The Earth Must Belong To All

 

Our object is the economic freedom of the producing class. This will mean the end of the present capitalist competitive system and the introduction of its successor, the cooperative commonwealth. We campaign for the end of the private ownership of the means of production The capitalist class owns the machinery of production, they don’t use it. The wage-working class use it, but they don’t own it. The capitalist class demands that they reap the profits. The greater the wage, the smaller the profit; the smaller the wage, the greater the profit. The capitalist system, with its extreme wealth upon the one hand, its abject and widespread poverty on the other; and its political corruption, is industrial slavery. In the present system capitalists must buy labour-power as cheaply as possible. Whipped into subservience by their poverty they are forced into the industrial servitude. They stand at the machine and feed it; they become cogs in the revolving wheels. The capitalists’ prosperity is built upon broken lives.

The Socialist Party not interested in the idea of violence. We are not insurrectionists. We are realists.  We have never advocated the use of violence. Our movement is worldwide because it is born of and follows the development of the capitalist system, which in its operation is confined to no country, but by its agencies of production, exchange, communication, and transportation, has leapt all national frontiers and made the world as a whole the arena of its activities. All the peoples of the planet must be drawn into relations of cooperation, to be the economic and social basis of human harmony. We produce by our toil all the wealth of the world. We have little or nothing to show for it. We build all the palaces and live in slums and shacks. We produce everything and possess practically nothing. Someone who controls and owns the means that sustain our lives, owns and controls us. We are his slave and in no sense free. So long as the workers are divided, economically and politically, they will remain in subjection, exploited of what they produce and treated with contempt by the parasites who live off our sweat.

The government oppress and suppress us. The political parties stand for the capitalist system, for the private ownership of the means of wealth production and the operation of industry in the interest of the capitalist class. They are committed to the perpetuation of wage-slavery, and whether one or the other wins, you always lose. It ought not to be difficult for  working people to decide which of these parties act in our interests. Unfortunately a great many workers do not know. Many are opposed to socialism. You still think there is still opportunities for upward mobility under capitalism and you fear that the socialists will take what little you have and divide it among the shiftless and thriftless. It will be the capitalists who will lay you off, push you into debt, who will bankrupt you, drive you into destitution. You will be stripped of whatever meagre wealth you own.

The Socialist Party is the only party that does not want a vote unless the person who casts that vote has the intelligence to know what he or she is voting for. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class — men and women.. The Socialist Party proposes that all shall be economically free. The Socialist Party is the party of the workers, organised to express in political terms their determination to break their fetters and rise to the dignity of free men and women. Fellow-workers must unite and develop their political power to conquer and abolish the capitalist political state and clear the way for industrial and social democracy.

We live in the most favoured times in all history. We have resources in  abundance, the most productive technology the world has ever known, and  eager and educated workers ready and willing to apply their knowledge and skills. The  unity of the workers must first be effected before there can be any progress toward emancipation.

 In the competitive capitalist system we are pitted against each other. We make war upon each other. We know that our fellow-workers are in an economic condition in which they are compelled to fight other fellow-workers. The Socialist Party is concerned with the environment. We do not propose a mere change of party — we propose a change of system. We are not reformers — we are revolutionists.  We do not support any other party, and we would never compromise political principle for electoral gain. We are looking forward to that time when there is no master and no slave. Capitalism is war. With socialism comes peace. Technology will be our servant. At the touch of a button, flick of a switch, automation will produce in abundance for all. What work men and women will engage in will be joy. Every one will have leisure.

Why we are socialists

The master class are quite prepared to use the present world pandemic crisis for the purpose of beating down the standard of living of the working class and to begin the next booming period of trade and profit-reaping with cheapened labour-power.

However, the Socialist Party points out to members of the working class that the aim of our class must be the abolition of the capitalist system, and the construction in its place of a system of society based on the common ownership of the instruments and means of wealth production and distribution. When that is accomplished there will be an end to all class struggles, because there will be an end to classes, and mankind will arise from the evil dreams of the past to the realisation of a sane, noble and free existence.

