Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The Socialist Party and Parliament

 


We are solely concerned with the establishment of socialism. This cannot be obtained until a majority of the workers want it and work for it. Once the workers do understand and want socialism, and without this socialism cannot be established, then they will vote delegates to Parliament to take control of political power for the sole purpose of establishing socialism.


In Britain, it is Parliament that makes the laws and provides for their enforcement. Parliament controls the armed forces and the police — two instruments of class oppression. It can therefore crush any attempt at the seizure of power by a minority. It will be able to continue doing so as long as the working class votes into power its economic and political enemies. The capture of political power and the machinery of government (Parliament) by a Socialist working class is necessary for the successful carrying through of the Socialist revolution. Before abolishing the need for Parliament it must first be captured. Our Declaration of Principles points out that the armed forces of the nation are controlled by Parliament, the centre of political power. Once the workers obtain a majority in Parliament, for the purpose of establishing Socialism, they will have control of the armed forces and no captain with ten soldiers will be able to disperse them.


Political power through control of the state machine is the means whereby the owning class is able to dominate society. There are no capitalists at factory gates reading proclamations about their ownership rights. Any disturbance at the factory gate is handled by police or, if it gets nasty, by the armed forces. These coercive agencies are under the direct control of the political machine. The legality of private property institutions is decided by the state. To gain possession of all the means of production and distribution by the whole community it is an inescapable necessity to capture political power. Obviously, only a worldwide working-class majority with a socialist understanding would be interested in gaining political power to end class society. Parliament is a capitalist institution now because the great majority of workers vote for capitalist parties. When the quality of the vote changes, so will the purpose for which it is put. Then, Parliament will be used to strip the capitalist class of their ownership of the means of living. What, in the final analysis, gives the licence for continuing capitalism is the workers’ approval of it. Fortunately, the democratic process cuts both ways. When the workers cease supporting capitalism and exploring blind alleys, they will vote for socialism.


The capitalist class, which, according to leftist folklore, could do nothing to stop the workers from taking over the factories, suddenly becomes endowed with mystic powers the moment the political field is discussed. The left hasn’t even learned that the capitalist as 'such does nothing. It is workers who run his state for him, just as they run his factories. What they are really saying is that workers in the civil service and armed forces would continue supporting capitalism. Even if this were true it could not determine the outcome of events. But there is nothing to insulate workers in government jobs or armed forces from the spread of socialist understanding. Socialist ideas will permeate all sections of the working class. The leftist industrial-actionists fail to grasp the significance of a world majority wanting socialism. This is part of the weakness of élitist thinking. They cannot visualise the workers being self-reliant and having no dependency on leaders.


The capitalist class have economic power because they have political power and not the other way around. They control the state machine and the armed forces through Parliament and are confirmed in their control by the working class at election times.


We are organised as a political party not out of preference (which implies that there are other ways of achieving our object) but because all the evidence of history and an analysis of capitalist society shows that this is the only way to achieve working-class emancipation. Without first gaining control of the state (the public organ of coercion and repression) through which the capitalists maintain their privileged relationship to the means of life by keeping the working class in its propertyless position, any minority movement seeking to challenge them will inevitably be beaten by the armed forces and the police who remain under the control of the capitalist class.


It does not follow that because Parliament is at present an institution of so-called “representatives” it must necessarily remain so. Once a working-class who knows what they want and how to get it sends their delegates to Parliament with a mandate to capture political control of the state machine, it will cease to function as an instrument of class rule and become the indispensable instrument for our emancipation.


Soviets cannot establish socialism

1. because they are economic organisations and not political; and

2. because they are based on the workplace, not on the centre of political power

Before an electoral demonstration of a socialist majority, socialist ideas will have penetrated all strata of society — including central and local government, the police and the armed forces and this would strengthen the growing demand for socialism.


However, control of the state machine is necessary

1. to lop off its repressive features, and in order:

2. to prevent any possibility of their being used in desperate attempts by counter-revolutionary groups to frustrate the wishes of the majority.

Armed forces will continue as long as capitalism because capitalism needs them. The capitalist class won't simply give up armed forces in the face of opposition. That is, they will still exist until consciously done away with.


We must point out that membership of the Socialist Party is dependent on acceptance of our aims and objectives set out in our Declaration of Principles. No one is forced to join or prevented from leaving through disagreement. What for example would be the point of an advocate of minority action attempting to join the Socialist Party, other than possibly to be disruptive? Such a person is at liberty to join organisations which advocate his or her views. Party members finding themselves in disagreement with the Declaration of Principles invariably leave the Party — what would be the point in remaining in an organisation dedicated to a method and object with which you disagree?

