The captains of industry command

 

The aim of socialist industrial production is not profits but the prosperity of the the people. The capitalist practice of only seeking profit while ignoring the harm done to the planet and its people is alien to socialism. It is becoming more and more obvious that capitalism can only destroy the environment. The market and the profit system are incapable of planning a world where millions can live in safety and security. The pursuit of profit leads corporations down pathways that might be quicker and cheaper in the short term, at the expense of public health and safety. The very definition of greed. Fast disappearing are clean fresh air, clear pure water and wholesome nutritious food. Pollutants fill the atmosphere, our rivers and seas have been turned into sewers and we fill our plates with chemicalised fodder.

Sadly, a great number of people concerned about the environment have been naive enough to believe that their protests and lobbying would force those at the controls of industry and finance to turn around climate change, even if only because of self-interest. But this once again proved to be a cruel illusion. The people came on to the streets to be heard. But in the CEO board-rooms, they were not listened to. The very sources of global warming, means of production, are in the hands of a few who cannot see beyond their share-holder returns. What is to be done about global warming and the greenhouse effect? The Socialist Party rejects the idea that capitalism has a self-correcting economic mechanism. If nothing changes the result will be climate chaos. Only a reduction and redistribution of resources makes any sense. All the resources for a world of abundance, without pollution, disease and squalor, exist at the present time in skill, technique and science. Yet, they are the same resources used to produce environmental destruction. They cannot be used for constructive purposes till the capitalist system of profit-making is overthrown. Grim reality teaches that the choice of socialism or barbarism may have been transformed to world socialism  or extinction

The world today is one of stark and bewildering contradictions. Possessing the greatest industrial and agricultural power in history, we cannot feed, clothe and provide a decent livelihood for billions. Countless struggle away their lives to just survive.  Poverty and economic insecurity exist alongside luxury and extravagance. The answers to these questions cannot be found in cynical condemnations of “human nature” or apologies about the “way things are.” No! Capitalism, the social system under which we live, is responsible for the contradictions of society. A system of exploitation, violence, racism and war strangles our lives. Capitalism thrives on the private control of society’s wealth and production – production involving the interconnected efforts of millions of working people.

The rich have one basic goal in life: to make more and more profits, and they accomplish this by dominating the economics, politics, and cultural life of the country. The monopolists will throw workers out into the streets to starve, promote violent racism, and build a military arsenal that can destroy the world several times over – anything for profits!

This is an irrational and unjust system. But life does not have to be this way. We can improve our lives and society, and eliminate exploitation and capitalist injustice, by overturning the capitalist system. We can replace capitalism with a rational and humane system – socialism. Socialism is a social system where social wealth is genuinely controlled by society and for the benefit of society; where the common good, not profits, becomes the chief concern. Such an economic and political transformation will be radical, but a radical solution is what it will take to bury the miseries of capitalism. Socialism will qualitatively improve the lives of the working people. The socialist revolution has become a historical necessity and possibility. There is no other choice today. If the working people, and not the monopolies, controlled the great resources of our society, we could improve all our lives. These are the hopes and dreams of socialism. 

The Socialist Party is dedicated to realising that day when the exploiters, racists and warmongers will be thrown from power forever, and a new life for the people of the world can begin.  We must use the power we have won to end the bosses’ rule of profit.

A New Vision for the Working People

"The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" - Communist Manifesto

All socialists are rebels against any kind of enslavement and exploitation. Reformers believe that the working class can not emancipate itself by its own efforts. We are to be emancipated through the efforts of humanitarians, intellectually superior to the workers.  But it is clear that little was to be expected from the politicians and millionaires of the bourgeois.

 The Socialist Party perceives that the power necessary for the realisation of socialism can come only from the working class itself. The Socialist Party fights not only for shorter working hours and higher wages, unemployment insurance and shop councils, but also for the liberty, equality, fraternity of all human beings, regardless of race, gender, colour or nationality. Our Party declares that its aim is to develop the class consciousness of our fellow- workers through our education and agitation campaigns. We try to get the workers to have trust in their own power to achieve their own emancipation,  to have confidence in the ability of their own class.

The essence of socialism is cooperation, organisation, concerted effort, and united action on the part of the working class for their own advancement and their own emancipation. If a person does not understand the necessity of these things, the person does not understand socialism, and is not yet a socialist. The working class must organise to get it for themselves. The struggle against the capitalist class is a struggle against all who live by the labour of others, and against all exploitation. It can only end in taking political power by the working class, and the transfer of all land, instruments, factories, machinery and mines to the whole of society for the organisation of social production under which all that is produced by the workers and all improvements of production must benefit the people themselves.

The Socialist Party has always said that socialism cannot be established unless and until it has majority support and has always emphatically rejected minority violence. We are actively working to avoid violence by seeking to persuade in an open, democratic and peaceful manner a majority of the merits of socialism.

The socialist revolution will be essentially peaceful precisely because it will be the act of a conscious majority. Unfortunately, whether isolated incidents involving violence may occur does not depend on the majority, but on the anti-socialist minority.

Whether a minority of anti-socialists, faced with an overwhelming democratic decision in favour of the establishment of socialism, would dare to take up arms in a futile gesture against the socialist majority is very much open to question. But if they do, the Socialist majority must have a policy for dealing with them. We think it reasonable that steps should be taken to restrain them, even to the extent of using actual physical violence if need be. After all it will be they who began the violence and acted in an anti-democratic way. Not to act against them would be to allow a few fanatics to hold up the establishment of socialism. “Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary” only applies when once the vast majority of society are already in favour of the establishment of socialism.