Although most people these days would admit to being concerned about the state of the planet we live on it is remarkable how little the destructive tendencies of the profit system are blamed for causing environmental damage. Yet it should be impossible for us to ignore the fact that our relationship to our environment, and the effect we have on it, is governed entirely by the kind of society we live in.

This should not be seen as “economic determinism”; it does not mean ideas simply spring from economic conditions like mushrooms from a compost heap. Indeed, at any point in time one will probably find an array of ideas on any subject. What causes some of these to take root and spread while others are passed over or allowed to wither on the vine? According to historical materialism, a key factor, but by no means the only factor, in this social selection of ideas is the economic one. Thus, the precise origins of an idea is less important than its utility for society and its mode of production in particular.

But what is a “mode of production”? This has two aspects—the “forces of production”, and the “relations of production” as constituted by the form of ownership of the means of living. With the emergence of private property and the state several thousand years ago these relations became differentiated into antagonistic class relationships. As ownership of the means of living became concentrated in the hands of a small minority, this minority began to live off the labour of others, using the state as its means of coercion. The particular form this economic exploitation took allows us to distinguish one mode of production from another. Thus, in the relatively short history of private property society we can identify a succession of such modes: chattel slavery', feudalism and capitalism.

According to Marx, the relations of production tend to reflect the level of technological progress. However, as the productive forces develop within a particular mode of production they eventually come into conflict with, are “fettered” by, its relations of production. This conflict expresses itself as an intensification of class struggle between the exploiting class which has a vested interest in maintaining these relations and a new class whose interests lie with the further development of the productive forces (and hence the revolutionary' overthrow of those relations which block that development). The resolution of that conflict occurs when the latter class finally succeeds in capturing the state and using it to usher in the new mode of production.

Every established order tends to project an image of itself as being tunelessly grounded in nature, thereby implying change is “unnatural”. As a social order is defined by its class structure, this projection is bound up with the need for a ruling class to perpetuate the existing relations of production through which it dominates society. Such dominance is hegemonic: it is based on the acquiescence of the exploited majority rather than just crude force. Although the “objective” interests of most people should lead them to change society, they tend to accept the ruling class idea that society cannot, and should not, change. As Marx points out “the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force” (German Ideology).

Yet despite the enormous power a ruling class wields through its control over the means of disseminating ideas, change is inescapable. In this respect, the development of the productive forces exerts a subversive influence, breaking the mould of long-established ideas. Indeed, insofar as technology mediates our relationship with nature, technological change can alter our perception of “nature” and hence society.

Ideas on nature under feudalism

We can see this in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The dominant metaphor of nature up until the early modem era was an organismic one. Nature was viewed as a living organism. Its manifold parts, including humankind, were held to be fundamentally interdependent and constituting an integrated whole. Such a concept fitted in with tire close organic ties most people had with the land and with the nature of the society in which they lived. Nature was seen in essentially teleological terms; everything was designed for a purpose which supposedly emanated from God. That purpose was to benefit humankind. This anthropocentric view of nature was nevertheless couched in religious terms whereby nature was seen as a “book” through which God’s plan was revealed.

“Physico-theology”, or the religious study of nature, was the means by which one could discover what God had in store for humankind. Since God was seen as a benevolent creator the world he created was essentially good, so to act in a way that conflicted with his design was wrong. Thus the notion that the universe was designed as a Great Chain of Being in which everything was interconnected was not simply an attempt to understand how it functioned; it was a moral statement which had implications not only for the behaviour of human beings towards each other but also for their treatment of nature.

On the other hand, the Christian belief contained in the Book of Genesis that God made man “in his own image” and enjoined him to “subdue the earth” has been interpreted as sanctioning a domineering attitude to nature. A leading exponent of this view is Lynn White who argued that a traditional Christian arrogance towards nature and the driving out of pagan animistic religions is what led to our present ecological crisis. According to him, “since the roots of our trouble are largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious” (The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis).

But this “idealist” interpretation of history does not stand up to scrutiny. There is considerable evidence of environmental destruction on a large scale in the Ancient World pre-dating Christianity which can in fact be linked to the emergence of class-based forms of social organisation.