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

CHOMSKY ON SOCIALISM (video)

 


How Socialism Works

 


The Socialist Party is opposed to the policy of putting forward a programme of reforms in addition to the objective of socialism. It has sometimes been argued that a socialist party can usefully have a programme of reforms or immediate demands, consisting of measures to improve the workers’ conditions under capitalism. The objections to this are many. One is that such a programme inevitably attracts the support of people interested in the reforms but not interested in socialism. This leads, as experience has shown in the past, to the socialist objective being pushed into the background, and to the socialist membership being swamped by the reformist element. A second objection is that the party which adopts such a policy finds itself advocating reforms which are part of the programme of openly capitalist parties—which causes confusion in the minds of the workers and leads to a demand by the reformist element of the would-be socialist party that it should co-operate with capitalist parties in order to put the reforms into operation.


A further objection is that no matter what reforms are introduced capitalism will still remain. It will frequently nullify the temporary improvement brought about by each reform and at the same time produce other evils which in turn demand still more reforms. The only solution to the workers’ problem is the introduction of socialism, and this can be brought about only when a majority have been won over to an understanding of socialism and has organised to achieve it. All the time and effort spent on reforms is time and effort lost to the propagation of socialism.


It won’t be the Socialist Party as an organisation separate from the working class that would have a parliamentary majority, but the socialist-minded working class. It is they who will have won political control and the socialist MPs will be their delegates. This presupposes, as you say, a socialist majority outside parliament, one which will have organised itself not just into a socialist political party, but also in places of work ready to keep useful production going. Also, there would be similar movements in control of political power or about to be in other advanced capitalist countries.


So what would the majority of socialist delegates do? The main reason for going into parliament, as an elected central law-making body, is to be in a position to control the machinery of government; not for the purpose of forming a government as under capitalism but, as a minimum, to prevent the powers of the state being used against the movement for socialism. But, as the state is not just the public power of coercion but also the centre of social administration, to use this aspect to co-ordinate the social revolution from capitalism to socialism as well as to keep essential administrative services going.


There is no need to create from scratch a central co-ordinating body – as the syndicalists and others have proposed, whether based on industrial unions or some central workers’ council – when one that can be adapted and used already exists. In our view, winning control of the existing political structure is the most direct route to socialism. Trying to smash it would be suicidal; trying to ignore it risks violence and unnecessary disruption. Why try to set up alternative central departments to deal with such matters as agriculture, education, energy, health and transport? The same at the local level: why can’t existing elected councils continue to administer local services?


So a socialist majority in parliament would have to decide to adapt the existing central administrative structure to make it fully democratic. The main measure, though, would be to withdraw the state’s sanction and backing for the capitalist class ownership of the means of production. Because most productive resources are vested in limited liability companies this will be relatively straightforward. Companies are legal institutions created by the state which gives them an artificial legal personality that can own property. All that would be required would be to declare that all companies are dissolved and that henceforth their physical assets are the common property of all the people. The capitalist class will have been dispossessed and all their legal titles, their stocks and shares will have become useless, unenforceable pieces of paper. As an immediate measure, those working in places producing something useful or providing a useful service would continue running them, producing for direct use and no longer for profit.

 

Assuming that there is no attempt by some minority to try to thwart by force of arms the democratically expressed will of the people for socialism, the working class’s use of the state would then be over. The state would in fact cease to exist as such and its administrative side would become an unarmed, democratic administrative centre. Socialism will have been established. 


As regards the question of voting for individual measures in Parliament it is not denied that certain measures may, at least temporarily, alleviate the hardship of some groups of workers. In such a case, if the effect of the proposal was clearly beneficial, Socialist Party M.P.s would be instructed by the Party to vote for it while pointing out its limitations. They would, of course, in no case invite support or elections on such grounds.


It should, however, be observed that most of the proposals put forward are not beneficial at all. It can be said, for example, that the past Acts of Parliament extending the franchise were useful to the socialist movement, as also Acts providing and extending education. These cases are fairly clear but a proposal to introduce family allowances would in effect merely have the result of redistributing wages between workers with young children and workers without.

