The happiness of humanity is not in the past, but in the future

The Socialist Party desires to base practice upon sound theory. Are we not seeking to establish a class-free society so our organisational structure must reflect our goal. Capitalism promises the people of our planet not prosperity nor amelioration of conditions but austerity, oppression, and possible environmental destruction of humanity. Only through an irreconcilable struggle against capitalism, towards its elimination and the establishment of socialism, will working people of the world find the full freedom, equality and democracy for which they aspire. Only when the working people in the world have the power in their own hands can we realise the cherished cooperative commonwealth. Technological progress is now reaping vast profits for the industrial and financial oligarchy and condemning millions to misery.

The Socialist Party opens up tremendous possibilities for our fellow-workers. But to realise the possibilities it must present itself as a real alternative to the capitalist parties. It must be rooted in the working class—in the social movements of the working class. The interests of big business and workers are fundamentally irreconcilable. Every penny of capitalist profit is robbed from the workers’ pockets. Only uncompromising struggle against the capitalists and their parties can advance the position of working people. Workers can have no truck or trade with the capitalist parties. No worker should vote for the capitalist parties at the ballot box. Power resides in the ownership of capital. The capitalists control the mass media, the educational system, all the means of indoctrination in capitalist ideology. This ruling class exercises power through the state machinery which they control — the army, the police, the courts, the upper echelons of the civil service, all tied to the corporate bosses by a thousand strings. The state is administered by the cabinet, hand-picked from the most reliable politicians capitalist politics has to offer. Parliament does not rule. It provides rulers with the facade of sharing their power with working people. It is only through independent labour political action that workers can win real power. The cause of the labour movement cannot be forwarded by crossing class lines. The party of the working people must speak and act like one. In this lies its future. The profit system cannot make use of new technology, artificial intelligence and automation for the benefit of society; socialism will! The future society that will be constructed under socialism will reduce work to a insignificant part of daily life and offer the individual the fullest possibilities to pursue his own abilities and interests.

We live in a society racked with crises. This society can neither guarantee them a secure future nor even promise there will be a future. The threat of the climate emergency casts a shadow over the lives of all of us. The vast majority of our people work out their lives for the enrichment of the small minority of profiteers who own the  wealth and control the entire society - all these are hallmarks of the "system" we live under. The system is capitalism. it’s their system, not ours! Under it a small minority rule in fact if not in name, and profit is the be-all and end-all of economic life; human needs come second—if at all.

The class struggle as it is reflected by the Socialist Party means opposing the reformist mis-leaders of the working class. It means striving to generalize and transform every impulse in the class struggle of the workers to go beyond reformism toward revolutionary action.

The next revolution will not only break down the state and substitute free federation. Working people will trust the free organisation of food supply and production to free groups of workers which will federate with like groups in other cities and villages to accomplish their aim. The workers will do the planning; they will organise production; they will manage production. Socialism will see that each person make a full contribution to the common thought and engage in the running of everyday life. We believe that men and women can and must participate actively in change to ensure that they bring fulfilment of their aspirations.

Reformists put off the cooperative commonwealth and prolong the suffering of the world’s disinherited. The Socialist Party points out the economic basis upon which democracy must stand in order to achieve liberty. It proclaims all liberty to rest back upon economic liberty, and all individuality to be rooted in economic unity. It affirms that there can be no liberty save through association; no true commonwealth save a cooperative commonwealth. It makes clear that democracy in the state is but a fiction, unless it be realised through economic democracy in production and distribution. 

The polarisation of wealth, the result of the accumulation of capital is the cause of the intensification of the class struggle. Socialism is the sole solution to the major problems which dominate over all others, meaning the question of poverty, the question of exploited labour. The Socialist Party hold that the exploitation of labour, with all of its consequences will not disappear until the day the means of production –– land, machinery, and in general all that serves production –– will be transformed from private property into common property. The socialist movement is as wide as the world, and its mission is to win the world — the whole world — for humanity. Then the world — the world the socialist movement shall win from capitalism — will be filled with wealth for all to have and to enjoy in its abundance. The world is one vast store of raw materials. In every passing breeze, in every wave, in gurgling stream, all the rays of the Sun, energy transforms natural resources into wealth, and provides fabulous abundance to banish for all time spectre of want, and make the world fit for human habitation. The worst in socialism will be better than the best in capitalism.