Do you wish to hasten the day of victory? Join the Socialist Party! Don’t wait for the morrow. Join now. Take your place where you belong. You cannot do your duty by proxy. You have got to do it yourself and do it squarely and then as you look yourself in the face you will have no occasion to blush. You will know what it is to be a real man or woman. You will lose nothing; you will gain everything. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a spirit to develop. You need to know that you are verging on the edge of a great new world. You need to get in touch with your comrades and fellow workers and to become conscious of your interests, your powers and your possibilities as a class. You need to know that you belong to the great majority of humankind. You need to know that as long as you are ignorant, as long as you are indifferent, as long as you are apathetic, unorganised and content, you will remain exactly where you are. You will be exploited; you will be degraded, and you will have to beg for a job. You will get just enough for your slavish toil to keep you in working order, and you will be looked down upon with scorn and contempt by the very parasites that live in luxury out of your sweat and unpaid toil. The Socialist Party says: “Take possession of the factories and work-places in the name of the people.”

The Abolitionist Party of Emancipation

What differentiates the Socialist Party from other organisations advocating social change is its focus on self-emancipation and its criticism of leaders and all substitutes for the self-activity of the working class. Socialism is distinguished by its principle that the people can only be free when they free themselves from poverty exploitation and oppression.  This emancipation from misery cannot be accomplished by mending particular evils but only by a fundamental revolution of society.

We are the Do-It-Yourself movement. Socialism is our goal and with it the abolition of every kind of exploitation and oppression, directed against a class, sex, or race. Socialism as a means to the emancipation without democracy, is unthinkable. Socialism not just the economic re-structuring of production, but democratic organisation of the social and political life of society as well. Socialism starts with the basis principles of freedom and self-liberation.

Ideas that tell working people that they are not ready or are incapable of deciding for themselves keep them from trying to change things. The system that existed in the former Soviet Union and its satellite countries is held out as proof that socialism does not work. Defenders of capitalism are very happy to endorse these dictatorial exploitative regimes as models of socialism to destroy the very concept of socialism in the minds of millions of people. The state owned the means of production – but who owned the state? Certainly not the workers, who were exploited and without control of all levers of social and political power. In what sense was it “socialist”?

 Reformist parties have virtually eliminated any demand for socialism from their programmes, promising to maintain private property at all cost. These parties have practically re-defined socialism out of existence.  They typically dreamed of “socialising” capitalism from above by increased state intervention in society where socialism is  handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control. Our objective is the social revolution – the abolition of capitalism and wage slavery – and the emancipation of the working class. 

 Direct participation of citizens in the administration of all social matters presupposes the abolition of the modern system of political representation and its replacement by direct popular democracy. The political self-education and the rule of the working class are a necessary preliminary condition of its economic emancipation. It is becoming increasingly clear on the necessity for the social and political revolution is organising into a special socialist party which is hostile to all parties of exploiters. We cannot achieve socialism by making peace with the bourgeoisie.

Future society will be socialist society. This means primarily, that there will be no classes in that society; there will be neither capitalists nor proletarians and, consequently, there will be no exploitation. In that society there will be only workers engaged in collective labour.

Future society will be socialist society. This means also that, with the abolition of exploitation commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed— there will be only free workers.

Future society will be socialist society. This means, lastly, that in that society the abolition of wage-labour will be accompanied by the complete abolition of the private ownership of the instruments and means of production; there will be neither poor artisans nor rich capitalists—there will be only workers who collectively own all the land and minerals, all the forests, all the factories and mills, all the transport and communications, etc. The main purpose of production in the future will be to satisfy the needs of society and not to produce goods for sale in order to increase the profits of the capitalists. Where there will be no room for commodity production, struggle for profits, etc. Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need either for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power.

Capitalism rests on the domination of the overwhelming majority by a small minority. And one of the worst things about this domination is that it is experienced as such, without being understood as such. Part of our job as socialists is to help people see through the illusions of capitalism, to understand that we are faced with this stark choice of socialism or barbarism, and to encourage a vision of self-emancipation as both the means and the end, the only means of creating socialism and the essence of what socialism would be. This vision is what the Socialist Party see it is a part of. 

Scottish Poverty Worsening

The Scottish government needs to display "bolder ambition" if it is to meet targets for tackling child poverty, a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said.

In its Poverty In Scotland 2020 report, the JRF said that "poverty has been rising and we are not on course to meet interim child poverty targets within three years".

About a million people in Scotland were in poverty "living precarious and insecure lives" even before Covid hit. In many cases the pandemic will "have swept them deeper into poverty, as well as dragging others under", it added.

The report warned of the impact of ending the furlough scheme at the end of this month, coupled with the withdrawal of temporary higher benefits payments in April, saying it was "clear" this will make poverty higher.

The report went on: "This is because unemployment will be higher, working hours and earnings may be falling, benefits would be reduced back to pre-coronavirus levels while housing costs will be no lower. Such a situation would be deeply worrying, not just in the context of interim child poverty targets three years away, but in the daily lives of people who face being swept further and deeper into poverty."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-54411848