Sunday, December 25, 2022

Socialism is the Remedy 

 

MUSTER UNDER OUR BANNER

Nationalism has nothing to offer—except a change of masters. Your real enemy is the present system. Capitalism, with its hideous contradiction of mass poverty amid the potential for plenty, is your real enemy. It persecutes you at every level, advertising itself as a world of plenty and then rewarding the wealth-producers with deprivation. For too long workers have suffered under this rotten set-up, when the means are at hand to create a society of production for need in which we can all give according to in abilities and take according to our self-determined needs. The clear duty of a real socialist party is to work for real socialism. It has no justification for existence apart from that. The cause of working-class misery is private ownership of the means of life. The interests of the workers, who do not own the means of life, are opposed to the interests of the capitalists, who do own them. This clash of interests is the class struggle. You have to choose. Either you take action to get socialism or you have to put up with the consequences of capitalism. There is no third choice. This is what socialism really means and its basis would be the ownership of the means of production and distribution by the whole community. The alternative is a social system in which the production of goods and the operation of services are carried on solely and directly for use, without buying and selling, profit-making or the wages system. We all want to get the best the world can offer. 


Our sole object is the achievement of socialism—a social system in which everything that is in or on the earth will be the common possession of all mankind. Everyone will be on an equal footing. There will be no frontiers, no buying and selling, and no privileged groups—except the old, the young, and the infirm.


We hold that capitalism, the system under which goods are produced by the workers for the profit of a relatively small section of owners of the means of production, is now the system that prevails all over the earth; that it breeds wars, slumps, internecine conflicts, and misery for the mass of the people; that there is a constant class struggle going on between the owners of the means of production, and those that operate them—the working class; that all the reforms put forward and fought for by well-meaning people have not touched the fringe of the problem of working class subjection but, instead, though even unintentionally, have pushed further away the day of emancipation; that, so long as the present system prevails there is no remedy for this state of affairs; the only way out is to abolish capitalism and establish socialism in its place; that State-ownership is not socialism, but a particular form of capitalism; that the workers must organise together internationally to attain their freedom from the conditions that oppress and frustrate them.


The Socialist Party has no desire to add itself to the number of your leaders. We are not back-slapping or head-patting to gain supporters. We seek your understanding and cooperation in the biggest of all projects, not to fight for the abolition of this or that or the amelioration of that or the other, but for a complete revolution in our social system. The capitalist system (the private ownership of the means of living) must go, we say. Its place must be taken by a system of common ownership, based on production for use only. This remedy is the only one worthwhile for the workers. Nothing, we say, can be accomplished until this is done.  The Socialist Party seeks the support and understanding of the working class and offers itself as a means by which the workers, through the ballot box, can obtain political power for this purpose. Since 1904, when this Party was founded, socialism has been our sole aim, and for that reason, we are opposed to all other political parties. The only way in which mankind can bring about social change and build a fraternal society, free of war, is to establish socialism. This will not come about as an expression of non-violence but as the conscious act of a socialist working class. 


The parties and politicians you voted for stand for capitalism. Those elected are in office now on your mandate; you elected them to preside over your own poverty and exploitation. We would suggest that you consider taking control of your own lives. Instead of electing politicians and parties to run your own exploitation, you can organise your own future. We, the working class, can mandate our own representatives to go into the seats of government, local, national and international, and abolish the entire system of private and/or State ownership of the means of living which gives the accumulation of profits priority over our needs.


We call on all workers to join us to establish a society based on serving our needs instead of the profit needs of the minority class which dominates our lives today We can create a world in which poverty, famine, slums, unemployment and international conflict could not exist. Such a system we call socialism: a moneyless, classless world in which we all share in the ownership of wealth; a world in which we co-operate voluntarily to produce all the things we need and where we will have free and equal access to satisfy our requirements. 

Pipes of Peace (music video)

 




Merry Marxmas


It's that day of the year again. This is the time when everyone is caught in a deluge of hypocrisy. Christmas is supposed to be a time of good cheer when the harsh reality of this world is briefly forgotten. But it is impossible to disregard capitalism even at Christmas. It is the time of the year when the consumer goods market is stuffed with a mass of gadgets and gifts of all kinds, when shops are anxiously stocking their shelves in the hope of a sales boom. Once more we suffer the customary sentimental piffle in the media regarding Christmas. This is the season of goodwill in the midst of hunger and wars. The ugly truth is it still be a capitalist world. You will still be members of the working class and the problems you have will still face you on Boxing Day.

We will be told again and again that Christmas is for the children. Yet while we fill our bellies with turkey and trifle, millions of children are going hungry and thousands are dying of hunger. The reality is that Christmas is for the food and drink industry and the toy businesses. Capitalism has reduced a festival of making merry to a celebration of consumerism. Charles Dickens's Scrooge had it right -  its all humbug.

