The People's Voice

 

The golden rule of capitalism is the rule of profit. To continually increase their profits, the capitalists do everything in their power to speed-up production and decrease wages. It also means that each capitalist strives to concentrate production by buying increasingly efficient and powerful machines, which, by reducing the costs of production, allow him to get an edge over his capitalist competitors. In this race for maximum profits, the strongest capitalists win out, forming coalitions and financial groups controlling capital worth billions.

Capitalism, the system of exploitation for maximum profits extended over the entire globe. Not only did the capitalists exploit the working people of their own country, but in their drive for markets, raw materials and new areas for capital investment, a system of barbaric oppression and aggression developed to exploit the peoples of the entire world, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

According to the food experts, there are millions of people who will face dangerous malnutrition or actual starvation. The food shortage will, as always, hit the poorest the hardest. And it’s all the fault of the capitalist system. It is the we pay for continuing the capitalist system, the price for allowing the ascendancy of the power of money over the needs of man. For a permanent solution of the vital issue of food, for its equitable distribution and for its most abundant production, a world socialist society must be constructed.

 

Our world is capable of producing and delivering abundant food supplies and all the informed experts agree that it is feasible to wipe out starvation through organised distribution of food. It is only the lack of political will to distribute food without profit that prevents starvation from being eradicated. Those who hold theories that the population is exceeding Earth’s capability to provide food can be considered crackpots. The Socialist Party admits that the cooperative production and distribution of wealth for the equal benefit of the entire community, can only be accomplished when all people have access, not only to the land, but to the tools and technology of modern society.

The housing shortage is becoming more and more acute with no real relief in sight. The mounting cost of living and the shrinkage in housing are the twin burdens that weigh most heavily upon the mass of the people. Productivity has reached undreamed-of heights; skills are available and so are the raw materials. Technology made new and great strides. And yet, not even the socially necessary minimum of shelter is available to the people who produce. Does not this indicate the bankruptcy of a system? The housing shortage is not a new phenomenon. Nowhere in the world can capitalism point to having provided adequate housing for the people. Conversely there can be no real or lasting solution to this problem without a radical solution of the social and economic conditions. The housing problem, as well as the problem of other necessities of life, is indissolubly linked with the inefficiency of the capitalist system. The full and complete solution of the housing question is most intimately and directly bound up with a socialist solution of all the burning problems of society.That housing is one of the basic needs of the people nobody denies; and yet every housing programme that has been projected has been stymied by the profit motive. The lesson is inescapable. Without the socialist solution even such noble ventures come to naught. Conversely, the capitalist profit system itself remains the greatest obstacle in the way of adequate housing for the people, just as it stands in the way of satisfying all the other peoples’ needs. Hence our determination to fight for the socialist society. Such a system would first of all put an end to speculative land owners, to real estate sharks and rent-gougers, not to mention the profit hungry mortgage brokers and financiers. Profit returns would no longer enter into calculations for home building. On the contrary, the needs of the people would be the highest concern.. The need for homes is never satisfied, precisely because the profit system bars the way. 

If people can accept the idea of a free national health service, why not a national food service, or free housing? And then why not worldwide rather than just national?

A World Free from Hunger

 

Too little is produced, that is the cause of the whole thing. But why is too little produced? Not because the limits of production – even today and with present day means – are exhausted. No, but because the limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies but by the number of purges able to buy and to pay. Bourgeois society does not and cannot wish to produce any more. The moneyless bellies, the labour which cannot be utilized for profit and therefore cannot buy, is left to the death-rate. Let a sudden industrial boom, such as is constantly occurring, make it possible for this labour to be employed with profit, then it will get money to spend, and the means of subsistence have never hitherto been lacking. This is the vicious circle in which the whole economic system revolves. One presupposes bourgeois conditions as a whole, and then proves that every part of them is a necessary part – and therefore an “eternal law.” - Engels to F.A. Lange

 

A hunger-free world is possible but only if we re-set our global economic system which can allow people to change how we grow and eat our food. Hunger and malnutrition generally are symptoms of a larger underlying problem — poverty. This economic system, as Rachel Carson, the pioneer ecologist, put it, recognises no other gods but those of profit and production. Food is treated as just another commodity. No distinction is made in this respect between necessities and luxuries. The rich can afford to purchase anything they wish while the poor are not able to acquire even their most basic needs. Under capitalist relations people have no right to an adequate diet, shelter, and medical attention. People may have a “biological demand” for food—we all need food, just as we need water and air, to continue to live. But as with other commodities, people are excluded from access to necessities without what economists call “effective demand” cannot buy sufficient nutritious food. Of course, lack of “effective demand” in this case means that the poor don’t have enough money to buy the food they need. The market is not efficient at all. It is also absolutely unable to act as a mechanism to end poverty and hunger.

