You have a world to win

 

All around us the world in crises, yet men and women seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it. The Labour party is a reformist party. What does this mean in practice? The lessons of theory and history teach us. It means that it, like all reformist parties acts in all crucial situations as an agent of the capitalists. A social revolution can only take place providing the working class itself is conscious of the need to change society and is prepared to participate in the struggle. Is the socialist society a Utopian dream? We completely reject this idea. There is no alternative for the working class other than socialism. The movement for workers' power and social democracy advances through struggles against capitalist tyranny but also through debates  over tactics, strategies, programmes and principles. The Labour Party proves as helpless and hapless as the present one, the party of capitalism.  It is good people are talking about socialism, but it’s the job of the Socialist Party to clarify what socialism means and how it will be achieved.

 

Everything you use, everything you eat or wear, your car, your home — you didn’t make any of these things. We don’t produce these things as individuals. We produce socially. We have a division of work in the whole world for that matter. People in one part of the world make things which people in another part of the world use. But, even though we produce socially, through co-operation, we don’t own the means of production socially. And this affects all the basic decisions made in this society about what we produce. These decisions are not made on the basis of what people need but on the basis of what makes a profit. 

Take the question of hunger. There are people going hungry all over the world. And yet, because of the profit system, there are governments subsidising some farmers not to farm food. Farmers don’t make their decisions by saying: “We need to feed the hungry, so I’m going to plant a lot of corn.” They never say that. They say: “How much money am I going to make if I plant corn?” If decisions were not made on this basis, then we could feed the whole world. The potential is there. The potential also exists to wipe out every slum. There are the factories and materials for building. Yet, they are not going to solve the housing question because it’s not profitable to build decent homes.

Because of the way the system is structured a large percentage of the people do not do any productive work at all.  You have the unemployed who are not hired because it’s not profitable to hire them. Then you have the people in the military, not to mention the police, prison wardens and others who consume a great deal but don’t produce anything. Then you have things like the people in the advertising and finance industry. They don’t do anything really useful or necessary. In addition, you have a mammoth, organised effort to create waste. For instance, if you designed a product that would last 50 years, they wouldn’t use it. Because that would not produce profits.

Another example of how the potential for meeting human needs is destroyed because of the profit system. Say you are a capitalist, and you’re about to build a factory. Do you say: “I’ll build it where it’s nice, where there are trees and fresh air, and where the workers will have nice homes and will be able to go mountain climbing or hunting or swimming?” No, that’s not the way you think. You say: “Well, where’s my market, where are my raw materials coming in, how can I make the most profit?” And this means you might build a factory where you will pump even more poison into the air.

Capitalism doesn’t just have like those. It has other contradictions — Crises, like recessions and wars.

The left-wingers who in their blind pursuit of the narrower expediency, of immediate practical advantage, lose sight of the wider goal of socialism are no comrades of ours. We can not trust them. They are following a downward path. They are on their way to join that army of ambitious office-holders and status-seekers who began their careers as champions of the people. One of the first obligations of the Socialist Party is to mark itself off, in word and deed, from false prophets and masqueraders.

 

Workers’ democratic control over the means of production and the establishment of socialism is the only solution to austerity, unending war and the destruction of our environment. And it is the only road to the reversal of the current descent into barbarism. Working class democratic control over society is the goal of revolutionary socialism and, practically speaking, the only thing that will save the world. This cannot be reformed into being. Supporting radical sounding or so-called progressive candidates of capitalist parties (because one can’t really distinguish between them) muddies the truth that the system of capitalism itself is the real enemy of the working class. No socio-economic transformation of society can ever be achieved through reforms. Supporting (critically or otherwise) candidates of the parties of the capitalist class is deceptive because it implies that the system can be changed through such reforms as long as we elect the correct capitalist candidates. We need to organize independently of the capitalist class and their parties. We need to show the working class that we have strength and power on our own because we do. Supporting the candidates of capitalist parties weakens us. It ties our hands to the capitalist system to resolve our problems. It’s a dead end. Reformism is not the same as revolutionary socialism. We can’t make that distinction clear if we lend our support to capitalist politicians no matter what they call themselves. Calling liberal-minded political candidates socialists will not clarify anything. It gives false hope that electing a lesser-evil candidate can achieve all the reforms workers need to survive and the world needs to keep the planet from being destroyed.

Diary of Planet Earth

 

To change the world

 Social revolution is the essential objective of the World Socialist Movement, the end towards which every step it takes must directly tend. It will be an emancipated world, a society of economic and social equals without class divisions or privileges; a system of social ownership of the means of production industrially administered by the workers on an organised and harmonious plan, ensuring from everyone according to one’s capacity and to everybody according to needs, under the motto “All for each and each for All”.