The Socialist Party supports economic and political solidarity. When enough have become socialists a new power will be in control! The People! For the first time in history the working people will be free and no class will be in subjection. Even the descendants of the present capitalists will thank the socialists of today for the freedom and harmonious civilisation they enjoy. The Socialist Party proclaims its mission to win the world from capitalist barbarians and dedicate it to the human family. No greater mistake was ever made than to suppose that socialism is a dream and that “human nature” excludes it from being realised. Socialism is neither a dream nor a scheme, but a theory of society based upon the principles of social evolution, Industrial democracy will wrest the earth from its exploiters and its vast and inexhaustible storehouse will yield abundance for all. The growth of socialism is the promise of freedom and fraternity — the heralding of a new dawn. Workers at last are waking.

Break Your Chains

 

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Under capitalism the workers are wage slaves, slaves of the bosses. The bosses run the factories in order to maximise profits. This means that they pay workers as little as possible. A capitalist has to exploit his workers in order to survive as a capitalist. We must stand together against them. The only struggle for us is the struggle of the workers against their exploiters. 

The Socialist Party aims to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a new social system from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede capitalism and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-management of production, based upon economic democracy will be possible. Capitalism is marked by glaring inequalities of wealth, by chaotic waste and instability; and in an age of plenty it condemns the  people to poverty and insecurity. Power has become more and more concentrated into the hands of a small irresponsible minority of financiers and industrialists and to their predatory interests the majority are sacrificed. When profit is the main stimulus to economic effort, our society oscillates between periods of feverish prosperity in which the main benefits go to speculators and profiteers, and of catastrophic recessions, in which working people’s normal state of hardship is accentuated. We believe that these evils can be removed only in a planned and socialised economy in which resources and the means of production and distribution are commonly owned, controlled and operated by the people.

The new society at which we aim is not one in which individuality will be crushed by a system of regimentation. We seek a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer cultural life for every citizen. The social and economic transformation, the ideal of a co-operative commonwealth, can be brought about by political action, supported by a majority of the people. We do not believe in change by violence. The Socialist Party aims at political power in order to put an end to this capitalist domination. It is a democratic movement. The Socialist Party will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism. We stand for changing the world through a process of self-emancipation, where there aren’t leaders who tell people what to do but rather people who collectively liberate themselves. 

As socialists, we surely take as our starting point that capitalism produces sufficient wealth to provide enough for all, but because of the ownership and organisation of production, that wealth is wasted or even destroyed. Certainly capitalism is incapable of providing decent homes, social services and living standards for all. Only by resisting all attempts at class collaboration, insisting on the independence of the working class, can a movement be built to challenge capitalism.

The Socialist Party goal is the establishment by democratic means of a cooperative commonwealth in which the supplying of human needs and enrichment of human life shall be the primary purpose of our society. Despite of great economic expansion, working people do not benefit adequately from the increased wealth produced. Wealth and economic power continue to be concentrated in the hands of a relatively few private corporations. The gap between those at the bottom and those at the top of the economic scale has widened. Billions around the world still live in want and insecurity. Lack of decent housing in the mega-city slums, shanty-towns and ghettoes  condemn many families to a cheerless life of daily misery. To sum up, our world is still characterised by glaring inequalities of wealth and opportunity because of the domination of one group over another. The growing concentration of corporate wealth has resulted in a virtual economic dictatorship by a privileged few. Political democracy will attain its full meaning only when working people have a voice in the management and running of their economic affairs and effective control over the means by which they live. This lack of social planning results in a waste of our natural resources and of our human resources.

