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

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

Nothing will stop an idea which time has come.

All wealth comes from the workers, not from the useless parasite class who derive their wealth from the exploitation of us. 90-99% of the world’s population are wage slaves.  It's only when workers across the world discard all notions that countries and national identities are a central part of the political landscape that real changes can be made to all our lives.

 Socialism has never existed to fail. Many opponents of  socialism are simply restating capitalist propaganda about post-feudal attempts to kick start capitalism. In Russia the absence of a large enough capitalist class meant the state stepped into the breach. Effectively those examples of Leninism were state capitalist developments. 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.

 Socialism is a post-capitalist society. The idea will seem strange 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, commonly owned world is that of the working class itself. The nation-state also would cease to exist in a democratic socialist world, effectively we would become our own government, with delegatory democracy, locally regionally and globally, over things and resources rather than as presently, representative class government over people.

For sure, there are sincere but misguided Leninists, and many Trotskyists, taking their cue from Lenin, who think that workers need to be led into socialism, as it turns out, they lead them into state-capitalism. Socialism in one country is impossible. It is a global society. It requires a revolutionary transformation in that the immense majority become aware that the present mode of production and distribution is obsolete.

 Chavez was not a socialist but a social reformer of capitalism. During his presidency, he kept open the doors on the flow of Western capital into Venezuela, while introducing a familiar programme of nationalisation and social reform. He did not cease to preside over an exploitative capitalist economy, nor did he cut off economic relationships with the West.

  The degree to which the Venezuelan workers are exploited will continue to depend on fluctuations in the economy, on their own capacity and will to resist the inevitable downward pressure on their incomes, and on government policy. The fact of their exploitation, though, is inevitable. So is their relative poverty, their limited freedom of choice, and the lack of control they have over their lives.

 None of this will change until they and working people everywhere, have ceased to put their faith in governments and charismatic politicians whatever claims and promises they make.

Capitalism's other essential twin concomitant with war is poverty. With ownership and control in the hands of the few, whether individuals, corporations or state, a parasitic class, in direct competition with each other, (leading to wars) allied with production for sale on the market to enrich the minority, with a useful productive waged slave (rationed in access) class, the majority, producing all of the wealth, but, of social necessity, kept in conditions of poverty, relative or absolute.

 It is not a case of intentional 'evil', although undoubtedly there are some evil bastards, but a consequence of competition within and without, the social classes. There are many decent individual capitalists, would wish to reform the system but this cannot occur. Wage slavery is essential for the production of surplus value for the capitalist.

 Capitalism cannot be reformed of wage slavery. If profits were to be eroded by redistribution of them to the worker, the capitalist would be out-competed and go to the wall. Even cooperatives find themselves in this double bind.

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

Remove the masters of death

Capitalism is unpredictable and there is presently the sound of war-drums in the air, in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the South China Seas and in the Arctic. The world is in an economic slump also.

Socialism/communism, production for use and not for sale, abolition of the wages system, has never been tried to fail. All we have ever have been variants of capitalism. Capitalism cannot be reformed in this way except for brief periods if it proved useful for the ruling class. Capitalism depends on poverty (absolute or relative). How else will we present ourselves for waged slavery exploitation for the surplus value wealth only workers create? The end of the ruling class by the last great emancipation, that of the wage slave and the introduction of production for use, will end the necessity for the war machines.

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

War is not some natural event, but a consequence of a social system, where intense competition for raw materials , trade routes or geo-political interests are threatened by other members of a global minority parasite capitalist class. The capitalist social system and its bloodstained ethos of, primarily of individual accumulation of riches for the minority capitalist class, can be replaced by a classless commonly owned society of production for use. One where all human needs are met and access to them is free, where raw materials are shared and not owned, where the world is organised locally, regionally and globally by all its people with no elite vital interests.

The organising tenet of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", will send capitalism's twin horrors of war and poverty to the dustbin of history. There are probably enough buildings in London to house everybody, certainly enough so that nobody need be homeless or live in accommodation without basic amenities. The problem with housing is same with anything else it is a commodity produced for sale on the market with a view of realising a profit. Because housing is produced for profit there is no possibility of a rational approach to housing within capitalism. As Engels pointed out as long ago as 1872:

‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself’ (The Housing Question).