The capitalist food chain is under strain with hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and food waste loss on the rise. The causes of hunger and famine have little to do with a shortage of food. Our planet currently produces an abundance of food. This tragic story is indubitably the most striking indictment and condemnation of our barbaric capitalist society.

We live in a world in which, as with all other industries, a few multinational corporations dominate the world’s food market.  One central problem in the food system is one of exploitation of small producers and the landless labourers for the interests of those powerful Big Business groups. Their control over the supply chain allows them to capture the value created by the labour of peasants and small farmers, as well as capture the value created in the industrial processing of raw foodstuffs by the workers they employ in their factories.  World hunger is due to the corporations that control food production and its distribution. 

Only in a socialist world will the benefits of scientific agriculture be given to all of the peoples of the world, because only a socialist economy can permit the rational planning of food production. Ending world hunger is quite simple. Almost every country in the world has the soil, water, and climate resources to grow enough food so that all their people can eat a healthy diet. In addition, the knowledge and crop varieties already exist in most countries so that if farmers are given adequate assistance they will be able to grow reasonably high yields of crops. Instead of the emphasis  on production of export cash-crops which under capitalism helps a country’s balance of payments, it does not ensure sufficient food for everyone nor does it promote a healthy rural environment. It leads naturally to the production of high-value luxury crops demanded by export markets (luxuries such as cut-flowers grown in Kenya), rather than the low-value subsistence crops needed to meet the needs of the local population. Production of sufficient amounts of the right kinds of food by small farmers working in cooperatives or on their own and using sustainable techniques is the best way to achieve the goal of “food security.” This, of course, means not taking land out of food production to produce crops for the bio-fuel markets.

THE REAL GREEN PARTY

Socialism is Liberty and Freedom

 

True liberty does not exist where property is not common property, where working people are wage slaves, where the capitalist has control of our lives and our wealth. Liberty in our society is an empty word, a word without meaning. Where is this liberty of which they boast? When all the wealth of society is freed from the control of the property owners, all the inexhaustible riches of science and human art will be at his disposal. The only care of society will he how to increase the necessity and pleasures of life, to perfect the instruments of labour in order to create for the citizen a proper amount of ease and leisure; Freedom will then cease to be a slogan and will become a reality, an everyday fact the property of all.

 Socialism is possible now. It is possible because it represents the interests of all; because it expresses the common interest of the producing class which forms the immense majority in all countries. The opponents of socialism say that we are not practical, that we are dreamers, Utopians, visionaries. Our critics tell us human nature makes socialism impossible. This same human nature argument has always been used against those who wished to abolish slavery and serfdom, exploitation and despotism. It is a mistake to accept that human nature does not change. Everything changes in nature and in life. Everything is in a process of transformation. Everything evolves. Everything changes. Chattel slavery was replaced by the semi-slavery the serfdom and that give way to our wage-slavery. The wage system will have to give way to socialism which will bring to a final end to the exploitation of man by man and slavery in all its forms. It has also been said that if men and women do not have the spur of hunger and want and the desire to make profit they will become lazy. To argue thus is to forget the necessity for clothing, feeding and sheltering oneself. Who does not work will not eat. It is to forget too, that idleness is not the characteristic of a man in his sane senses. Laziness and idleness are social ills not personal weaknesses. When the producers know that the products of their work will belong to them and their communities they will jettison the  repugnance which forced toil engenders in them. Work well regulated and fairly apportioned will become attractive. It will become a joy and a pleasure, and this is because work is necessary for the physical and mental well-being of mankind. Humanity must choose between the continuation of the capitalist system which leads to destruction and the revolution of international labour founded on the basis of solidarity and reciprocity through the socialisation of the forces of production. Socialism win make of the earth one country single and indivisible and each will by free co-operation work for the common progress and happiness.

