Who is the Enemy?

The Socialist Party has a clear and definite understanding of socialism and knows how to express it lucidly. The Socialist Party has an active, and enthusiastic membership which works in unison propagating the case for socialism. It is a party of education. Our Declaration of Principles outlines a line of action, a prospectus and platform that is also the test of qualification for membership and a guide for the actions of any member elect of the party elected. The Socialist Party rejects violence in bringing about socialism. Our methods are persuasion, through the written and spoken word. The Socialist Party’s vision and imagination serve as one of our recruitment tools. Our trust in humanity is motivated by the simple but profound belief in the creative capacities of ordinary men and women. We cannot properly express socialist ideas unless there are people to listen.

Socialism is a future society where the associated producers are in control of the process of production, an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Socialism is not where everybody has been levelled down to a lower common denominator, a so-called “equality”, but it will be a society in which the classes have been abolished, in which the distinction between “town” and “country” has been vanished, where there can no longer be any comparison between the living conditions of of the whole population under the new society and under the most highly developed capitalist state and above all, in which the state power and coercion has died out and to be replaced by the administration of things.This assumes such a tremendous rise in the productivity and a highly developed technology.  Socialism is not state ownership, central planning, a command economy and a ‘progressive’ foreign policy

It is not easy to interest the working class in socialism. Private property remains attractive to many, not only in the form of personal ownership of small businesses but also in the sectional ownership of cooperatives. There is no point in the Socialist Party thinking that the present indifference to our society’s economic base is going to change miraculously and overnight into a mass enthusiasm for its transformation, or that an undefined set of favourable circumstances will suddenly make common ownership the popular. The Socialist Party, however, does not say that more favourable conditions for the advocacy of the socialist case will never occur and that support for common ownership will never be generated. What it does mean is that it will take time and the Socialist Party have attuned ourselves to the possibility of politics of the long haul. Meantime, our priority is explaining why common ownership of the means to life is the key to socialist change. What we need to communicate is an adequate grasp of the political and economic forces at work in our society. What we need to do is to relate is how the economic system underpins all aspects of capitalist culture. The Socialist Party must seek to relate the erosion of political democracy, the brutalisation, commercialisation and the trivialisation of life to the present economic order. 

The Socialist Party’s case is one of convictions not clichés.  We assure our fellow-workers that common ownership does not mean the establishment of a technocrats’ paradise, but the liberation of production and the liberation of people. The Socialist Party seeks a better world founded on common ownership, equality and democracy to meet all mankind’s material needs, to raise men and women’s personal and individual development to the greatest possible height. Sadly, today in the name of socialism we see common ownership changed into state slavery, distorting socialism.
William Paul, at the time a member of the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party, explains:
“...The revolutionary socialist denies that state ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the state cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees…Socialism will require no political state because there will be neither a privileged property class nor a downtrodden propertyless class: there will be no social disorder as a result, because there will be no clash of economic interests; there will be no need to create a power to make ‘order’.” Paul wrote, “In the last analysis state ownership is more a means of controlling and regimenting the workers than of controlling industry... The attempt of the state to control industry is therefore the attempt of the ruling class to dominate labour.”

Engels himself, warned against any equation of socialism with state ownership:

“... since Bismarck adopted state ownership a certain spurious socialism has made its appearance, here and there even degenerating into a kind of flunkeyism – which declares that all taking over by the state, even of the Bismarckian kind, is in itself socialistic. If, however, the taking over of the tobacco trade by the state was socialistic, Napoleon and Metternich would rank among the founders of socialism.”

One might point out that if all that was required for socialism was the ownership of property by a collective organisation and administration then the Catholic Church has been a socialist institution for over 2,000 years

The Socialist Party declares what is required for socialism is production for use and not for profit, under the supervision of a democratic structure, the ownership of means of production by society’ and not the State. We should not equate ‘the state’ and ‘society. State and social ownership are not the same. Whatever differences follow nationalisation, the nature of the workers essential subordination to the immediate work process will remain unchanged. Workers continue to receive a wage, to clock in every morning and clock out every evening. The nature of the work process remains unchanged, although the responsibility in the line of command will have shifted away from the individual or corporate capitalist towards the state as owner and administrator

Trump comes up trump

Donald Trump’s Scottish golf courses are expected to get a tax rebate of nearly £1m as part of a government bailout for tourism businesses hit by the coronavirus crisis.