Immigrants are fellow workers and are equally victims of the housing shortage problem as anyone else, not the cause of it. 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.

We need a post-capitalist system, which 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 calculation of capitalism, only necessary to satisfy profit taking. Our business needs to become that of ending business and the ruthless competition which leads to war. The end of the ruling class by the last great emancipation, that of the wage slave and the introduction of production for use, will end the necessity for the war machines. You can't say "Not in my name" when it is civilians, but it's OK for fellow workers in uniform, who have been coerced into fighting their masters' battles are killed. Voting for a capitalist political party is voting for poverty absolute or relative and war by proxy by deed as business by other means as suppliers from the masters of death, the capitalist class as a whole upon whose interests all wars are fought. The 'tax payer' in whose interests all war is fought, for raw materials, markets, spheres of geo-political interests, is not a member of the working class, but of the global parasitic capitalist class. Taxation is a burden upon the capitalist class levied upon their profit. The weapons will always be in the wrong hands while we have capitalism.

Selling to the highest bidder is 'normal' and moral market behaviour in an aggressive competitive capitalist social system. The morality of it is determined by the accumulative economic and/or strategic outcome for the capitalist class engaged upon it. These are all upstanding 'moral' good guys and gals whose governments approved the conducted war science upon civilians of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It is the social system which requires to be revolutionised into a human centred, commonly owned, production for use, cooperative world. The ethical behaviour and morality which proceeds from this will surely be different to the ones which presently prevail. All we need is a majority who are politically aware of those facts and conscious of the necessity of their shared role with fellow-workers worldwide, in bringing the post-capitalist society into being.

We don't need leaders.

We are not sheep.

Workers have no country

We have a world to win

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

Public ownership is not common ownership

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation."

People, by and large, have lost confidence in the ability of the ruling class to maintain a peaceful, secure, orderly and prosperous society. Socialism is not a complicated doctrine. Socialism as a society dedicated to the interests of the people. The means by which society produces its wealth – factories, mines and farms – are transferred from private to common ownership, and exploitation eliminated. Socialism unleashes the creativity of the people, who are capable of tremendous advances when not toiling under a system of exploitation. The basic starting point of the socialist idea is that the working class is a revolutionary class and as such is capable of overthrowing the capitalist system.

All of the usual examples given of socialism/communism are nothing of the sort. They are either attempts to reform capitalism, or post-feudal attempts to introduce capitalist methods, such as Russian China, in the absence of a domestic capitalist class the state stepped in such as it did in Bismarck's Germany. Socialism and communism mean the same thing, common ownership or social ownership of the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth. The distinction of socialism-communism is a Leninist distortion of what Marx was referring to when capitalism then was in its infancy and could not go straight over to a free access society. There is now no need for a two stage solution since the early part of last century. We can go straight into the post-capitalist society of abundance and plenty for all. Millions already do voluntary work. All the more so when they are freed from the compulsion of wage-slavery and work which will be superfluous and unnecessary inside a post-capitalist society.

Socialism is effectively a post-capitalist, production for use, democratic, free access, money-free society producing a superabundance of the necessities to enable free access i.e. moneyless distribution with democratic control by all and no elites governing over us, we govern resources ourselves, locally regionally and globally, using recallable delegation when required. The organising tenet is: "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Anything else, and you are being sold a capitalist pup with its twin concomitants of war (business by other means) and poverty (absolute or relative).

The solution is not to be found in capitalism where the economic bottom line prevails, despite good intentioned people trying the impossible task of reforming a monstrous system over you by electing reform parties. The Labour Party, throughout its various terms in office, has always supported the interests of capital against labour because it is a capitalist party. It has never been, is not and never will be, a socialist party. They may see themselves a 'socialists' or identify with 'socialism' but they are a part of the problem, as reformers, rather than the solution to capitalism which is a post-capitalist revolution. Public ownership is not common ownership but state ownership and is not even a step towards socialism. Nothing to do with state ownership or corporate or private ownership. Nothing to do with centralised control either. Socialism is a post-capitalist system, which 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 calculation of capitalism, only necessary to satisfy profit taking. We will not need a market in a post-capitalist free access, socialist society.

