End capitalism. Establish socialism

 Production and distribution are still to be left at the mercy of the industrialists and bankers whose aim is to make a profit. We realise that reforms and improvements can be occasionally won from time to time within the present system through the organised political and industrial action of working people, but we contend that no permanent solution can be won unless we change the whole social system from top to bottom, unless we change from the capitalist system for profit to the socialist co-operative system of production for use; in other words, production and distribution must not be left dependent the blind forces of the market. The economic foundation of the socialist system of economy is common ownership and control of the factories and all means of social production and distribution. But socialism cannot be imposed upon the people by a minority. It is a movement in the interests of the vast majority and will come into existence only when a majority of the people want it and are organised sufficiently to obtain and maintain it.

The Socialist Party knows that there must be a majority of the working class understanding and determined on achieving socialism before the real tasks of the socialistic revolution can even be begun. Given such a majority in possession of the machinery of government, with the powers and in the position of a ruling class, nothing but a possible capitalist revolt can stand between the workers and their object. Such a revolt would, in the nature of things, be foredoomed to failure, and need cause anxiety only to those who may be misguided enough to resist the forces of the State when the workers control those forces. We do not seek a majority out of any merely sentimental attachment to the idea of democracy. We need a majority because our aim is socialism, and socialism is democratic or it is nothing at all. Vain hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, there are not in existence any means by the use of which a minority can seize and keep the powers of government in modern democracies. Those who govern us on behalf of the capitalist class do so with the active support or passive consent of the great majority of the workers. To oust them the minority which aspires to power would need to overwhelm not just the capitalist few, but the mass of the workers as well.

And, if the further argument is necessary, what one minority could do, another minority could and would endeavour to undo. The knowledge of the numerical weakness of the revolutionary forces would naturally encourage the defeated capitalists to a new trial of strength. Prolonged civil war may sound fine to romantic urban guerillas, but socialism does not from choice select such difficult beginnings.

 

We want for society the property now owned by the employers, and we do not anticipate that they will yield it up with goodwill. We recall not with pride but with regret, the years when the workers of each nation willingly hated and fought the enemies of their respective sections of the ruling class. We urge not co-operation but the acceptance of the truth of our peacetime and wartime slogan “The enemy of the working class is the master class.”

 

Common ownership of the means of production is the means of nullifying capitalist competition and of introducing planned production. Socialism will be established will be common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution with production for use. But before it becomes possible two pre-conditions must exist: 1) the material conditions of potential abundance, and 2) a world working class who understand and want Socialism and know how to establish it. Since Marx’s day, capitalism has itself developed the first of these necessary pre-conditions. It is the task of Socialists, now as formerly, to speed the development of the second.

Capitalist society has two classes, the owners and the non-owners (the working class); the conflict of interests between them is the class struggle, which goes on all the time. It has two aspects, the political and economic. The latter is the daily struggle over wages and working conditions that all workers are in — usually in trade unions. But this is a restricted, mainly defensive struggle and most of those who wage it take capitalism for granted. When the consciousness of the true nature of things arises, the political struggle has to be engaged in: this is to gain control of the means of production and distribution, through the State, to abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

Therefore if you want to end capitalism and introduce common ownership, you should be taking part in the political struggle, in the Socialist Party.

Lead in the Drinking Water of Ontario’s Schools.

In 2019 nine Per cent of Ontario's schools were shown to have lead in their drinking water that exceeded safety levels. The provincial government said they'd fix it, but two years later it’s still the same. 

Lead can affect brain development, including lowering IQ and causing behavioural disorders. Younger children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning because they absorb it four times faster than adults.

 Tests conducted between April 1 2019 and March 31 2020, showed that the amount of lead was 20 times the national standard and of the 221 tests, 90 per cent were in public schools. 

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof is active on the school council and has an 11-year-old son who started kindergarten at age 5. He is autistic and has intractable epilepsy. To quote the lady, ''A lot of this has to do with the fact that there isn't enough money put towards education and especially towards repairs. Schools are falling apart.'' 

That's standard fare: under capitalism, everything has a price tag, including workers lives.