A more telling argument against White’s thesis is that it does not explain why some aspects in the Christian worldview emphasising harmony with nature became less influential in the early modern era while the theme of dominating nature came to be increasingly asserted. The latter was in fact connected with a marked increase in productive activities such as mining, deforestation and draining marshes which in turn were related to the growth of a capitalist market and scientific progress. The “tension between technological development in the world of action and the controlling organic images in the world of the mind had become too great. The old structures were incompatible with the new activities” (Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, p.2).

Rise of capitalism

The rise of capitalism undermined the old static order of feudalism in which everyone “knew their place” by bringing about increased mobility. Land enclosures and agricultural improvements resulted in the removal of labourers from the land and their transformation into an urban proletariat, no longer in intimate contact with nature’s rhythms. Furthermore, the commodification of labour power went hand-in-hand with commodification of nature itself. As Marx put it, “the mode of perceiving nature under the rule of private property is a real contempt for, and a practical degradation of, nature”.

This change in perception was reinforced by scientific developments. The Copernican revolution in astronomy which shattered the Medieval view that the earth was the centre of the universe, the growing awareness of hitherto unknown biological organisms (many of which did not appear to serve any useful purpose for humankind) in the wake of the Voyages of Discovery and the invention of the microscope, and the dawning realisation that fossils were the remains of now-extinct species, all served to undermine the old anthropocentric view of a world designed by God for the good of humankind. Such developments did not occur in a vacuum but in response to the specific needs of an emerging capitalist economy.

However, organicism was to re-surface in the shape of the Romantic Movement of the 19th century—a philosophical and aesthetic reaction to the depredations of industrial capitalism which sought solace in spiritual communion with nature. This idealisation of nature was dealt a blow by the Darwinian Revolution which represented nature as an arena of struggle in which only the fittest survived—in some respects a mirror image of the competitive ethos of Victorian capitalism—but out of Darwinism was to emerge the science of ecology.

The development of science under capitalism proved to be a double-edged sword. In a remarkable passage Engels noted that for all our claims to have “conquered nature”, it lends to take its revenge on us, thus reminding us that “we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people” but “belong to nature, and exist in its midst”:

“After the mighty advances of natural science in the present century, we are more and more placed in a position where we can get to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences of our most ordinary productive activities. But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but know themselves to be one with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and anti-natural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body" (Dialectics of Nature).

Today, we can once again find evidence of organicism in the modem environmental movement. While this has been viewed as a positive development it does have its negative side: it can lend itself to authoritarian, even fascistic, forms of social organisation. It can also lead to a misplaced and irrational opposition to science for allegedly displacing a sentimental attachment to nature by an objective analysis of it; and its tendency to deify nature, to blame humankind-in-the-abstract for our ecological crisis, rather than the society we live in, can only cripple our ability to tackle that crisis.

The Green movement world-wide has been seen to be dominated by left-wing tendencies; but this has obscured the movement's more diverse ancestry. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s there were right-wing expressions of concern for the environment, combining a mystical conception of nature with the myths of race and nation. The epitome of this outlook came with the Nazis, whose whole political ideology can be described as "ecofascist". (It is to be regretted, however, since this term blurs some important distinctions between Italian fascism and German “National Socialism".) Hitler was a vegetarian, opposed to vivisection and loved his dogs. He was an enthusiast for renewable energy sources. Himmler saw to it that the SS had it own supply of organic farm produce. The Nazis introduced the first nature reserve in Europe and began a programme of extensive reforestation.

That was then and this is now. Any right thinking person (pun intended) should of course be concerned with what's happening to our environment. It really is a scandal. What the existence of eco-fascism, shows, however, is that uninformed concern and “doing something” can have disastrous consequences. For this reason, anyone who has read of the Malthusians with the Green movement blaming over-population will have been uneasy about where their line of argument is taking them. We need to understand the social and economic causes of environmental degradation before we can take effective political action. This does not have to be difficult, but it can confound a professor.