It is a post-capitalist, production-for-use, prices-free, society without elites and with free equal access to the collective produce. Government ceases to be over the people a part of class society and becomes the democratic administration over resources as part of a classless, elite free society run by us all.

The Socialist Party is Britain's oldest socialist party and second oldest political party and has consistently retained the definition of what socialism is, a revolutionary, post-capitalism, despite its usurpation by capitalist political parties to mean reform. The traditional conceptual models of 'right' and 'left' politics were borrowed from the French bourgeois revolution and are used still by capitalist parties to brand different versions of the same thing.  Socialism/communism is not some left-variant of capitalism. Socialists of our kind are not on the Left. The Socialist Party exists to get rid of the market system and introduce production for use.

Wee Matt

Leninism is pseudo-revolutionary drivel

There is a class struggle going on. The national interest is not the same as the workers class interest. The working class have never had a government that cares a damn about them. It is past time they stopped looking for one.

"The workers must organise for their emancipation. They can do this, and only they can do it. I cannot do this for you and I want to be frank enough to say I would not, if I could. For, if I could do it for you somebody else could undo it for you. But, when you do it yourselves, it will be done for ever -and until you do it, you have got to pay the penalty of your ignorance, indifference and neglect." -Eugene Debs

Even Attlee's famous reforming government brought troops out against workers 8 times in the bosses’ interest.

Here is Labour's record for using troops to break strikes. 1945: Dockers. 1946: Smithfield porters. Southampton dockers. 1947: Road transport workers (including Smithfield), dockers, Tower Bridge operators. 1948: Buckingham Palace boiler-room workers, dockers (State of emergency declared under Emergency Powers Act of 1920). 1949: Dockers, Smithfield road haulage drivers, gas maintenance workers. 1966: seamen. 1975: Glasgow refuse collectors. 1977: Air traffic control assistants, firemen. 1978: Naval dockyard workers. During the so-called Winter of Discontent of 1978-9 Merlyn Rees, the then Labour Home Secretary, informed Parliament of the plans made to protect the interests of British capitalism:

The government were ready at any time to call on the assistance of the Services and to proclaim a state of emergency should that have been necessary. The contingency plans were kept constantly under review by ministers. 160 service instructors were trained and 15,000 servicemen were recalled from leave over the New Year period and kept on short notice. Detailed contingency plans had been prepared for requisitioning of tankers and restricting the use of fuel to priority purposes. To put the plans for requisitioning tankers into effect would have required a proclamation of a state of emergency. If necessary parliament would have been recalled. In the event it has not been necessary to put any of these plans into operation. (Hansard, 15 January 1979. col. 1318)

When the Labour government did eventually use the troops during this major industrial dispute it was against . . . the ambulancemen. Ambulance crews were particularly badly paid, with a minimum basic rate of 38.44p per week and the rejection of their claim for a two-thirds increase on 12 January led to their participation in the general local authority workers one-day stoppage on 22 January.  The Labour Party administration of capitalism under Callaghan replied by calling in the troops. In London 50 army vehicles and 85 police were brought into use with the police providing the first line of cover backed up by the volunteer services, and troops only being summoned when these could not cope.

Workers should not just recall the anti-working class actions of past Labour governments but should also understand why. It is the working class who produce the wealth in society and it is the exploitation of their labour-power that has created the vast accumulation of wealth represented by the means of production and distribution. These are not owned by the workers but by the capitalist class and are used to make profits irrespective of workers' unfulfilled needs and wants. This state of affairs is made possible because the capitalist class control the state through Parliament where its various political parties, including the Labour Party, now sit. The Labour Party, throughout its various terms in office, has always supported the interests of Capital against Labour because it is a capitalist party. It has never been, is not and never will be a socialist party.

Trotskyism is just left-wing capitalism in practice (state-capitalism) a top-down rule over the workers by a minority who think workers are too dumb to understand what socialism/communism is, and have to be led by a party into it. It bears no relation to what Marx envisaged but is a Leninist distortion. It is not Marxism. It is Leninist pseudo-revolutionary drivel, justifying a dictatorship over the proletariat. The task of creating the socialist post-capitalist, production-for-use, free-access, commonly-owned world is that of the working class itself. There is no short cut to this. It is time you started to educate yourself then, as to why poverty, absolute or relative and war, (which is business by other means),  are inevitable concomitants of capitalism, how capitalism cannot be reformed

Wee Matt

Caged hamsters

The Left is and always has been a part of capitalism, albeit, in some instances a state-controlled version. Labour in government has sent troops in to break strikes, backed all of the major wars engaged in by the UK this last century (and has initiated a few of them), and has repeatedly attacked working class living standards to ensure the profitability of British industry. The welfare state was a capitalist “success”. It distracted workers with 'cradle to the grave' promises and staved off any social revolution.

