Overpopulated world, or not?

Many people have come to see the tragic refugee situation as though it were more a problem for us than for the migrants. We have stopped caring about them. The reality of this on-going crisis is nothing short of a modern-day slave trade, with migrants treated as commodities. It’s as though nothing has changed in the 300 years since desert tribes used the very same routes to bring slaves to north Africa: Nigerian women told they are going to Italy to work as housemaids only to be trafficked into desert brothels with no idea when they might leave, young men cruelly beaten and held captive for months until their families pay a ransom

Three rival governments preside over the failed state of Libya, and the real power lies in the hands of armed militias. Libyans may rely on their own militias for protection, the migrants have nothing and no one to protect them.  Not only are desperate migrants at the mercy of people smugglers but also the authorities themselves – in the main, armed militias with no one to hold them to account and few other sources of income apart from the migrant trade. 

In the Libyan detention centres, migrants are locked up and left to rot. It’s a humanitarian disaster with barely any humanitarian organisations there to help. For tens of thousands of migrants in the country at the moment, they have no means of escape.   EU leaders have signed a deal with Libya. Far from helping people escape, this deal is aimed at keeping them there. The next step is to forcibly returning asylum seekers in Europe to Libyan prisons.

Despite the illusion of diversity we do all have more in common with workers worldwide than with the capitalist class as 95% of the worlds population own little more than their ability to work for a wage or a salary and the 5% capitalist class constitute a parasitic class to whose ends the diversity propaganda serves.. The overpopulation myth threatens to overtake the human nature myth as the chief explanation for the evils of the modern world where hunger, disease, the retarded development of backward countries, social unrest, political instability, urban sprawl, destruction of wildlife, city squalor, crowded mental hospitals, violence, all kinds of pollution and ecological upset, the shortage of housing and the desecration of the countryside are all confidently attributed to the problem of an excess of human beings. The readiness to accept the "overpopulation" argument arises from a lack of understanding of the way capitalism works.

The "overpopulation problem" is really a misuse of resources problem. Capitalism, as a system of rationing via the market, is justified in people's minds by a belief in scarcity. "There isn't enough to go round", so we must be restricted in what we are allowed to consume. It has become a cliché to speak of "this overcrowded planet” yet if, for example, the entire world's population were now placed in the United States, the population density in that country would still be little more than that of Holland.

It is not overpopulation is the problem but the private, corporate or state ownership of the means of production and distribution with its competitive ethos and accumulative 5% minority parasitic profit system allied with the coercive state apparatus and war machines to aid , back-up its plundering and wasteful use of nature given raw resources as well as the exploitation of the 95% human resources in pursuit of accumulation of profits.

We are more than capable, with a commonly owned world, of sustaining a superabundance of the necessities of life with production for use and not for sale, allied to free access to them, with democratic control exercised by all through delegation, not government or states allied to a self-regulating equilibrium of virtuous, holistically sustainable and ethical environmental standards. Poverty is caused in the developed world by capitalism, it takes place at the point of production. It is INEVITABLE. The political differences are small between the governing and aspirant governing parties and in the less developed world poverty is caused by the same capitalist exploitation of resources in which tribal and other organised clan, family or ethnic differences are exploited to capital's advantage in power grabs over natural resources and raw materials.


Each new mouth to feed produces a pair of hands to be exploited by the parasite class.
All wealth springs from labour. A democratic, post-capitalist, commonly-owned, production-for-use society can utilise resources and technology to introduce a fully automated luxury communism with free access to the wealth thus socially produced. We can run society ourselves, rid the planet of government over us, war between rival capitalist concerns over, trade routes, raw materials, markets and spheres of geopolitical interests.

 Housing and anything else in capitalism is produced to make a profit from market for a parasite class and not to satisfy human needs. Capitalism is responsible for this , deliberate creation and manipulation of markets in human misery and for driving down wages and reducing availability of essential commodities if profit is not derived form their production, not immigrants. We are quite capable of producing for use to satisfy all human needs and ushering in the post-capitalist future. If ownership and control of production and distribution was in the hands of all and production was for use instead of for profit, with free access,there would not be the same wasteful production in wasteful competition to satisfy markets with duplication of efforts, while human needs go unmet. Capitalism depends on poverty stricken workers selling their ability to work for a minimum ration of what they need to survive and reproduce future wage slaves and these conditions of waged slavery ensure a ready supply of workers to exploit now and in the future.


Wee Matt

Brexiteers

Capitalist democracy is government in the interests of a parasitic minority class OVER you.

The recent referendum was a battle between members of the parasite capitalist class. The sad thing is that so many workers were led to back this maverick section of the capitalist class in the belief that they were protesting against the ‘elite’, while in fact they were being duped into pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for a part of it.

The notion that it is YOUR country is YOUR nightmare which helps produce cannon fodder for the capitalist parasite class, whenever it suits them to go to war over trade routes, raw materials, spheres of geo-political interest. You are only of consequence to the real owners of this country, while they can extract surplus value from your employment or use you to further their interests in a bloody conflict with your fellow workers of other lands and none. They will promise you ,"Homes built for heroes" or welfare, "From the cradle to the grave" in order for your continual slavish attention to their bidding, but withdraw any reforms when they feel the purpose of this, to buy off potential social discontent, has been served

After the EU referendum, the Electoral Commission released figures on the funds received by the two sides. They showed that the Leave side spent about £17.6 million and the Remain only £14.3 million. These were not contributions from grass-roots supporters but, on both sides, from individual capitalists. Since staying in the EU, and especially the single market, was in the overall interest of the majority section of the British capitalist class, how come that capitalists gave more to Leave than Remain? In fact, who were the capitalists who funded the Leave campaign, and why?

Among the dozen largest Leave donors were: Peter Hargreaves (£3.2m), Arron Banks (£1.95m plus a loan of £3m), Jeremy Hoskins (£980,000), Lord Edmiston (£600,000), Crispin Odey (£533,000), Jonathan Wood (£500,000), Patrick Barbour (£500,000), Stuart Wheeler (£400,000), and Peter Cruddas (£350,000).

What all these have in common (apart from most of them appearing in the Sunday Times Rich List) is that they are involved in hedge funds and other such financial activities.

It might seem strange since the City stands to lose from Brexit, that those who funded the Leave campaign should be financiers (other financiers funded the Remain campaign). But there are financiers and financiers. The City establishment tends to see some hedge fund managers as cowboys engaging in practices it doesn’t regard as entirely above board and which it is prepared to see regulated. It is precisely such regulation that the Brexit financiers wanted to avoid.

One of the Brexit supporters, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, let the cat out of the bag when, in an article in the Daily Mail (12 April), he painted a picture of what a Brexit Britain would look like in 2020:

“London, too, is booming. Eurocrats never had much sympathy for financial services. As their regulations took effect in Frankfurt, Paris and Milan – a financial transactions tax, a ban on short selling, restrictions on clearing, a bonus cap, windfall levies, micro-regulation of funds – waves of young financiers brought their talents to the City instead.”

