey . . . do not change a word of the directives that the Holy Church gives you through the Bishops. Be obedient!”

Again, within capitalist society there is a continual class struggle which can only be abolished by the establishment of a classless society—socialism. But Christians believe that there is a harmony of interests under capitalism. Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclincal on Labour asserted: “If one man hires out to another his strength or his industry, he does this in order to receive in return the means of livelihood, with the intention of acquiring a real right, got merely to his wage, but also to the free disposal of it . . . Socialists . . . strike at the liberty of every wage-earner, for they deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages.” The good pope has a point—in that socialism will certainly deprive everyone of the “liberty” of wage-slavery. However, with typical Christian charity (towards the bourgeoisie) he chooses to overlook the fact that under capitalism the workers are forced to sell their labour power to the owners of the means of living. This is not, as the pope suggests, a case of fair exchange but is based upon the appropriation of the surplus value created by the workers by the master class.

Yet there are those who still maintain that Socialism and Christianity can somehow by synthesised, given the right leader as a catalyst. The Labour Party has always taken this line and the so-called Christian Socialist Movement lingers on. desperately trying to create some sort of comprehensible amalgam out of conflicting idealist and materialist theories. Their analysis of capitalism is based upon the contention that it is an “evil” system, rooted in sin. But in their literature we find: “Capitalism has served mankind by accumulating capital, so making large scale production possible and increasing wealth generally . .  .” Thus these Christian gentlemen admit that what they call “sin” and “ evil ” have been of service to man. This inconsistency is the inevitable result of trying to accommodate Christianity and Socialism—the utopian and the scientific.

Christmas is supposed to be a time of good cheer, when the harsh reality of this world is briefly forgotten. But it is impossible to disregard capitalism even at this time of the year. We address our Christmas message to the working class, about to enjoy yet another wretched holiday under capitalism—the system they chose to perpetuate when they voted for the Labour and Tory parties last October. That man of the people, the sanctimonious Harold Wilson, has gone on record as talking of “our quest for the Kingdom of God on earth”. After one year of Labour government the conclusion in inevitable; God and Mr. Wilson are forced to administer capitalism in the interests of the ruling class as ever. But then Mr. Wilson is not a socialist—and neither is God. John Crump

Homeless Children in Scotland on Christmas Day

Scotland's Housing Minister Kevin Stewart released statistics showing 12,343 children were part of live homelessness applications on Christmas Day 2018.

The number of children homeless across Scotland had been rising since the 2015 figure of 10,508, until last year when it fell by 424 to 12,858.

The local authority with the largest number of children on its live homeless applications last Christmas was Glasgow City Council at 2,475, followed by Edinburgh City Council on 2,153.  South Lanarkshire Council having the third largest number at 796.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/more-than-12-000-children-in-scotland-homeless-at-christmas-1-5065951