Trump Turnberry had been due to pay £850,766 in property tax this year and Trump Aberdeenshire £121,170.

This week South Ayrshire, the local council which includes Turnberry, and Aberdeenshire council are expected to tell both businesses they no longer have to pay that tax, known as business rates, because they qualify for 100% relief.

Both resorts have been able to avoid paying corporation tax, the main business tax in the UK, because they consistently report heavy losses due to their debts to Trump himself, cumulatively put at £155m in 2018.

Capitalism. The Divisive System.

 Even in isolation people who have been brainwashed by capitalism still find a way to spew out their hate. 

In May, YWCA Canada asked women to talk about how the impact of the global pandemic affected them specifically. This was on the video conferencing app Zoom. This is an example of how quickly people can come together and adapt to a situation and if nothing more share advice, but like so many things under capitalism it can be used or abused and it didn't take long for the abuse to come pouring in. This was in the form of racist and chauvinist comments with a torrent of profanity thrown in for bad measure, most of which were male voices. 

According to Maya Roy, CEO of YWCA Canada, ''Within two minutes of the call starting, someone started shouting racial epithets.'' 

There is no avoiding the fact that capitalism is a divisive system and is particularly obvious in a situation where everyone should stand together.

S,P.C. Members.

The Profit Motive The Very Life Blood Of Capitalism? They Are Wrong.

''Ontario COVID-19 deaths far greater in for-profit nursing homes'', were the headlines on the front page of the Toronto Star, May 9. The Star’s analysis showed that residents in the for-profit homes were four times more likely to become infected and die from the virus than those in municipal run homes. 

This is the result of the Mike Harris, Conservative government of the 1990's, which removed minimum staffing levels and set up competitive bidding for government contracts. 

Shaeleen Stewart, pres. of the Healthcare workers union, said, ''For profit nursing homes use more part-time and casual staff and have lower staffing levels compared to non-profit homes.''

 Some law suits have been initiated, but have not, at the time of writing, been certified by a judge.

 Whatever the outcome may be, it won't bring the dead back to life. Some have called the profit motive the very life blood of capitalism, but they are wrong - its the death blood.

S.P.C. Members.

The Real Meaning of Socialism

Socialism is not a complicated doctrine. Marx had a definition of socialism which was, “...the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage labour, of capital, and of their mutual relations.” 

The enemy is capitalism. We are living under a system which is more and more clearly revealed as the enemy of humanity. It has vast productive potential, but only means poverty and oppression for the masses. It brings deprivation and hunger to the people. It imposes draconian cuts on living standards in the interest of still greater profits for the capitalist class. Capitalism is responsible for the destruction of the environment. Its armaments industry monopolises much of the world’s research and development and cynically profits from war. The cause of all this is capitalism’s guiding principle, the quest for profit, which takes precedence over any human interest. Today capitalism is an existential threat to humanity.

The modern wage-slave is nominally free and possesses certain illusory political rights which the chattel slave or feudal serf did not enjoy. But these privileges are not sufficed to emancipate the wage-slave from economic servitude and subjugation to the class which has succeeded the old land-owning and slave-holders. Throughout the whole of their working lives they are totally dominated by the employing class. The fact that a certain number of the workers receive good wages, in comparison with others who are paid at a much lower level of subsistence, makes no difference to the system. In ancient Rome some highly-educated slaves received considerable remuneration from their owners, and even became rich men, but this did not affect the lot of the mass of overworked and ill-fed slaves of the same owners toiling in their mines or on their fields. What prevents the present wage-slaves of all grades from understanding how little freedom they really possess is the payment of wages - the cash-nexus - which blinds them to the fact that they receive but a fraction of the value of the wealth they create in return for the use of their capacity to labour; just as their liberty to change from one employer to another obscures the other truth that they are always, in reality, under duress to the capitalist class as a whole. In today’s world, if their trade unions gained in strength, workers could obtain certain advantages from the employers. But they could only do so through recognising the validity of the system itself.