S.P.C. Members

250 Years of Reforms and Capitalism Still Dumps Crapola on Us.

A recent report compiled by the Migrants Rights Network (MRN) lays bare the awful conditions migrant workers face in Canada, exacerbated by the pandemic. 

In Ontario alone 2,400 farm workers have fallen ill with it and health experts blame their shoddy accommodations. Half of them surveyed said they share a bedroom with four to eight others. The majority said they share a bathroom and kitchen with between six and 12 people and 65 per cent said the bunkhouse wasn't safe.

 In 2018 the Federal government urged certain safety standards, but these were never implemented. Employers said it would be, ''An excessive administration burden,'' meaning it would cost too much and therefore eat into their profits. 

Hussan, a director of MRN, complained that,'' Reforms won't even be ready at this rate for next year.'' 

The whole thing is similar to The Grapes of Wrath, which shows how much improvement has been made in 90 years. 

As for Mr. Hussan griping about needed reforms, we've had 250 years of reforms and capitalism still dumps a ton of crapola on us. It isn't reforms that are needed but revolution dumping of capitalism altogether.

S.P.C. Members.

Socialism - Real Independence

 The question of the demand by the Holyrood Government of Scotland for separation is one which really requires full and detailed treatment in order to make plain the correctness of the Socialist Party attitude of refusing to support either the independence or unionist side. 

While the problem of Scottish nationalism is, broadly, the same as the other problems of nationalism, it can only be properly understood by taking into account the extent to which many of the present generations are influenced by the events of past centuries, and by dealing with the arguments put forward by the various groups in defence of their actions and attitude.

The Socialist Party view is that the problems and conflicts, arising from capitalism do now prevent, and will continue to prevent, the large and small groups of peoples in the world from living together harmoniously. Neither the creation of small would-be independent nations nor the forcible incorporation of unwilling groups in larger States will work satisfactorily as long as international commercial rivalries keep stoking the fires of national hatreds.

One argument used in the past by left-nationalist advocates of Scottish sovereignty has been that until the national question is settled the workers will never be able to recognise their worldwide community of interest in the abolition of capitalism.

As against this, the Socialist Party points out that nationality problems never will be settled under capitalism. The efforts to do so under all the various treaties since the 18^th Century illustrate this. This in itself is a factor that militates against the spread of socialist knowledge.

Understanding our world

 As long as capitalism has lasted, not a single day has gone by without discontent and dissent somewhere in the world. But the enormous potential for revolutionary change has, for the past century, been channelled into fruitless reformism. The reformers have no alternative; they never did have a remedy for the ills of the profit system, and they never will, because capitalism is an inherently anti-social system that continuously throws up more problems and contradictions than the reformists can solve. Workers won the vote but instead of using it to end the profit system, they have used it to give capitalism a longer lease.

Understanding this society is not a difficult or an exclusive business. The knowledge is easily available and accessible for the Marxian analysis of capitalism, exposing its foundations, its development and its workings is as vital and relevant now as it was when it was first set down over a century ago.

There is every reason for workers to understand that capitalism cannot satisfy its people's needs and that it must exploit and debase the majority who do all its useful work. They can easily grasp the fact, because the evidence is all around them, that none of the political parties who appeal for their support to continue capitalism can effectively deal with the problems of the system.

From that understanding, it is a simple, logical step to the conclusion that only a democratic revolution to establish a society with a different basis, and different social relationships, will be effective. And this revolution cannot come about through leaders; it must be the act of a conscious, participating majority of the world’s working class. For most workers, this is suspiciously simple. They prefer submission, keeping their place in society. Capitalist mouthpieces have convince millions of people that unpalatable things are actually good for them. Things like class society with the profit motive rampant. Things like unemployment forcing workers out of their customary poverty and into deep hardship. Things like sexual and personal repression and Victorian moral values. Things like patriotism which is used to inspire ordinary, peaceable people to make war upon other ordinary, peaceable people they don’t know and have no quarrel with.

 

Shelter regularly announces that there is a “shortage" of homes, which is another way of saying that millions of people are without a decent place to live.

