Stand with the Socialist Party

 

No matter how hard we may work and save, you and I know that every one of us in the face of the rising cost of living is always “up against it.”

You toil along for a year and manage, perhaps, to save up a few pounds and someday you find a notice nailed up on the factory door telling you that the boss has closed down indefinitely.

If you think it over, while you are living along on your savings, and trying to get another job, you will realise that the boss has not shut down because folks have more food and clothing, or more homes than they need. He shut down because he could not make any PROFITS. The sole end and aim of business are PROFITS. No matter how much the bosses may talk, in public, you know that they consider everything connected with the shop, the business, the mine or the mill from the standpoint of whether it will bring MORE PROFITS to them. They install automated machinery because it will enable them to discharge men or women and thus make more PROFITS.

They adulterate food. They use poisonous preservatives in meat; they dye beef red to make it appear fresh; they sell condemned hams, and monopolize the egg supply; they skim the milk or adulterate it– all for the sake of MORE DIVIDENDS.

You go on strike for shorter hours and higher wages. The boss opposes you, because higher wages and shorter working hours for you will mean lower PROFITS for HIM.

You see the police force used to protect the scabs and the property of the Boss, to serve the interests of the Boss in order to prevent you from gaining higher wages and cutting down his PROFITS.

You see the media preaching contentment and thrift and economy and honesty, because the rich pay their salaries and the master class want you to be honest and saving, contented and obedient. These things mean more PROFITS for him. The media always side with the employers because the employers ADVERTISE and advertising means PROFITS.

Because the bosses own the factory, the mine, office and shop, they are able to buy your working strength for less than the value of the things you produce or make. This leaves a profit for the bosses. Socialism intends to make the factories and farms, mines, the collective property of those who work in them; to do away with bosses and to abolish the PROFIT system.

The Profit System is the cause of all wars today. The capitalist class has profits which it wants to invest in some other country in order to make more profits. And this is the cause of all capitalist wars. Wars are caused by the competition of various national capitalist groups for new markets, new natural resources, for new investments. Each national capitalist group wants the strongest military to protect their industrial and financial expansion. Socialism will prevent wars because it means the ownership of the factories, mines, shops, lands and all other instruments of production and distribution by the workers who use them. It means the abolition of the Profit System.

Profits are the cause of poverty. And socialism proposes to abolish poverty. This is why every working man and woman ought to be a socialist. The way to cure a disease is not to put salve upon the symptoms, but to remove the cause. The Profit System is almost the only cause of war today. Discard the system and remove the cause of war.

The Profit System is the cause of nearly all the suffering poverty, sickness, crime, as well as war. It is the one great enemy of the working class. Amidst the horrors of famine, poverty, crime and war there is one way out for the working class of every country. There is one way that means victory for the useful workers of that country. That way means socialism or industrial democracy.

Nearly all power lies in the hands of the workers. You can make the whole world your world with a united working class. But you must have an educated, organised class.

 The Socialist Party advocates a world where the whole of humanity is united about social relationships of equality and co-operation. The identity of the socialist is not with any national grouping, the brand of religion, any alleged “race” or local culture.

The Socialist Party holds no loyalty to Britain or any other country, to any religion, to the colour of any person, or to Welsh culture or African culture. By our perspective of history, by our knowledge of the economic nature of modern society, the Socialist Party has gone beyond the shallow allegiances that misdirect the attitudes of those who are still burdened by nationalism, religion or racism. Our argument is that if the majority were socialists, the security of all men and women in material comfort in a world of harmony and freedom would at last become a reality.We are denied this because the means of wealth production and distribution are owned by a minority class, who exploit this ownership and the labour-power of the workers for the purpose of profit-making. 

The Socialist Party has no hesitation in taking a stand. We condemn capitalism. All workers, whatever their skill and capability, have a common identity and a common interest as members of the working class. Their common problems can only be resolved, not by squalid differences between themselves, but by a confrontation between a united working class and the owners of the means of wealth production – the capitalist class. The world’s workers must destroy this private monopoly of the means of wealth production and convert it to the common property of the whole of man. Only then can social integration, co-operation, equality and freedom be realised where it really matters, in the production and distribution of wealth, in meeting the world community’s material requirements.

The Socialist Party will continue to show that there are no essential differences between peoples that prevent the establishment of a society where the human family can live in harmony and co-operation. 

Know Socialists By Their Principles

 

Socialism is the international movement of the working class to abolish the wage system. It is a revolutionary movement of the workers, by the workers and for the workers. And these workers are not to be side-tracked. You have been fooled too long to be satisfied with mere words.

 

A person who works for wages is a slave. Worse than a slave, for a slave can always look to his master to feed, clothe and house him. The wage worker is forced to get a job – to sell his or her working strength to a boss or beg, starve or steal.