Now when our planet is threatened as never before, the need to change society has never been so great. Only by altering our relationship with one another can we hope to transform our relationship with nature of which we are an inextricable part.

For World Peace and Permanent Economic Security for the Human Family.

All over the world capitalists try to reduce workers’ wages as the most direct way of increasing their profits. International competition and the mobility of capital have made this “cost-cutting” more ferocious. 

For several decades the world’s capacity to produce food, for instance, has far exceeded the entire human population’s need for nourishment. Yet the stockpiles of unused foodstuffs pile up unsold each year in producing nations while somewhere else in the world hundreds of millions of others are malnourished, if not actually starving to death. The paradox is explained away easily enough in market terms. Indeed, the market insists that feeding impoverished people would be harmful to them, indulging their backwardness and postponing their eventual self-sufficiency. That answer may satisfy the marketplace, but for humanity it constitutes another great, unanswered social question. Capitalism, for all its wondrous creativity and wealth, has not yet found a way to clothe the poor and feed the hungry unless they can pay for it. Capitalism is not about freedom; it’s about profits and costs. Socialism has come to be a dirty word. But it’s only once we establish a socialist society of production for use not profit that nobody will have to pay for travel, heating, food or water. It you are opposed to a system of society where the market plays no role and there is free access to goods and services

Socialism presupposes an abundance of goods so great that society could distribute them without payment and thus establish social equality, in this way social distinctions and money would ‘wither away’. A socialist society  needs no governmental coercion; and so the state, that machine of coercion, would also wither away. In order to have the label of socialism the ideas of equality, of a money-free economy, and of the withering away of the state has to prevail. ‘According to needs’ is the sole formula for equality. That equality would be possible only after the supply of goods and services had become abundant. Ours is not an age in which it is enough for a small élite of technicians to possess technological secrets in order to develop the productive capacities of society. This is an age when many millions of workers, have to be skilled, trained, taught, educated, in order that the advance should become possible. What is involved is a thorough upheaval of society in every field of its life.

Under capitalism the workers are wage slaves, slaves of the bosses. The bosses run the factories in order to maximise profits. This means that they pay workers as little as possible, that they do not hesitate to maintain unsafe working conditions to save a buck, and that poor quality products are purposely produced in order to increase profits. History has shown that these conditions are always present under capitalism, and cannot be eliminated as long as there is boss rule of the country (i.e., the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie). A capitalist has to exploit his workers in order to survive as a capitalist. One of the most important contributions that Karl Marx made to socialist ideology was his description of the relationship between the economy of a country and the nature of its government. In a capitalist state the government must necessarily be run by and for the capitalists. It is meaningless to talk about socialism without discussing the class nature of the State.

With people working together to satisfy needs, there is no question that an abundant society could be built quite quickly. Then the need for manpower would diminish, the remnants of capitalist ideology could be wiped out and the society could function guided by the principle, “From each according to ability, to each according to needs”.

It is clear that the working class is the only social force to which humanity can turn to create a pathway through the chaos and anarchy of capitalism. The working class cannot brings its curative capacity to bear upon the situation. Go beyond the demands for freedom under capitalism. If you’re interested in FREE ACCESS FOR ALL to goods and services, then it’s time to go beyond pleading.

The Economics of Insanity

Capitalism is not an efficient way of supplying crucial human needs. Just by virtue of being human, are entitled to certain basic conditions of freedom and dignity which have to be respected by others. That’s something the Socialist Party hopes everyone can accept. Yet, we live today in a capitalist world, and capitalism has completely transformed the meaning of political rights and their relation to economic and social rights. Capitalism has created a separate economic sphere with its own rules and its own forms of power; and political rights have been emptied of economic and social content. The system has produced a whole new set of social problems which belong specifically to capitalism.  

Under the capitalist system basic goods and services are produced for and obtained from the market. But above all, it’s a system in which the main economic actors, workers and employers, are dependent on the market. Market dependence is the essence of the system. This unique way of organising material life has had a relatively short history. Other societies have had markets, but only in capitalism is dependence on the market the fundamental condition of life. This means that a wide range of human activity is subject to the market and determined by its requirements in a way that was never true before. In capitalism, the workers who supply our goods and services are market-dependent because they live by selling their labour-power for a wage. In other words, labour-power has become a commodity. Capitalists depend on the market to purchase labour power and capital goods, and to sell what the workers produce.

