The dawn of socialism is rising on humanity’s horizon.

 

What is the future of humanity? Who dares to answer? Are we upon the threshold of death and destruction for the whole of mankind? Or do we stand upon the threshold of a new age of unparalleled peace and plenty? The Socialist Party pose the alternatives that have arisen.

The future of humanity must not be decided by those in power, the bankers, the industrialists, the politicians, or all those who have taken the world through recurring economic slumps, bloodbaths of war and the destruction of our environment. Working people must organise, speak out and with one voice demand life under socialism before death under capitalism overtakes us all. A programme of planned production for the use of the people rather than for the profits of the owners of industry would bring an age of peace, plenty, and prosperity. This is already technologically possible. How can any sane person conceive of capitalism coping with the climate change crises? The only permanent solution to capitalist exploitation is the workers' revolution to establish a socialist future for humanity worldwide.  Workers must awake, and awake quickly, to the understanding of all the horrors of the capitalist system.

A capitalist economy produces goods for a market the limits of which are determined not by people’s needs, but by the ability to make a profit, and to re-convert, the profit realised into further production. It is impossible for the economy of any national capitalist state to be self-contained. In the first place, because of the uneven distribution of natural resources in the world, no nation contains all of the raw materials that it requires. Secondly, the effective consumer market in all advanced capitalist nations is never sufficient to absorb the total output of the economy, and markets must be sought outside the national boundaries. Thirdly, because of the limitations of the domestic market and the disproportions generated within every advanced capitalist economy, there is never a sufficient outlet for capital investments internally, and such outlets must also be sought elsewhere.

Goods and services are produced, not in order to satisfy human needs and wants, but in order to make as large a profit as possible. And so long as there’s a profit to be made, all sorts of anti-social products, including such things weapons of mass destruction are cheerfully produced. Socialism – or perish!

 Only the working class, which suffers the cruelties of capitalism in peace and war, can deal the death-blow to this foul system. The workers can rally around their liberating banner and can change the world. Having abolished capitalism, they can harness the productive forces and the wondrous technology of science to the service of human needs, eliminating all poverty and raising the living standards of all peoples to undreamed-of heights. Hazardous and unhealthy occupations can become things of the past. The drudgery and servitude of ugly and unnecessary toil can be ended. There can be leisure and comfort for every man, woman and child on earth. We are certain that before long the world will witness the working people in all countries seeking to break once and for all the chains of exploitation and establish the truly free society of socialism.

The capitalists have not solved a single social ill. They have opened new sores. World capitalism, as a system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit, not only ignores needs that can’t be paid for, but it also distorts the pattern of world food production

Food, like everything else under capitalism, is not produced for use. It is not produced to be eaten but to be sold, with a view to profit, on a market, a local market, a regional market and, increasingly, the world market.

When there is production for the market it is only market demand, not a real need, that is satisfying and it is this that, in the context of food production, condemns millions of people in the world to go hungry or be badly fed and others to actually die of starvation. These people are malnourished not because it is technically impossible to produce enough food to feed the whole world’s population, but because the present world economic and social system capitalism produces only to satisfy profitable market demand and not human needs. It is as simple as that. These people don’t starve to death; they are starved to death, by capitalism.

Big Ag  will not invest in anything that is not profitable even if they are corporations with the best will in the world they are not free agents. They must, under the logic of the capitalist system and the laws of the market produce in countries that get the best possible return on investment. Undeveloped and developing countries are caught in a vicious circle. In order to modernise they must have funds to invest. How do they get these funds? By selling on the world market the crops that they are apparently best qualified to produce. This means forcing their peasants and farmers to stop producing to satisfy their own needs or local markets and turn to produce the cash crop in question. This in turn means that money has to be spent on importing fertilisers and food crops, paid for by the profits from the exports of the cash crops. And, if the price of the cash crop on the world market falls? Then they do not have enough money to import enough food and the world hears about a “famine” somewhere caused by some “natural” disaster. Famines are artificial in the sense that they could be avoided if we had a social system geared to satisfying needs rather than profitable sales.