There is nothing to suggest that either Corbyn or Smith, despite their radical phrases, would behave any differently in office – all national governments are there to administer their particular section of world capitalism, and as Syriza in Greece found out soon enough, have very little control over the market economy as events unfold. Looking to government is infantile, as governments exist to govern over you in the interests of the dominant economic parasite class in order that you attend to being a dutiful Uncle Tom wage slave ‘Thank you, master’. If you vote for a government over you, you will get governed over. Politicians supply demons. They supply a singular address for evil upon which you can blame everything. Where the economy is a mess, where people’s mortgages are underwater, it is much easier to find one single person or group of people to blame for all their problems than it is to analyse the extremely complex subject of, for instance, mortgage-backed Wall Street securities, which most people can’t understand. So, you blame taxes, or you blame the bankers or you blame individual politicians themselves.

People are like caged hamsters running endlessly on a proverbial spinning wheel. The media go about the business of misinforming, disinforming, and diverting the people from the source of their misery—which is the system itself. In other words, it’s all about controlling the minds of the masses.

“If those in charge of our society—politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television—can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power...” explained Howard Zinn.

Or as Steve Biko said, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

For power to be lodged in the hands of the people does not mean merely that they are to have the widest possible franchise and equal voting power. It implies that the people are to have control of all social institutions, a say in all social activities, the self-management of social life. Such a condition of affairs presupposes at the very outset the common ownership by the people of all the means of life.

Momentum activists will no doubt argue that Corbyn is a decent man with a track record of opposing wars. But this misses the point about how capitalism entraps those who seek to administer it. And while Corbyn may have opposed the senseless butchery of the Iraq War, he is a man (along with John McDonnell) who has sought to apologise repeatedly for the nationalism and terrorism of organisations like the Provisional IRA and Hamas. Men like these who commemorated IRA terrorists and who refused to condemn some of the most anti-working class atrocities in UK history (such as the Birmingham pub bombings and Enniskillen) are men whose peaceful and socialist credentials deserve to be viewed with quite some scepticism. Workers have no country or nations but the world to win for a commonly owned free access socialist society. Nationalism is a curse on the working class and leads them to the slaughter in the interest of the dominant economic class. When the slaughter ends it is back to the same old wage slavery regardless of the nationality of the employer.

What is of importance now is that people who may identify with wanting to create a genuinely socialist society of common ownership, democratic control and free access to wealth, don’t get suckered in by a radical-sounding, ‘populist’ reform movement that has yet to prove its popularity anywhere beyond the already like-minded. The attempt to reform capitalism by so-called benevolent governments has always been a disaster and there’s nothing to suggest it would be any different next time under either Corbyn or Smith.

Real socialists have always been content to leave the Labour Party to the reformists – and the more we think about it, the more they are welcome to it.

Wee Matt

Capital does not build anything

"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois." (1879, Marx and Engels)

We are with Marx and Engels for the abolition of the wages system.

Workers run and manage capitalism from the top to the bottom and even police themselves. The PC or laptop you are using, the clothes you are wearing the food you eat and the money you shift about is the product of waged workers selling their commodity, labour power at less than its value to produce a surplus value.

 This is a vast inter-relationship of labour globally which adds value to the capitalist’s commodity via socially necessary labour time. This is everything you can think of from infrastructure building to shithouse manufacture and installations, to children mining in less advanced capitalist nations. Workers have no capital worth mentioning. Capital on its own can do nothing, it can't light an oven or dig a ditch, until it is invested in an exploitative opportunity and it is the labour of the working class globally whether by hand or by brain, which is utilised to this end of producing a surplus over and above the invested capital. Capital itself is dead labour. In times of economic uncertainty such as presently financial capital reserves, may be used to speculate and create bubbles but this is just gambling until markets pick up.

