The "Freedom" Socialist Party

All class societies are based upon and filled with social contradictions and conflicts. Capitalists are interested in production for profit, socialists in production for use. Capital is based upon a constantly increasing exploitation of labour, in order to maintain its profit; workers constantly resists this exploitation. There is and can be no such thing as a “legitimate profit,” inasmuch as all profit is derived from paying workers less than the value they add to the product. There is and can be no such thing as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” inasmuch as wages are the payment for only one part of the day’s work, the other part of which the worker is compelled to contribute to the employer in the form of surplus-value, or profit. The capitalist class always seeks to intensify the exploitation of labor by reducing wages, increasing the work-day, or speeding-up production, or by all three at once; and labor always seeks to raise its wage and working standards. Capitalist always seeks to increase their profits, which can be done only by exploiting workers and workers always seek to resist exploitation, which can be done only at the expense of profits. These are fundamental economic facts. Under capitalism, nothing that all the capitalists, or the government can succeed in wiping out these facts.

The capitalist class, of course, indoctrinate the workers from childhood that they are entitled to an “honest profit” as it is so decreed by divinity and “human nature.” They fill the heads of the workers with the idea that capitalism always existed and always will. Maybe it should be improved a little, patched up here and there, but not ended. They work hard at instilling these ideas into the heads of the people. If these ideas did not prevail, they could not retain their power. The defence of the interests of capitalism is, however, incompatible with the defence of the interests of the working class. The revolutionary idea is that the workers should organise as a separate, distinct class, independent of the capitalist class. To meet the capitalists on the economic field, the workers organised trade unions. To deal with the capitalist class on the political field, it is necessary to organise a socialist party. The class struggle is a political struggle. It cannot be fought successfully by the workers unless they have a political weapon.

When speaking of socialism and socialist revolution we seek “no condescending saviours” as our great workers’ anthem, the International, says. We do not believe that well-wishing reforms – and there are well-wishing reformers – will solve the problems of society, let alone bring socialism. We believe that task belongs to the workers, only the workers itself. Regretfully, in the so-called socialist parties, that idea does not dominate. The Socialist Party start by teaching fellow-workers to rely upon themselves. There is no socialism and no progress to socialism without the working class, without the working class revolution, without the working class in power, without the working class having been lifted to “political supremacy” to their “victory of democracy”. No socialism and no advance to socialism without it! That is our principle. That is what we build the fight for the socialist future on. That is what we’re committed to. The Left have lost their hope for the working class because for so long a period of time it has, and it does, lie dormant and seems absolutely passive. In other words, the Left have doomed the working class which, however, has shown itself so capable of so many resurgences in the past years of its struggle. They doomed it to eternal servitude. The Left cannot accept the idea that the workers can free themselves. The Socialist Party has nothing in common with such people and want nothing in common with such people in all their 57 varieties of Trotskyism.

Socialism is a system of society in which the land, the means of production, and distribution are held in common. Production is for use, as and when required, not for profit, exchange or sale. Socialism is a class-free society in which all shall have leisure and culture, and all shall be secured from want.

To the Workers of the World

The media has an excellent method of confusing the workers and keeping them under mental imprisonment. This method consists in putting up slogans and sound-bites that are lacking substance and absolutely empty of content. The greatest lie of our times, the most despicable, used to confuse the working-class is that they are not telling people that so long as the rich remain in power, so long as the destinies of every country are decided by the interests of the capitalists. The wars will continue to be fought for years and years, without any prospect of peace for the people. The world will be soaked in blood; corpses will be mountain high and war will continue because nowhere are the ruling classes able to bring, it to an end. Nowhere do the ruling classes offer the people a way out of the nightmare of suffering. There is one way out and it is not by putting or keeping people in slavery but by freeing all those who are enchained. That is what the workers must do and can do. The Socialist Party is a political party that stands irreconcilably opposed to capitalism.

It’s no good voting for a new set of leaders to manage the present planetary chaos in a slightly friendlier fashion. Even if they really wanted to, politicians can do nothing to solve the problems.

Do you really want to go on working almost every day of your life, just to generate profits for a tiny group of capitalists? Do you know that eight individuals now possess as much wealth as half of the world’s population? Do you realize how fundamentally insane that is? Do you want to live in a society more and more characterised by poverty, addiction and despair? In which children are constantly dying of hunger or being killed in wars - all completely unnecessarily? Do you want to see the natural environment trashed in the pursuit of profit?

A socialist society would not be one organised “for the many, not the few”. It would be a society that has entirely abolished such class division. Communism or socialism (the same thing, whatever the Leninists say) requires getting rid of the buying and selling system and creating a society of free access to goods and services. With the productive capabilities that exist today, there is enough for everybody to enjoy a life of abundance without undertaking any wage labour. 

Once a progressive force (for all its horrors), capitalism today is a system that generates totally unnecessary suffering for the majority of people and it is long overdue for abolition. It continues in large part because we, the working class, continue to give it legitimacy and because, whatever we might say to the contrary, we don’t really believe that there is an alternative to the market system.

What is needed is for workers to come together to bring an end to the madness of the profit system.

Socialist Standard No. 1385 January 2020

PDF Version

• Editorial: Brexit done, back to capitalism as usual
  
• Pathfinders: Fake news? Go and boil your bread.
  
• Letters
  
• Football TV rights: Amazon joins the game
  
• Cooking the Books I: The Labour Party Marxist? Pull the other one!
  