Towards a Socialist Future

 

The ruling class and their governments can trick and deceive the people by relying on our short memories. No matter how careful the capitalists and their apologists may be, the inconsistencies of the present economic system constantly are revealed. The world is engaged in some of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history. People fear another world war which may be a nuclear exchange. What has happened to the peace which we were assured would be ours with the end of the Cold War? The people were not only promised peace, but also security, and freedom from fear and from want. Where is this security today? The promises made to us were fraudulent. The United States has the largest military budget in its peacetime history and more and more billions of dollars are added to it every few months. It is pouring still more billions of dollars into militarizing and arming countries around the world. Russia is likewise preparing for war. Its great and long-suffering people are still held under a totalitarian ruling class which has now tried to add Ukraine to its empire. Each side, in its own way, is telling the truth about the other. But even if only half of what they say about each other is true, they stamp themselves as criminal fools or criminal liars. If the people are to live and prosper, capitalism must be ended.

The Socialist Party is not organised for the purpose of relieving the more or less obvious results of poverty. Our object is to abolish the cause of poverty, not to waste our time and energies in futile attempts to mitigate some of the more glaring effects. 

Many workers have yet to hear the socialist case, but our efforts to enlighten them are severely restricted by our meagre resources. We need support to enable us to carry on the struggle for socialism. The Socialist Party calls upon fellow workers who sell for wages the only commodity that they own—an ability to work—to consider its case—the case for socialism. Consider your position as a member of a class that is sweated in industry and bled in wars; consider the poverty, misery, disease, and slum life of your fellow workers and class consciousness—not leaders—will enable you to capture the control of the machinery of government and thereby the means of producing and distributing the wealth that will allow us to live like men. The alternative is existing like slaves.

The outstanding social problem of our age is poverty. It exists side by side with great wealth and affects the employed as well as the unemployed. It is the result of the private ownership by the capitalist class of society’s means of producing and distributing wealth. The facts of this concentration of ownership in the hands of a small minority of the population are well enough known.

The Socialist Party has been telling fellow workers for years, not merely that the Labour Party do not believe in socialism, but that they are an organisation which hopes and attempts to reform capitalist society, neither understanding the basic structure of capitalism which it wants to modify, nor socialism which it claims as its objective. The Labour Party can govern and can administer capitalism— only in the interests of the capitalist class. Past Labour governments are ample demonstration of this. The Labour Party can govern; it can and must make promises which induce the electorate to give it support—but can it keep them?

The problem with the working class is the modesty of its demands. It could organise the economic and political life, not in the interests of the employers, the profiteers and the bureaucrats, but in its own simple interests of all the people, who want to oppress nobody, to exploit nobody, to war on no other people. It could organise production not for the profit of a handful of capitalists but for the use and enjoyment of all. It could build homes, instead of bombs to destroy homes; provide for the health and welfare of all, instead of for the destruction of nature. It could set such an example of democracy that no tyranny could withstand the uprising of its own slaves. For this, the working class needs nothing but an understanding of the task and the political power to perform the task. Up to now, however, the working class has been content to leave its fate in the hands of the leaders of the parties of capitalism.

Up to now, however, the working class, and especially the organised labour movement, has been content to leave its own fate and the fate of the nation in the hands of the twin parties of capitalism. We seek nothing more than to be part and parcel of its loyal socialist wing because it will be our party no less than the party of the working class as a whole. We are convinced that great and stirring days are ahead. We are convinced that the working class will soon start its mighty stride along the road of independent political action in its own name and under the red flag. We remain socialists – independent socialists. We are independent of capitalism, of all capitalist governments, of all capitalist politics. We are democrats, consistent and thoroughgoing democrats because we are consistent socialists. The working class, and we as part of it, need democracy, widening and deepening democracy.

THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION

 Building a sustainable future will require the end of capitalism and the creation of world socialism.

Stripped down to the basics, the reformist critique of inequality can be described as the rich are rich because they are rich, and the poor are poor because they are poor, and will remain poor until they get more.

 

Socialism is not an idea engendered in the brains of men out of nothing but arises from the present system itself, a socialist must have an understanding of the present system; particularly he or she must understand what is capital. 

 

Capital is money invested in land, buildings, machinery, tools, raw material, labour power, for the purpose of returning a surplus; and the only source from which this surplus can come is the unpaid labour of the wage worker. Capital, therefore, is wealth used to exploit wage workers.

 

Capitalists are rich because they own the means of wealth production, and consequently the resultant product; and the workers are poor because they possess nothing but their labour-power, which they are compelled to sell to the capitalists in order to live. As the value of labour-power is determined by the cost of its reproduction, that is to say, the necessary food, clothing and shelter to enable the worker to maintain oneself in a fit state to do a job, and reproduce by supporting a family, increases in the wealth produced are of benefit, primarily, to the capitalist class.