Governments representing capitalists, having strained every nerve to strangle workers’ resistance are now all the more determined to prevent its example from spreading, and are ready to adopt every method to that end, from diplomatic chicanery, false propaganda in the media, schools, pulpit and platform, economic intimidation, hypocritical appeals to patriotism, religious prejudice and racial fear or pride, to the brute force of the mailed fist and the iron heel wherever they dare. Lately, they have instituted a determined campaign all over the world to reduce wages. They are criminally conspiring to maintain as long as they can their decadent, outworn, slave-grinding system with its political expression, as a glance at any day’s news will show, it has not only failed to fulfil a single one of the promises still held out for it but, by crushing the workers with the perpetual dread or actuality of unemployment, starvation, repression, massacre and war, it is driving mankind ever deeper into the abyss. We hold aloft the glistening banner of World Socialism to be when the class war shall have been forever stamped out when mankind shall no longer cower under the bludgeon of the oppressor, when the necessaries and amenities of life, the comfort and the culture, the honour and the power, shall be to all and when none shall be called master and none servant, but all shall be fellow workers in common.

As far as socialists are concerned, states have always been in the pocket of unaccountable business cliques, and have always worked in their interest. Many of the states whose “sovereignty” will be infringed are already corrupt and toadying lackeys to our corporate masters, with despotic elites living the life of Riley out of ill-gotten plunder from environmental despoliation and pillage, wealth almost literally torn from the bodies of the world’s poor.

Some capitalists understand their system better than others or are more honest about it. George Soros, who made fortunes speculating in currency markets, does not regard capitalism as a stable or self-regulating system. In an interview, which has become particularly relevant now, he said: “Markets can move in unexpected ways and become chaotic. I’m afraid that the prevailing view, which is one of extending the market mechanism to all domains, has the potential of destroying society. Unless we review our concept of markets, our understanding of markets, will collapse, because we are creating global markets, global financial markets, without understanding their true nature. We have this false theory that markets, left to their own devices, tend towards equilibrium.” Speaking of market fluctuations, he said that if they become too large, “you can have a breakdown. It will come through political and eventually military events, rather than events merely in the financial markets”.

There are those who are given to the utterly absurd contentions that induce members of the working class to give allegiance to flags and patriotic clap-trap.  In terms of working-class life, it is irrelevant.  History is a sequential process, each chapter being an intermix of the past and the present. People do not take those political decisions that then become history with the freedom of an artist choosing a colour from a palette; on the contrary, though political decisions may be fashioned to serve the dominant economic interests, prevailing ideas handed down from the past play a vital role in the acceptance or rejection of such ideas. If history was simply a reflex of material interests, the matter may have ended there but, as Marx pointed out, while we make our own history, that history is contained to a greater or lesser extent by the dead hand of the past.

The Socialist Party and Ecology

 

The Future Socialist Society

 

Many intellectuals follow academic convention by saying that socialism defies precise definition and then proceed to give emphasis to the policies and actions of Labour, social-democratic and “socialist” organisations and individuals around the world. A common thread uniting many of the self-styled “Socialist” organisations has been a defence of the welfare state, although the idea can be traced back to Thomas Paine who suggested comprehensive welfare benefits to combat poverty in Rights of Man (1791). But the welfare state has also been pursued by non-Socialists and anti-Socialists. For example, in late nineteenth-century Germany, Bismarck introduced a number of welfare measures, such as unemployment insurance, in the belief that he was fighting socialism.

The Socialist Party has a clear definition of socialism; it will be a society of common, not state or private, ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution; there will be democratic and not minority control of social affairs; production will be solely for use rather than for sale or profit; there will be free access by all people to all goods and services, without the fetters of the money economy.

All of that is clear and anyone who cares to go back to 1904 will find all of our literature advocating the same principled and unequivocal socialist aim.

Socialism means a world society based on production solely for use, not profit. 

It will be a class-free society, in which everyone will be able to participate democratically in decisions about the use of the world’s resources, each producing according to their ability and each taking from the common store according to their needs.

In such a society there can be no money – or, more precisely, no need for money. Money is only needed when people possess and most do not.

Imagine that all the things you need are owned and held in common.

There is no need to buy food from anyone–it is common property. There are no rent or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to all of us. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers).

In a socialist world monetary calculation won’t be necessary.