Socialist Courier wishes all a speedy end to the degrading, inhuman society we live under. We address our Christmas message to the working class, enjoying yet another wretched holiday under capitalism―the system they chose to perpetuate. Socialism will be like one long Christmas Day, a world where the needs of everybody—young and old. man and woman, black and white—will be satisfied.

Friday, December 23, 2022

Socialism Now

Only with the introduction of socialism will the problems of capitalism end. As revolutionaries, we should fight the collective war between us and the ruling class, not play the hostage game at their bargaining table. We have nothing to say to our rulers on how to run capitalism, we should not be drawn into fighting their battles. We advocate a world without borders, social classes, leaders, governments and armies. A world without money or wages, exchange, buying and selling. Where people can give freely of their abilities and take according to their own self-defined needs. A global system in which each person has a free and democratic say in how their world is run. It is workers who produce everything society needs and provides all of its services. Capitalism is a barrier to the fair and needed use of the world’s productive forces. In a world of potential abundance, profit imposes widespread artificial scarcity.  We have always said that socialism can only be established by a conscious, participating working class organised not only politically to capture and destroy the State machine but also outside parliament ready to take over and run industry and society generally.


Capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the world’s billions, because reform does not address the basic contradiction between profit and need. Governments cannot be depended upon because they only act as an executive of capitalism. An expansion of democracy, while welcome, makes little difference if candidates can only offer variations on the same policies. Capitalism must be abolished if we as a species are to thrive. No amount of reform, however great, will work. Change must be global and irreversible. It must involve all of us. We need to erase borders and frontiers; abolish states and governments and false concepts of nationalism. We need to abolish our money systems, and with it buying, selling and exchanging. And in place of this, we need to establish a different global social system – a society in which there is common ownership and true democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources. A society where the everyday things we need to live in comfort are produced and distributed freely and for no other reason than that they are needed. Socialists build that new world, by building an understanding of what socialism will be like.


We feel no shame or guilt in inviting you to join the Socialist Party. It is no boast when we say that it is the only political party in this country worthy of working-class support; the only party whose sole object is the overthrow of this system whereby the majority of human beings —the working class—produce the wealth of the world for the small minority—the capitalists—who own it. Our organisation is small, but it is based on principles sound and irrefutable. Socialists would ask where is this common-sense in working men who continue to vote for political parties representing the capitalist class. It is indeed a strange state of affairs when we live in a society which is capable of producing an abundance of goods for the benefit of all men, yet that production is restricted artificially because a minority of men and women who form the capitalist class, can see no profit at the end of the day. Workers after all produce all the goods and services, they run the capitalist system from top to bottom, and yet they own virtually nothing of the means of production except their right to defend themselves in times of war, and the right to be subservient to them in times of peace. We believe that the human race is gradually learning the simple lesson that the people as a whole are wiser for the public good than any privileged class. we can only attempt to educate our fellow-workers, as we in our turn have had our eyes opened to the nature of society, and what makes it tick and explode.


Socialism is the complete antithesis of capitalism. In a socialist world private and/or state ownership of society’s means of life will give way to social ownership and production of goods and services solely for use. So goods and services will no longer be produced as commodities for sale and profit. Accordingly, there will be no role in a socialist society for a means of exchange; hence, the entire, utterly wasteful commercial sinews of capitalism will be obsolete. The classless, wageless, moneyless society envisaged in the socialist aphorism: “From each according to their ability; to each according to their needs” will become a reality. A world free from the corruptive influences of money and power where the government of people will give way to a simple administration of things.


Such a society – founded on co-operation instead of competition – could not be established by guns, bombs or violence. It can only be established and only maintained by the conscious democratic action of the majority. Such a majority would be the democratic foundation of a free, socialist world. If the question of counter-revolutionary violence is hypothesised then obviously that violence would have to be eliminated; as socialists have traditionally said “peacefully if we may; forcefully if we must”, but, given the conditions created by a socialist-conscious majority, the capitalist reaction would be deprived of material nourishment.

Adam Buick interviewed on socialism (video)

 


Capitalist Exploitation

 


Without a doubt, the most misused word in politics today is the word socialism. Socialism will be a class-free, money-free society without prices or wages wherein production and distribution of wealth will be carried out for the sole purpose of satisfying people’s needs. Socialism will be an global system, of necessity knowing no national frontiers. In socialism all mankind will have free and equal access to the fruits of social production upon the principle of: from each in accordance with his mental or physical abilities; to each in accordance with his needs.