• Wood For the Trees: History as Drama
  
• Material World: The Vote in Hong Kong
  
• The Election: Analysis
  
• Nativism: Covert Racism
  
• Fascism: Avoiding Anachronism
  
• Las Vegas: Everyone’s a Loser
  
• Disability: Models of Meaning
  
• Zerosum: Pies and Lies
  
• Cooking the Books II: The Lib Dem vision for capitalism
  
• Proper Gander
  
• Reviews
  
• Liverpool Marxist Book Fair
  
• 50 Years Ago: The Socialist Party and the Common Market
  
• Party Election Results
  
• Rear View
  
• Free Lunch
  

2020 Vision

On behalf of all members of the Edinburgh and Glasgow branches of the Socialist Party, we send greetings to the world’s working peoples for the New Year, wishing them success in their struggles against capitalism. We do not wish fellow-workers a "Happy New Year”— we point them to a new world, the world socialist cooperative commonwealth.

 We face 2020 where the socialist cause is beginning to revive after receiving great setbacks. It is the job of the Socialist Party to face the facts. It is no service to the socialist movement to paint rosy pictures or make "optimistic” predictions except they rest on the surest of foundations. In the face of the present activities of the world's workers the surest prophecy that could be made is that the socialist is faced with years of plodding propaganda and educational work for which no measurable result can yet be seen.

Socialism will yet gain recruits, conscious of all the difficulties and despite them. They will work for socialism with the will of those who know that the world is ready for the socialist solution for its problems and its achievement is possible the moment a sufficient number of workers want it. Now, if events could produce that moment out of a hat now. They will work for socialism now because there can be no other alternative to the world we know, and in order to enjoy its benefits with their fellow-workers. If in the years to come the worker is lured again from socialism by  promises of reform, so that those whose active life is behind them would cease to hope to see the dawn of socialism, this would not affect their work for socialism.

 It is in the nature of mankind as a social being that we work not only for ourselves but for society and posterity. The worker who understands what socialism offers to the world will work for it that his or her children escape the misery we had to endure.

New movements will most likely arise which promise an easy road to the "New World.” There will be disappointments and set-backs. But out of the struggles and their lessons there will be some who will learn, and they will add to the strength of the World Socialist Movement, preparing the way for the inevitable time when people will be receptive to the Socialist Party’s message.

Historically, the stage has not yet been reached when workers in sufficient numbers grasp our case for socialism . But it can be hastened the more our message is spread. It is the business of all socialists to work for this end. We are confident in the soundness of our case and tenacious in our purpose. The terrible damage which the present wars and environmental destruction inflict will harden us in our purpose: our hatred of capitalism and what it stands for, undiminished and increased.

 Socialism is an historical necessity thrown up by the economic and social development of centuries. The alternative to it is chaos and conflict. As socialists we are conscious agents of the process of history. Our task is to carry on the work of campaigning for socialism at all times without fear or compromise. It is your job, if you are a socialist, to offer a helping hand in every possible way and so help the socialist and workers’ movement to make most of all the opportunities that the future may hold.

Scotland: Land and Power (1999 book review)

Land reformism (1999)

Book Review from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scotland: Land and Power (The Agenda for Land Reform) by Andy Wightman, in association with Democratic Left Scotland. Luath Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 1999.)

There is much of interest to be found in this book, not least the amazing statistic that 1252 landowners own two-thirds of the 16 million-plus acres of private rural land in Scotland. Scotland has a population of 5 million. This of course is a legacy of the universal process behind the rise of capitalism: the war on common ownership and the separation of people from land, by sword and by fraud. Once enough people were denied the autonomy that access to land provided, a class of exploitable wage workers was produced and the rest, as they say, is history.

What exists in rural Scotland, behind the aristocratic veneer, is not really feudalism. In the true sense this is a system in which all land is held by the monarch (ultimately from god) and parcelled out to “superiors” and “vassals” who control the land inhabited by the tenants. This is a dead system, as Scotland’s landowners (as elsewhere) own the land they hold in fact and in law. They are the “kings” of “their” patch. As the authors point out, the proposed abolition of one of the last vestiges of the feudal system, that of the theoretical status of the Crown as “paramount superior”, would actually benefit big landowners as this is also the last vestige of the idea that landownership was conditional and subject to the “public interest” represented by the Crown. Junking “feudalism” would also give the essentially capitalist system of landownership a ore up-to-date image of course, and perhaps further hide the fact that what we are talking about here is the dividing up of stolen goods.

The authors see a solution to Scotland’s unusually concentrated pattern of landownership in “land reform”—to break up large holdings to enable people to purchase property within a regulated framework which insists on residency and limits monopoly holdings” (p.79). Indeed a similar process was undertaken in Ireland between 1881 and 1903. Whether this will happen is questionable. What can’t be denied though is that any such move would have to take place within the confines of the same “market forces” that have brought hunger, clearance and destruction to both Scotland and Ireland (and England for that matter) and depopulated the land. The market system unfortunately doesn’t give a toss about “social justice”, sustainable rural development etc.

Globally, what are the implications for all this of the march of the fully industrialised agriculture system? As land is effectively changed into a system of huge factories, as agri-business corporations like Monsanto move to patent DNA and unleash the “terminator” gene, what does the immediate future hold for those living and working on the land? From India to the Vale of Evesham, things are not looking good.

Ben Malcolm