Now, this is not really a shortage. For a long time bricks and other building materials have been stockpiled and among the three million on the dole are many skilled building workers. This situation exists because, for one reason or another, it is not profitable to use the materials or to employ the workers. However desperate people’s needs may be, capitalism does not produce unless there is the prospect of profit.

Then there are those people whose housing problem consists of difficult decisions about which one of their homes they should live in at any one time. These are the people in whose interests production is carried out, the people who accumulate the profits without which there is no production, the people who live parasitically on the workers who suffer in the housing problem.

The Socialist Party stands on a unique and different basis, of working-class unity and democratic revolution. The solution to the chaos of the market system is like the problem it solves, worldwide.  We ask people not to vote for us unless they are fully conversant and in agreement with what we stand for. After all, socialism could only be established if a majority are prepared to take the necessary action democratically, and with responsibility. True democracy cannot be enforced or introduced by methods of secret infiltration. We are gradually building a separate political force that will be able to use the vote in a revolutionary way.  Unlike the politicians who have been elected to run the system of class division, we will not vanish from the scene. In the days to come, the Socialist Party will be working with all the force at our command to show the workers that there is an alternative to the corpse of left-wing reformism and the viciousness of naked capitalism. Each worker declaring a practical commitment to a class-free, world society of democratic control and common ownership represents another nail in the coffin of capitalism. 

Socialism - Sharing the common heritage of humanity

 

We live in a fearsome and threatening world with all these signs of a society gone mad. The peoples of the world go about their daily business, seeking to forget or ignore the grim dark shadows that hang over their lives. But capitalism will not allow them to forget or ignore its terrible realities. Some would deny that we live in a world of potential plenty and claim that the cause of world poverty and hunger is natural scarcity. That, in other words, some people starve simply because not enough food can be produced. Why in a world of potential plenty is so elementary a human need as food neglected for so many people?  In the present state of scientific knowledge and productive techniques, enough food could be produced adequately to feed the whole population of the world. The cause of hunger and malnutrition must be sought not in any lack of natural resources but in the way society is organised. It is this anarchical world market system of artificial scarcity and organised waste that is responsible for poverty and hunger in the world today. The law which governs production everywhere is “no profit, no production”. This means that if there is no profit to be made from producing and selling a good then that good will not be produced, even if people desperately need it. The present system of production is geared only to meeting profitable market demand. Their very real human need for food is not “effective”, to use the jargon of business, so they are badly fed and, in many cases, starving to death.

In the midst of an impoverished world, booming with wealth and productive power we possess the potential for abundance. But presently the ecological degradation of the planet helps to enhance the profit-making powers of the capitalists. Even the wealthiest capitalist nation cannot satisfy the basic needs of its working people, decent housing, adequate food and healthcare. So long as the rich continue to coin profits out of the sweat and blood of the toilers, they do not care how many are out of work, go hungry and homeless, and lack all hope for the future. Only a clique of capitalists stands in the way of abundance. The workers have to wrest control of the factories and other major means of production from the hands of the employing class and establish their own control over industry and society. Production for profit must be superseded by production according to a unified plan determined by the needs of the entire people and directed by the associated producers themselves. This is the socialist remedy for capitalist chaos and misery. Only socialism can transform our world into a secure and peaceful one.

 "The common heritage of all mankind” is a phrase applicable to the treaties about Antarctica and the Moon. These treaties declare that no state can establish territorial rights nor any individual private property rights over these areas — that, in other words, they belong to nobody. What is required is that this same principle should be extended and applied to the whole globe: all that is on the Earth should become the common heritage of all humanity. On this basis, there would be nothing to prevent the world’s people from organising the production and distribution of wealth simply and solely to satisfy their needs as individuals and as a community. Production would no longer be restricted by the law of “no profit, no production” nor any longer governed by the blind economic force which the world market represents. Instead, it would come under conscious, democratic social control and be oriented to what after all is its only rational end — satisfying human needs and wants. In these circumstances, production could be rapidly increased to levels that would ensure that every man, woman and child on this planet was adequately fed, clothed and sheltered. The mass hunger and deaths from starvation that characterise the world today would remain only as bad memories of what no doubt will be commonly agreed to have been a barbarous past. The Earth is the common storehouse of all humanity; the production of wealth solely for use not sale or profit; a world without arms — is this an unrealistic Utopia? Not at all. It is the only logical and rational way to run the world given the present high stage of development of the forces of production. Because a solution is so simple and obvious does not mean that it won’t work.