The essential features of capitalism are:

1. the ownership of the means of wealth production by a propertied class which lives by owning;

2. the sale of their labour-power by the property-less majority for salaries or wages;

3. the production of goods for sale.

The Labour Party does not propose abolishing these essential features of the capitalist economic system. We say that only with socialism will the poverty and insecurity of the workers be brought to an end. The risk of war will be removed only with the removal of the commercial rivalries of capitalism. The Labour Party programme will fail, not because of the personal merits or demerits of its leaders, but because it is wholly a programme of reforms of capitalism.

The Socialist Party alone has seen that there must be socialists before there can be socialism and acts on it. Socialism can only be achieved by the success of the working class in its struggle against the owning class. The World Socialist Movement is built upon the facts of this class struggle. It is useful and necessary therefore to learn what the class struggle really is and the field in which it is carried on.

Our capitalist opponents allege that we socialists make the struggle ourselves by appealing to class hatred and stirring up discontent which should be left undisturbed.

The fact that society is made up of owners of property and those who practically have no property, naturally leads each section to take action to protect its interests. Owners of wealth seek to hold on to their possessions and add to them. The working class, own no wealth as a class and is compelled to take action to protect their interests as a working and dispossessed group of men and women.

 The interests of the workers every day is to live as well as they can while employed by the owning class. Naturally, the interests of workers and owners clash, because the owners employ the workers to get a profit or surplus out of the work done, and the smaller the proportion given to workers as wages, the more there is left for profits.

Is then the struggle between workers and employers over wages and working conditions the class struggle? Is that the struggle which carries the hope of victory for the workers? Is that struggle for better wages and shorter hours, etc., the real fight? Is the workshop, the factory, the mine or strike headquarters, the real final and chief battleground of the class struggle?

The workers must seek masters and obtain the best terms for the sale of their working powers. The whole working life of the working class means that they are engaged in the class struggle, a struggle to uphold the interests of their class in the daily conflict with employers.

It does not depend upon the workers’ state of mind, ignorance or alertness. The struggle is bound to exist whether it is recognised or not. The existence of a body of the population with no means of living but of working for the group of owners —that fact alone denotes a class struggle. The workers cannot take action to seek work and wages without displaying the conflict of interests between them and employers, and the inevitable struggle that is involved in it.

THE ECONOMIC FIELD.

The continual struggle about hours and wages seems to some to be petty and ineffectual, and they, therefore, deny that these daily struggles of trade unionists and other workers are a part of the class struggle. But these never-ceasing battles over details of wages and hours are the actual result of the conflict of interests and are inseparable from the struggle of the working class to live as wage slaves in a society which allows them no other way of living as a class.

The field of industry is therefore a battleground of the class struggle, but it is not the only one. Around the question of “the job,” and job conditions, the workers are always compelled to struggle, and always will be while there is a working class dependent upon employers for existence. The changes in hours and wages always taking place never destroy the power of the employers over the workers. Through all the variations of hours and wages, there is but, on average, a subsistence wage for the worker, with rapid exhaustion of his physical powers. The economic battleground of the class struggle is limited to guerrilla warfare, with no chance of a victory for the working class.

LIMITATIONS OF ECONOMIC ACTION.

In the industrial field, the power of the workers to fight the employers is small to-day. The workers have practically no savings, and cannot stop work for long. To withhold their labour-power from the employers is in most cases to simply postpone their surrender.

The workers cannot stop the use of modern wages-saving technology. Almost every step in industrial development throws the scale heavily against the workers, who in spite of the long strikes and lock-outs are eventually defeated.

Trade unions, too, have helped to keep alive a narrow, sectional or trade outlook among the workers and do not easily promote a class outlook. It takes much time for the various branches of workers to realise that the competition and conflict among themselves is itself a result of the position of the working class. The workers do not quickly grasp the fact that they are driven to compete with each other because the economic system of to-day reduces each worker to a seller of merchandise (labour-power) in a market where there are fewer buyers than sellers.

Where is the sinister and powerful factor which plays so much havoc with the workers’ efforts to fight for better conditions? That factor is the labour leader who, for the sake of careerism or to earn the goodwill of the employers—side-tracks the struggles of the worker into blind alleys and trusts in the employers.