Socialism maximises opportunities for individual development and the maximum of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs. Unprecedented scientific advances have brought us to the threshold of a new technological revolution yet unless there is social planning, the changes will produce only greater concentrations of wealth and loss of power and will cause widespread distress through unemployment and the displacement of populations. The Socialist Party reaffirms its conviction that our society must build a new relationship among humanity--a relationship based on mutual respect and on equality, a levelling up and not a levelling down, in which everyone will have a sense of worth and belonging, and will be enabled to develop their capacities to the full, ensuring justice to producers and consumers is the cooperative form of common ownership. The hungry, oppressed and underprivileged of the world must know democracy not as a smug slogan but as a way of life which sees the world as one whole and which recognizes the right of everybody to the highest available standard of living. The Socialist Party has confidence in the people from many lands in search of freedom, security and opportunity. This is the world socialist cooperative commonwealth which the Socialist Party invites our fellow-workers to build with imagination.

The Church Says Sorry

The Church of Scotland has said sorry for its role in sending children to Australia in the 1950s and 60s.  It now admits the programme was "ill-conceived" and caused trauma and suffering to many families.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry heard that the first migration ship linked to the church set sail in December 1950, with 22 boys aged under 14 on board. The scheme continued until 1963.

Over this period, thousands of young British children were deported, with the help of charities and organisations across the UK. The children often came from deprived backgrounds and were already in some form of care. Many of the parents gave up their children because of poverty or social stigma of being a single mother.

Although the aim was to give the children a better future, the church now acknowledged that this was not what happened. In reality, children were sent into an unfamiliar and often harsh and abusive environment.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-54387212

We are the People

Scotland has a tradition of common property rights. They include rights arising from commonties, grazing rights, peat-cutting rights, salmon rights, rights to use harbours and foreshore, mineral rights, sporting use rights, ownership rights, rights to usufruct, rights of access to resources and rights of passage over land and inland water. Commonty in Scots Law means; a piece of land in which two or more persons have a common right. A widespread example of such common property is living in a  tenement. Those who own or rent a flat also hold other parts of the property,  e.g. the stairs or close (and have its common responsibility – your turn to clean the stairs!) and access to the communal back-garden  It does not mean state-owned or public-land but could be parish/burgh land.

It is estimated that half the land area of Scotland was still common land in 1500. They provided areas of free access. It was not a “free for all” but their use was covered by sets of rules that were well established and understood locally. No-one could make financial profit. The resources of the commonty were solely for personal uses, and individuals could not, for instance, cut timber for sale or rent grazing to someone else. By the mid 19th century, virtually all this common land had been divided into the private property of neighbouring land owners. Subsistence farming could not survive without access to the resources that the commons traditionally supplied and their loss was a major factor in forcing local people to abandon the way of life that had sustained generations before them and join the mass of people leaving the Scottish countryside.

“Ferm touns” or collective farm settlements, of Scotland’s subsistence agriculture, which survived in northern areas into the 19th century, were a traditional arrangement that typically could not have survived without the resources provided by a commonty which provided many of the resources needed by a community at no cost apart from the inhabitants’ own labour.

Crown Commons were land held directly by the Crown and are thought to have originated out of the once extensive Royal Hunting Forests. The lands that became Crown Commons were areas within those forests where traditional communal use, which had predated the establishment of the forests, continued after the system of forests broke down in the medieval period. While these Commons were most heavily used by people living nearby, anyone unconnected with the area could also use them. Crown Commons had certainly largely disappeared by the early 19th century. An Act in 1828 allowed for their division and the land was then shared out between the adjoining land owners.

A green is a small area of common land usually closely associated with a settlement, whether a town or village or single clachan. These greens provided an area where cows could be milked, markets and other events held, garments bleached and a host of other common and communal activities carried out. The greens associated with many fishing communities were used for the drying and repairing of nets, the salting and drying of fish and other related activities. One specific type of green were the overnight and river crossing stances associated with traditional routes and drove roads.

