We Need Socialism

 

The Socialist Party makes clear that even if our oppressors were willing to grant them palliatives and reforms it would not end the contradictions of capitalism. Only the social revolution can release the forces of production from the exploiting power of capital, put an end to poverty, eliminate the root causes of war and unify world. Capitalism does not exist except by exploitation.  We invite all who share our aspirations, our world outlook and class commitment, to join our ranks and help us win. The Socialist Party enters the political field with a membership that will not offer any false promises. Socialism is rule by the working people. They will decide how socialism is to work. This was how Marx and Engels defined socialism. To use the word “socialism” for anything but working people’s power is to misuse the term. Nationalisation of mines, railways, steel, etc. is not socialism, nor is there any such socialist sector of a “mixed” economy. Nationalisation is simply a degree of state capitalism, with no relation to socialism. Nor is the Welfare State socialist. A “welfare” state is not socialism but a form of state capitalism. The task of the Socialist Party therefore is to help fellow-workers with the transfer of power from capitalists to working people. 

The current coronavirus pandemic has convincingly demolishing the myth of America as an affluent society. It revealed just how many live from pay-check to pay-check, how many are in debt and surviving upon credit and who now need to resort to charity to feed themselves. Even if it wished, it is simply not possible for capitalism to solve these gigantic problems. It is a sad reflection upon the present political environment in the USA that working people can become so disillusioned with political action, and can only assimilate themselves with reformism. The progressive leftists can only offer us a re-shuffling of the Democratic Party as a way out. Nevertheless, there are more clear-sighted workers who understand that the misery and suffering from this economic system can be ended by establishing socialism which would kick out the small handful of wealthy families who blocked the wheels of production, and start distributing goods to the ragged and hungry millions. The bosses are always the beneficiaries; the workers always the victims. Such is capitalism and the workers who side with the bosses and support capitalism politically and are therefore responsible for capitalism, and also responsible for the hell they get and the pain they suffer.

Hunger in the midst of plenty, is the distinguishing mark of the capitalist system of production. The Socialist Party has always contended that capitalism should be abolished because it mismanaged the means of production so that a very few – those who own the means of production – reaped great profits while the majority of the people were deprived of a secure standard of living. We would often prove this assertion by demonstrating the tremendous technology which the modern industrial machine has; how it could satisfy the needs of everyone if it were run for that purpose; and how capitalism, instead, ran the industrial machine for profits.  The Socialist Party would say, if only the people could run these industries themselves, they could produce enough to satisfy everyone’s needs. It remains the great and tragic paradox of our age – poverty in the midst of plenty. Capitalism is a social system which cannot satisfy the most elementary needs of the people, yet it squanders much of its resources on war: That is the greatest indictment of world capitalism. It is the greatest war machine in history in order to continue its tremendous accumulation of profits. Capitalism is a wasteful and inefficient system. It cannot plan on either a national or an international scale. It deprives most people of products. Socialism could plan better, provide the people with all necessities. War would be a thing of the past. Socialism could take the vast resources which are available and use them for constructive purposes. The inefficiency due to capitalist competition. The inefficiency and economic inequality due to the impossibility of constructive economic planning under capitalism – all would be things of the past. In their place could arise the new society of peace and plenty. That is why socialism is the burning need of the hour.

We Can Win, We Shall Win!

 

Through the many global agencies that exist today, we know better than ever before what the needs of mankind are. What is more the means to relieve these needs for every human being are now at hand now and has been available for a number of decades. The means are there, the knowledge is there, and what is needed is the will to apply it. The difficulty is a political difficulty and not a technical difficulty. All scarcity in the world is due to capitalism. We have in the world to-day a number of palpable material evils — starvation, disease, slavery, and war — evils which in previous times were accepted as a part of the natural world or as the actions of the gods, but which now continue solely because we live under out-of-date political and economic system. There is no longer any reason why everyone should not have enough to eat and dwell in respectable homes. There is no reason why anyone should do more than three or four hours of disagreeable or monotonous work a day, or why they should be forced, by economic pressure, to do even that. War, in a period of potential plenty and ease for all, is sheer folly. Our world has had far more than enough of the futility of war. The greater part of disease in the world to-day is due directly or indirectly to unhealthy diets and living conditions. All these are plainly remediable and preventable social ills and science if properly applied can sweep all off the face of the planet.

Everybody should and could have a comfortable and attractive home, nutritious wholesome food,  opportunities for recreation and education, plus security against accident, sickness, and old age; and the sense of independence and self-respect that goes with these things. What we actually have, however, is widespread inequality, injustice and insecurity. This appalling contrast between what might be and what is  arises from the nature of the economic system – capitalism. The system acts, obviously as a brake upon production so that, as the phrase goes, you have “poverty in the midst of plenty:”

Our duty is first understand and then to change of the world we live in. We must understand society before we can understand people. Human nature is not fixed and constant. It can be and is being moulded by society. Everybody knows by now that all our misery and disappointment, our fear of the future, is not due to any fault or weakness of people but simply and solely to the competitive structure of capitalism. In order to plan for still greater efficiency in the use of our resources we envisage global planning. National borders are as artificial and restrictive and socialism must in essence be a world economy. Every effort to establish “planned” production under private capitalism breaks down, since the warfare between rival capitalists, in a nation and capitalist groups in different nations disrupts such efforts.

