Rab - Part 1

Isaac Rabinowich, better known by his pen-name as Rab, was a prominent member of the World Socialist Party of the United States.

 A biography was written,  'Role-Modeling Socialist Behavior: The Life and Letters of Isaac Rab,' available to read at  https://libcom.org/library/role-modeling-socialist-behavior-life-letters-isaac-rab. 

This is the first of a series of essays adapted from his writings 

The state and parliament

To establish socialism must the workers first gain control of the powers of government through their political organisation?

It is the recognition that the state is the central organ of power in the hands of the capitalist class. By gaining control of the powers of state, the socialist majority are in a position to transfer the means of living from the parasites, who own them, to society, where they belong. This is the only function or need the working class has of the state/government. As soon as the revolution has accomplished this task, the state is replaced by the socialist administration of affairs. There is no government in a socialist society. We emphasise that the ballot is the lever of emancipation. We do this just because the conscious, socialist majority takes political action in order to be in a position to transfer the means of living from the hands of the parasites into the hands of society, as a whole. The ballot symbolises the nature of the socialist revolution.

We advocate the ballot because we cannot visualise the need for a socialist majority to use violence. Violence does not symbolise the socialist revolution. However, we can get all tangled up in speculations of projecting possible contingencies that may exist in a future event. History may make liars out of us in predicting the workings of social forces based on scientific analyses. When we say that socialism is inevitable it always implies: barring unforeseen catastrophes such as astronomical collisions or the wiping out of the human race. However, given capitalism and its laws of motion, the next stage in social evolution is socialism.

Regarding the common accusation that the WSM is unaware that Parliament is not the real seat of power, and that Parliament is only a façade for the real rulers: Question: what is the central organ of power used by the “real rulers,” if it isn’t the state itself?

The word “government” is often confused with the word “administration.” It is a very common misconception, until one realizes that “government” is but a synonym for the “state,” that is, rulers and ruled; governors and governed. (Although all governments have a secondary function of administering social affairs, it is a secondary function that is subordinate to its primary function of ruling society in the interest of the ruling class.) Where the social relationships of private property exist, there is a need for state machinery (a government) to keep the people in check and under control, as well as to protect the national ruling class interests against the rivalries of foreign “enemies.” Thus, we have had governments in chattel slave, feudal, and capitalist societies. Primitive tribal societies were typically administered communally and had no governments, as such. Socialism is a classless society, without rulers and ruled. a genuine democracy where there exists a real community of interests between all the members of society and society as a whole. It is a social administration of affairs where everyone cooperates in the common.

The state has demonstrated its function as the executive committee of the capitalist class. You will never hear the anarchists or syndicalists, at any time, mention just what is the seat of power of the ruling class! It only points out incidents, in a vacuum, out of context of the workings of the state. They can’t deny that the final decision must be determined in Parliament, when the chips are down, just because modern capitalism cannot function fully and properly and for any length of time under a military dictatorship.

Many compound the felony by accusing the WSM of seeking to be returned as a Parliamentary majority. Where did the WSM, ever, at any time, agitate such a program. We are uncompromisingly opposed to any leadership policy or principle! We urge the socialist majority to vote for socialism, and socialism alone. If the workers ever rely or depend on the WSM, the WSM may well indeed sell them down the river. Nothing could be more repugnant to the WSM than the idea of voting for the WSM so that the WSM might do something for the workers.

Anarchists make a distinction between “direct action” and “political action,” . The key question is “Action for what?”

