What Causes War?

 

Socialism is where wealth is produced not for money-sale but for the direct satisfaction of the ascertained needs of the whole co-operating community of owning-workers involves a complete change in every detail of social life. In its struggle against the workers’ emancipation movement, capitalism plays upon all the dark sentiments of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. This is seen daily and hourly in its endeavours to divide the workers and oppressed people along national, racial and religious lines. We partisans of world socialism retain undimmed that vision of the future and hastens its realisation. 

 We begin from these fundamental propositions:

1. Modern wars are part and parcel of the capitalist system.
 

2. Capitalist economy must continually expand or suffer from recession
 

3. Each capitalist represented by the nation is continually driven to seek new markets, new sources of raw materials and new areas for investment.
 

4. Important trade routes must be protected
 

5. There can be no end to war without an end to capitalism.
 

6. Permanent peace is only possible when planned production for use has taken the place of competitive production for profits. Planned production for use on an international scale means a world socialist cooperative commonwealth.

All are familiar with the more superficial and immediate causes of the war. Previous wars and the terms of settlement which created lasting hatreds and thoughts of revenge;the remnants of a feudal system with its royal dynasties which retarded modern social and political progress with racial and religious prejudices. The supreme duty of the hour is for us, the socialists of all the world is to dedicate ourselves anew to the imperishable principles of international socialism; to strengthen the bonds of working class solidarity.The Socialist Party extend to the socialists of all the world our greetings and hail them all our brothers and sisters, our comrades.We socialists are for the goal of a world administration, which would eliminate the obsolete national boundaries into which the earth is divided. The national boundaries are obsolete not only because they breed fear; they are obsolete because they choke and distort the inevitable need for political integration in a world where economic integration is already a fact in various ways. The peoples of the world in the various countries, through coordinated international effort, will  progress toward the complete class-free socialist society, all the various workers' organizations which have been instruments and mechanisms of class struggle, that is, the socialist parties, the unions, the cooperatives, the workers’ councils, will gradually lose their original functions and coalesce into one united body. And that one united body will be the organised world society of the free and equal. World socialism shall really be the human race.

Time Will Tell How Capitalist Austerity Screws Us All.

On Nov.30, federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled next year’s budget. The media made a load of hoopla over the fact that it was the first time the budget speech had been made by a woman, oblivious to the fact that whomever attempts to administrate a screwy system like capitalism, whether it be male, female, black, white catholic, protestant, jew or gentile, it’s strictly a case of B.F.D. 

The highlights of her speech were: The spending of $13 billion on COVID-19 vaccine plans; $1 billion for setting up national standards for long term care homes and helping provinces meet those standards; People working from home with modest expenses can claim up to $400 on their 2020 taxes; Some families will receive a

temporary boost of up to $1,200 for every child under 6; GST/HST will be dropped on face masks and face shields; Ottawa will eliminate interest on federal portions of Canada Student Loans and Canada Apprentice Loans for 2021-22. 

Freeland also said Canada's deficit will balloon up to a record $381 billion, the biggest since W.W.2 Freeland, Trudeau and the rest of their crowd may mean well, but it takes a lot more than good intentions to solve the problems capitalism throws up at us, especially when so much money has been borrowed. 

Time will tell how this will work out, but for the members of Canada's working class, the best advice is to not raise your hopes too high for we may just be looking at 50+ years of capitalist austerity screwing us all.

S.P.C. Members.

Socialists for Progress

 

Socialist Party organisation means getting together with a common understanding and a common end in view, and working systematically for the attainment of that end. For our fellow-workers to organise effectively, they must have a correct understanding of their position in society and of the conditions under which they live and work. If they fail to understand these things, they will either not organise at all or will organise in an ineffective manner. The effectiveness of their organisation depends on the correctness of their understanding. The better they understand conditions the more effectively they will organise. Our common end is the abolition of the wage system.

 

Many workers mistakenly believe that they are all free and independent sovereign citizens and that all people have an equal chance to become wealthy and powerful, or to enter the White House as president. They have been told that it is a person's own character failing if one is not "successful"; that the wealthy gained their riches by honesty, industry, self-denial and dedication to business; that there are as many opportunities for advancement today as there ever were; that his workers are protected by the law, and get justice in the courts; that the boss is their best friend; that the way to improve their condition is to work harder and that work a privilege.