Workers are paid for their work. That seems just the opposite of peasants exploited by landlords, peasants who pay some kind of rent to the landlords. But do workers in capitalism really get paid for all the work that they do? What are they actually paid for? They’re paid for their labour power for a certain period of time, not for what they actually produce during that time. Whatever the workers produce belongs to the capitalist, and the capitalist appropriates the difference between what the workers are paid and what their products or services will fetch on the market. So capitalists appropriate the surpluses produced by workers in the form of profit, just as landlords appropriate surpluses from peasants in the form of rent. Karl Marx called this, exploitation. Capitalism, however, means a very specific way of extracting surpluses from workers — it’s not done by means of direct coercive force but through the market.

The fact that capitalists can make profit only if they succeed in selling their goods and services on the market, and selling them for more than the costs of producing them, means that making profit is uncertain.

Capitalists have to compete with other capitalists in the same market. Competition is, in fact, the driving force of capitalism — even if capitalists often do their best to avoid it, by means, for example, of monopolies. But the social conditions that, in any given market, determine success in price competition is beyond the control of individual capitalists.

Since their profits depend on a favourable cost/price ratio, the obvious strategy for capitalists is to cut their own costs. This means above all constant pressure to cut the costs of labour. This requires constant pressure on wages, which workers constantly have to resist. It also requires constant improvements in labour productivity. That means finding the organisational and technical means of extracting as much surplus as possible from workers within a fixed period of time, at the lowest possible cost.

To keep this process going requires regular investment, the reinvestment of surpluses. Investment requires constant capital accumulation. So there’s a constant need to maximise profit. The point is that this requirement is imposed on capitalists, regardless of their own personal needs and wants. Even the most modest and socially responsible capitalist is subject to these pressures and is forced to accumulate by maximising profit, just to stay in business.

We can talk as much as we like about corporate social responsibility. But capitalism itself puts severe limits on that. The need to adopt maximising strategies is a basic feature of the system and not just a function of irresponsibility or greed — although it’s certainly true that a system based on market principles will inevitably place a premium on wealth and encourage a culture of greed.

The need constantly to improve the productivity of labour generates constant improvements in technology and what’s conventionally called economic growth. But the same market pressures that make it so dynamic also have contradictory effects. Capitalism is prone to constant fluctuations and business cycles producing continual periodic crises.

Capitalism may be efficient in producing capital, and it’s certainly true that capitalism has generated great material and technological progress. But there’s a huge disparity between the productive capacities created by capitalism and what it actually delivers.

Production is determined not by what’s needed but by what makes the most profit. Everyone, for instance, needs decent housing, but good and affordable housing for everyone isn’t profitable for private capital. There may be a huge demand for such housing, but it’s not what the economists call “effective demand,” the kind of demand with real money behind it. If capital is invested in housing, it’s most likely to be high-cost homes for people with money. That’s the whole point of capitalism.

Where production is skewed to the maximisation of profit, a society can have massive productive capacities. It can have enough to feed, clothe, and house its whole population to a very high standard. But it can still have massive poverty, homelessness, and inadequate health care. You only have to look at the United States, where there are some of the highest rates of poverty in the developed world and where tens of millions have no access to affordable health care. What possible excuse can there be for that in a society with such enormous wealth and productive capacities?

Capitalism is inefficient in another sense too. With its emphasis on profit maximisation and capital accumulation, it’s necessarily a wasteful and destructive system of production. It consumes vast amounts of resources; and it acts on the short-term requirements of profit rather than the long-term needs of a sustainable environment. All aspects of life that become market commodities are outside the reach of democratic accountability. They answer not to the will of the people but to the demands of the market and profit.

Capitalism is unique, because unlike any other system before it, the capitalist doesn’t need direct coercive force to get access to the worker’s labour.