There Can Be No Peace For Workers In Capitalism.

 

All of Canada was shocked and saddened by a malicious hate crime on June 7. A Muslim family were out for a Sunday stroll, in London Ontario when they were run down by a young man driving a Dodge Ram pickup truck. Four members of the family were killed, ranging in age from a 15-year-old girl to a 74-year-old woman. The lone survivor was a 9-year-old boy who suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries. 

The driver, a 20-year-old white man, Nathaniel Veltman, was soon arrested, though the police have released few details about him. Muslims across Canada has called for Veltman to be prosecuted to, ‘The fullest extent of the law.' 

One family friend, a refugee from Syria, said, ‘I don't get it; I came to Canada to find peace.'' 

Sorry buddy, but for the working class there never was and never will be any peace under the insane and divisive apology for an economic system we live and die under.

S.P.C. Members

Banks Increases in Income. Workers increases in Unemployment

The second-quarter income figures are in for Canada's four biggest banks. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce saw a 321 per cent increase in net income to $1.7 billion. The Bank of Montreal had an 89 per cent increase to $1.3 billion. The Royal Bank of Canada saw a 166 per cent rise to $4 billion. The Toronto-Dominion had a 144 per cent gain to $3.7 billion. 

Stats-Canada released its figures for May which also showed an increase -- in unemployment. 

The economy lost 68,000 jobs in May, which was the second consecutive month jobs were lost; 207,000 were in April. Another increase is that 49,700 members of the working class got so discouraged they gave up looking for work. If one includes the latter then the unemployment rate would be 10.7.

S.P.C. Members

Socialism is a planned society

 All around us we see poverty although we know we could produce abundance. The socialist revolution attains the stage where it can produce sufficient for all.  There will be no buying or selling. The revolution abolishes private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and with it goes capitalist business. Personal possession remains only in the things you use. Thus, your watch is your own, but the watch factory belongs to the people. Land, machinery, and all other public utilities will be common property, neither to be bought nor sold. Actual use will be considered the only title-not to ownership but to possession. The organisation of mines, for example, will be in charge of the coal miners, not as owners but as the operating agency. Similarly, will the railway workers run the trains and tracks, and so on. Common ownership, cooperatively managed in the interests of the community, will take the place of personal ownership privately conducted for profit. Money becomes redundant.  When the sources of supply, the land, factories, and products become common property, socialised, you can neither buy nor sell. As money is only a medium for such transactions, it loses its usefulness. You can't get anything for it.

How about shirkers and the work-shy? A rational community will find it more practical and beneficial to treat all alike, whether one happens to work at the time or not. For if you refuse to feed a man, for whatever cause, you drive him to theft and other crimes - and thus you yourself create the necessity for courts, lawyers, judge', jails, and warders, the upkeep of whom is far more burdensome.

 Socialist society will be a class-free society, in which all the means of producing wealth are owned in common. Instead of being divided into workers and employers, rich and poor, society will be an association of free people, all making their special contributions to the well-being of society, which in return will supply them with what they need in order to live full and happy lives. Such a society can be summed up in the slogan: “From each according to  ability, to each according to  needs.”

For this to be possible, socialism must be based on abundance. Production will be organised in such a way that there is plenty of everything for everybody: not only food, houses, railways, and so on, to satisfy material needs; but also schools and theatres, playing-fields, books and concerts so that people can lead full, physical and spiritual lives.

A socialist society must be global. It is not something that can be fully completed in one country, isolated from the rest of the world. On the contrary, it must eventually embrace all the peoples of the world; and in so doing it will put an end to war and because no wars can take place in a truly international society there will be no need for armies.

Because it will be a community of plenty, where there is enough for all and therefore no advantage can be obtained by theft or other forms of crime, all need for courts of justice and police will have disappeared. In other words, the State, which is the sum of all these institutions and organisations, will itself disappear. Instead of one section of society ruling and oppressing another, men will have grown accustomed to living together in society without fear and compulsion. Thus, for the first time, mankind will be united in a worldwide family.