Men and women can never be free or independent as long as they have to beg the idlers for a chance to work. The man who owns your job owns you. Generally, he will pay you barely enough to live on, while he keeps for himself all the things you make.

And we workers make everything in the world. There is nothing fine, valuable, beautiful, or useful that is used by men and women, no matter who they are, that is not made by the hands and the brains of working men or women.

But we are not permitted to enjoy these things. The bosses claim them all. They only give to us (in wages) enough to eke out a poor existence.

The whole secret of our slavery lies in the fact that a few people owns the means of production and distribution, the land and the communications.

Socialism proposes that the workers who operate the industries shall own them in common – that men and women shall work for themselves and shall own the things they make without dividing up with any idle property owners.

This is socialism in a nutshell. If you are a miserable worker living from hand to mouth and in constant fear of losing your job, it ought to sound good to you. The Socialist Party is the party of wage earners, organized for the overthrow of the wage system. It is OF, BY and FOR the working class alone and it ceases to be a socialist party the very moment it pretends to represent the members of any other class. 

 

Remember that the interests of wage-workers and capitalists are absolutely opposed. You and I are not at all interested in benefiting the capitalist class. The capitalist class has already helped itself by appropriating the product of our brawn and brains.  The capitalist helped himself. He always does help himself, by taking everything we make for his own property. Every day the capitalist is able to appropriate more of the value you or I have made. He is getting richer. For this reason, we will not permit avowed socialists whom we elect to office to serve us and our class to promise to serve our enemy, the capitalist class. We put men in office to do all in their power, by any and every means FOR the working class. Every individual who refuses to so serve us is a traitor to the socialist cause.

 

Why is the Socialist Party different from the other parties? And why should working men and women join the Socialist Party and support its candidates? 

 

We are going to give you a few plain facts and we want you to think them over and talk them over. We want you to find out the aims of socialism and decide whether the Socialist Party will be of benefit to you or whether the old parties will serve you best.

 

We all know how fertile the old parties have been with promises to the working class, in the past, and how effective in making laws for the benefit of the employing or capitalist class. They have failed you upon every possible occasion. We want you to consider the Socialist program for a while.

The aims of socialism are always in the interest of the working class. You will find that the socialists are working men and women fighting the battles of the working class, while those in the other parties are serving the men who hire you and rob you. The factory owners, the mill bosses, the mine operators, have had old party officials serving them long enough. If workers unite in the Socialist Party you can elect men and women to serve your interests. The working class has nothing in common with other classes in society. We know that any news outlet, any media, or any movement that is financed by the employing class is going to serve those who grow rich on our labour.

Sometimes you may see a reformer in office who are trying to lighten the burdens of the workers by reform legislation, such as shortening the hours of labour-giving you an eight hour, instead of a ten or twelve hour day. But these reform measures are not essential for socialism.  When the capitalist parties see the workers joining a party of their own, they will give us a few sops to keep us from the real task of socialism and the real task of socialism is to abolish a society that is based on the wages system.

It proposes that the working class shall take over all the great industries, the mines, the factories, the land, the transport and the communications; it means that these industries shall be owned and managed by the workers who use them without handing over any profits to any boss. It is ownership of the factory that makes one man a rich and idle employer and the one who has no property, a wage slave.

Socialism stands for the ownership of the factory by the factory workers. It means the overthrow of the wage system. This is the real essence of socialism.

Holyrood - Another Thieves Kitchen

 

There is a clear class division in present-day society. Millions of people are being born into families of workers. They may end up as teachers, miners, dockers, musicians. Of one thing we can be sure. They will be forced to sell their ability to work for a lifetime, simply in order to live. And then, every so often, are born exceptions to this rule—the children of the few families whose names are written over all the stocks and shares, who own the farms, mines and offices. Families of financiers, international global empires, barons of industry. From birth they will be given the best that the world’s workers can produce. They will be taught not how to go looking for jobs, but how to indulge their leisure hours with pleasure-seeking pursuits.

Workers are endlessly urged to support “the Scottish nation”. But we have no stake in Scotland; it is just the place where we happen to sell ourselves. The working class is a global class which owes no allegiance to any nation states. The capitalists themselves invest in whatever country is most profitable for them. Patriotism  has always proved stumbling block to the workers and to their immature organisations, and nothing has more clearly shown the danger of half-knowledge than the ease with which the ruling class have been able to muddle their minds and inflame their passions by raising such issues as national identity.  We are all human beings, and under capitalism most of us are members of the working class, forced to work for a wage or dependent on someone who does so. Thus we are all subject to the exploitation of capitalism, and to varying degrees to its inequalities and discrimination. People differ of course: gender, sexual orientation, abilities, interests, but allotting people to pigeon-holes disguises what brings us together. Nations are artificial entities, and a shared national identity has to be invented and constantly reinforced by propaganda.

 Nationalism is a product of the competition and rivalry inherent to the capitalist system itself. Nationalism is the ideology serving the interests of differing sections of the ruling class, and it now stands as barriers in the way of the progressive movement which seeks to establish a real world human community without class division and national frontiers on the basis of the potential economic abundance made possible by capitalism. That movement of course, is the movement for world socialism.

Many workers of all nationalities who have passed through ethnic terror, now realise that the cult of nationalism is indeed tragic futility so far as the working-class are concerned; and the spirit of international co-operation and solidarity, though slowly, is surely growing up amongst them, born of the knowledge that they are poor because the greater part of the wealth they bring into existence is robbed from them by the capitalist-class.

Socialism will be a global society, with no countries or borders or passports. As for culture, it will be up to people in socialism to organise their lives as they wish. We cannot predict now, but there are likely to still be differences such as language, diet, sport and so on. Aspects of climate will result in differences in how people live, with some finding ways to pass the long winter nights while others will spend far more time outdoors, with some places perhaps having siestas.  ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’  expresses well the idea that people in a socialist world will be able to live as they wish, as long as it does not infringe on the freedom of others.

Homes without Families

Figures from government body National Records Scotland show 112,300 properties – 4.2 per cent of all dwellings – are unoccupied at any one time. That’s almost one for every 20 Scottish homes.

Of that total, 15,912 have lain empty for between six and 12 months, and 27,584 for more than a year. 

An estimated 130,000 people in Scotland are homeless or on waiting lists.

The Scottish Empty Homes Partnership (SEHP) believes 44,000 homes could be brought back into use if councils were to use compulsory purchase orders to buy and repair the vacant properties.

SEHP’s Shaheena Din said, “Some owners are unwilling to return their home to use, cannot be traced or are difficult to engage with. We believe compulsory purchase orders should be used more widely to prevent homes from being left to deteriorate when Scotland desperately needs more homes.”

The number of long-term empty houses in Scotland is seven per cent higher than in 2019. The cities with the highest number last year were Edinburgh with 6180, Aberdeen with 6006 and Glasgow with 2958.

Over 100,000 homes in Scotland have nobody living in them - with some lying empty for decades (msn.com)

Socialism Is Self-Management

 One of the central points of the Socialist Party’s case is that, under capitalism, the working class run the world from top to bottom—only they do it not in their own interests but in the interests of the class who own the means of wealth production and distribution. 

Socialism is the expropriation, of this owning class and the transfer of the means of wealth production to society as a whole. In other words men and women (no longer a working class since classes will have disappeared) will run affairs in their own interests; they will produce to satisfy their needs. The revolutionary change in the economic basis of society from private to common ownership will produce corresponding changes in the whole organisation of social life. Culture and leisure will be free to all instead of to a minority. Social, moral and family habits and customs which rest upon the private property basis of capitalism will adjust themselves to fit into the new order. Capitalist ideas will dissolve into history’s melting pot. Freed from the poverty and servitude of class-society men and women will face each and the other as free and equal social beings. All social values will undergo revolutionary changes. Reflection upon the potentialities of society organised on a socialist basis humbles the imagination. Anything short of this is not socialism: it is capitalism by whatever name it is called.

Socialism involves the abolition of private and class ownership in the means and instruments of production, and the establishing of an order of things wherein they will be owned by society. For the first time in civilised history mankind will face the problem of organising production for society without an owning class. Things will be produced solely for use and because people need them. They will not be produced to sell and to provide profit for the owners of the means and instruments of production as they are under capitalism. There will be no profit. There will be no wages because men and women will not need to sell their energies in order to live. The function of money to circulate goods will disappear because it will not be needed. The function of wages to ensure that the worker receives only part of the wealth he produces will disappear because the worker in socialist society will enjoy the full fruits of his production, after meeting the necessary replacements and enlargements of the means of production and distribution. Wages are an indication of working-class poverty and measure only its extent. The continuance of the wages system under any government or with whatever modifications is still capitalism.

When the soldier enlists he agrees to fight the battles of the capitalist class and shoot down his fellow workers. It is better to be a traitor to a country than to be a traitor to your own class. The army is an institution for making widows and orphans. As long as there is a class that preys, the class exploited and preyed upon will continue to struggle for emancipation. Mankind seeks pleasure and avoids pain and largely in this fact lies the hope of humanity. Every struggle teaches us how best to unite our strength in a steadfast march toward the abolition of wage-slavery.

All over the whole world, we are toiling and sweating to make the wheels go round. We build mansions and palaces and we live in slums. We MAKE ALL the great and beautiful things in the world and the boss says these things are his. He pays us only enough to feed ourselves, to get us a few  hand-me-downs. We sow the fields and reap the harvests – for somebody else to enjoy. We feed the world; we clothe the world – and if we are out of a job for one week – we are broke, we are hunting for another master – another boss again. 

When we grow so weak and tired and desperate with struggling continually that we are impelled to throw down the whole burden of our lives and pull society about our ears, the reformers, with loud voices appear. These reformers promise us many things. Sometimes they come under a Labour Party banner and again behind the nationalist band-wagon. Oh yes, they promise many things. Some of these they do not intend to give us; and all they may grant will only render them more secure in their position upon our backs. The way reforms turn out are that hey look like something good for the workers but they always end by benefiting the capitalists.

But supposing we continued to make all the useful and beautiful things we make now and kept them ourselves! The only reason you and I work for the boss is because the boss owns the factory. Suppose we owned the factory – you and I and thousands of our fellow workers. Suppose we collectively owned the factories and the mines.

Socialism means the common ownership by the workers of the mines, the offices, the offices and the land, to be used for the benefit of the workers.

Think this over. Socialism means the value of the things made in the factory for the people who work in the factory. It means nothing left for the old boss

Join the Socialist Party – the international organisation of the working class for the abolition of capitalism. There are ten of us workers to one boss. If we unite, we can own the whole world. Division alone can defeat us. Think it over. Study up on the subject. You can’t lose by becoming a socialist unless you are a capitalist. Unite with your fellow-workers into one great organisation of the workers.

Alone we can accomplish nothing; united the world is ours.

Their Sovereign Scotland or Our One World?

 

A powerful and potent force for dividing the working class is that of nationality. All over the world workers are taught that the artificial boundary which separates “their” country also confines special qualities like courage, verity and intelligence which are denied to those across the frontier. 

The problem is that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of society in an undemocratic and unaccountable fashion. This obscene concentration of wealth in a few hands lies at the heart of all major social problems which confront us today. Far from being irrelevant, as some argue, the property question is the most important social question of the modern age. It cries out for an answer.

The Scottish nationalists say everything would be better with independence: the NHS, the environment, the economy, business efficiency, productivity, road safety, more tourists, etc. On top of all this there would be savings of many millions, even billions, of pounds, giving us all more spending power as well as big savings for businesses. The source of these riches is the surplus value wrung from the working class but the SNP seem not to have noticed this. The SNP's aim is really just the same as all the other reformist parties - they try to solve capitalism's problems by merely re-organising.  We support no nationalist movement. Socialism and patriotism are irreconcilably antagonistic. Nationalism is anti-working class.

True, it is not easy to oppose mass patriotic movements but that difficulty is not removed by closing one’s eyes to it, nor is it lessened by postponing it until after independence has been achieved. If those who wish to organise and educate Scottish workers lend themselves to nationalist propaganda now, they will find it immeasurably more difficult to return to working-class principles after they have won for their masters the reality and for themselves the illusion of Scotland’s independence. Our advice to fellow workers is to build up organisations to fight their own capitalist class—they will need them soon enough. Our advice to Scottish  workers is to acquaint themselves with their own class interests.

Scotland is only a small bit of land and a tiny part of an economic system which embraces the whole world. It could never enjoy any real autonomy or self-sufficiency in the face of the world market. From day one of independence it will be buffeted by hostile economic forces entirely beyond its control. We'd still be living in a money-driven, buying and selling economy, still working for wages, still insecure, being hired and fired, still chained by capitalism. What the Socialist Party campaigns for is a worldwide, money-free, production for use society in which  goods and services would be accessible and available to all.

The World Socialist Movement sprung from a handful of workers who understood the capitalist system and the need for its replacement by socialism. An essential clement in this understanding was that of capitalism’s class structure, of the interests which defined that structure and of the role of capitalism in forming those interests. As that understanding spreads, so will the socialist movement grow and branch out.

This movement must be based on a unity which is conscious. It does not rest on blind faith in some super-intelligent vanguard or a manipulative elite who aim to lead the rest to some other, so far undefined, social system. Working-class understanding and acceptance of socialist ideas will be international, just as their present support for capitalism infects the entire world.

For socialism, then, human unity is vital—a unity for the majority in society to establish a system based on majority interests. Socialists have had enough of division, of human beings opposing each other without reason, when the world is desperate for them to unite to change the basis of society.

So we struggle to persuade the working class that all of them—in the words of our Declaration of Principles “without distinction of race or sex”—have the same interests to work together to rid the world of capitalism with its artificial and destructive divisions and replace it with socialism. That will be a society of common ownership and democratic control of the means of life, abundant production and free access to wealth.

For the first time in its unhappy history, humanity will in a socialist society satisfy its needs. Socialism will be abundance, freedom and unity.