 

If the workers are dissatisfied with capitalism but have no faith in themselves or their class; if they want to be led by politicians they will remain slaves. Those holding a socialist understanding can neither be chloroformed into inactivity nor carried away by half-baked theories of reformist half-measures. Class-conscious workers do their own thinking instead of trusting to politicians or would-be leaders to do it for them. All wealth is produced by labour, but it is taken by the capitalists, who give the workers in the form of wages just enough to keep them in working condition and to reproduce their kind. The capitalists own the natural resources and machinery of production. The capitalists live in opulent extravagance never before heard of in the history of the world. While the capitalists revel in luxury, the workers are condemned to lives of poverty, ignorance, toil and privation. They lack economic security. Poverty and the fear of poverty render their lives miserable. The average worker is not more than a few weeks removed from a state of dependency. Great numbers are killed annually in the industries. Hundreds of thousands die from occupational diseases. Millions of children are deprived of education and are stunted and dwarfed physically and mentally by slavery in factories and mills. Other millions go hungry to school and suffer from countless diseases brought on by malnutrition. Having no standing before the law, workers are hounded by the police, victimised by the courts and subjected to all kinds of abuse, injustice and tyranny.

 

It is not “human nature” that is the cause of the problems people face today. It is the way society is organised, with a minority of people owning and controlling the wealth and the industry of our planet, excluding the vast majority of the people from any real say in the running of society. This is what lies at the root of the problems that working people face. It is this capitalist system that cannot guarantee security, cannot provide the good things of life for all, cannot give a constantly improving standard of living for the millions and cannot guarantee peace in the world. It is this that must be changed. The working people who have produced all the wealth around us must come into ownership and control of what is their own by right, so that they can then build the society and produce the things they want.

 

The capitalists control government and all institutions of society by means of their wealth; they get their wealth by means of controlling those who work, the source of all wealth. Governments bow to them, courts hasten to do their bidding, politicians grovel at their feet, the media distort facts in their interest. Socialism means radical action that deals with causes instead of tinkering with effects. The workers have a power infinitely greater than that of the capitalists. When the workers control industry, they will own the earth. Socialism will enable us to overcome the brakes on progress of capitalism. It will release the creative energies of the people, making it possible to build a society that will be able to meet their needs in food,health and shelter, and will open vast horizons of cultural and educational possibilities for millions. Mankind will be freed from worry about basic material needs as we know them today. Different classes will, in fact, cease to exist, as all people make their contribution to the productive life of society. The oppressive functions of the state as we know them will become redundant, and will wither away as they fall out of use. What will remain will be only a democratic administration of production in the hands of the people. Men and women will be able to develop their own talents to the full. With the harnessing of science and technology to industry, boring and repetitive drudgery will be eliminated. Work for all will become interesting and satisfying. housing, travel and cultural facilities become available to all people. The boundaries between mental and physical labour will be removed as all people receive the freedom and means by which to exercise their potential and abilities. The separation between town and country will end.

 

Winning socialism will open up for us the possibility of a life for all that will be plentiful, secure, happy and interesting which will end of those worries about wages, housing, poverty, peace that dominate our lives today. Building this new society is the aim of the Socialist Party.

A better tomorrow for all.

Erich Fromm stresses the insanity of capitalism. As objective evidence of the pathological condition of this society, Fromm points to the statistics for suicide, homicide and alcoholism. We take society as it actually is; a world-wide system. Capitalism is much more than capitalism in the United States. In its first stages, capitalism was highly rational, for it developed the productive forces as no other society before it. This is an objective fact that must be recognized no matter what one might think about the real attitude of this society toward “the unity of man, of reason, love and justice.” Today, however, capitalism has become such a brake on the productive forces that it is turning them into their opposite – forces threatening to destroy civilisation and even mankind itself. 

 

Socialism is based upon cooperation, administered in the equal interest of all without a trace of slavery to breed resentment or mar the social interactions of society and community.Competition, they tell us, makes the world go round. Competition, however, means rewards for the rich but penalties for the rest. Socialists see men and women as constantly involved in a process of change, changing their societies and their environment and, through that, changing themselves, their nature. As a basically predatory society, capitalism is destructive, and develops aggression in mankind. Socialism aims to release humanity from the ugliness that capitalism fosters.

 

Socialism is indispensable to real freedom – that is to say, of liberties that are concrete and actual, not formal and “constitutional”. Socialism rids us of enemies of human liberty. The working class is enslaved, its organisatons suppressed, and its conditions of work and life constantly deteriorating. The working class is not free. Property cannot be collective until the community as a whole is free to dispose of it as it wishes. Without democracy, and unless the community as a whole enjoys an absolute right of control and decision, collective property is an empty phrase. The point is to dispossess the plutocracy of its power.