We are organised for action to change the world from capitalism to socialism. We are not concerned with the problems of administering capitalism. Capitalism cannot be administered in the interests of the working class or of society as a whole. Karl Kautsky:

"It is claimed that we have today sufficient democracy in all civilized countries to make possible a peaceable revolutionless development. Above all it is possible to found cooperatives for consumption whose extension will introduce production for use, and so slowly but surely drive capitalist production out of one sphere after another. Most important of all, it is possible to organize unions that shall continually limit the power of the capitalist in his business, until constitutionalism shall supplant absolutism in the factory, and thus the way will be prepared for the slow transition to the republicanized factory. Still further, the socialists can penetrate into the municipal councils, influence public labor in the interest of the laboring class, extend the circle of municipal activities, and by the continuous extension of the circle of municipal production narrow the field of private production. Finally the socialists are pressing into parliament, where they are ever gaining more influence, and push through one reform after the other, restrict the power of the capitalists by labor legislation, and simultaneously extend ever wider the circle of governmental production, while they work for the nationalization of the great monopolies. So by the exercise of democratic rights upon existing grounds the capitalist society is gradually and without any shock growing into Socialism. Consequently the revolutionary conquest of political powers by the proletariat is unnecessary...This idyll becomes true only if we grant that but one side of the opposition, the proletariat, is growing and increasing in strength, while the other side, the bourgeoisie, remains immovably fixed to the same spot. Granting this, it naturally follows that the proletariat will gradually, and with no revolution, outstrip the bourgeoisie and imperceptibly expropriate it."

Nor are we primarily concerned with the economic phase of the class struggle (unions) although we are always prepared to fight the economic struggles between the wage slaves and their parasitic masters over the division of the wealth produced by the workers. We are also always prepared to fight for civil liberties. Workers who are satisfied, contented slaves are poor prospects for socialist revolution. The fight for civil liberties is basic, just because democratic forms are powerful tools for socialist victory.

The work of introducing socialism is the work of the working class. Socialism is democratic both in objectives and means. Our objective of socialism — which is real democracy — shapes our means, which can only be democratic. This is socialist action — real “direct action”!

Now look at the anarchists and syndicalists. If they have the majority convinced of socialism, the weapon in existence for the majority to use is the ballot, already at hand. The trouble is not the franchise, but the political ignorance of the workers, who support capitalism.

To many the road to socialism is via the economic organisation of the workers. They stress that the State is an organ of the ruling class. It can only function as the central organ of power and the ballot is a deception, merely a democratic form and not democratic essence. However, they overlook that it is not the economic phase that is the highest expression of the class struggle, but the political phase. The economic phase by its very nature is limited to working within the framework of capitalism. It is the fact that State power is in the hands of the ruling class that stymies workers from revolutionary changes. Titles and deeds, the military forces, etc., are in the hands of the ruling class through its control of the State.

The essence of Marx’s writing was consistent in stressing the need for political action; and this view has stood the acid test of unfolding events. Just because the state is the central organ of power, it requires the political action of a resolute, determined class conscious majority to accomplish the transfer of the means of living from the hands of the parasites to the possession of society, as a whole. That is socialist political action. What confuses the question is the activities of reformists who call themselves “socialists.” Their political activities are confined to administering the capitalist state, and instituting palliatives for the smoother operation of capitalism.

The missing ingredient

Nothing can be more basic than the realisation that socialism is, by its very nature, a classless society. It is not composed of workers, as such. This concept is a carry-over from capitalist social relationships. Such a view is alien to the social relationships of socialist society, and gives rise to such expressions as “workers’ councils” as features of socialism, which typify several “democratic, libertarian, socialist” journals. Can it be denied that the socialist revolution has for its object: the establishment of a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution of wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole? It is not a quibble to emphasize both that the socialist revolution emancipates not only the working class but all mankind from the chaotic limitations of outworn capitalism, and also that the revolution must be the work of the working class. Nor can it be denied that the immediate goal, today, of class-conscious and revolutionary socialists is to gain political power in order to transfer the means of production from the parasites to where it belongs, the new socialist society. The capitalist class is powerless when confronted by a determined, overwhelming majority of socialists. It is an illusion to think that the workers in the factories can institute socialism while the political machinery remains in the hands of the capitalist class. The revolutionary political struggle for power is not to be confused with parliamentary efforts to reform the effects of capitalism. The very essence of scientific, revolutionary socialism is that the political struggle for power is the highest expression of the class struggle. In the factories, co-ops, unions, we are fragmented, sectionalised and tied to our interests, but on the political field, we can make our numbers tell in a way win which they cannot use the state to strangle.