That was their main aim, then, their manifesto for the referendum: allow all these practices which enhance their profits to continue. To achieve this, they in effect hired politicians, not just lightweights such as Hannan but also national figures like Boris Johnson and Farage, with a remit to go out and get a vote to Leave by any means. They didn’t really care about the NHS or immigration but left it up to the politicians to deliver. Which, against expectations, they did.

The rest of the capitalist class are furious with them but are going to have to adapt to the result. Most of them will want a deal with the EU that allows them continued free access to the vast tariff-free single market with common standards and its coming extension to services, even if this involves accepting some free movement of labour and a payment to Brussels. Some of the Brexit funders might well be prepared to go along with this as long as there is no regulation of their activities.

The sad thing is that so many workers were led to back this maverick section of the capitalist class in the belief that they were protesting against the ‘elite’, while in fact they were being duped into pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for a part of it. Workers of the world have more in common with each other than with their home-grown, local, regional or global capitalist class. Real equality comes from common ownership, production for use and equal access to the social product rather than a parasite class gleaning profits from a wage-enslaved one.

Technology has been used to tighten the screw on us instead of freeing us. We can have the world to run by ourselves, using the technology to produce a superabundance of necessities along with a self-regulating system of stock controls, access based on need, rather than priced demand, allied to production for use and not for sale, without elites, political or otherwise.

All wealth comes from the workers.

Workers have no country but a world to win.

It is not and never was OUR country.

A plague on all nationalisms.

Wee Matt

Make capitalism a memory

“I’m not arguing there are no decent people in the Tory Party...But they’re like bits of sweetcorn in a turd; technically they’ve kept their integrity but they’re still embedded in shit."  - Ian Banks, The Quarry

Our type of revolution is a democratic one, using capitalism's Achilles heel of democracy to remove ownership and control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, as commodities for a market for the profit of the few, 1-5% of the global population, from a parasitic minority class and making ownership and control, common for all of us wealth producers 95-99%, by producing for use with free access and wages and prices abolished. Real socialism in other words.

Most people have not heard of this, so you can't know want they want. Socialism is a post-capitalist society so it will seem alien at first. Just as capitalism must have seemed strange in feudal times. But nothing will stop an idea which time has come. The task of creating the socialist, post-capitalist, production for use, free access, a commonly owned world is that of the working class itself. There is no short cut to this. A post-capitalist revolution does not have to be violent when it is the conscious act of the immense majority. Most revolutions have been minority led ones.

Capitalism itself cannot be reformed or tamed to work in the majority interest? Capitalism can only exist upon the backs of an army of wage- slaves. It is impossible to create a fairer society and retain capitalism and the wages system. If you are born poor you will most likely die poor. Poverty is both absolute and relative.

Socialism-communism (they mean the same thing) is a post-capitalist, production-for-use, money-free, price-free, society without elites and with free access to the collective produce. Government ceases to be over the people a part of class society and becomes the people’s democratic administration over resources as part of a classless, elite free society run by us all. Nothing to do with state ownership or corporate or private ownership. Nothing to do with central control either. It utilises the technological advances of capitalism to produce for use to satisfy all human needs, using self-feeding loopback informational tools for stock measurements and control with direct inputs, at local, regional and global levels to allow calculation-in-kind, as opposed to the economic monetary calculation of capitalism, only necessary to satisfy profit taking. If you want a real democracy you will need to abolish the wages system, get rid of capitalism and usher in administering structures using recallable delegates where necessary.

We absolutely reject vanguardism. We get from capitalism to socialism by making the case for socialism and not selling them a reformist duck. The same old muddled Labourite, reformist claptrap masquerades as socialism, while retaining wage slavery for the many, and riches arising out of the exploitation of the many to produce a surplus for the few. There is no such thing and never will be such a thing as a communist state. The state management of the capitalist economy is state capitalism. The nation state is a capitalist entity. Workers have no country. Socialism has never existed to fail. You are simply restating capitalist propaganda about post-feudal attempts to kick start capitalism in the absence of a large enough capitalist class the state stepped into the breach. Effectively those examples of Leninism were state capitalist developments. The previous Labour governments were in the interests of the working class and you have a blind spot in this regards, through your misplaced loyalty to friendly sounding, pro-working class sentiments, which belie the actual actions of Labour, as a pro-business political party.

The old Soviet Union had damn all to do with socialism and was a state capitalist society.

Did it have waged slavery? Yes.

Did it have capital? Yes.

Did it have elites? Yes.

Did it have delegatory democracy? No.

Did the workers own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth? No

Socialism will be a society where wealth is owned in common by us all, in conditions of democracy with a superabundance of the necessities of life arising out of production for use rather than the production of commodities for sale to satisfy a market. All wealth comes from the workers. Workers run capitalism from top to bottom. The capitalist class are superfluous to modern production. Capitalists don’t invest to give anthing back to society. This is a conceited ideologically reinforced by-product. They invest to accumulate and will quite happily disinvest and make redundant their waged-slaves if profit is not forthcoming. The investments may not even be made by them these days, but by other highly paid worker managers on their behalf. The needs of capital to make a profit to accumulate ever more capital puts a brake on production to satisfy needs, as production is turned off when profits cannot be realised. Capital is just dead labour, it is useless unless used to exploit workers for their surplus value. It can’t build bridges, make widgets or man lifeboats. It is even useless as shit paper. It will feature in a museum of antiquity in the future where children will wonder at how stupid we all were, producing all of the wealth in society but being rationed out our access to it, with these useless pieces of paper and coins.

It is time workers realise that workers have no country and a world to win. They have more in common with workers worldwide, than with any home grown or global capitalist. Get off your knees and get rid of capitalism.

Wee Matt

A money-free world to win.

Who produces all the wealth, manages and runs capitalism from top to bottom? The working class - that is who. Please do not equate Marxism with Leninism. A bit like blaming Jesus for the sectarian Christian divisions manipulated by power-seekers. There is an honourable anti-Bolshevik tradition in Marxist politics:

‘We have often stated that because of a large anti-socialist peasantry and vast untrained population, Russia was a long way from socialism. Lenin has now to admit this by saying: “Reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us” (The Chief Task of Our Times)…If we are to copy Bolshevik policy in other countries we should have to demand State capitalism, which is not a step to socialism’ (Socialist Standard, July 1920).

 ‘Both Trotsky and Stalin draw up their programmes within the framework of state and private capitalism which prevails in Russia’ (Socialist Standard, December 1928).

 ‘[all the Bolsheviks] have been able to do is to foster the growth of State capitalism and limit the growth of private capitalism’ (Socialist Standard, July 1929.)