The alternative to monetary calculation based on exchange-value is calculation based on use-values. Decisions, apart from purely personal ones of preferences or interest, will be made after weighing the real advantages and disadvantages and real costs of alternatives in particular circumstances.

There will be no state in a socialist society. The state is the body which has existed for as long as property society has existed, in order to defend the propertied ruling class against the propertyless majority. Socialism will be without exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled, coercion and submission. There is no point in having a state unless there are people to be bullied and coerced. Once workers gain control of the state our one simple task will be to abolish both classes and the state by means of the immediate dispossession of the capitalist minority. This will put an end to the class struggle forever. 

The ending of the profit system will mean at the same time the ending of war, economic crises, unemployment, poverty and persecution–all of which are consequences of that system.

The revolutionary change that is needed is not possible unless a majority of people understand and want it. We do not imagine all humankind’s problems can be solved at a stroke.

Reforms of the present system fail because making profits must always be given priority over meeting needs, so the problems keep on recurring and ever-multiplying.

It will take time to eliminate hunger, malnutrition, disease and ignorance from the world. But the enormous liberation of mental and physical energies from the shackles of the profit system will ensure that real human progress is made.

Either society is based on property in which there is buying and selling and a need for money or on propertyless common ownership. The two conditions are mutually exclusive: you can no more have a bit of both than you can be a bit pregnant.

Under a system in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit, a system that has expunged the causes of war, a system that can locate people to areas less prone to flooding and drought, poverty and hunger can then be a thing of the past. Socialism could perhaps be brought about with less effort than goes into organising a world food summit and running the myriad of existing aid agencies. It is not some pipe dream anathema to human nature, for what can be more natural than producing for need?

Socialism is Real Social Security

As members of the working class are well aware, it is quite impossible to put a little by for a rainy day, for every day the forecast is a downpour, and trying to keep your head above water is a constant problem.

Our aim is socialism, which we define as a worldwide the society in which the Earth’s resources will be the common heritage of all humanity under democratic control at world, regional and local levels as appropriate. It will be a society where we shall work voluntarily as best we can, as far as our ability goes, to suit our joint needs, as part of a cooperative society. It will be a society in which the state, as the public power of repression at the disposal of a ruling class, will have been abolished and replaced by participatory democracy. This is our immediate aim, not some long-term goal.

In short, we think that given the development of productive capacity since Marx made the distinction in 1875 between a “first” (when full free access according to needs would not be possible) and a “higher” phase of “communist society” (when it would), the so-called higher phase can-and should-be established more or less immediately.

Although we call such a society “socialism” we have no objection to it being called “communism” as long as it is clearly understood that this has nothing to do with the state-capitalist dictatorships that used to exist in Russia and East Europe.

We don’t see ourselves as “the benefactor of the working people”. We are wage and salary workers who don’t see ourselves as a group doing anything for other fellow workers other than putting before them the basic socialist propositions that under capitalism there is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between capitalists and workers; that capitalism can never be reformed so as to work in the interest of workers; that what is required is a society of common ownership, democratic control and production for use, not profit.

If workers want such a socialist society this is something they must do for themselves without following leaders or relying on benefactors. We can’t establish it for them. As we say in our declaration of principles “the emancipation of the working class must be the working of the working class itself”.

We don’t suffer from the illusion that existing MPs and local councillors can do anything to further the cause of socialism. Their job, and in fact aspiration, is merely to run the political side of capitalism in Britain, and capitalism can only be run as a profit system in which priority must always be given to making profits over meeting needs. We also agree that there can be no real democracy under capitalism in the sense of a situation in which everybody has an equal say in deciding what should be done and in which those decisions can be implemented without hindrance. This is not the case today.

Having said this, in many parts of the world including Britain a sufficient degree of democracy exists for a socialist majority to be able to use existing elective bodies, such as parliament, to win control of the state machine through the ballot box. Of course, to work, this presupposes a socialist-minded and democratically organised majority outside parliament standing firmly behind the delegates they will have sent into parliament with the single-mandate to take the formal steps to stop the state from supporting capitalism.

 

We are faced as consumers with an increasingly perplexing range of career decisions, pension plans, healthcare options, educational opportunities and leisure choices. But as electors, the political choice we are provided with appears to be rapidly narrowing down to an infinite number of politicians dancing on the middle-ground. Even Greenpeace and Oxfam have given up on governments, focusing their energies instead on shareholders at AGMs. Is the market system the only way of prioritising what gets produced – or who goes hungry? Is the old communist ideal of production for use just a romantic but Utopian vision? And who cares about globalisation anyway?