 

Revolutions make themselves; they have no need of any school-master to assist them. All that is necessary is that the organisations of the working class should adopt tactics calculated to promote this gigantic economic and social transformation. We are not a party like other parties. We retain an unshakable confidence in the socialist future of humanity. The fetters which bind the forces of production and condemn the overwhelming majority of the population to misery must be cast off. The only road that can avoid chaos and barbarism is the socialist emancipation of society.

 

The aim of socialism is nothing but the fullest attainment of democracy. The World Socialist Movement differs from all others in that it is the only consistent and thoroughgoing champion of democracy in all spheres of economic, political and social life. 

To the Workers, the World

 

We are very much at the beginning, but one full of urgency and possibility, of one of the biggest opportunity for the world socialist movement in decades. We can’t successfully deal with the problems of today unless we clearly understand the main features of our goal. Our task is to replace the dictatorship of the capitalist with social democracy. Underneath its guise of neutrality and impartiality the state exists to defend the interests of the wealthy by repressing other classes. A future society will be will differ from capitalism in that no classes will exist, therefore, there will be no need for a state or coercive force. Economic production will be developed to a point where each can give and take freely. Racism, nationalism and sexism will disappear. The conflicts between manual and mental labour and between urban and rural life will be reconciled. Capitalism is a system of greed whereby 1/10 of 1% of the population controls all the wealth of society. This wealth can only come through the exploitation of the toil of the working people.

At present the whole globe is under the rule of capitalism.This rule is based upon private property and the production of commodities for the market. A small group is in possession of the means of producing these goods, and of the means of distributing them; this is the capitalist class. Their ownership assures this class economic domination over billions of working people, who possess no means of production, and who are forced to sell their labour power. The working class serves as a living source of profit to the capitalists exploiting its labour. The working class, economically oppressed is the slave of capital. The economic domination is secured by its political rule, and by its control of state organisation. There is not a single country in the world where Capital is not trampling the most elementary demands of the working class underfoot. . Everywhere the employers are attacking the disorganised and divided workers’ movement. The capitalist governments, the employers’ organisations, the capitalist media, all are being utilised in the fight against the working class. The offensive of capital has crossed the national frontiers and is being fought on an international scale.

 

The aim pursued by the World Socialist Moveent is the substitution of the capitalist order by a cooperative commonwealth as the sole means of escape for humanity, for it alone is able to remove the fundamental defects of the capitalist system. By means of abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, and the passing of these means into common property, the socialist society replaces the unregulated force of competition and the blind course of production by a rational organisation and an appropriate plan. The abolition of anarchy in production and of competition implies the simultaneous disappearance of poverty and war. The abolition of private property does away with the exploitation of one human being by other human beings. The work done is no longer done for others. Every difference between poverty and wealth disappears. At the same time class rule vanish also, above all – state power. State power, which is the embodiment of class rule, vanishes with the vanishing of the classes.

 

The Socialist Party is not leninist or trotskyists or maoists, but we are plain revolutionaries. We do not intend to lead the masses towards a class-free society because we are a constituted part of the working-class ourselves and adhere faithfully to the motto of the First International: The emancipation of the workers is an act of the workers themselves. If the masses wait for a revolutionary vanguard to lead them to the free society, they will neither be liberated. Our function as revolutionaries is to expose and debunk capitalist ideologies to open the door to the construction of a socialist society. There are various false theories, conspiratorial views, overt and concealed moral and political assumptions that have wide influence in society; the role of the socialist critic is to expose these as illusions or ideologies, and this is a permanent job which has to be carried on from generation to generation. The Socialist Party hold the hopeful belief that by education and rational persuasion men and women can decide on the formation of a free society. Our picture of a future free society would not even be intelligible to us if we were not already acquainted with examples of cooperative activities in our present society. Contrary to the utopian, the Socialist Party consider it is a matter of keeping alive what already exists, of keeping up resistance, urging on the struggle to emancipate ourselves from myths and illusions. Nearly all socialists agree that a free society can exist only through voluntary association, and that its ultimate success will depend upon the educational development of the workers who will supplant the wage system with a new social arrangement, based on solidarity and economic well-being for all. That is socialism, in theory and practice.