Capitalism is not based on plenty. Though it has developed, for the first time in history, the possibility of providing enough for everybody, it has always condemned a great part of the people to live in poverty and insecurity. This is because capitalist society is a society divided into two main classes: the capitalists, or bourgeoisie; and the working class, or proletariat. The former owns the land, the factories and the machines, and all the means by which wealth is produced (the means of production), and are therefore the ruling class, though they do no productive work themselves. The latter though they do all the real productive work of society, own neither the means of production nor the wealth they create; and, therefore, are forced to sell to the capitalists their ability to work and produce. Numerically, the capitalists are an insignificant minority, while the workers constitute the vast majority of the people. The capitalist class, who decide what is to be produced, base their decisions not on what people need but upon how much profit they will make when the goods are sold in the market. Capitalist society is not a peaceful, harmonious society, but, on the contrary, nationalist in a narrow, selfish way. Just as within each capitalist country the various capitalists and groups of capitalists compete with each other in order to sell their goods at a greater profit, so capitalist countries as a whole enter into competition with other capitalist countries. This competition Inevitably leads to wars: on the one hand to enslave more backward countries; and on the other, to redivide the countries which have been enslaved between the different capitalist countries. Such wars are not in the interests of the working class, but only of the capitalists.

Under capitalism human society is condemned to a series of bitter struggles; class against class, nation against nation, and individual against individual. Inevitably, therefore, the great majority of the people, instead of being inspired by a common social purpose, are forced to struggle for their own individual and selfish interests. Moreover, since capitalism condemns the majority of people to poverty or insecurity, there is a continual waste of human talent and ability.

The first and fundamental contrast between socialist and capitalist society is that with socialism all the means of production and exchange—the land, factories, machines and banks—are owned in common. Thus the exploitation of one class by another is ended. Production is organised to meet the needs of the people and not to provide profit for a single class. It will therefore be possible to plan production, and so to increase enormously the amount produced.

The No-Take Zone

 It was the pace of change that made Howard Wood realize something was going badly wrong. In the 1970s, when he started scuba diving in the crystal-clear seas off the Isle of Arran, the seabed was a mass of colourful fish, shellfish and plants.

"By the late 80s you were seeing species disappear year on year — you realise that this isn't a long slow evolution of change, this is rapid," said Wood, a diver and co-founder of the Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST).  

He was witnessing the impact of a new type of dredger that could be used to scrape up scallops — a prized shellfish — on seabeds previously unfishable this way. And then, in 1984, the UK scrapped laws, dating to the 19th century, that had banned most trawling within 3 miles of Scotland's shores. By the early 1990s the seabed was becoming an underwater desert.

After 13 years of campaigning, in 2008 the Scottish government designated a no-take zone (NTZ, an area set where no extractive activity is allowed) in 2.67 square kilometers (1.03 square miles) of the northern side of the island. The zone was established around Lamlash Bay — a picture-postcard slice of silver sea studded with the huge rock of Holy Island. It's now totally protected from all fishing and other extraction.  

"We've seen a general increase in biodiversity compared to the areas just next to it," according to marine ecologist Bryce Stewart from York University. "We've got nearly four times the density of king scallops in the NTZ than back in 2010, and they're also much bigger, much older and much more reproductively productive. We have also seen a big increase in the number of lobsters."

Lobsters are now four times more abundant in the no-take zone compared to the areas around it. Seaweeds, corals and other forms of life have blossomed as well.

The Scottish Creel Fishermen's Federation (SCFC) COAST and others are now campaigning for a new 3-mile limit to be introduced across Scotland. That would stop inshore trawling and dredging for shellfish. But many fishermen oppose it. 

Alistair Sinclair from the SCFC is campaigning for the 3-mile limit, says people are complaining that fish are disappearing along the Scottish coast.

"That is due to trawl activity, and you can only take so much out the bank until there's nothing left in the bank." 

Reviving Scotland′s ′disappearing′ marine life with no-take zones | Global Ideas | DW | 13.07.2021