The Chartists taught that so long as the payment of wages by one class to another class continued, and production for profit under a competitive system consequently remained the dominant form of employment, it was quite impossible for the propertyless majority to emancipate themselves from the control of the rich. The only possible remedy for this state of affairs is for  workers, to cease being wage-earners for working people organised collectively, owning and controlling all the great means of making and distributing wealth, and thus would be the co-operative commonwealth.

 Socialism is a class-free society without property, without ownership – either private or nationalised – of the means of production, without commodity production, money or a state apparatus separate and apart from the members of the community. In the light of that definition, it is clear that no socialist  society exists anywhere in the world today.

 The Socialist Party exists to help replace the present capitalist system by socialism, understood broadly as a co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production. We hold a vision of socialism as a society where wealth will be in the hands of those who produce it, where the exploitation of man by man will be ended, where production will be used not for profit, where a new relationship will develop between peoples based on equality, where individual men and women will fully develop their abilities. We do not stand for violence. 

Our aim is a peaceful transformation to socialism: though we have to add that an aim is not a guarantee. We are not saying ‘Wait for the revolution.’ but that struggles which build towards self-organisation are pointing the way towards the way a future non-capitalist, socialist society. Part of the class struggle is the building of working-class self-confidence and organisation. There is no short cut to the social revolution. The revolts of impatience, of frustrated anger and with insufficient organisation only play into the hands of the ruling class, as all past experience has shown. Education and understanding among working people makes socialism attainable and are indispensable conditions for success.

Highlighting the Slavery Connection

Scotland's first black professor, Sir Geoff Palmer, professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt University, has again called for plaques on Scotland's statues to give a truthful account of their links to the slave trade and said the move could help educate and change attitudes against racism.

Sir Geoff has previously argued that Edinburgh's economic transformation at the end of the 18th Century was a result of slave ownership and that Scotland had a higher share of the trade by population than England or most European countries. By 1817, 32% of Jamaican plantations were owned by Scots.

Numerous statues and street names are still in place across Scotland honouring figures who perpetuated such atrocities.

Palmer previously called for a plaque under Edinburgh's Melville Monument, which honours slave owner Henry Dundas, one of the country's most influential politicians in the 18th and 19th centuries who played a prominent role in delaying the abolition of slavery - forcing about 630,000 slaves to wait more than a decade for their freedom.

Sir Geoff told BBC Scotland that adding clarifications to these monuments, rather than pulling them down altogether, would avoid erasing history.

"I don't want statues to be taken down. My view is you remove the evidence, you remove the deed."

Nobody Ever Said Life Under Capitalism Was A Happy-Go-Lucky Romp.

 The figures released by Stats-Canada for April ain't exactly cause for a celebration. More than one-third of Canadian workers were hard hit as the full force of the pandemic blasted the economy. Nearly two million jobs were lost and the unemployment rate jumped from 5.2 to 13 per cent. By April 12, the number of the Canadians who were unemployed or working much shorter hours totalled 5.5 million. The Toronto region was the hardest hit, with a loss of 593,000 jobs. The agency predicted if present trends continue the unemployment rate at the end of April will be 17.8 per cent. 

It’s chilling to think of what the economy will be like world-wide when the virus is over, which sounds like gloom and doom, but nobody ever said life under capitalism was a happy-go-lucky romp.

S.P.C. Members.

The Many Forms Of Capitalism. We Advocate The Abolition Of Capitalism.

 In these trying times governments all over the world are under scrutiny concerning their handling of the corona virus. 

The Canadian government seems to be doing their best, whereas the American and Brazilian ones are not, which is hardly surprising considering their presidents are jackass's. Some folk may advocate a change of government, which in the long run means squat no matter how they handle the crisis. 

Consider if you will, a guy born in the eastern part of Germany in 1900, living there all his life and reaching the ripe old age of 100. He would have lived under the imperial regime of Wilhelm the second, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, the so-called Communist dictatorship and the present parliamentary democracy.

 Therefore he would have lived under five different forms of capitalist administration. However he would have been exploited under all of them. Capitalism can be administrated in a variety of forms, but the fundamentals remain the same - the ownership of the tools of production by a small minority even if it is the elite of the ruling party, and the consequential wage enslavement of the working class. 

We of the SPC do not differentiate between forms. We advocate the abolition of capitalism, because no form of it can solve the major social problems we all face.

S.P.C. Members.