A loan was a common route through private property to and from an area of common land or some other ‘public’ place. The distinction between this and a right of way was that the loan was itself common land and not just a right of use. Their former existence of others is indicated by street and  place names, like Loanhead.

A moss is a wet area where peats can be dug and historically many were used in common by local inhabitants. Common mosses were the same form of shared property. The common status of surviving common mosses has often gone unnoticed because they have been of relatively little use since the decline of peat cutting in the eastern and central Highlands.

Rigs were narrow strips of cultivated land, sometimes up to around 15 metres wide. Traditionally, adjacent rigs were used by different cultivators and the rigs periodically re-allocated between them. This system was known as runrig. Lands lying runrig were invariably associated with an area of rough ground or hill land that was also shared in common. These two types of land were the longstanding basis of farming in Scotland before the Improvements of the 18th  and 19th centuries. Originally, many areas of runrig, together with their shared hill ground, were held by two or more proprietors. Each owned a number of rigs, which were interspersed with the rigs of the other owners and each owner had an undivided share of the ownership of the common hill. The common hill was thus a commonty and the runrig lands equivalent to a commonty on arable land.(Bishopbriggs was originally Bishoprigs)

Burghs were established in Scotland from the 12th century. The creation of Royal Burghs was to provide the Crown with a convenient counter-balance to a feudal aristocracy which threatened to assume supreme power in the State. It was necessary that the King’s burgesses should have absolute freedom from the jurisdiction of the neighbouring baron and should have an adequate patrimony. The Kings, therefore, granted wide privileges and vast territorial estates for the common good use of their chartered burghs. In 1617 the jurisdiction of the Magistrates of Rutherglen extended from Polmadie on the south side of the river Clyde to Carron; the entire parish of Ayr at one time belonged to the Burgh of Ayr; Aberdeen once possessed lands which extended many miles in circuit round Aberdeen, granted by the Kings of Scotland, for the use of the town. Edinburgh’s common land, the Burgh Muir had a total area of approximately 5 square miles. The last open area of common land remaining of the Burgh Muir is now Bruntsfield Links. The Border towns still retain the tradition of the annual Common Ridings, reasserting the boundaries of it.

The vast territories granted to Scotland’s Royal Burghs were designed to act as a bulwark against noble power.  Labour politician Thomas Johnson wrote extensively about Burgh commons and its loss, being a sympathiser of “municipal socialism” and nationalisation. According to Johnston, such acreages, together with other common lands, extended in the latter part of the sixteenth century to fully one half of the entire area of Scotland.

But this valuable inheritance did not to last long:
“Until the Burgh Reform Act of 1833 the landowners and the commercial bourgeois class controlled all burghal administration of the common lands, and controlled it in such a way that vast areas of common lands were quietly appropriated, trust funds wholly disappeared, and to such a length did the plunder and the corruption develop, that some ancient burghs with valuable patrimonies went bankrupt, some disappeared altogether from the map of Scotland, some had their charters confiscated, and those which survived to the middle of the nineteenth century were left mere miserable starved caricatures of their former greatness, their Common Good funds gone, their lands fenced in private ownership, and their treasurers faced often with crushing debts. As late as 1800 there were great common properties extant; many burghs, towns and villages owned lands and mosses; Forres engaged in municipal timbergrowing; Fortrose owned claypits; Glasgow owned quarries and coalfields; Hamilton owned a coal pit; Irvine had mills, farms and a loom shop ….”

By the time the Royal Commission on Municipal Corporations in Scotland reported in 1835.
“Wick had lost in the law courts its limited right of commonty over the hill of Wick, and owned no property; Abernethy owned nothing, nor did Alloa. Bathgate was the proud possessor of the site of a fountain and a right of servitude over four and a half acres of moorland. Beith had no local government of any kind; Bo’ness owned nothing; Castle-Douglas owned only a shop; Coldstream was stripped bare, not even possessing ‘rights in its street dung’; Crieff had two fields; Dalkeith nothing; Dunkeld nothing; and Dunoon, nothing””

Even the towns which did not hold their charters from the Crown, but from the neighbouring baron, possessed wide territories of commonity. The lands over, which property rights and privileges of use were held by the burgh were the burgh commons. The loss of the burgh commons stemmed in large part from an Act of the Scots Parliament in 1469. This Act had suppressed the popular election of Councils and led to the dominance of burghs by local land owners and wealthy merchants. The evidence in the reports shows how these land owners and merchants, with their relations and allies, had appropriated the burgh commons to themselves through generous land grants and cheap feus.