THE POLITICAL FIELD.

The employing class maintain their supremacy in the struggle because they have control of powers which enable them to defeat the workers. That power is political. How are the great strikes of our time smashed? Not because the employers rely upon economic means, but because they make use of the law at the disposal of the political rulers. Every Emergency Powers Act, Trades Disputes Act, and prosecution of strikers shows where the real power lies.

Beyond the mere victory in a strike, the employers have the wider and permanent victory of being still in control and possession of the means of production, etc., and that is why they so carefully and strenuously seek to retain control of the political machine.

The real success in the class struggle by the workers can only be secured if they are able to obtain control of the machinery by which the employers at present dominate. That is if the class struggle is to be waged victoriously by the workers they must win political power, and thus get the machinery in their hands to put an end to capitalist ownership.

 

The economic battlefield of the class-struggle is one therefore where the workers are bound to continually struggle within capitalism for a bare existence.

 

The political battlefield of the class struggle is the only battlefield where the workers can finally win and abolish the struggle altogether by abolishing classes and capitalism altogether.

 

Necessary though it is that the workers should struggle on the economic field, the most important battleground of the class struggle is on the political field. But they must become conscious of their class interests—they must fight for socialism.

Emancipation from Money 7/7

 

What a waste of the ingenuity and skills of the computer analysts, programmers and software and hardware engineers. All these digital algorithms are being designed for one purpose: to allow those with money to access it and to deny those without wealth in a society based on private property and buying and selling. Another example of how today under capitalism scientific knowledge and technology are prostituted and used to serve anti-social ends.

In a rationally-organised society, where we produced goods to satisfy the various needs of people and where people had free access according to their individually-defined needs to what had been produced, the same technology could be used to set up and operate the efficient system of stock control that would be needed to ensure that the stores were always stocked up with the products people had indicated they wanted.

The economists tell us that property and buying and selling are inevitable because of the scarcity of resources — because there is not enough wealth to go around, there has to be monetary rationing. This would be a good reason for the existence of money were it true, but as it is evidently false we must dismiss it as yet another example of the confusion of the experts of the economics text-books. We are now surrounded by a capacity to produce an abundance of wealth

It is at this stage in the argument that the economists bow out of the argument the psychologists step in. “Fair enough’’, they admit, “we are prepared to accept that there is no economic reason for money rationing.” The real reason money is needed, they say, is because without such rationing we would all take more than we need. Greed becomes the reason to oppose a money-free society. However, it is a product of a system in which private property exists. Imagine if everyone was given unlimited money to spend on what they liked—but for just one day. Of course, the stores and the shelves would be emptied, with people hoarding provisions in anticipation of the coming day when their wage packets would once again restrict their spending. So poverty, or the expectation of poverty, breeds a desire to not only obtain enough to survive but to obtain more than your poverty allows you. The desire to escape poverty under capitalism is labelled greed.

Now think about a money-free society where all goods are freely available. Will people take more than they need when they know that wealth will be there for the taking whenever they want it? The psychologists, with their minds contaminated by the conditioned behaviour of property society,  conclude that always men and women must act as anti-socially as we are forced to now. Yet it is not “human nature” that stands in the way of a money-free society, but our consent to the continuation of private property. When we wage slaves to get rid of the institution of property, money will have no more use than gas lighting in an age of electricity. Exchange will have no meaning when there are no property rights to pass from one person to another. When the community commonly owns and democratically controls the means of producing and distributing wealth, there will be no non-owners to buy things from or sell things to, to steal from or to give to. Wages will be replaced by cooperative labour; classes will be replaced by social equality; money will be replaced by free access to all wealth. The richness and beauty of the world are there for enjoying. We have always argued that many workers would arrive at conclusions similar to those of socialists on their own, without encountering socialist speakers or publications.

 The basic causes of problems should be attacked, not just the symptoms. For the Socialist Party, it is the pursuit of profit which is responsible for the ills of society—for gross inequalities, for the bloodshed of war, for the waste of production, for people's need to obey and conform. Our alternative is a system without money or the profit motive, based on cooperation not competition, with work done by volunteers. We counter the “lazy person" argument by pointing out that there would still be plenty of motivation to work in a society where people would be cooperating to produce the best possible, free of stress and worries. Without useless pointless jobs and the waste of wars and so on. it would be possible to produce an abundance of goods, for people to take as they wish.