Workers aren’t legally dependent on capitalists. They’re not slaves or serfs. They’re not in conditions of debt bondage or peonage. They’re obliged to work for capital not because they’re compelled by the capitalist’s superior force, but because they need to sell their labour power for a wage just to get access to the means of subsistence. This means that economic and political power have been separated in a wholly new way.

It doesn’t mean that the capitalist market can exist without support from the state. If anything, capitalism needs intervention by the state in some ways more than any other system, just to maintain social order and the conditions of accumulation. But the economic power of capital is separate from political power in two senses: the capitalist’s power over workers doesn’t depend on privileged access to political or legal rights, and possession of political and legal rights by workers doesn’t free them from economic exploitation.

The second major point is that the capitalist system is driven by certain inescapable imperatives, certain compulsions, the economic imperatives of competition, profit-maximisation, constant accumulation and the endless need to improve labour productivity. These really are imperatives. They’re not just choices made by greedy capitalists. They’re conditions of survival for capital. When we talk about the capitalist market, we’re talking about compulsions, necessities, not simply opportunities and freedom. And much of human life is driven by these imperatives. They drive not just production and the allocation of labour and resources but many aspects of life outside the workplace, even down to the most basic organisation of time.

There’s no such thing as a capitalism governed by popular power, no capitalism in which the will of the people takes precedence over the imperatives of profit and accumulation, no capitalism in which the requirements of profit maximisation doesn’t dictate the most basic conditions of life. The essential condition for the very existence of capitalism is that the most basic conditions of life have been commodified, turned into commodities subject to the dictates of profit and the “law”’ of the market. Every human practice that’s commodified is outside the reach of democratic accountability.

Capitalism has certainly marginalised and impoverished many people, and it continues to reproduce poverty even in developed economies. But there’s no doubt that it has tremendously improved material conditions in general and raised the standard of living for vast numbers of people throughout the world. The point, though, is that it has also produced distinctive problems of a kind that never existed before, even in more prosperous economies. The basic point is that market dependence in capitalism means that people have lost non-market access to the means of production and the means of subsistence.

When people are in direct possession of land, for instance, and when that possession doesn’t depend on success in the market, there isn’t what I’m calling market dependence or market imperatives. What we see in the history of capitalist development is the loss of that kind of possession. We see either complete dispossession for the majority, or the imposition of conditions that make possession dependent on success in the market, which for many people ultimately leads to dispossession.

We also see the destruction of communal networks — village communities, and so on — which traditionally gave people some kind of support in times of need. In the earliest days of capitalism, in England for instance, this meant among other things the loss of customary rights to the use of common land, in the famous process of enclosure. It also meant a change in communal values and changes in the way the law was applied. It meant new legal definitions of property in which any traditional commitment to a basic right of subsistence was replaced by the imperatives of profit. As capitalism developed into its industrial form, there were also measures, like changes in the system of relief for the poor, designed to uproot people from their local communities, to increase the mobility of labour. It means the privatisation of just about everything. It means what some people have called a whole new process of enclosure. It can mean outright dispossession of small landholders, or it can mean the imposition of economic policies that force producers to abandon strategies of self-sufficiency in favour of export-oriented strategies, the production of single cash crops, and so on. It also means, as it did in the early days of capitalism, the break up of various social networks which people have relied on for support.

The basic principle of the capitalist system is the isolation of individuals and their naked exposure to market imperatives. It means eliminating everything that stands between people and dependence on the market, everything that makes them autonomous from the market. And when social life is driven by market imperatives, it’s also subject to the cycles and crises of the market. For example, dispossessed workers, who depend on selling their labour-power for a wage, have nothing to fall back on when the market doesn’t need them. It’s not hard to see how this has created new social problems.

Social services and welfare safety-nets are vulnerable and precarious not just because of changing political fashions but for a more fundamental reason, and that’s because it’s in constant tension with the imperatives of capitalism. It’s the imperatives of capitalism that make these rights necessary, and it’s capitalist imperatives that constantly threaten them. How do we challenge those imperatives? It’s hard to see how we’ll ever overcome them completely without moving beyond capitalism and the commodification of labour-power.