Professor Cosmo Innes (1798-1874), Advocate and Professor of Constitutional Law and History wrote in his Scotch Legal Antiquities,
“Looking over our country, the land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable – the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated and held by charter – is a narrow strip on the river bank or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving. They were not thought of when charters were made and lands feudalised. Now as cultivation increased, the tendency in the agricultural mind was to occupy these wide commons, and our lawyers lent themselves to appropriate the poor man’s grazing to the neighbouring baron. They pointed to his charter with its clause of parts and pertinents, with its general clause of mosses and moors – clauses taken from the style book, not with any reference to the territory conveyed in that charter; and although the charter was hundreds of years old, and the lord had never possessed any of the common, when it came to be divided, the lord got the whole that was allocated to the estate, and the poor cottar none. The poor had no lawyers.”

From another blog-post related to this thread

…The landowning establishment among Scotland’s elite continue to have their links into financial and money-making circles, as well as considerable cultural power. The “mighty magnates” of 19th century Scotland – the men (and some women) who headed the great houses – were essentially a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial class, making their money from rents and investments. They were sufficiently astute to invest in the new industrial capitalism which ran Scotland economically and politically for so long, while being strongly represented on the boards of the major banks and finance houses. At the turn of the century, The Marquess of Linlithgow, for example, was a director of the Bank of Scotland, and Standard Life; the Duke of Buccleuch, of the Royal Bank, Standard Life and Scottish Equitable; the Earl of Mansfield, of the National Bank, and Scottish Equitable; and the Marquess of Tweeddale, of the Commercial Bank, Edinburgh Life, and Scottish Widows. Such hegemony has, of course, eroded significantly with the decline of indigenous Scottish capitalism and its replacement with multinational corporations. Nevertheless, the banks and finance houses still find it useful to have titled property represented on the board. …

Again, this is a very interesting thread of history, but i do feel it neglects the relevance to workers of today. At least the blog relates the past to the current purchases of land by the community. The latest being in the Borders from the estate of the Duke of Buccleuch

https://pressat.co.uk/releases/300000-game-changer-for-southern-scotlands-biggest-community-buyout-as-deadline-looms-51705455abcf91d299b2ba02bf1d57ba/

”everyone has a right to a deer from the hill, a tree from the forest, and a salmon from the river” – An old Highland saying

The stageist conception of history may be viewed  from a distance but close-up there were anomalies

Coal miners in Scotland, and their families, were bound to the colliery in which they worked and the service of its owner.  This bondage was set into law by an Act of Parliament in 1606, which ordained that “no person should fee, hire or conduce and salters, colliers or coal bearers without a written authority from the master whom they had last served”. The cruel edict reduced the Scottish collier to the position of a serf or a slave. By that Act, workmen in mines, whether miners, pickmen, winding-men, firemen, or in any other service of the mine, were prohibited from leaving that service either in hope of greater gain or of greater ease, or for any other reason, without the consent of the coal-owner, or of the Sheriff of the County; and any one receiving a runaway into his service and refusing to return him within twenty-four hours was to be fined one hundred pounds Scots. A collier lacking such written authority could be “reclaimed” by his former master “within a year and a day”.  If the new master did not surrender the collier, he could be fined and the collier who deserted was considered to be a thief and punished accordingly.  The Act also gave the coal owners and masters the powers to  to apprehend “vagabonds and sturdy beggars” and put them to work in the mines.  A further Act of 1641 extended those enslaved to include other workers in the mines and forced the colliers to work six days a week. The Habeas Corpus Act of Scotland, in 1701, which declared that “the imprisonment of persons without expressing the reasons thereof, and delaying to put them to trial is contrary to law”; and that “no person shall hereafter be imprisoned for custody in order to take his trial for any crime or offence without a warrant or writ expressing the particular cause for which he is imprisoned” specifically stated “that this present Act is in no way to be extended to colliers and salters.”