Based on the writings of I. Rab, a member of the World Socialist Party of the U.S.

Time for Change

Today the great majority of working people are faced threat of insecure employment and austerity cuts in health, education and other services. The future of working people is less and less certain. Exploitation and oppression gets worse every year. The working class and the ruling class are locked in a bitter struggle. A handful of capitalists make fabulous profits off the labour of working people who are killed in work accidents, or are mutilated for life or dying slowly of industrial diseases. All this misery is created so a small clique of very wealthy individuals can continue to line their pockets. All the major means of production - the factories, the mines, telecommunications and transportation - are concentrated in the hands of a few thousand capitalists who employ millions of workers. Every bit of the capitalists’ property and possessions was stolen from working people. The capitalists get rich by appropriating the fruits of our labour. The capitalists claim this is a fair exchange. But it is highway robbery. In reality, a worker gets paid for only a small part of the value he produced. The rest, the surplus value, goes straight into the boss’s bank balance. The boss class get rich, not because they have “taken risks” or “worked harder,” as they would have us believe. The more they keep wages down and reduce the number of employees with speed-ups, the more they can steal from us and the greater their profits. And if the boss thinks he can make more profit somewhere else, he just closes his factory and throws the workers out on the street. The idea that everyone can get rich under this system is a lie invented by the rich themselves. Under capitalism, the only way to get rich is to trample on someone else. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. A handful of parasites live off the backs of the workers. This is why workers have only one choice: either submit to this wage slavery or fight it. Only socialism can respond to the just aspirations of the working class.

Working people cannot live according to the rule “all against all”, but only according to those other principles, “everybody with everybody” and “all for all.” For the future of humanity solidarity must prevail.

Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep social transformation. Too many of our fellow-workers prefer to cling to brutal, unjust and exploitative capitalist economic system. They have not learned the lessons of history and decline to choose a path forward to creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy. We have the resources to remake the World, but it will have to come at the expense of the plutocrats and the plunderers. Over its existence, capitalism has wreaked its unavoidable havoc throughout the world, devastating whole nations with poverty, war and disease. As long as the capitalist social economy remains, its main purpose won’t change.

There are those who condone armed struggle as a means, or the means, of social emancipation. That raises a serious question about the perception of the socialist revolution. Socialism is the complete antithesis of capitalism. In a socialist world private and/or state ownership of society’s means of life will give way to social ownership and production of goods and services solely for use. So goods and services will no longer be produced as commodities for sale and profit. Accordingly there will be no role in socialist society for a means of exchange; hence, the entire, utterly wasteful commercial sinews of capitalism will be obsolete. The class-free, money-free society envisaged in the socialist saying: “From each according to their ability; to each according to their needs” will become a reality. A world free from the corruptive influences of money and power where government of people will give way to a simple administration of things.

Such a society – founded on co-operation instead of competition – could not be established by guns, bombs or violence. It can only be established and only maintained by the conscious democratic action of the majority. Such a majority would be the democratic foundation of a free, socialist world. If the question of counter-revolutionary violence is hypothesised then obviously that violence would have to be eliminated; as socialists have traditionally said “peacefully if we may; forcefully if we must”, but, given the conditions created by a socialist-conscious majority, capitalist reaction would be deprived of nourishment.

This is not a time for destruction; it is a time for construction, for rebuilding society. Too many times working people have placed their faith in left-wing messiahs, ignoring Eugene Debs warning:

“I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”

An Economy for All

We in the Socialist Party seek to turn what is presently improbable into the inevitable. We want socialism. The Socialist Party’s premise is that the conception of socialism is based upon the existence of a material abundance. We propose the building of a class-free society and the presence of abundance plays a crucial role in Marx’s vision of socialism/communism. Abundance removes conflict over resource allocation, since there is enough for everyone, there is no competition over shortages. 