Socialism stands for the end of the war and poverty. Socialism existed as a practical system for many centuries among the majority of peoples. They believed that the land was the common property of the family or the tribe. Even up to the present day basic forms of socialism exists among some people in some parts of the world. But “primitive” socialism differs from modern socialism in this way; the former had as its foundations equality in poverty and want. Its means of production were undeveloped and primitive. It was more dependent on the forces of nature than on dominance over them.  Socialism today, on the other hand, presupposes a vast development of the forces of production, mechanical tools, large-scale production and organised class-conscious workers. Modern socialism takes from capitalism its technical basis, its  its administration and supply chains and places them at the service of the community. We cannot go here into the details of socialist organisation, which on its part will have to be adapted to the various and varied social and national conditions. Suffice it to say, large-scale capitalist production offers us data of all the best technical conditions for the new organisation of society. The machinery is all there set up. All that is needed is that we set it in motion for the benefit of all. Production is already structured socially. It is necessary that all benefit be collectively shared, based on need and not on profit. The future alone can tell what will be the precise forms and special methods of organisation. The future comes from the womb of the past and the present just like the child from the mother. Capitalism gives birth to socialism. It bases its practical work on recognition of the class struggle. The working-class is the centre of all action. 

Nationalism Divides Workers – Don’t Be Duped

 

“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.” - Thomas Carlyle

 

It appears that the SNP are trying to make political advantage out of the Scottish government’s differing approach to the pandemic to push for separatism and full sovereignty.

The “internationalism” of the Socialist Party is much more than the mere internationalism we hear so much of in the present day, of global treaties, world courts of justice, or United Nation resolutions. These themselves may a sign of the times that the nation-state is growing more and more superfluous but it is one of capitalist expediency  which necessarily overlaps national frontiers. Instead, our world socialism is based on the  principle “fraternity” – or, if you will the one family of humanity, a union of peoples. Socialism the antithesis of capitalism. The latter means the domination by one nation in the interests of the governing and capitalist class, of weaker nations. The former, on the contrary means the voluntary co-operation on the basis of the communalisation of the means of production and the disappearance of all existing nation states. Socialism is the reconstruction of human life broadly. The Socialist Party seeks the elimination, not merely of national jealousies, but also of national barriers generally.  Socialists feels that we belong first and foremost to the World Socialist Movement, and, as such, that our socialist comrades of other lands stand closer to us than any non-socialist compatriot. It is right to look forward to the day when national patriotism is swallowed up in world-wide solidarity. Let us cast off all nationalism, all parochialism, and sit down as brothers and sisters together. Patriotism requires allegiance to the State and the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister, sons and daughters.

 The true lover of liberty is the one who aspires and works at home and abroad for the elimination of class exploitation and the abolition of the poverty, misery and suffering which increases so long as the private property system continues, who aims at making this world and all its wealth the common property and heritage. A world socialist movement fighting relentlessly for socialism and in that fight combating the day to day attacks of capitalism is the only way to meet and defeat nationalism. Workers can be won from the blind alley of nationalism only if the socialist movement spells out and campaigns clearly for the alternative. The Socialist Party fights within the confines of the nation-state for the interests of the world’s working class. We will defend workers wherever an attack is made, regardless of frontiers. Our purpose is to create an understanding of the interdependence of all humans the world over. All governments are maintained for the purpose of keeping us in subjection.

Nationalism means exclusivism and isolation. Any nationalism finally implies that those people are better than all others. Nationalism preaches superiority and inferiority. Nationalism divides workers so that the workers of one nationality are struggling against the workers of another nationality for a few illusory crumbs the rulers throw out exactly for that purpose! It is nationalism that pits workers against each other while their mutual oppressors accrue the benefits from the profiteering. A nationalist outlook preaches to the people of a country or ethnic group that regardless of class they have more in common with one another than they do with the people of other nations. Countries and national groups consist of different classes. Nationalism helps bind the working class to the bourgeoisie of its nation. Nationalism binds the working people to their own ruling class. That is why our masters promote nationalism. The Socialist Party say that working people’s destiny must not be tied to our employers. We say that the world’s working class must rid itself of patriotism, the ideology of its class enemy. We do not fan the flames of nationalism that further divisions between the working class. We criticise all nationalisms as reactionary. We did not welcome the national liberation struggles. They were ideas based on illusion, not reality.

 These new states were never really independent. The economic grip over them was never broken. Vietnam, Cambodia and many others have become the sweat-shops for the West. The leaders of these new states all pretended a desire for socialism but they had to ensure no trade unions had any power, the the working class had an independent voice. The local capitalist or bureaucracy made a deal to get a bigger slice of the exploitation pie. Experience has repeatedly shown that the national bourgeoisie will betray the people every time. They have adopted the banner of nationalism, not socialism. They have chosen to negotiate with the capitalists instead of maintaining the perspective of class war.

Those who believe that a nationalist party, or a party based on race, can be for the working class, reveal their complete ignorance of the ABCs of Marxism. Genuine socialist parties in each country are parties that represent the interests of the entire working class, a class party representing all the working people, not  only a section of the working class, not organised along race or national lines, but united upon class lines. 

Separatism is no answer.