One of the amazing things about capitalism is that whereas machinery creates abundance millions are in want.

As always, Marx hit the nail on the head.

“It is not the case that too much wealth is produced. But it is true that there is periodical over-production of wealth in its capitalist and self-contradictory form. The limitations of the capitalist mode of production become apparent:

1) In the fact that the development of the productive power of labour establishes, in the falling rate of profit, a law which becomes, at a certain point, hostile to this mode of production itself and which can only be overcome by periodical crises.

2) In the fact that the expansion or contraction of production is decided by the appropriation of unpaid labour and by the proportion of this unpaid labour to materialized labour in general, or in the language of the capitalists, by profit and by the proportion of this profit to employed capital, by a definite rate of profit, instead of being determined by the relations of production to social needs, to the needs of socially developed human beings.

Consequently, the capitalist mode of production reaches its limit at a level of production which would be wholly inadequate in terms of the second proposition (production for needs) it comes to a standstill at a point determined by the production and realization of profit, not by the satisfaction of human needs.” -Capital Volume 3

Poverty is also relative to the surplus it creates. Poverty absolute or relative, and war (business by other means) are inevitable concomitants of capitalist competition over raw materials, markets, trade routes and geo-political interests. The export of the absolutes of poverty and war does not change the fundamentals of this system. Workers are all in this together and have a collective social class interest. How many echo their master's voice in responding to people who are worse off than themselves. The separation of 'poor' into categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Or the notion that there is a 'middle-class', when even the majority of high-earning workers are under no illusions as to themselves being a few salary cheques away from a food-bank.

Capital does not produce anything. It is only invested when a profit can be realised by the workers in extraction, refining, distributing, researching etc. Who flies the helicopters? Who builds the helicopters, makes the overalls, cooks the meals, educates the workers?  Workers do this. Capital cannot drill holes or build rigs or move ships. It is the worker who conceives, plans, builds the push button, auto machines and relative to the surplus produced is collectively exploited by virtue of not owning the product of their collective labour, as its realisable value torrents upwards to the parasite class, who own the stolen surplus value (capital) which is only required in a production for sale class system. Indeed he may not personally be exploited like a kid in a Welsh mine, but the kid extracting the raw earth materials in a less developed country is a part of the exploited chain in his/her tools for the job.

The rules of engagement are very simple. It matters not if machines can replace human drudgery if production is for sale with a view to realising a profit for the private, corporate or state owner of the means of production. Ownership and control by a minority class is subjugation of the majority. It requires social control over the majority. It matters a great deal, indeed is a revolutionary, post -capitalist solution, if ownership is common, in a production is for the use of all, in a free access, democratic, commonly owned world,

Freedom from waged slavery will also free workers from work in this instance and enable the application of the operating tenet, "From each according to their ability to each according to their needs". It is the ownership and control of robotic resources along with everything else in and on the planet which must be made common, to enable a free access post-capitalist society. Costs, as expressed in economic monetary calculation will be irrelevant in a commonly owned society. We will have calculation-in-kind and production-for-use with free-access.

It is workers presently who run capitalism from top to bottom. They will be more than capable of running the new society without any parasitical economic elites or governments 'over' them.

The Socialist Party is against a mythical past. We are for the future, opposing capitalism in all of its incarnations. We say a plague on all attempts to reform it, as impossible delusions and include state capitalism as per post-feudal Russia and state-capitalist nationalisation variants, as per successive Labour and Conservative governments. All doomed to failure, as too, the Thatcherite neo-conservative and Blairite governments 'over' us.

"The workers must organise for their emancipation. They can do this, and only they can do it. I cannot do this for you and I want to be frank enough to say I would not, if I could. For, if I could do it for you somebody else could undo it for you. But, when you do it yourselves, it will be done for ever -and until you do it, you have got to pay the penalty of your ignorance, indifference and neglect." (Eugene Debs)

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

Goodbye money

However the Labour Party 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. Time for a post-capitalist upgrade, a democratic, commonly-owned, production-for-use world, of free-access to the common wealth without any elite parasite class.