Make this year the turning point when the unjust, destructive, and inhumane capitalist system begins to topple and is transformed into a new rational sane society. Let future historians look back at 2020 and recognise it as the time when working people started to fundamentally change the politics and economics of the old order.

Working people are demanding an end to the outdated idea that politicians and CEOs are superior and all-knowing. They no longer wish to submit to the obsolete belief that governments are always good. Working people have had enough of the political elite stealing the wealth, offering excuses as they berate and blame working people. We’ve seen through the lies. Revolutions are not made by writing letters to our rulers or signing petitions to appeal to them.

Working people create all wealth, they do not own or control it. Workers are wage slaves who survive only by selling their labour power to the capitalists. Capitalists own the means of production and pay workers for their labour power. But the working class produces far more wealth than it receives in income. The difference is the source of capitalist profits. The capitalist system exploits the working class and creates the poverty and economic insecurity of society as a whole. 

The capitalist system is a system of economic anarchy and crisis. Capitalism is plagued by periodic economic crises, such as recessions, which are becoming more serious and complex. These crises are built into the economic system. Each enterprise tries to maximise its profits by pushing production and cutting expenses, especially the pay of workers. Economic crises are also produced by speculation, hoarding and other schemes of the bankers, financiers and industrialists. Each tries to profit in the short run, but because of this individual greed, working people suffer. This anarchistic system of capitalism wastes a great amount of social wealth. Even technological advances often are delayed or even suppressed due to profit considerations. And when technological innovations such as robotics are introduced, they are at the expense of workers who are discharged from their jobs. Governments spends hundreds of billions of dollars on a war machine whose basic purpose is to extend and protect the empire of capital.  The result of all this is that the people suffer. 

The capitalist class benefits from the misery of countless numbers of people. This exploitative and oppressive system, where profit is master, has choked our entire society with economic crises, political reaction and social decay. The drive for profits holds millions hostage to hunger and want; it has poisoned the very air we breathe; it spawns cynicism and violence, drugs, crime and other social problems.

Our fight is against capitalist exploitation, for mastery over the means of production. The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves. They will achieve it through socialist revolution, which will end the private ownership of the means of production in order to establish socialist and collective property, and replace capitalist commodity production by the socialist organisation of production designed to ensure the complete well-being and full development of each person.

Exploitation, injustice, racism and oppression, and the threat of war – this is the face of capitalism today. The situation cries out for change, for a new, more rational social system – socialism!

A Doomsday Senario.

Toronto Mayor John Tory has outlined a doomsday scenario for his city if the federal and provincial governments don't step in to save the city financially. They have not yet committed to cover the estimated $1.5 billion dollar shortfall which causes the slashing of police, transit and library budgets and mass lay offs. The fire service would see a $23 million dollar cut, community services would see 61 centres close, causing a loss of 600,000 hours of recreation programs as well as library branch closures. Long term care would lose 1,320 beds.

 If this should teach anybody anything it's to expect anything under capitalism.

S.P.C. Members.

''A Feeling Of Powerlessness.''

 In September 2019, the Toronto Star conducted a survey on insecurity, collecting data from 2,500 workers. They were asked, among other questions, how confident they were that they would still have the same job two years later and 47 per cent said they unsure. The expression most commonly used was -- ''A feeling of powerlessness.'' 

By the third week of March, when COVID-19 was getting into its stride, a new survey showed that feeling had increased to 61 per cent. Since no survey has been taken in May, one can expect it would be a lot higher. The intensity of insecurity and powerlessness was felt more by workers who did not have a university degree, older workers and those with a family income of between $25,000 and $50,000. 

If living under an economic system makes one a nervous wreck, then it would be a hell of a good idea to get rid of it.

S.P.C. Members.

Workers of the World

There are millions refugees in the world today living in misery and hopelessness. Such is the appalling truth. Can the conscience of the capitalist world stirred so deeply that the camps can be emptied and every man, woman and child be resettled? Every country has room to spare could  open their bureaucratic doors and accept without ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ a percentage of these vulnerable human beings. However, we know from bitter experience that it is hopeless to appeal to the conscience of a society which has been directly responsible for such a monstrosity. Far better to have a world where mankind can freely to travel over its surface without the futile restrictions of nationality, passports and visas, where we can satisfy our needs from a sufficiency of wealth that only socialism can make available.