This is what socialism means. It has nothing to do with dictatorships, nationalisation, “workers’ republics” or schemes for reforming this or that feature of capitalism. Socialism will be brought about only by the democratic action of a majority of socialists — members of the working class who have learned that the problems that confront them in our present society arise inevitably out of the nature of capitalism and that socialism is the only alternative to capitalism.



The task of the World Socialist Movement, then, is not to parade, prattle and protest against this or that evil of capitalism — evils we know to be an inevitable consequence of our present system — but to advocate socialism — not just the word, but its meaning.


The Socialist Party has always said that socialism can be established only when there is a majority of conscious socialists — people who understand socialism and want it. In line with this principle, we must obviously ensure, as far as we can, that our members all understand the case for socialism. In that sense we do ‘vet’ applicants for membership, which does not mean that joining  is like being interrogated by the thought police. The Socialist Party simply tries to find out the applicant’s political ideas. If he or she disagrees with socialism, then clearly they cannot become members; if they agree they are welcomed into our ranks.



Socialists are in favour of workers grabbing whatever crumbs may fall from their masters’ tables; so we recognise that some reforms can be said to have benefitted the working class. This does not prevent us still struggling for socialism, which is the whole loaf rather than a few crumbs.


When the word “exploit” or "exploitation” is used by socialists, what is really meant ?



To exploit is to make use of, but the directors of a company formed to “ exploit ” certain oilbearing territories do not propose merely to use the land in question, nor do the shareholders of the company intend to take any part in the actual work of oil getting. In fact the mass of the shareholders will probably never even see the land from which the oil comes.



Further, the company is not formed for the pleasure of providing oil to a needy world, nor for the vindictiveness of polluting the sea and the air. It has only one purpose—to provide dividends for the holders of shares in the company. It is only because the particular oil wells appear to hold out the promise of being fruitful in this direction that they figure at all in the prospectus of the company. From the same point of view it is immaterial whether the oil be good or bad, Russian, Dutch, or American. The claims of patriotism, religion and humanity take second place before the claims of the purse.



The question that presents itself, then, is why should oil wells be instrumental in producing dividends as well as oil? This brings us to the question of the source of dividends. A glance at the published returns of companies carries the matter a little further. They show us that dividends come out of profits, past or present. But whence come profits?



As soon as the company is formed work goes rapidly ahead to get the production of oil under way, because until oil is sold no funds flow to the company, apart from loans and what the shareholders provide. When oil is sold over a definite period the difference between all the expenses of getting it and the money produced by its sale represents profit; but we still need to know from whence this profit comes—how it is possible for the production and sale of oil to be the means of also producing profit. The answer is a simple one.



In order to get oil produced, workers as well as oil wells are required. If the workers were to receive in return for their labour the equivalent in value of the oil produced, there would be nothing left for the shareholders of the company—there would be no profit from which to draw dividends. It follows, therefore, that the employees of the company cannot receive a value equivalent to the oil produced.



How are the wages of the company’s workpeople arrived at? Experience tells us. They are paid on the average what it costs them to live and bring up families, regardless of the result in the form of oil due to the application of their energies in the company’s service. This wage may differ according to place and type of worker, but it still remains what it costs the worker to live.


Whatever the wage of the worker, however, it is far below the value of what he produces, and it is owing to this fact that the investors and directors of the company expect it to prosper and anticipate dividends. It is out of the surplus labour of the oil worker, the labour above the value of his means of existence, that the profit and the dividends of the shareholders will come. An illustration will make the matter plain. If one man can lie in the sun while two others work to provide him and themselves with the food and so forth they need, then the first man is living on the surplus labour of the other two. This, on, a larger scale, is the position of the oil company. It is neither the land nor the oil that is exploited, but the worker. It is he in reality who is made use of by the company.


Exploitation, then, is squeezing from the worker surplus labour. Other things remaining the same, the more surplus labour squeezed from the worker the greater is the exploitation, regardless of the level of wages paid, and the more successful is the company in providing dividends for its shareholders.


It is, therefore, plain that exploitation is the root of all accumulations of wealth by private individuals. At one time it was the exploitation of chattel slaves, at another the exploitation of serfs. In modern times it is the exploitation of wage workers, or, more truly, wage slaves.


With this end in view the earth has been covered with manufacturing centres, and the bulk of its population reduced to beasts of burden, but without the security of livelihood of the latter.


Exploitation has brought into existence the glittering civilisations that have expressed the agony as much as the achievement of man across the centuries. The process will continue until the workers awake to the fact that it is they who produce and distribute the wealth of the world, and that they have no need to carry parasites on their backs to do so. The day the workers arrive at this knowledge exploitation will cease.