The social democratic experiments of the Labour Party were all attempts to manage capitalism with reforms. But capitalism cannot be reformed and shorn of its concomitants of war (business by other means) and poverty, absolute or relative (essential, to keep us as wage-slaves.) It cannot be shorn of its economic cycle of booms and busts.

“In 1918, in the shadow of the Russian revolution, they made a deliberate, conscious, ideological choice, that they would not pursue the syndicalist road, that they would not pursue the revolutionary road – it was a real choice in those days. They would pursue the parliamentary road to socialism.” Neil Kinnock

That just amounted to their infamous Clause 4 definition of 'common ownership' with a 'means of exchange'. In other words, not socialism at all, but nationalisation, state ownership and not common ownership, retaining the wages slavery system, prices and social classes. They are bourgeois vacillators between potential winning capitalisms, masquerading as radical. The Labour party was never a socialist party but a reformist one. Capitalism cannot be reformed however noble or ignoble the politician.

Representative democracy is seriously flawed, not least by the principle of leadership. Representation is a myth. It is a surrendering of power within a restricted choice of capitalist politicians. Proportional Representation merely diffuses the political power over us giving an ersatz illusion of choice of bosses. In a class society, the politicians are elected to govern 'over' us in the interests of the dominant economic class. This is the only control they exert, 'over us', as they are powerless in respect of the economic conditions of the day in a market society where production is for sale with a view of realising a profit and capitalist , left right or centre politicians, can only deceive themselves that they can alleviate in some way the inevitable concomitants of a capitalist society, of war (business by other means) and poverty (absolute or relative).

In a socialist society, a real one, not a capitalist reformist pretend one, we won't need any classes or political leadership, as we will have local, regional and global control over all the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, in a world owned in common, where production is for use and there exists free access, "from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs", with recallable delegates where we need to delegate administrative tasks.

Socialism isn't a commodity for sale, but a social relationship of classless free access in a post-capitalist social system which will arise out of the present system without the contradictions of private ownership, production only for sale, or social elites with advantageous access to the social product. Once people aspire to dissolve governments and elect themselves, no power can stop them. Nothing will stop an idea when its time has really come. Socialists have always wanted working people to ‘take control’ of their collective destiny. That’s what real socialism is all about. This is not possible under capitalism because it is a system governed by uncontrollable economic laws which impose themselves on people whatever they want or decide. The only way to take control (‘back’ is out of place since the majority class of wage and salary workers has never had any control) is to take control of the places where we work and where wealth is produced and run them for the benefit of all.

Socialism and communism mean the same thing. 'Common' or 'social' ownership. Just because power-hungry politicians utilised the name 'socialism' to sell their dodgy reforms as 'socialistic' doesn't alter one iota the definition of socialism. It is a commonly owned, world of free access and democratic control over the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth. Nothing to do with nationalisation, state ownership or any of the paraphernalia of state-regulated market capitalism.

Socialism has to be the work of a politically conscious worker class themselves organising to this end. The democratic ends determine the means rather than the Leninist/Stalinist justifying of them. We have a post-capitalist world to win. Socialism will not be the bloody capture of power by a minority, but the politically aware and responsible act of the immense majority, expressed "peacefully if we can violently, only if we must".

The workers of the world already run capitalism from top to bottom, it is just a change a change of ownership, from private or state into common ownership and democratic control, with production for use and not for sale, allied with free access and voluntary production.

Wee Matt

The insane system called capitalism

"One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman; two men with the same idea in common maybe foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question." - William Morris

We workers are not a nation. The nation state is the collective arm of the capitalist class and the referendum had damn all to do with workers but represents a division in the interests of rival capitalist groups. Workers have more in common with fellow workers worldwide than with their local or global capitalist class. Workers have no country to live or die for, but we do have the world to win. The emancipation of the last great social class, the wealth producing working class will end waged slavery and class divided society. Social evolution suggests that no mode of production is cast in stone and the dynamics of change also affects capitalism as a social system. Studies of social systems with distinct social relationships related and corresponding to their specific mode of production have identified, for instance, primitive communism, chattel slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. All of these societies changed from one into another due to the contradictions inherent in that society and also due to technological advancement which each society found itself incapable of adapting to. Capitalism reached this point over a century ago. It’s time to move on to socialism.

Opponents of the arms trade argue that it promotes war. But they have got it the wrong way round. It is economic competition in which ‘might is right’ that promotes the arms trade. As long as capitalism lasts with this built-in competitive struggle between states over economic matters there will be a demand for arms and so an arms trade. No state which has, as Cameron put it, a ‘comparative advantage’ in arms production is going to renounce this profit-making advantage on ‘ethical’ grounds. This means that, given capitalism, the opponents, despite their sincerity and however justified their objection to arms and arms trading which socialists share, will, unfortunately, be tilting at windmills. The only way to stop it is to join us in campaigning to end capitalism. Removing the international arms trade is a nice ideal but an impossibility within a capitalist social system. It is similar to wishing for lions to become vegetarian. Aggressive competition is the norm.

You should not single out just one capitalist political manifestation for your ire. The Labour Party has just as enthusiastically endorsed capitalist war, with some exceptions in its ranks but Conservatives sometimes do so for different reasons. Opponents of the arms trade argue that it promotes war. But they have got it the wrong way round. It is economic competition in which ‘might is right’ that promotes the arms trade. As long as capitalism lasts with this built-in competitive struggle between states over economic matters there will be a demand for arms and so an arms trade.

 You are not a 'machine head' but a thoughtful, sincere individual. What an indictment on capitalist education when you can only bring the faulty and religious 'human nature' argument to bear upon the much greater prevalence and the evidential fact of socially conditioned human behaviour which is more likely to be cooperative in essence. If this were not so we would have extinguished the human species long ago.

History is a series of class struggles for supremacy. The examples of history which you can cite are all examples of ruling classes fighting within themselves with coercive measures to make workers comply as cannon fodder, so resistant to violence are we in the main and far from typical human behaviour. Still, war-free complex societies are known to go back a long way. Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in Turkey dating from around 7,500 BC, famously lacks any sign of warfare, or of social or gender stratification.

The State, which is an organisation composed of soldiers, policemen, judges, and gaolers charged with enforcing the law, is only needed in class society, for in such societies there is no community of interest, only class conflict. The purpose of government is to maintain law and order in the interests of the dominant class. It is, in fact, an instrument of class oppression. It is irrelevant whether the government is professedly capitalist or allegedly labour.

One of the main criticisms that world socialists have of attempts to reform the insane system called capitalism, is that gains obtained one year may disappear when the economy dips, and you find yourself back at square one again. That looks to be what is happening as we enter a period of recession. A slump is the market's way of correcting a serious failing – that is, the diminishing levels of profit returning to the owning class. That recalibration must occur inside capitalism, regardless of the damage to be incurred by those dependent on the state, such as children, the unemployed and the poor.

