Nationalist Nonsense and Cant

 

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon plans to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence, with or without UK government approval.

 

The SNP tell us that independence from England and the control of our own purse strings will cure much of our problems. The nationalists argue that the problems facing workers in Scotland are due to"Westminster rule". If only there was an ‘free’ Scotland, they say, separated from the rest of Britain, then there would be more employment, higher wages, better job security, improved state benefits, a healthier health service and all the other politicians promises. What they do not seem to realise is that the problems they are going to try to solve are an integral part of the capitalist system, and history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that within this system there is no satisfactory solution to these problems other than socialism.

 

In what way is the Scottish culture different from that of an English, an American, or a Russian wage slave? The idea that the Duke of Buccleuch is oppressed because he is a Scot is laughable. The world’s working class all suffer from the same problems such as poverty and insecurity. Independence from England will not cure the poverty and insecurity of the Scottish workers, because they will still be the wages labour and capital relationship. Scottish sovereignty would be a purely constitutional political change which would leave the basic economic structure of society unchanged. There would still be a privileged class owning and controlling the means of production with the rest having to work for them for a living.

 Nor is there any truly independent country in the world because international capitalism has made sure of this. Foreign financial institutions and global corporations instruct governments on how to spend money  and how it must not be spent , in order to keep the international capitalist class satisfied. An independent Scottish government would still have to operate within the constraints of the world capitalist system. It would still have to ensure that goods produced in Scotland were competitive on world markets and that capitalists investing in Scotland were allowed to make the same level of profits as they could in other countries. It would still be subject to the same economic pressures as the existing London-based government to promote profits and restrict wages and welfare benefits. 

Independence for Scotland, therefore, is a myth put about by the Scottish National Party, which further confuses the Scottish section of the working class and blinds them from the real struggle - the class struggle.  The SNP’s claim to be a party for the workers is exposed as a fraud by its fawning attitude towards business.

Some critics of the Socialist Party accuse its members in Scotland of being unpatriotic. We are in fact proud to be anti-patriotic. But just because we are not prepared to back the efforts of Scottish nationalists to break away from the United Kingdom does not mean that we are a Unionist party. We don’t support the Union. Members of the Socialist Party are just as much opposed to British nationalism as they are to Scottish. If workers in Scotland were ever to put the passion they show for the football clubs they support into something like socialism, then it would be the end of the ruling class. It benefits them to see the workers placing meaning and identity in things that are irrelevant and tribal to the truth of class struggle. Keeping the workers unable to see the true state of affairs in the world works to the ruling class's advantage.

As socialists, we re-affirm that all peoples should seek their emancipation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as human beings, as members of the human race. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a World Cooperative Commonwealth of which we will all be free and equal members - citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states. The goal of the socialist movement is not to assist in the creation of even more states but to establish a genuine world community without frontiers where all states as they currently exist will be destroyed. In a socialist society communities, villages, towns and cities will have the opportunity to thrive – and people will no doubt feel an attachment to places and neighbourhoods that is real and tangible – but the nation-states will be consigned to the history books where they belong. 

Pessimist or Optimist?

 

The present and the future are indeed grim unless the workers rouse themselves and organise for the replacement of the present system with a new world-wide system of production for use and the satisfaction of individual and social needs. There really is no viable alternative. Someday, someone who has the time and the interest will make a study of the way capitalism has corrupted thought and expression and debased language to such an extent that millions of people are incapable of making plain statements of fact and words rarely mean what they should mean. Most people know, in a general way, that the claims made for advertised goods are mostly false and misleading, yet always people will be taken in by the extravagant claims made for some new product or by a newly-phrased re-branding for an old one. Capitalism has a persistent habit of holding out hopes to those who suffer at its hands.

Read the deceitful language used by professional politicians, whose skill lies in gaining confidence and votes not in a truthful statement of the nature of the problems before the electorate. Notice the traditionally evasive and obscuring habits of expression of the majority of religious evangelical preachers. They are probably the worst offenders, because they are so utterly dependent on the favour of the rich and powerful in their church, and even lack the robustness of the politician and journalist who, though similarly dependent, have the confidence that comes from the knowledge that they have behind them the backing of their own party or paper within well understood limits. The hall-mark of expression under capitalism is that everything is twisted and distorted. Thus all politicians denounce the “profiteer,” but not the profit-maker. All the  guardians of “truth” are agreed that lying and deceit are to be condemned; except, of course, for purposes of waging war or diplomacy, or to attract buyers for goods, or induce workers to vote for capitalism at elections; in short, except for nearly all the normal activities of capitalist life.

The advice of the Socialist Party is to forget these whimsical side-shows and get on with the real work of ending capitalism. Are the workers ignorant? They learned what they know at capitalist provided schools. Are they lazy and selfish? If so, who robbed them of initiative and incentive and taught them that the way of life is to look after number one ? And what right have the rich and well-to-do to argue that the receipt of an income sufficient to buy the bare necessities of life should be dependent on the possession of all the social virtues: What about the ignorant, lazy, selfish property owners? Capitalism has a persistent habit of holding out hopes to those who suffer at its hands.

The Socialist Party will not barter its support for any promise of reform. For, no matter whether these promises are made sincerely or not, we know that the immediate need of our class is emancipation, which can only be achieved through the establishment of Socialism. Our interests are opposed to the interests of all sections of the master-class without distinction; whether bankers or industrialists, landlords or commercial magnates, all participate in the fruits of our enslavement. All will unite, in the last resort, in defence of the system by which they live.

For the party of the working class, one course alone is open, and that involves unceasing hostility to all parties, no matter what their plea, who lend their aid to the administration of the existing social order and thus contribute, consciously or otherwise, to its maintenance. Our object is its overthrow, and to us political power is useless for any other purpose. With these facts clearly in mind, and conscious that economic development is our unshakable and inseparable ally, we call upon the workers of this country to muster under our banner.

If world socialism is the only hope for us all—as it is—then the logical conclusion is that what we should be doing is campaigning in favour of this, not trying to pressurise governments to maintain welfare systems, vary taxes and interest rates and set economic priorities.

Outdated Nationalism

  

Nationalism is a political doctrine that preaches that people with a common history or language or religion form a separate “nation” from all other people and have the right to have their own political state to defend their common interest. The Socialist Party has always rejected this doctrine, not just because people who have a common history or speak the same language do not have a common interest; they are divided into classes, and a worker who speaks a particular language has a common interest with workers speaking other languages but not with a capitalist who speaks the same one but also because of its practical consequences.

Without the ideology of nationalism, capitalist states would be unstable since, being based on minority class rule, they need a minimum allegiance from those they rule over. Nationalism serves to achieve this by teaching the ruled to be loyal to “their” so-called “nation-state”.

The growth of global corporations, some with a turnover exceeding the GDP of most countries, has dramatically transformed the role of government as the focus of economic decision-making. Many of the most important decisions are now made, not by politicians, but by CEOs in the boardrooms of these multinationals. Indeed, this renders increasingly problematic the very notion of a “British” or “Scottish” capitalist class”. In practice, ownership of capital has become progressively dispersed across the world, a process facilitated by transnational mergers and buy-outs.

Likewise, the proliferation of trading links between different states has effectively blurred the lines of demarcation between nominally separate national economies. It would be more realistic now to speak of there being a single global economy. Even so, many locally-based businesses are indirectly tied into this economy as subcontractors to multinationals. Not only that, the ever-deepening international linkages means they cannot escape recessionary perturbations emanating from elsewhere when these impact the local economy. At the same time, the limited leeway of governments to ameliorate such localised effects has been correspondingly reduced.

Poverty in Capitalism

 

Poverty is the fate of the working class in present-day society. From poverty spring the many subsidiary evils to which a lot of the would-be re-constructors direct their main attention. Poor housing and unemployment are only problems for the poor. Ill-health and crime are largely the results of poverty. The most glaring contradiction of capitalism is the abject poverty that exists besides the super-abundance of wealth. In any effort to reconstruct society it will not be sufficient to attempt to alleviate poverty, it must end. Socialism alone shows the way. If the wages system is retained then poverty will be retained, for the two are inseparable. The end of the wages system will ensure an end of all poverty. Capitalism has shown us the enormous powers of production that humankind can wield. All such powers have not yet been unleashed. Capitalism has arrived at a stage where it must limit the expansion of productive powers in the interest of profit. Socialism will release all pent-up forces and enable working people to produce wealth in such abundance that a condition of poverty, as we know it to-day, will not be conceivable.

Men and women’s ability to work we call “labour-power,” and wages are the price they get when it is sold to an employer. This labour-power is a commodity, produced to be sold, and the price it fetches is determined, as is the price of all commodities, by agencies outside the individual owner’s control. Price is the monetary reflection of value, and value is determined by the amount of social effort necessary to replace the commodity. So wages fluctuate around a certain point, the cost of reproducing man’s power to labour. No amount of legislation within capitalism, no philanthropic effort can alter this fundamental economic law. All attempts to remove poverty by price control, minimum wage rates, family benefits payments, or any form of currency juggling fall to pieces against this “law of wages.”

To-day, wealth is produced for profit; workers receive wages for producing it, and it then passes into the hands of the owners of the means of production. The total value that the workers produce is greater than the amount they receive in wages. The surplus accrues to the owners and becomes divided among all sections of the owning-class, landlords, industrialists and investors. But in the process, in order that the owning-class may enjoy the privilege that ownership implies, the wealth must be sold; it must be converted into money. So out goes the product of the workers’ toil, out into a world-market to compete with similar products produced by similar workers in other countries. And from the ensuing competition follows the struggle for trade routes, for spheres of influence, for control of sources of raw materials, for empires. From this source, also, comes international diplomacy, tariffs, State subsidies, trading blocs, political pacts, military alliances and war.

No amount of tinkering with the effects of a system of production for profit will eliminate this competition. It can be raised from a local plane to a national one by State control, it can be raised from a national plane to a continental one such as the European Union, but it cannot be eliminated without at the same time eliminating the private property basis of present-day society. To guarantee against further and more disastrous wars socialism alone offers a way.War, that most colossal of all tragedies, must be ended for all time. All are agreed upon this. Only socialism offers a guarantee of a permanently peaceful future. Wars are unleashing forces that will sharpen the class conflicts of the future, that will present the administrators of capitalism, no matter who they may be, with a task of such magnitude that they will not be able to trifle with half measures.

 

Unless the socialist proposition for the revolutionising of society is accepted, and struggled for, by the majority of the workers after the war, then capitalism will forever present us with some problems that will have tragic results. For that purpose it is necessary to organise consciously, politically and democratically for the conquest of the machinery of government in order that this machinery may be converted from an instrument of oppression into an agent of emancipation.

The reformation of capitalism will avail them nought. It is the historic task of the working people to abolish the last of the class societies and to establish a class-free one. To this end alone they should bend their present energies and  effort. Their object must be to establish a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. Anything other than that will not be a reconstruction but merely a reshuffle.

To build the world we want, we must work together

 

A common defence of capitalism is that nowadays millions of people are investors, directly or indirectly, in industry. Pension funds, insurance policies and unit trusts are cited as examples. The suggestion is that wealth is more evenly distributed. The whole argument bears all the marks of a public relations trick to gain popular support for Big Business and the Stock Exchange against any measures they feel might harm their interests. There has been a shift from individual to institutional investors on the stock exchanges though not all these institutions hold shares “in trust for the people.’’ The insurance companies and banks are profit-making bodies whose own shares are traded on the stock exchange. It is difficult to see how the growth of institutional investors is a justification of capitalism. In fact it makes the basic absurdity of capitalism—social production yet sectional ownership—even more obvious. When the joint-stock company appeared a hundred or so years ago, Marx wrote that in separating management from ownership it meant that “the capitalist disappears as superfluous from the productive process." Engels was less polite. He spoke of “parasites”. The long list of social functions the capitalists imagined they had has gone: as individuals they can no longer claim to be the main source of finance for industry. Even this function, only necessary under capitalism, is now carried out by anonymous institutions. The individual capitalist — one-time alleged abstainer, organiser and risk-taker —is shown to be superfluous even in the realm of finance.

Having even a few thousand pounds worth of savings doesn’t turn anybody into a capitalist. Even the slaves in Ancient Rome had a fund called a peculium, collected from tips, which they could use to buy their freedom when old. A capitalist is someone who has enough wealth to live without having to sell his mental and physical energies. The real solution should be obvious: convert the already socially-operated means of wealth-production into the property of the whole community. Then production can be organised for use without the restrictions of profit-making, finance and commerce.

 Greed is not a characteristic of working men and women. In fact, the working class is the most charitable body of men ever known to history. Inadequately housed, shabbily dressed, underpaid and overworked, the workers make do with only a tiny portion of the wealth they produce so that the capitalist class can live in idle luxury. In fact, a socialist book written at the turn of the 20^th Century had the title “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.”

When the working class throughout the world has grasped that there is a socialist alternative to. the capitalist system it will use its immense numbers to capture political power. It will make use of the parliamentary machinery to achieve the revolutionary transformation of society. There is, however, unlikely to be very much blood about at the time. The workers, who make up the overwhelming majority of the world's population, will be able to smother any attempt at resistance by a dissident minority. The alternatives facing the working class are socialism or capitalism. There is no middle path nor any compromise with capital possible. None in the Socialist Party would think of referring it to the State as though it were some sort of benevolent society looking after working-class interests. Socialists realise that the State is the executive committee of the ruling class and that it only has a basis in a class-divided social system. We socialists know better.

Many are devising plans for making the world a better place to live in. Ideas thus generated find expression in schemes for remedying the outstanding evils of which the majority of people are victims—unemployment, insecurity, poverty, and war. The Socialist Party claims, and proves, that these evils cannot be remedied within the framework of the existing social order. Nothing less than social revolution offers a sound basis for social reconstruction. The abolition of private ownership of the means and instruments of production and distribution, the end of the wages system, the production of wealth solely for use instead of for profit—this, and nothing else, will provide the foundation for the construction of the social system that we so urgently desire. Any planning for a better new world that does not include these fundamental changes is doomed to bring disappointment to those who hope to experience substantial improvements.

Economic insecurity is bred of capitalism. Men and women are related to one another in a capitalist world, not as individuals, but as commodity owners. The buying and selling of commodities, including the workers’ energies, is the essence of this system. Buying and selling gives rise to competition, competition breeds struggle, and in the struggle no man can claim to be absolutely secure; any adverse turn of the struggle may reduce him to the ranks of the most poverty stricken.Ownership of land, machinery, factories, mines, railways, road transport, sea transport, etc., places some men in the privileged position of employing others. Non-ownership and, in consequence, the necessity to live by selling their physical and mental energies, makes other men seek employment. Socialism, by placing the means of wealth production under the democratic ownership and control of the whole of the community will ensure that everyone contributes to the common effort without entering into contract with his fellows on the basis of economic privilege.

Given common ownership of the means of production and distribution, the wealth produced by the common effort will be accessible to all. Modern scientific methods of production ensure that there shall be plenty and none need be short of the essentials and comforts of life. With the social store available to every one according to their needs, the dependence of wives on their husbands, of children on their fathers, of the sick and aged on charity, of men on their ability to hold down a job, will vanish. Each will enjoy the security afforded by all.

We have heard it all before

 

Most in the Socialist Party will agree that of all the questions put to them in their attempt to explain socialism to our fellow workers, “Who will do the dirty work” is among the most common. In fact, sooner or later during the process of convincing a worker, it is almost certain to come up.

We all know what is meant by the question. The enquirer is not alluding to the sharp practices of his masters, the betrayals of labour leaders, nor yet to our own exploitation. It refers to some of the jobs that are looked upon as dirty and degrading, and to which many fellow workers seem doomed to perform by the very nature of things.

They never mean those conducting autopsies, up to their elbows in blood and gore but those working in abattoirs, the badly paid dirty work.

Our proposition is that socialism is quite different from and vastly superior to trying to run capitalism. In all countries the mass of the population live in constant poverty, in fear of losing their employment, and in fear of losing their lives in capitalism's wars—for wars and crises are just as much part of capitalism as are millionaires.

The  Materialist Conception of History is one of the fundamental tenets of the socialist outlook. According to this theory ideas are the product of conditions, and not the other way round. Men have not started cut with original ideas of absolute liberty. Justice and equality and then striven to make a world that would fit them; what they have done is striven to make alterations in the economic and political framework that would fulfil their needs and then sanctified their proposals with moral maxims. Their ideas have been shaped by the world around and were limited by the social development so far attained and the immediate future which that development foreshadowed. Since the advent of private property, in the dim and distant past, moral, intellectual, political and religious ideas have been bound up with different forms of property ownership. These forms of property have split society into antagonistic classes which have engaged in bitter class struggles, each class striving to dominate society and serve its own interests As we look back through history we see that it is made up of these class conflicts and that it is they that are the vital thread from which progress has been woven— meaning by progress an ever wider adaptation to natural forces and the bringing nearer of the possibility of humanity, as a whole, achieving comfort, security and happiness.

Each new form of production has brought into being new social classes, a change in social relations, and a change in current ideas. The freeman and slave of antiquity looked upon the social world differently from the feudal lord and bondsman of the middle ages, and likewise capitalist and worker have different ideas from those of their mediaeval counterparts. To understand the ideas of a period it is necessary to examine the economic framework of the period from which the ideas are derived, because the economic framework is the dominating influence. Ideas carried over from old outworn systems are carried over into the new, in fact, as Marx puts it so well “the tradition of all past generations weighs like an Alp upon the brain of the living ” ; but these traditions are forced into the mould of the new system, though they may have some influence on the shape of the mould. The confused social outlook of a period, including the present, is the resultant of the mixture of ideas thrown up by the different classes that together make up society, but the prevailing, or the most insistent, ideas are those backed by the dominant class; and they remain so until another class becomes sufficiently conscious of its interests and strong enough to challenge the supremacy of the dominant class.

Each era in the history of mankind contains the voice of the past, the present and the future. The voice of the future is small and weak at first but grows stronger as time passes until it eventually becomes the voice of the present; mankind only takes up problems that it can solve since the problem only arises as a problem because the solution is contained within it. It is the solution that has forced the problem to the front.

Under capitalism where the means of wealth production are owned and controlled by a minority, technology is developed and applied in their interest with the aim of maximising profit. To blame technology, rather than capitalism, for our problems is a mistake which leads to wrong, indeed absurd, conclusions.

The industrial revolution, carried out as it was within the context of capitalism, certainly worsened the conditions of many people at the time but it also created the material basis for a socialist society of common ownership and free access to wealth.

It is neither possible nor desirable to abolish industrial technology. Without it we would have to go back to a much harsher form of living. What is required is to change the basis of society so that technology can be developed and applied in the interests of the majority and not for profit.

We are all in favour of humans living in a balanced, sustainable relationship with the rest of nature but, even in the field of ecology and the environment, industrial technology is useful, indeed essential. Renewable energy sources such as solar power, wind power, tidal power and so on all involve the necessary use of quite sophisticated machinery and equipment which we would not be able to make and operate without the technological knowledge acquired since the industrial revolution.