The persecution of minorities in many countries has made more acute the problem of the refugees, seeking a land where they will be permitted to live in comparative peace. But with hardly a single exception there are no countries which will freely admit the penniless wanderer, no matter how good their credentials or how great their need. One of the common arguments against offering a safe haven is that some refugees are "undesirables," but those who say this do not then go on to advocate admitting the "desirable" refugees nor indeed do they examine what does and what does not constitute an "undesirable."

The problem is, of course, obscured by arguments about unemployment. We are asked if we want foreign workers to take jobs away from British workers, and on the surface it looks like a reasonable point of view. Actually it is baseless. It is true that if an Arab waiter comes to London he may get a job in preference to a British waiter, just as hundreds of thousands of British workers have in the past managed to get jobs in America or Australia. But unemployment in the mass is not caused by the size of the population and does not increase because the population is increased, whether by births or by immigration. Capitalism everywhere normally has its unemployed, no matter what the population figures may be. If unemployment disappeared, then the workers would be able to demand more wages, and this would reduce profits to the vanishing point. Unemployment is, therefore, a capitalist necessity. The capitalist himself deliberately creates it by installing labour-displacing technology in the effort to keep costs down and profits up.

Capitalism to-day is an anti-social arrangement and produces anti-social ideas, even contradictory ones. A sensibly run community, anxious to improve itself, would welcome assistance from any quarter, but capitalism is not a sensibly run system of society, and the capitalists want to maintain capitalism more than they want anything else. Human beings intelligently carrying on the production of wealth for all to consume would welcome additional willing hands, quite apart from the natural desire to give refuge to the persecuted. Instead, the competitive struggle arising out of capitalism makes the worker shun his foreign fellow-workers in distress, and makes him welcome the wealthy idlers born at home or abroad who consume the wealth produced by the working-class without giving any help in the process of production.

As for contradictory ideas born of capitalist economic contradictions we see highlighted in the media the falling birth rate and consequent decline of population yet still opposing the entry of able-bodied, industrious refugee whose numbers would help to arrest the decline.

The World Socialist Movement describe economic migrants, asylum seekers, climate refugees simply as fellow-workers, fully worthy of our solidarity and in the words of Eugene Debs:

‘If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare. Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be none the weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the Socialist movement while they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.’

The real clamour to help refugees is not coming from Western governments, but ordinary people from all walks of life, organising as best they can, in their groups, communities, and often as individuals. For socialists, it is reassuring that so many workers across Europe refuse to see those they are rallying to support as anything other than human beings, homeless, frightened, displaced, and have refused to see them as migrants, illegal immigrants, refugees, Syrian, Libyan, Moslem, black or any of the other categories into which our species is labelled and pigeon-holed. We can only hope this solidarity grows into a revolutionary class consciousness – when these same workers demand the eradication of borders and frontiers and every other artificial boundary that divides us, realising that same solidarity can help us fashion a world in our own interests if taken a step further.

To emancipate ourselves, we, the working class must come to realise that we have no country and come together to engage in a world-wide class struggle against the capitalist class.

Ravines For The Homeless?

 A fire at a Toronto homeless camp killed a man on May 1; this was the seventh death by fire at a Toronto encampment since 2010, and is the 33rd fire involving a homeless encampment this year. The recent one was in the ravine near the wealthy district at Bloor Street East and Mount Pleasant Road. 

This prompted Mayor, John Tory, to call for more affordable housing to reduce the needs for camps in the first place. Most of the homeless camps in Toronto are set in ravines and there is no social distancing hence the threat of the virus spreading. 

Tory and his kind can squirm and struggle all they want to deal with it, but it would be better if there were no homeless in the first place, but then under capitalism wealth only trickles up.

S.P.C. Members.

Capitalism. The Use And Abuse 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.