So long as the workers are prepared to resign themselves to the evils of capitalism, and so long as they are prepared to place in control of Parliament parties that will use their power for the purpose of maintaining capitalism, there is no escape from the effects of capitalism. The workers will continue to suffer from the normal hardships of the capitalist system when trade is relatively good, and from the aggravated hardships which are the workers’ lot during economic recessions.

The workers just need to get off their knees and tell the politicians including St. Theresa of Maidenhead and Blessed Jeremy, to lead their business friendly capitalist supporting parties out of the way.

Wee Matt

Choose post-capitalism and people power

Socialism has never existed anywhere, regardless of the labels political opportunists claimed for themselves, as it is a post-capitalist society. Many are referring to top-down state capitalist efforts, in many cases to establish capitalist production methods, with its concomitants of waged enslaved conditions of production, poverty (absolute or relative) and war.

'Left wing' thinking is irrelevant to socialism, as in the main the Left attempt to manage capitalism and retain the features of it such as waged labour, governments and apparatus of state control. (Meet the new boss same as the old boss)

Socialism is not some Left variant of capitalism, but the antithesis of it, with production for use, utilising the advanced technology of capitalism to create the superabundance of necessities which will be required for free access. It will be a fully democratic society, locally, regionally, globally, with recallable delegates where necessary on world bodies such as WHO as an example where we need specialised expertise.

Most people fall into a trap of addressing the question from a perspective which has been shaped by a society with rationed access as a norm and attributing human behaviours arising out of the social conditioned normative responses of the present day, as general principles, a 'human nature' even. War as 'business by other means' is not a natural event but a social one arising out of competition..

Socialism will come about as the conscious political act of the immense majority acting in their class interest and will become seen, as in the interest of all humanity ultimately, ending war over resources, and artificially created scarcity, poverty absolute and relative, created by the production of commodities for markets in conditions of waged slavery, rather than production of useful utilities for human needs, so it will not have the same resistance, when it is seen to be in everyone’s ultimate self-interest to manage the planet and resources for all rather than depleting it for a minority parasitic owning class.

The capitalist economic argument is of accumulation, accumulation, of ever more profits for the capitalist parasite class is the driver of the destruction of harmonious use of resources. This senseless, in a sane society, competition between rival capitalists, the duplication of which leads to economic crises, leads to war and destruction of the natural environment.

It is quite possible to produce a superabundance of all the necessities, food, clothing, shelter etc. in ways which ensure the satisfaction of human needs without wasteful overproduction.

The end of the market system will end, sales, armies, government, banking, insurance and all of the attendant paraphernalia associated with the waged rationed economy. The problem is competitive production for profit, while initially building up the technology and resources, squanders those ultimately as it does not satisfy human needs, but satisfies market led demands and the needs of industry and commerce and thus wastes resources, in the interests of a minority class rather than rationalising the use of production and distribution resources to satisfy all human needs. The planet will become, already has in some places a wasteland if a commonly owned, democratically controlled solution is not sought, won and implemented without elite minority dominance.

The real world, of production for the profit of a minority parasite class, with the essential concomitant of waged slavery impoverishment for the many, war through competition over raw materials, trade routes and geopolitical interests of the hegemonic entities spawned by the business interests of the leech class, is well past its previously useful stage of building up the means of production.

Time to abolish class ownership and dissolve the politicians with their government over us. It is not real democracy when the elected representative is 'over' us. He or she is a representative of a dominant economic, parasitic elite then elected to control social discontent and arbitrate over the affairs of the powerful in a production for profit for the minority and waged slavery for the majority.

A true democracy can only arise out of common ownership and democratic control, of all the means of producing and distributing wealth, with production for use, which has recallable delegates, in effect, when we dissolve governments and their politicians and elect ourselves to run a post-capitalist, free access, society.

The EU referendum will be successful capitalist outcome regardless of how the proles vote. It provides the illusion that we have exercised some control over events. Utter nonsense.

Workers have no country and a world to win, to make and shape in the interests of us all, with production for use, in a post-capitalist future of common ownership, democratic control and price-free, free access to the common wealth.

The conventional political parties – Conservative, Labour, LibDem, the Greens, UKIP, the Nationalists – strive to persuade us that they have the ability and the intention to wipe out the current problems in society. To this end they produce policies relating to problems such as health, housing, crime, poverty, education, transport, along with less prominent issues such as planning, art and culture.

This is often effective in persuading enough people that they should take serious notice of their pronouncements, however transparently populist. But for people to do this entails them ignoring the fact that these parties have promised many times before to solve these problems, so that at times the remedies being put forward clash with those in the past. It also entails ignoring the vital – indeed crucial – fact that, as these problems are engendered by the capitalist system itself, they cannot be solved within its framework of minority ownership and production for profit, a system which all these parties uphold in one form or another.

Capitalism cannot be reformed and must be replaced. The referendum choice being presented to you is, do you want to be f**ked over in or out of the E.U.

It is a capitalist argument. Dissolve all governments 'over' you and elect yourselves to administer a commonly owned world.

The world for the workers.

Wee Matt

Capitalism has outlived its usefulness

The most pressing need facing humanity is to progress from the anarchy of capitalism to a post-capitalist society. The price to pay for delaying this task will be more poverty, increasing hunger, mounting disease and continuing wars. To these has now been added the climate change and global warming which could make all the higher forms of life extinct.

Socialism is a post-capitalist society where the private, corporate or state ownership of the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth, for the profit of the 1-5% in conditions of wage slavery for the 95-99%, is abolished and replaced by common ownership by us all, of all resources. Socialism is not state-ownership. It is common ownership by us all and administered by us all.

Instead of technology being utilised to produce for sale, only to make a profit for the minority parasitic owning class, with a rationed access to the wealth that workers create, (wages) for the working class (all wealth comes from the workers), production in socialism will be for use and will be ratcheted up to create surpluses for the satisfaction of human needs. Over-production, because of competition, sends capitalism into crisis, as human needs are still unmet, 'can't pay, can't have', is the cause of disputes and wars over trade, trade routes, raw materials and spheres of geopolitical influence.

Capitalism has outlived any useful purpose it might have had in building up the technology and educating workers, so the workers not only produce the wealth, they effectively run capitalism from top to bottom. The twin concomitants of capitalism poverty (absolute or relative) and war, (proxy or arms sales or otherwise) will always persist.

Therefore socialism is a production for use society, democratically owned and controlled by us all, without the need for the anarchy of markets, state-control over people or a means of exchange (money). Government ceases to be 'over people' and becomes the people self-administering 'things'.

Time for an end to wage slavery. The last great emancipation will be that of the working class freeing themselves from waged slavery and taking the world into common ownership and democratic control. Time for a societal upgrade to an elite free, democratic, post-capitalist, production for use, free access society, owned and run by us all, as part of a truly socially equal human family.