It wasn’t until 1799 when an Act was passed that all colliers in Scotland were “to be free from their servitude”.

The wage-slaves’ revolt

We urged upon the workers of the world to take control of society. Socialism is nothing other than people's conscious self-organisation of their own lives in all domains. Only within a socialist society can we take control over our own lives and bring an end to war, economic insecurity and sexual and racial inequality. Only within socialism can all people fully develop their potential and capabilities. We must bring about the end of the present economic and political system that is imposed upon our lives – the system of capitalism. This system is inherently based on misery and exploitation. It profits a wealthy few at the expense of the vast majority of working people throughout the world. It generates war. It keeps people divided and powerless by fostering racial and sexual oppression. We believe that this system is controlled by a small number of extremely rich owners and bankers – a ruling class – who use all this country’s major institutions, including the government, to protect their interests and wealth. This class will use any means to maintain their control over our lives. 

The principal task of the Socialist Party is to try to restore the credibility of socialism in the consciousness of millions of men and women.  Our aim is to give a dignified life to everyone. Priority must be given to solidarity and cooperation. Straight socialism and no compromise is our class war battle-cry. Socialism is not just an ideal.  The people will make it a reality. There is only one alternative to barbarism. Frederick Engels said it: socialism

The Labour Party, particularly its ’left’ wing, claims to stand for the workers’ interests and for socialism. Labour claims that socialism can be introduced gradually through a series of reforms using parliamentary means. But the experience of various Labour governments has brought disillusion. Today no-one believes that Labour will establish a new and better political and economic system. Even Labour politicians themselves ask for votes with the claim that they can make capitalism work better than the Tories. The Labour Party represents the capitalists and no other class. The working–class no longer holds any illusion that the Labour Party represents its interests or will bring about any real change in the system. At best, the Labour Party is seen as a lesser evil’ than the Conservative Party. If so-called ’revolutionaries’ support Labour in election campaigns, even as a ’lesser evil’ or with all sorts of qualifications to their support, they are betraying the working class.

Governments have no real solutions for the pandemic in exactly the same way that they have no real solutions for the collapse of eco-systems or for making our economic systems sustainable. Our leaders and our political parties are now controlled by billionaires who are not even pursuing their own nation’s interests, let alone the interests of humankind and the planet. Rather, this billionaire class pursue narrow, self-destructive corporate interests, whether it is banks driving people into debt, oil companies fuelling systemic environmental crises, or arms manufacturers lobbying for endless wars. If our society is to survive we need urgent and fundamental change. We require a greater acceptance that our leaders are incapable of that change because they are trapped in political structures irredeemably defective because they were captured long ago by capitalist interests

Socialism is built upon the common ownership of the means of production. Socialism is a real alternative. It is a a better system to the system we live under. History has shown that societies are not eternal and just as it succeeded feudalism, capitalism will inevitably be replaced by the superior system of socialism. We strive to replace capitalism with socialism. The enemy is capitalism. There is one, and only one, remedy. Help yourselves. Determine that you will not endure this abominable state of things any longer; act up to your determination, and it will vanish. We are many; our opponents are few. Then working men and women of all colours, nationalities and occupations claim your rights to conquer your own emancipation. If you want a thing done, and well done, do it yourself,” and this is precisely what we must do - we must take the work of liberation into our own hands in order to guard against deceitful friends. We proclaim that we no longer want deliverers, that we no longer wish to serve as instruments of others, and that we hold the knowledge to understand our interests.

The Internationale:

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear.