A Path Not Taken

 

When it comes to politics, workers are presented with various paths that lead to many possible destinations as the turnings on the road. Their decision on what direction to take is a crucial one.

 

Capitalism is a system of minority rule that operates for the benefit of a tiny segment of the population. Workers have no stake in the existing division of the world. The crisis of capitalism manifests itself on a world scale. Economic and political instability characterises all of the capitalist countries. Economic crisis and war occurs as on obvious result of capitalism itself. Yet all that stops the production and equitable sharing out of wealth is the capitalist system of production for private profit. All that is needed is to produce goods that people want and need, is a socialist system of production for use instead of profit. We will vote the capitalists out of power, and these defeated capitalists will give us the key to every office and factory.

 

It has been said that there can be no blueprints for the future because the people themselves will decide how to build the new society as they are building it. Fundamentally the Socialist Party concurs, and has therefore declined from attempting any blueprints.

 

Nevertheless, it is appropriate to put forward a few ideas for discussion about what might do to start building socialism. “No blueprints” does not mean “no ideas”. The Socialist Party has an analysis of the present society which holds the promise for the future, aims that people can decide whether or not they want to fight for in a revolution. Reformists make proposals as to how the present regime should deal with various problems, with or without a change in the system of society. Revolutionaries raise the question of a new type of world administered very differently from the old order. 

Revolution means that we, the working class take over the running of industry and make the decisions ourselves. It means abolishing the market economy. Production will be geared towards social needs rather than profits. Promoters of cooperatives only means preserving market relations between independent enterprises, still not working to a common social plan. We do not just want to create some free space within which slaves can manage some of their own affairs while leaving the ruling class to manage big industry and the affairs of society as a whole. The question of centralisation and decentralisation of enterprise management, is quite separate from the question of abolishing commodity production. We want to overthrow the slave owners and abolish slavery altogether.

 

Capitalism’s essential features is a system of exploitation, oppression and aggression, marked by injustice, inequalities and social scourges. Capitalism is a system in which exist exploiter and exploited classes, a class that dominates and another class that is dominated, a class which rules for themselves and another that are ruled, a class that upon which rests concentrated wealth and profits and where the overwhelming majority of the population live in poverty and misery. Capitalism is a system in which the most developed, richer and stronger countries exploit, dominate, subdue and oppress in the most varied ways the less developed, poorer and weaker countries, maintaining and creating, worldwide, immense zones were hunger affects and kills millions of people. Historically, the capitalism is marked by wars that has killed thousands of millions. Only someone who gains from such a system can consider capitalism as a system that benefits the needs, the interests, and the desires of the people.

 

The indignation against the evils of capitalism persists and the ideal of a better society keeps remains a valid aspiration, a society in which exploitation, inequalities, injustice and great social scourges are eliminated and in which the needs of working people are fulfilled.

 

The Socialist Party seeks to wipe out capitalism irreparable evils. It is true that the task of building a new society – the socialist society – has revealed to be more difficult, complex and lengthy than we expected. The progress of socialist thought was believed to be irreversible. We underestimated the ideological power of capitalism to dissuade people of their real interests. And we were unprepared for the distractions of the of the Bolsheviks and of the reformists. Both tendencies led to workers abandoning the socialist goal.

 

There are some persons, good and true, who respond to the inhumanity o capitalism in horror.  A politician may then make humanitarian speeches in the media – and perhaps also act with humanitarian concern in his or her personal life – but politician’s primary task is to make capitalism “work”.  No administration can get rid of the evils of capitalism so long as capitalism exists, and to effect its abolition is the purpose of socialist parties. For a socialist world! To this inspiring task, we summon all who are oppressed by capitalism. Only a socialist world can give us peace and plenty. Look how the capitalist world forever totters on the brink of self-destruction.

Damages in Lieu Of Reasonable Notice! One Wonders Why?

 On Oct. 9, by a vote of 7-0, the Supreme Court of Ontario, ruled that workers who were dismissed without notice would have a right to the bonuses, commissions and other non-salary forms of compensation they would have received if they had advance warning they were going to be fired. 

Justice Nicholas Kasirer explained, ''The purpose of damages in lieu of reasonable notice is to put the employee in the position they would have been in had they continued to work through to the end of the notice period.” 

Since the entire legal apparatus exists to conserve for the robber class the wealth they have stolen from the working class, one may wonder why an integral part of it would take such a stance. 

The answer is probably to reduce the level of working class militancy that would otherwise exist and therefore maintain the status-quo.

S.P.C. Members.

End the rule of capitalist parasites

 

The masters of finance and captains of industry control the destiny of the working class which it keeps in subjugation. The capitalist stock market itself is full of chicanery, fraud, inside trading, and wholesale looting by the vulture corporations that plunder and pillage the weak capitalist in the most shameless manner. The stock exchanges are simply dens of gambling where financiers and industrialist speculate in shares and bonds with the ethics of a burglar. The capitalist system breeds corruption and spawns a brood of thieves in high places and so as to be interfered with by the laws of the land, the capitalists must control the powers of government, and this they can only do, being numerically an insignificant minority, by deceiving the voters. They don’t steal, they “privatise”, legalising their theft. The political parties are all alike in the  promotion of this vicious and dishonest system. There is little to be gained by regulation and legislation in limiting such evils which inflict capitalist society. As long as the source of these ills remain, even if temporarily curbed, they must again re-surface express themselves and with even increased malignancy.

 

It is capitalism, that system of society which is based upon wage-slavery, which has divided the people and which provides protection to the polluting poisons of the parasite ruling class.Capitalism can never offer peace prosperity or security. Who works for wages are in bondage. The truth of the so-called “radicals” is that they really want us to believe that through protest and pressure the capitalist system can somehow be made to work in our interest. However, the cause of poverty, unemployment, hunger and war are built into the capitalist. The capitalist can’t change their priority of pursuing profit and the accumulation of capital or they’d go out of business and be swallowed up by their commercial rivals. Instead of exposing this criminal war between bands of thieves over their robbery of people all over the world, reformers try to pretty up the situation with some cure-all palliatives. The Socialist Party’s point of view and we don’t care what it takes, is not in wasting our time trying to find a way to fix up the system. We’re saying that instead of the endless cycle of economic crises and wars that the capitalist system causes we just won’t take it any longer. Rather than trying to fool people with all sorts of false hopes, of gesture politics we have to build our understanding, our organised strength and our unity to take the ruling class on in the course of the class war. The real cause lies deep within the system of capitalism itself.

 

 Imagine a junkie, body emaciated and wasting away, frantically shooting up with heroin to get a temporary high. Each shot of heroin only increases the addiction, only delays the inevitable come-down. This is capitalism. This is our economy, constantly shooting itself up with massive investment destined for the unavoidable crash of a recession

 

Capitalism is parasitic, living off people. Under capitalism, mankind produces for profit. It is profit, capital, that counts, and not the person. We’re responsible men and women, and we’re not interested in destroying for destruction’s sake but solely interested in destroying the old system in order to build anew, ending all manifestations of the evils of capitalism. 

 

All the wavering and hesitation, the constant reliance on the capitalists and their government by the reformists and gradualists have held back the social revolution and betrayed the working class. Workers are, nevertheless, still determined, willing and ready to fight against their oppression. It is the task of working people to build a militant union of all workers. The working class must reject the mad schemes of the capitalist ruling class to police and exploit the world for private profit. Workers are up against a capitalist class that has a stranglehold of  economic life, monopolises the political scene through its two-party system, has a subservient government at its command and stands generally united in using its power to fight the workers’ movement. Government and capitalist politicians always line up with the employers against and that this applies to all politicians of the capitalist class whether liberal or conservative. To combat the employing class, the workers need to take united action, predicated on the effective principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. They must fight all those who are hopelessly wedded to collaboration with the owning class. What the exact strategy will be remains subject to grass-roots decisions, reached democratically but it needs to involve a complete break with capitalist politics .

 

Fight the workers must and fight they will but they will have to learn the need to launch an anti-capitalist political offensive with their own independent anti-capitalist party. Only when that is done can the world be run in the interests of those striving for human advancement, with freedom at last from the oppressive rule of capitalist parasites who feed on human misery.

The Ugly Obvious.

In June Prime Minister Trudeau promised funding in a one time, tax free payout of up to $600 for people holding a Disability Tax Credit Certificate. He also acknowledged, ''significant challenges,'' faced by people with disabilities during the pandemic. 

So far, October 14, no one has seen any of this money. 

Maureen Haan, president of the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work, said: ''People with disabilities in Canada already live life at the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to social supports, but the pandemic has made that evident.'' When Canadian Emergency Response Benefit came, eligible Canadians could apply for up to $2,000 a month, if their jobs were affected by the pandemic. However, folks with disabilities on supportive income, prior to the plague got $1,000 a month on average. 

So it’s pretty obvious, or should I say ugly obvious(?), that the less you can produce for the swindling class, the less they'll do for you when your hard up.

S.P.C. Members.

A Shameful Canadian Event.

 Imagine being stolen from your family at 5 years old, never to see them again. September 30, has been designated to commemorate the residential schools, meaning prisons, where hundreds of thousands of Native Canadians, Metis and Inuit children were thrown into and exposed to physical, mental and sexual abuse for over 100 years. The last one, in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, was shut down in 1996; in the lifetime of many of you reading this. To put it mildly, it was one of the most, if not the most, shameful events in Canadian history. 

We are told to honour the survivors, but did they really survive? The effects of the abuse are ongoing; people see a drunken Indian and ask why he can’t adapt without wondering

about his life story, and remember some didn't survive the hellish schools, many of their bones are in unmarked graves. And for what? so they could be taught to adapt to life under capitalism, what could be more self defeating? 

Its capitalism which should be in the grave.

S.P.C. Members.

Strike together and vote together

 

Socialist Party members are no wiser than you, but they have have studied the capitalist system more on just how it fleeces most of you. The Socialist Party inherits the collective wisdom of generations of socialists since its foundation, sufficient enough to place what we consider true facts before you, our fellow-workers. We do not preach that you follow us, but merely ask you to listen to what we have to say so that you will not be defeated by the betrayal of the henchmen of capital, masquerading as friends of the working people only to further entrench the power of the bosses and perpetuate their reign of robbery.

 

 They are in the capitalist class; you are in the working class. They are millionaires; you are paupers. They have everything; you do everything yet have nothing. They live in mansions on large estates; you in boxes with stamp-size gardens if you are lucky. They have mountains of money; you have heaps of saved-up pennies. The capitalist class are the masters; you their wage-slaves. These are the grim realities of the capitalist system. That is the basis of the class struggle. It is the question of the working class organising to overthrow the capitalist class, emancipating itself from wage-slavery. Can this be done? Anything can be done by working people.We only need to awaken to our power.

 

Individually you are helpless and your condition hopeless. As a class, you are a great force. As a class, you can break the chains that shackle us all. We must recognise the power of class unity and do all we can to bring it about. That is what is called class-consciousness. The class-conscious workers recognises the necessity of organisation, economic and political, and using every weapon at our command — the strike, the boycott, the ballot, and every other — to achieve our emancipation. We, therefore, join the union of our class and support the party of our class and give our time and energy to the work of educating our class for the struggle of our class. You cannot afford to remain in ignorance of the class struggle, or of what socialism really means. Revolutionary education and organisation is the vital need of the working class. Don’t take only our word: rely on yourself. You can only help yourselves. No one else can. If you don’t even know that you are slaves in the existing capitalist system, shame on you for your blindness and there is no hope for you but a miserable death. Class-consciousness is better than the unconsciousness of a corpse. He or she dies as a Judas Iscariot, a scab at heart in economic ignorance to the wages system, that is, the cause of your poverty and degradation. You have got to get rid of the capitalist leeches that suck your life blood. Future generations will wonder that such servility was ever possible, the shameful spectacle of rallying round the robbers of the working class, and defending them against your own people.

 

 Instead, join in solidarity with ourselves in the struggle for freedom so that we finally succeed in overthrowing the parasitic capitalist leeches and share with Marx and the other great revolutionaries, the vision of socialism before capitalism destroys us and our planet. The Socialist Party is built on correct ideas and is therefore indestructible. The workers movement failed because it threw away its correct ideas.

 

The Socialist Party would rather win the emancipation of the working class through peaceful means. We see participation in the electoral process as a vital essential tactic for building the struggle of the working class. The armed seizure of power by the means of insurrection and civil war can only lead to defeat and demoralisation. While the ruling class retains control over military forces possessing an extensive arsenal of weapons and can call upon them to shoot down their own people, our only success can be in the battle of ideas, winning over the armed forces to our side of the class war. The capitalists have exercised their dictatorship over the working class for hundreds of years by their control of the State.

 

The Socialist Party will use the vote as our weapon to capture the machinery of the State to ensure we can carry out the task of political and economic emancipation.

Hitler as A God Figure? How Nutty Can You Get?

 Police suspect that the murder of Mohamed-Aslim Zafis, who was stabbed to death, while volunteering at his Mosque in Toronto, was committed by a member of the Nazi-Satanic cult the Order of the Nine Angles, (09A).

 This lovely bunch include elements of Satanism, occultism and Nazism in their so called ideology. Hitler is a god figure to them because of his interest of the occult and his murder of 6 million Jews. 

They believe Hitler was trying to establish their Satanic Empire with his atrocities. They use the year he was born as the start of their calendar. These intellectual giants think it necessary to slaughter people to advance their beliefs. While their number, world-wide may be low, the Nazi's started out with a few members.

 Capitalism is a divisive system and this type of nonsense is as far out as divisiveness goes.

S.P.C. Members

It’s Up to Us, Claiming What is Ours

 There is no point in talking to you about the misery of today’s society. Any person with a heart  will agree that our life is not happy.  The Socialist Party wants to draw to your attention that the basic cause of all the ills of present-day society, which is normally attributed to the flaws of human nature, is in fact the lack of organisation of human society. 

This system answers our cries of need with blows of terror. It offers unemployment, hunger, homelessness, welfare cuts, and epidemics. We live in a world where hunger, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, racial and sexual discrimination, and many forms of repression, including the most barbaric are the lot of the majority of the earth’s inhabitants. Rivalries, war and the threat of war characterise the relations between countries, peoples, and nations.  Men and women are living under the yoke of capitalism. Essentially, capitalism is the result of the exploitation of the labour power of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, sole owner of the means of production. This exploitation is particularly brutal  in order to guarantee profits. The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves. They will achieve it through socialist revolution, which will suppress 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. 

 Mothers want and try to give their children the right kind of food - food that will build strong, active, healthy young bodies. What prevents women of the working class from taking proper care of their children is lack of money – time – energy. 

The government is turning from neglect to attack – police brutality and incarceration, immigration raids and deportations  and other forms of terror. At present there are over seven billion human inhabitants on the surface of this planet. For the majority of them – of us – poverty, hunger, disease, are the “normal” human condition. Our response is socialist reorganisation of the world economy. 

On a global scale the most important political development over the last decade has been the transformation of climate change from a scientific prognosis to a palpable political movement. Those who rule our planet, both the owners of the giant corporations and the governments of the major powers, are well aware of the environmental threat to civilisation. They have access to all the data, they have been repeatedly warned by experts, that they acknowledged the reality of climate change. Yet they have effectively done little about it. What needs to be done is simple and well understood: the world economy, not you, not your local community, not one country but the world economy, has to switch from fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) to renewable and sustainable sources of energy (wind power, solar power and tidal power). This has to happen on a huge scale and it has to happen quickly. Nothing else and nothing less will do, but this is precisely what is NOT happening sufficiently nor urgently enough

 Massive layoffs and millions out of work, debts piling up and rent arrears coming due, education and health care falling apart - to a great number of its people this world has become a living hell. The capitalist rulers, continue to rule and maintain capitalism, plunging country after country into one war after another. The corporations despite honeyed words to placate climate change protests persist with their policies of environmental harm to the planet in their quenchless thirst for more profit. Politicians and economists keep saying they have solutions, but they all come down to one thing-tightening the noose around necks of working people. The capitalists demand that the people sacrifice t permit them to plunder more people.

All over the world people are rising up to resist. Unrest and discontent are sweeping the world. Some people are now talking of revolution. At the very heart of the struggle is the basic conflict between the working class–the millions who have no means to live except through their labour, and whose labour is the driving force in society – and the capitalist class – the handful who do no productive work but live and accumulate billions from the labour of the workers, and continually grind the workers down in accumulating more. Working people possesses tremendous potential power to change the world and to remake society to serve the interests of the great majority.

This planet is rich in many resources, and and its peoples have achieved a high level of science and technology. Production is on a massive scale, but with the present  capitalist relations, the basic producers, the workers, are deprived of its benefits. Under the capitalist system, production only takes place if those who control production, the capitalists, can make profit from it. And they can make profit only by wringing it out of the workers, and constantly pushing their wages down to the lowest level, allowing the workers only enough to keep working-and to bring up new generations of workers to further enrich capital. Part of the workers’ labour covers the cost of maintaining themselves and their families–their wages–and the rest is unpaid labour that produces surplus value for the capitalists, the source of their profit. This exploitation of the workers to create private profit for the capitalists is the basis of the whole capitalist system and all its evils.

The capitalist class arose within the feudal system, finally overthrew the feudal system and established the capitalist system. And now it is the turn of the workers to overthrow the capitalist system and build a completely new society, removing our masters and breaking all social chains that enslave us and shackle production itself.

Socialist Standard No. 1395 November 2020

 

 

 

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• Editorial: Science, Politics and Profits

• Pathfinders: Burning rain

• Socialism or Nationalism?

• Quote: John Lame Deer

• Letters: Chomsky replies

• Cooking the Books I: The really big slump

• Class Control

• Material World: ‘Too old to work, too young to die’

• Engels as Utopian Socialist

• Engels’s Political Testament

• Engels, pioneer socialist

• Trump and lying as a tactic

• Peace? In Capitalism?

• Cooking the Books II: The National Debt: whose debt?

• Proper Gander: Rubber Reboot

• Reviews

• 50 years Ago: Cathy – no home to go to

• Meetings

• Rear View