The capitalist class are the parasitical class. All wealth springs from labour. Capitalism has outlived any useful purpose it might have had in building up the technology and educating workers, so the workers not only produce the wealth, they effectively run capitalism from top to bottom.

It is not just a question of abolishing money but of common ownership with production for use and then money becomes obsolete. You can paper your walls with it then or soften it for toilet tissue. Capitalism’s technological change allied with its competition creates conflict which capitalism cannot resolve and sows the seeds of the possibility of the demise of capitalism with production for use of a superabundance of wealth harnessed for the common good.

Money is merely a means of exchange. Commodity exchange does not create wealth but is a reflection of the exchange values already contained in the wealth exchanged. The workers' commodity 'labour power' produces a surplus value above what its market exchange value is and is the source of profit once the surplus is sold on the market. Poverty, relative or absolute, is then the essential element within the exploitative relationship of capitalism which keeps the wage slave presenting himself for exploitation and productive in excess of his rationed waged access.

The Labour Party is not and never has been a socialist party. “The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it – a bit like Christians in the Church of England,” said Tony Benn

But some argue that British socialists should at more like the Spanish party Podemos but what advantage would that give any real socialist? They would be in precisely the same position as any other capitalist party and have to govern over the people as representatives rather than be proceeding, from the people with a mandate for the social revolution in which power resides with the people with recallable delegated functions when required by the people. Don't confuse parties which call themselves 'socialist' or 'socialistic' yet aim to govern over people with the real thing. They are all capitalist variants, at best 'reformist', at worst charlatans.

Socialism will not come in," like a thief in the night", as that balloon Keir Hardie once said, but as the conscious act of the immense majority, who know what it is they are doing and why the democratic end results of a democratic revolution determine the means used to attain it.

Socialism is such a revolutionary transformation of society, from private corporate or state ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth, into common ownership and democratic control of all resources, from production of commodities for sale, with rationing of access via wages and prices to the producers, into production for use, of utilities for free access and use by all.

Once common ownership is established and wage slavery abolished, the world will not be the same as it was. Children will laugh at those money tokens, bank cards, credit cards and cash registers and card machines, in the museums of antiquity.

However, the twin concomitants of capitalism poverty (absolute or relative) and war, (proxy or arms sales or otherwise) will persist as long as capitalism persists. War arises from competition over raw materials, trade routes and spheres of geo-political, national, global, transnational capitalist, interests.

Time for an end to wage slavery. The last great emancipation is that of the working class.

Time for a societal upgrade to an elite free, democratic, post-capitalist, production for use, free access society, owned and run by us all as part of truly equal humans.

It is not the job of politicians, but our job to see it as necessary and to make it so happen, we move into the post-capitalist society.

Wee Matt

Profit rules

It is profit which rules. Money is just the means of exchange which facilitates accumulation for the parasitic capitalists, rationing out for the wage slave wealth producer, of wealth. Food clothing and housing should be freely available, as all wealth comes from labour and should be produced for use and not for sale but owned in common by all. Time for a post-capitalist society of super-abundance of all the necessities of life rather than capitalist production for sale with access rationed via wages and prices with the profits going to the minority owning 1% capitalist class. Where there is a demand for houses they should be built for use and freely available. The working class built these homes. Why should they not be freely available?  In capitalism, food, clothing, and shelter are not produced for use, but for sale. What a daft use of resources. What an insane social system capitalism is? Much better to abolish capitalism and establish a commonly owned, free access, production for use, society, owned, controlled and democratically run by us all, without elites. As social equals, with equal access, we are all in charge.

Tory versus Labour governments is silly and misses the point entirely, which is that all governments over you are to manage the affairs of the capitalist class to ensure the maximisation of the extraction of profit from the exploitation of the majority. Capitalism cannot be run in any other way. The route of trying to change capitalism or 'reform,' is the one that has been taken by most people who have wanted to improve society. There are examples of some 'success' in such fields as education, housing, child employment, work conditions and social security. However, in this regard we also recognise that such 'successes' have in reality done little more than to keep workers and their families in efficient working order and, while it has taken the edge off the problem, it has rarely managed to remove the problem completely. If you are convinced, however, that groups or parties promising reforms deserve your support, we would urge you to consider the following points. The campaign, whether directed at right-wing or left-wing governments, will often only succeed if it can be reconciled with the profit-making needs of the system. In other words, the reform will often be turned to the benefit of the capitalist class at the expense of any working class gain. Any reform can be reversed and eroded later if a government finds it necessary. Reforms rarely, if ever, actually solve the problem they were intended to solve. This was summed up by William Morris over a century ago:

 "The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side."

The profit motive of capitalism is a major cause of the problems we face in today's society: ever increasing inequality, poverty, alienation, crime, homelessness, environmental degradation—the list could go on and on. There are countless ways in which the working class (and indeed the capitalist class) suffer as a result of the profit system. Unless we organise for an alternative, the profit system will continue on its blind, unswerving path

Socialism has never existed anywhere in the world, as it is a post-capitalist society utilising the technology and productive apparatus of the modern age and transforming it into a commonly owned production for use society for all with free access, rather than a production for sale society for the enrichment of the few with rationed access via wages and prices. It is a world without a means or a need for an exchange economy.  All previous revolutions were minority led revolutions on behalf of new emerging ruling 5-10% classes. The post-capitalist society is the work of the immense majority 90-95% on behalf of themselves, with its aim the great emancipation of the wage slaves and true social equality arising from democratic control by us all over resources, the means of production and distribution being owned by us all in common and run by us all. A democratic, locally, regionally globally, administration of resources rather than governments over people as presently.

Profit can only come from exploitation of workers for their surplus value and even if this went back to workers, it would scarcely resolve the basic problem of capitalist production even of basic commodities requiring to be at a profit and not for the satisfaction of human needs. With intense competition from other capitalist enterprise chasing the same market production would cease, even as needs still remain unmet, on a 'can't pay can't have' principle and workers laid off. Capital has already plundered wealth from the exploitation of the working class. Welfare is a good deal for the capitalist parasite class. It provides the myth of 'homes built for heroes' after a war, staves off social discontent with promises of 'cradle to grave' provision, reduces the wage burden of the parasite class when boom times arrive they would have to make provision for insurance to workers organised in unions and in slumps maintains a reserve army of labour to be exploited as wage slaves when the good times roll and production picks up..

Capitalism cannot be reformed by Sanders or anyone else. Capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interests of the wage worker. Capitalism will continue with its poverty, homelessness, and hunger for many Americans and Europeans. It’s not a different president, or government, that is needed but a new economic system.

Instead of blaming immigrants, get up off your knees and get rid of capitalism and its governments. The problem with pro-capitalist commentators is that, they believe their own bogeymen and misconceptions of what socialism is and continue to spread confusion in order to bolster an ideological narrative in which various manifestations of the capitalist systems of government, such as reformism, state capitalism, and regulation are equated with 'socialism' and not seen as failures of capitalism in that it is capitalism which is inimical to reform in any substantial way. Socialism is a world which does not need money, or any other means of exchange as it is, a commonly owned, production for use, free access, post-capitalist social system.

"Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many - they are few."

Shelley.

Wee Matt

The World to Win

Patriotism is nationalism as an ideology. It is used to persuade workers they have a country to fight and die for. In fact, workers have no country, but the World to win, in common with fellow workers worldwide. Socialism is a post-capitalist, production for use society, of free access without prices or any need for a means of exchange, as everything is owned in common. Many people are attributing attempts to regulate capitalist excesses, with socialism when in fact they are elements of governing capitalism, using reformist means to manage discontent. The purpose of business is to exploit the worker for the surplus value which they alone create. Their failure (reforms) is just further evidence of the fact capitalism cannot be managed and requires replacement, by common ownership and democratic control of all the means of producing and distributing wealth, with production for use and local, regional and global control by the people themselves in conditions of free access and sharing of vital resources. Socialism has never existed anywhere, regardless of the labels political opportunists claimed for themselves, as it is a post-capitalist society. Many mistakenly refer socialism to top-down state capitalist efforts, in many cases to establish capitalist production methods, with its concomitants of waged enslaved conditions of production, poverty (absolute or relative) and war. 'Left wing' thinking is irrelevant to socialism, as in the main the Left attempt to manage capitalism and retain the features of it such as waged labour, governments and apparatus of state control. (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss)

Socialism is not some Left variant of capitalism, but the anti-thesis of it, with production for use, utilising the advanced technology of capitalism to create the superabundance of necessities which will be required for free access. It will be a fully democratic society, locally, regionally, globally, with recallable delegates where necessary on world bodies such as WHO as an example where we need specialised expertise. Too many folk fall into a trap of addressing the question from a perspective which has been shaped by a society with rationed access as a norm and attributing human behaviours arising out of the social conditioned normative responses of the present day, as general principles, a 'human nature' even. War as 'business by other means' is not a natural event but a social one arising out of competition.

Socialism will come about as the conscious political act of the immense majority acting in their class interest and will become seen, as in the interest of all humanity ultimately, ending war over resources, and artificially created scarcity, poverty absolute and relative, created by the production of commodities for markets in conditions of waged slavery, rather than production of useful utilities for human needs, so it will not have the same resistance, when it is seen to be in everyone’s ultimate self-interest to manage the planet and resources for all rather than depleting it for a minority parasitic owning class.

Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research thinks over-population alarm is wrong. “We find it hard to be positive about population growth. But it has boosted economic growth. It has made austerity less painful, by increasing total employment and tax revenues. And congestion, pressure on services – they’re considerably easier to cope with, from a collective point of view, than the opposite problems. We’ve forgotten what depopulation feels like.”

Between 1975 and 1978, the UK population fell. In 1982, it dropped again. “The population of inner London fell by 20% in the 70s,” says Jonathan Portes. “Many people said London was basically doomed. It was going to go the way of Detroit. Inner London would become wasteland.” The consequences of depopulation could be bleak: boarded-up houses; miles of urban dereliction; dwindling investment and passenger numbers in and on public transport. In some places, despite the recovery of the population since, this emptied Britain still exists.

Portes points out that much of the UK is not crowded anyway. Liverpool and Glasgow have barely half as many inhabitants now as they had at their peaks in the middle of the 20th century. All population statistics are by definition slightly out of date and approximate, but while England has roughly 410 people a sq. km – the second highest in the EU – Wales has only 150, Northern Ireland 135 and Scotland 70. Even heaving, stressful London is much less full of people than is widely supposed. “London is the lowest-density mega-city on the planet,” says Danny Dorling. “The densest part of London is four times less dense than Barcelona, a normal, well-planned European city that Britons all want to visit.”

Globally, 50% of the world’s population is crammed into just 1% of the Earth’s landmass. Yet if you wished you could fit the entire world’s human population into the state of Texas.

The world’s population is predicted by some to reach 11 billion by 2100. The map shows there is space for us all to live but it’ll take some clever socialist thinking, in a post-capitalist, commonly owned, production for use society to ensure we actually do.

The map is based on NASA’s gridded population data, which records the population of Earth in 14 square kilometre patches. This map uses a grid of 28 million cells of roughly 3 x 3 miles. “The yellow region in the map includes every cell with a population of 8,000 or more people. Since each of them has an area of about nine square miles, the population density of each yellow cell is at least 900 people per square mile, roughly the same population density as the state of Massachusetts.

http://www.alphr.com/science/1002386/50-of-the-global-population-live-on-1-of-the-world-s-land

It is the economic argument of accumulation, accumulation, of ever more profits for the capitalist parasite class is the driver of the destruction of harmonious use of resources. This senseless, in a sane society, competition between rival capitalists, the duplication of which leads to economic crises, leads to war and destruction of the natural environment. It is quite possible to produce a superabundance of all the necessities, food, clothing, shelter etc. in ways which ensure the satisfaction of human needs without wasteful overproduction. The end of the market system will end, armies, government, banking, insurance and all of the attendant paraphernalia associated with the waged rationed economy.

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

Do not settle for crumbs from the rich man's table, take over the bakery. We have the World to win.

Wee Matt

A Movement for the Many

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor" - Voltaire

Why should workers, who produce all the wealth in the world be denied the right to go where they please to engage in economic activity, or be restricted in their movements, while the parasite capitalist class can export their capital or exploit workers in wealth making opportunities for their self-enrichment, anywhere they damn well please without let or hindrance? Why should workers on benefits (reserve army of wage-enslaved labour for future exploitation by the capitalist class) have to jump through bureaucratic red-taped hoops, for the basic human need of a place to live, while the capitalist parasite class can have luxury homes all over the world? Why should the world’s workers, who produce all of the wealth, have to put up with inferior housing, while the leeching class live in mansions? Immigration is hardly the reason why governments, Labour and Tory stopping building council houses and encouraging their sale, with no 'like for like' new builds.  Immigrants are not the cause of the housing crisis. They suffer the consequences just the same as we all do. The problem is capitalism's production for sale with private, corporate and state ownership of resources by the minority global and national capitalist parasite class. Food, housing, heating and clothing could be freely available as tap water used to be in a sane, democratic, production for use, free access, commonly owned post-capitalist society. We should not need to afford housing. It is a human need and should be a right.

The immigrant workers are not scabs. It is the system of capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and crumbling health services, – not workers, be they ’indigenous’ or foreign. The bosses hope to keep the worst-off sections of workers fighting with each other over shrinking pieces of a small pie instead of uniting to fight for a decent life for all. Workers have no country. We have a world to win. Every country now is part of an integrated global economy and class structure. It is the capitalist class's country and the capitalist class's world. Before anything constructive can be done, capitalism must go and, with it, the artificial division of the world into separate, competing states. This leads inevitably to war, when the capitalist parasitic class thieves fall out. (Business by other means). War and poverty are inevitable concomitants of capitalism. We need to abolish the out-moded and old-fashioned division of the world into nation-states. Instead we need to cooperate on a world basis to meet our material needs and energy requirements. Capitalism must go and workers must make it go. A plague on all parties who wish to retain capitalism. Only workers themselves can bring to fruition the post-capitalist revolution of free-access, delegated democracy, production for use, a price-free, wageless, moneyless, society. Business is not 'people friendly'. Real socialism will do away with the business of exploiting workers in return for a wage or salary and channeling profits to the few.

Socialism should be hostile to all the parties of capitalism, Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Tartan or whatever flag they drape over their wage-slavery administration exploitative activities. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It comes into the world oozing blood form every pore. Dissolve all government 'over' you and elect yourselves into common ownership and democratic control over all the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. Don't whinge that life is not fair. Instead organise with fellow workers worldwide for the overthrow the capitalist system before we sleep-walk into the next world war. There will be no government over people in the post-capitalist commonly owned world. This is an essential feature of minority ownership in capitalist class society. In a classless, commonly owned society, government ceases to exist as an oppressive necessity, loses this feature and becomes an administration of resources. People will organise wealth production and distribution themselves, locally, regionally and globally. In a real delegatory democracy rather than a representative government on behalf of a ruling elites. All wealth will spring, as it does presently, from labour. The difference will be as it is a production for use society, utilising the technological potential capacity of the present, to produce a superabundance of necessities, instead of rationing it, stifling production through the market necessity to profit for a few. There will be no means of exchange as markets cease to exist, when all wealth is owned in common.

The socialist alternative to the profit system is:

• common ownership: no individuals or groups of individuals have property rights over the natural and industrial resources needed for production.

• democratic control: everybody has an equal say in the way things are run including work, not just the limited political democracy we have today.

• production for use: goods and services produced directly to meet people's needs, not for sale on a market or for profit.

• free access: all of us have access to what we require to satisfy our needs, not rationed as today by the size of our pay-cheque or state hand-out.

The lesson in the ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ by Robert Tressell, is we workers need to combine, stop being slavishly philanthropic and providing the wealth for a parasitic minority employer class, take all wealth into common ownership and democratic control, abolish the wages system, waged slavery and establish a free access society.

Capitalists greedis the natural outcome of capital accumulation, within an intensely competitive system, where war is 'business by other means'. It has outlived any socially useful function, having developed the means of production and distribution to its present stage, with an increasingly educated, wage enslaved class now able to run the system from top to bottom .

We can proceed to a democratic, socially equal, commonly owned, post-capitalist society where production is for the use of all, to satisfy human needs and distribution can be free, without any necessity for monetary transaction, within a super-abundance of the necessities of life. Housing to be lived in, food to be eaten, medicine to treat illness rather than as at present, commodities to be sold for the enrichment of a minority owning class, with the vast majority rationed in their access by the present wages /salary /prices system. We only have to remove ownership and control by, corporations, states, private individuals and replace it with common ownership by us all, with production for use. Then we can proceed immediately to having free access to the commonly owned wealth thus dispensing with money and all the paraphernalia which goes with money. Abolish wages and prices. Opt to work for a post-capitalist, commonly owned, (not private, state or corporation) money-free, wage slavery-free, free access, production for use, future. You are only 3 salary cheques from a food bank.

Wee Matt

The Revolutionary Vote

"You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist one second without you. You would begin to live without him. You DO everything. Some of you imagine that if it was not for the capitalist you would have no work. Really he does not employ you at all. You employ him to take from you what you produce, and he sticks faithfully to his job. If you can stand it – he can – and if you don’t change it – he won’t." (Eugene Debs)

Specifically, capturing the state apparatus has to be, in a bourgeois democracy, by the ballot box -"capitalism's Achilles heel". Certainly, it is essential for to win the battle of ideas outside of parliament but this won’t be done by selling them a lie that capitalism can be reformed, by well-meaning or careerist, Left, Centre Left or 'riding two pro-capitalist horses' with one-arse politicians. You are the dreamer, along with the Corbynites, if you think a Labour government which from its earliest incarnations bent to the will of the dominant economic class in society while making worker-friendly noises.  To continue repeating the same historical folly of trying to reform capitalism is by definition an insane reaction to capitalism's madness. The Labour Party is very much a party of capitalism, albeit a reformist one which  has the delusion that capitalism can be reformed and made more equitable. No matter how the Labour reconstitutes itself, it can only run capitalism in the interests of the capitalist system, which means waged slavery for the vast majority and wealth, ease and luxury for an economic parasitic, capitalist class, living off the wealth created by the immense majority.

Anything else, which occurred during the 20th century has little to do with socialism and more to do with minority-led revolutions to overthrow feudalism.

Socialism is the work of and has to win the support of the immense majority. It is not something which will come, "Like a thief in the night", (Keir Hardie) by gradualist 'baby steps' of reforming capitalism, or by nationalising the commanding heights of the economy, state capitalism.

But misrepresenting a capitalism reformed as socialism as the Corbynites seem to be doing won't get socialism either. The task of creating the socialist post-capitalist, production for use, free access, commonly owned, a world is that of the working class itself. The people need to sack the parties of capitalism and elect themselves into running a production-for-use world. There is no short cut to this.

In the real world, of course, capitalism cannot be reformed in any meaningful way, despite the pious sounding hopes of either well meaning, or opportunist politicians of whichever political persuasion

For example:

"Statisticians rate almost 7,000 areas in Scotland by standards including income, employability and health. The statisticians say "deprived" does not just mean "poor" or "low-income". It can also mean people have fewer resources and opportunities, for example in health and education. Glasgow has 56 of the 100 most deprived areas. Edinburgh has six."

...and the problem in capitalism is that some of those deprived  areas, Easterhouse, Barlanark, Carntyne were part of the solution offered by successive Labour and Tory governments in the post-war house  building boom.  Yes, we well remember the hopes of the people who moved from the slums of the east-end into Easterhouse and Drumchapel. The solution of council housing, was welcome enough at the time, inside bathrooms, hot water and so on, a luxury initially, to build new flats  and some houses in the peripheries of the city, in places like  Easterhouse, Drumchapel, Castlemilk, but these we came with fewer social amenities, the building of them provided employment for many, but when  the council housing boom ended, the dole queue beckoned for those  unfortunate enough to have not secured a place in the light engineering  factories sprung up, but soon to vanish, with the Thatcherite wind of  change, itself a product of capitals inevitable crisis-ridden system. They began to deteriorate quite early in the 70's. There really was not much to do, in a social sense, for youths.