The burden of capitalist crises always falls heaviest on the toilers. They are taught that their masters can do no wrong but the workers must pay the price when things go awry. The capitalist system is a fraud. The present economic system uses its elaborate and complex manufacturing  capacity which is to a great extent spent in the production and distribution of luxury goods, throwaway gadgets, waste, planned obsolescence, military equipment – in short, in what economists and sociologists used to call “unproductive” goods and services and what socialists call useless commodities and consumerism.

The goal of the Socialist Party is the achievement of socialism, a new social system based on the elimination of all classes and class differences, the most progressive, revolutionary and rational system in human history, a system without exploitation or oppression, when people work voluntarily with the enormous development of the productive forces and the production of abundant social wealth, to accomplish the the principle, “From each according to ability, to each according to need.”

 Permanent plenty is no longer a Utopian dream, and with it awaits the arrival of permanent peace.  We must look to producing more active and harmonious ways of living, individually and socially. Socialism brings power and liberation. The Socialist Party prepares for peace and happiness, where industry, health and education is to maintain the bodies and minds of the people and end for all time the perpetuation of wage-slavery. We must form a fully organised world socialist party so that we can take possession of the world. Let the workers form one great world-wide union, and let there be a globe-encircling revolution to gain for the workers true liberty and happiness. With socialism the state machine, an instrument of class domination, is no longer necessary. 

Unpaid Overtime

 Analysis of the 2019 Annual Population Survey (APS) estimates that, on average, workers in Scotland do more than seven hours of unpaid overtime per week, equating to an annual total of 118 million hours.

The APS showed there to be 310,000 employees working unpaid overtime in the week that the survey was conducted, with 110,000 of them in the public sector. 

If each hour were paid at the average hourly rate of £14.07, this would mean that workers in Scotland have missed out on an additional £1.6 billion in wages.

‘Scotland’s economy is reliant on unpaid overtime,’ research reveals | Morning Star (morningstaronline.co.uk)

Now is the time to build a socialist party

 

Socialism is in principle a working class movement which organises and moulds the workers for the class struggle and the construction of a future new society. It is impossible even to imagine socialism as realisable within capitalist society where the robber class has always stolen power from the people. Only a working class party working for the propagation of socialismand for the success of the future social revolution can be recognised or supported. All other action must be resolutely condemned and combatted. A socialist society must be built by the expropriation of all land and capitalist property, and by the workers taking production and distribution into their own hands. From a Marxian point of view, the working class movement should take the direction of revolution, should prepare itself seriously for the event, and not seek to avoid it by other action.

Crises today are not caused by natural scarcity. In the past, when people starved, it was a result of harvest failure – there wasn’t enough to go round. Now such scarcity is artificially created. Now we have overproduction. Not too little, but too much is produced – ‘too much’ not compared to people’s needs, but to the profits of those who control the world economy. Capitalism, then, is an economic system based on production for profit. So long as society is bound to commodity production, it is only through the market that its needs can be satisfied. Capitalist society necessarily presupposes exchange. Present-day society does not even concern itself with determining the consumption capacity or needs of society, in order to make a corresponding adjustment of production.  The only social concern is the market on which the purchasing power depends.

Modern capitalist production is social in operation. The problem is that while the global labour of the workers is collective, what they produce is privately owned by a small number of millionaires and billionaires, who literally dominate billions of people. Powerful dynasties, multinationals, monopolistic corporations are the levers which direct capitalist production, so as to garner the highest profits based upon the most intensive, brutal exploitation of the worker around the world in an international division of labour. It is no exaggeration to say that the bulk of the earth's wealth is firmly in their hands.

In our present society humanity is but a cog in a machine. Early proponents of the cooperative tried to avoid the cruelties and barbarities of the capitalist system and establish an egalitarian society. The hope of the early Utopians, like Fourier, Robert Owen and others, was to set up cooperatives to free workers from their exploiters. The cooperatives could show that the capitalists are really not necessary, that they are an ulcer on society. They proposed that if the worker received the full product of his or her labour, minus the cost of administration and organisation, it would be easy to do away with the cruelty and extortion of the private capitalist establishments, who appropriated the unpaid labor of the workers. The unpaid labour of the workers, according to the Utopians, would then go into the common fund, for health care, housing and all human needs.

Cooperatives also sprung out of the necessity of survival where mutual aid was an imperative. Often it is the religious communities which depend on helping one another. The Amish and the Mennonites or the Jewish Kibbutzim are examples. After the American Civil War in the face of racial violence and oppression there was a period when ex-slaves survived by forming cooperative ventures together, caring for one another, an idea revived later in the years of the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, capitalism is a world system by that time with a world market. In order to undo the capitalist system, the cooperatives has to compete with all-powerful capitalist enterprises. Not only is the capital investment of these businesses formidable and overwhelming, but they had enormous capacity to undersell, even taking big losses, in order to drive the cooperatives out of existence or alternatively force the cooperatives to adopt the commercial practices of the conventional companies. The cooperative movement was relegated mostly to fringe areas of the economy. For the most part, it survived in those areas of the economy where the capitalists felt they couldn't obtain an adequate rate of profit, and driving co-ops out was not worth the effort. Many  cooperatives are short-lived and have disappeared. Any successful large cooperatives existing today are in reality capitalist enterprises with no affect on the devastating operations of the capitalist system. They are in essence an integrated element in capitalist production.

We know that the root of the social evils in the world today is the oppression of the working people suffering all the atrocities of capitalism. It is world  enslaved by a few capitalist bandits, who own all the wealth of the earth as their private property. The capitalist ownership of the means of production – this is the reason of reasons which explains the barbarity of the present order of things. To deprive the rich of their power by depriving them of their wealth is the paramount duty of the working class party of socialists.

The Age of Plenty is Within our Grasp

 Going into 2021 we are living in extremely frightening times. Life is becoming more difficult for most of us. Without a vision of a better world and the staying power organisation that goes with it, even mass protests of working people in response to injustice will likely not succeed. Witness the failures of the Arab spring and movements like Occupy. Yet the urgency for a socialist transformation has never been greater if we consider the existential crisis of civilisation posed by global warming. Without fundamental social change, our younger generations are facing a bleak future indeed. We are running out of time. There must be a mass world socialist movement, or there will be no future at all. Members of the Socialist Party have never wavered; never compromised; never doubted the principles and ideals of socialism, or the ultimate triumph of the world socialist movement.

Why has wealth piled up on one side and poverty on the other? Because the very root of capitalism is wrong. Because the basic idea is unsound. Because the foundation is illogical. Because the capitalist system is founded on a contradictions. It is the system in which the person who owns the means of production does not work them; and the one who works them does not own them. This is, the basic contradiction of capitalism. Capitalism pits worker against worker in a mad race for a crust of bread, for survival, for security. In an age when plenty is possible for all. Capitalism is more destructive than all the earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions ever visited upon our planet. Capitalism kills and cripples millions in its wars and in hunger and malnutrition, in preventable illnesses and occupational diseases, in malnutrition and child labor, in poverty and crime. It destroys the wealth of society in pollution and waste. In an age of plenty capitalism condemns the majority of the people to anxiety and insecurity. 

The question whether socialism was inevitable was sometimes approached from the stand-point that capitalism’s contradictions makes its indefinite continuation impossible, to be dissolved by a complete transformation.  The efforts of labour in its building of a practice  of class struggle, were viewed by the ruling class as a disturbance of the social peace—something that eventually could be regulated or ironed out by conciliation of contending interests. The contradictions of capitalism—the great basic ones that are involved in the working class struggle for power over the means of life—cannot be smoothed out even by an iron heel. 

 One of the capitalist attempted solutions to civil strive - fascism - is not just political dictatorship, not just right-wing reaction, not just the curtailment of civil liberties, not just the way of trampling the rights of labour, and not just a process of race-baiting either. We have had all these things before the ideology of fascism arose. None of them needed the corporate state; none of them tried to regiment the whole of daily life and regulate it to a plan; none of them sought to invent a new type of society. To run the world economy under an iron heel, where every petty bureaucrat of a supreme oligarchy is looking for his graft for doing his dirty work, where everyone is in a state of discord and discontent, where the military command is incessantly needed to maintain order and thus made mindful of its own opportunity to become supreme, is to enter a period of chaos and waste than we suffer from now. Fascism is not a forward looking plan nor a far-sighted realism. It is a blind retreat. It rallies its support with an irrational appeal, to be fought by no other means than power. The road to fascism is paved with liberal good intentions. Its means of operation is the regulation of capitalism in an alleged public interest. Every regulation over workers, whether by union officials or by public bodies on which such union .sit, is another brick for its world-wide prison. Capital establishes fascism, albeit reluctantly, for the same reason that it establishes and supports any form of government, all the while for more business in government and less government in business. It is done to police working people. 

Our world economy could readily enough be coordinated on the basis of a community of interests to effect the highest possible standard of living for all—if run by producers for producers. We are upon the threshold of new social system that offers abundance to all, that privilege of a class society for none. The great historic role of the working class more readily visualised today than ever before is a planned economy of plenty that can be effected by the one big union of working people.