We remember Frankie Vaughan coming up to help launch the Easterhouse Project, a youth facility. As the song went, "I'm Frankie Vaughan, jist come up tae gie yese a' a haun". Billy Connolly's characterisation of them as, "deserts wi' windaes" struck a chord. One socialist recalls moving to London to find work, (after being stabbed), which paid a bit better, but after being made redundant was quite happy to get a flat in Easterhouse again, where he was surrounded by really nice people doing their best but the closure of factories set him off wandering again in search of wage slavery, 'twas ever thus.

 It really is the counsel of despair to imagine that capitalism can be reformed. This is not to play politics but to end the pretence to yourself that government over you is in anything but the interests of the capitalist class. To lie to yourself that a different government will have different outcomes. No change at all. Workers still produced all of the wealth in return for a waged ration. Thatcher's government was just doing its capitalist masters new bidding in dismantling the 'homes for heroes', 'cradle to the grave', capitalist caring ideology which won the post-war consensus. Kinnock’s Labour would have done the same as Smiths Labour would have. Hence Blair.

Surplus wealth is not produced by the parasite capitalist class, but by workers. All wealth comes from labour. Capital is stolen surplus value.

Capitalism is not amenable to reform. The free market system requires a majority to be exploited of their surplus value. It is but one of the many paradoxes of capitalism that it has shrunk the world only to divide society into smaller and smaller fragments. That it has progressed at breakneck speed in the fields of travel and communication yet it has divided and alienated us from our true humanity. Anti-social behaviour is a result of the despair engendered by the hopelessness of capitalism a consequence of the system and not a fixable problem.

“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” Voltaire

Capitalism's profit requirements will place severe constraints on what any government can achieve and that, like their predecessors, they will have to compromise and run the economic system in favour of the  capitalist elites which they currently rail against.

"If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a  congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head  to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." Marx

Wee Matt

What is money

There is no truly independent country in the world, because international capitalism has made sure of this, and our own experience here in Britain, especially since 1964, should have brought it home to us. The past few years should have shown us just how independent Britain is, when foreign "bankers" tell the British government how to spend money, and how it must not spend money, in order to keep the international capitalist class happy. Workers have no country and a post-capitalist, wage-slavery free world to win.

Independence for Scotland therefore is a myth put about by the Scottish National Party, which further confuses the Scottish section of the working class and blinds them from the real struggle – the class struggle. The outcome of the class struggle is the abolition of capitalism and an end to poverty, insecurity and the ever-present threat of war. The SNP is just another capitalist supporting political party, as politically dishonest as Labour and Conservatives and Lib-Dems and Greens or UKIP. Don't follow leaders. Leadership is capitalist principle. How about getting rid of leaders and opting for working towards socialism as capitalism can not be reformed without war (by deed or proxy) and poverty (relative or absolute)?

Don't settle for crumbs take over the bakehouse as we, the 95 percent, produce all of the wealth. Abolish capitalism and its iniquitous wages system.   Marshall Sahlins, perceptively observed:
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such, it is the invention of civilization" (Stone Age Economics).

In truth, the majority is impoverished. It is impoverished insofar as it has no other option than to sell its working abilities to those who monopolise the means of living and whose conspicuous wealth must irresistibly provide the very yardstick by which that poverty will be starkly exposed. This may not be the poverty of material destitution. But if the measure of a human being consists in the accumulation of material possessions to which he or she may claim the, by that token, we are demeaned. And, ultimately, it is in this devaluation of our human worth—not simply in the fact of material inequality but in the meaning this society attaches to it—that we may glimpse the very essence of this poverty. The basic income is not a solution, but another form of subsistence ration, effectively relative poverty, while wealth surpluses torrent upwards to an economically dominant capitalist parasite class.

Supporters of capitalism, especially the Von Mises school, may not be able to conceive of production without money and prices, but we socialists can. The definitive answer to your the "economic calculation problem" is a (largely) self-regulating system of stock control in which calculations are made in kind rather than in terms of a common unit like money.

And let us address those currency cranks who believe we can create money by a stroke of the keyboard. Surely, the recent banking crisis has exploded the myth about banks being able to create credit, i.e. money to lend out at interest, by a mere stroke of the pen but apparently not.

Financial crises always spark interest in critics of the system. They see the problems of capitalism—like its vulnerability to crises—as primarily financial in origin. The whole point of production under capitalism is not the satisfaction of needs, but the accumulation of money. In other words, it’s impossible to separate the economic world into a good productive side and a bad financial side; the two are inseparable.

The monetary surpluses generated in production—the profits of capitalist businesses—accumulate over time and demand some sort of outlet: bank deposits, bonds, stocks, whatever. It’s going to be that way until we replace capitalism with something radically different. What we need to ask is why people today tend to blame banks rather than capitalism as a whole.

No bank can lend more than it has, either as deposits or what it has itself borrowed. The idea that money is created through fractional reserve banking is more of a metaphor.

No point in the socialist case arouses such controversy as that of the abolition of money and wages. Marx identified money as one of the two main manifestations of human alienation (the other was the state) and looked forward to its abolition in a communist society where human values would apply: where the standard by which something would be considered ‘valuable’ would be human welfare.

Marx also fully endorsed the slogan “Abolition of the Wages System!” a system which he regarded as a form of slavery. Money is just a means of saying ‘This is mine, not yours’.

Money in various limited forms existed for hundreds of years before the advent of capitalism but because it is an indispensable element in the workings of capitalism its general usage expanded universally with the development of that system. For a start, it is the device whereby capitalism separates the worker from the fruits of his or their labour; an indispensable part of the process whereby a minority class of capitalists ration the consumption of the great majority who as workers of one sort or another produce all the real wealth of society.

Marx saw money as having two basic functions: (1) a medium of exchange or circulation, i.e. the means through which articles produced for sale get bought and sold; and (2) a measure of value, i.e. a common unit in which the value of articles produced for sale can be expressed as a price, and is thus a standard by which they can be compared.

Marx also identified two kinds of paper token money: tokens that were convertible on demand into a fixed amount of the money-commodity and tokens which were not. The former created no problem. The latter, however, could create a problem if they were issued in a greater amount than the amount of the money-commodity that would otherwise circulate. In this case, if they circulated alongside gold or silver, the value of the tokens would depreciate, i.e. they would buy less than their face-value. If they were the only currency (as is the case today) this would result in a rise in the general price level, i.e. in a change in the standard of price.

An inconvertible paper currency has to be managed by the government or some state institution such as a central bank which, to avoid depreciation or inflation, has to calculate the correct amount to issue. In Marx’s day the case where the only currency was paper token money was a hypothetical one which he only discussed in passing.

"Paper coin, that forgery
Of the title-deeds which we
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of earth."
Shelley

Wee Matt