Communism/socialism is a post -capitalist society, means exactly the same thing to us as they did to Marx also. The common ownership and democratic control by us all, of all the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth. 'Common' and 'social' mean the same. Nothing to do with state ownership or corporate or private ownership. Nothing to do with central control either. It is a post-capitalist system which utilises the technological advances of capitalism to produce for use to satisfy 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 calculation of capitalism, only necessary to satisfy profit taking.

If you are born poor you will most likely die poor. Poverty is both absolute and relative. All wealth comes from the exploited labour of the working class which creates a surplus value above its rationed access (wages). A commonly owned society, would not have rich or poor, we would all have free access to the commonly produced wealth, with no elite classes creaming it off and storing it.

We are all component parts of the wealth producing social class, called the working class, comprising 90-95% of the world population, who collectively produce all of the world’s wealth, effectively runs capitalism from top to bottom, in conditions of wage slavery. Our attribute is to assist in the re-focusing of the attention of my class, from the foolish notion of ever reforming this abominable system, in which the richest 300 capitalist parasites have more wealth than the half of all humanity, in favour of a revolutionary change, to a post-capitalist society, in order to make all wealth to be held, produced for use and distributed according to self-assessed needs, in common for all on this planet, all of its human family.

The new Duke of Westminster is set to inherit his family's £9billion fortune aged just 25 following his dad's tragic death. Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor is already godfather to Prince George after being asked to accept the prestigious role by Prince William in 2013. And now, he will be among the richest people in the world after his 64-year-old dad, Gerald, passed away at Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire yesterday. Hugh, who is the 7th Duke of Westminster, will receive his father's estimated £9.35billion wealth - including the family seat, Eaton Hall near Chester. He will also gain a staggering property portfolio, including land in the wealthiest areas of London.

In Capital, Karl Marx describes how an aristocratic lady’s lands were accrued because of her skills at performing fellatio “Lady Orkney’s endearing offices are supposed to have been foeda labiorum ministeria,” (base services performed with the lips).

 July 28, 2013, Washington Dateline Report said:

“Four out of 5 US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives …” And, “measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk … 4 in 10 adults falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.”

A report in The Asahi Shimbun on June 23 presents a poverty-picture in Japan, an economic model to a section of mainstream economists in poor countries. The report “Young people struggle to emerge from poverty” by Masaki Hashida mentioned a middle-aged person. To save money, the person’s only meal is breakfast, and the breakfast is with rice, miso soup, fermented beans and broiled fish. The person has lost 30 kilograms in two years. The man, according to the report, is a victim of a “black company”, an employer that harasses employees, forces them to work long hours often without pay, and presses them to resign. The monthly pay from these companies appears limited to 200,000 yen ($2,104). The AS report cited Haruki Kono, head of nonprofit organization POSSE: The black companies “exploit employees by forcing them to work for the same job as stated in manuals to such an extent that they get sick and eventually quit.”

Hence, it comes out: Big entrepreneurs irrespective of poor and rich societies are the same while they compete in the market. They harass, they force to work long hours, and often they don’t pay, and these give them a competitive edge. How much value, after the above fact, sermons from rich societies carry?

Doesn't it sound like Marx, as he detailed back-breaking work of industrial labour in the capitalist economy in Europe? Too many fellow workers are servile, unable to comprehend the world where all would be freed from wage slavery, able to freely partake of the wealth from the common store which they had collectively created, so conditioned had he become to accept what his master taught him.

The class system is a result of varied, succeeding minority revolutions and the economic modes which prevailed up until the advent of the capitalist class, another minority led revolution, which displaced the landowning aristocrats as the ruling class and absorbed them into itself, establishing bourgeois democracy in its wake as a method of social control.

Effectively, there are only two economic classes. The ruling capitalist one which exists in a parasitic relationship to the immense majority working class , wealth producing one, by virtue of its ownership of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. Wielding this ownership to exploit workers in waged slavery, for rationed access to the wealth only workers produce, in return for producing vast surplus value for the parasite class.

Changing the class system is straight forward, as changing the mode of production and distribution from private, corporate, state or any combination of those ownerships, into a democratic, commonly owned, production for use , free-access, post-capitalist, class-less, elite-free society, eliminates the economic foundation of the class system. There is then, no need for any representative government over us anymore, as a government is the executive arm of the dominant parasite class, which 'represents' in capitalism, the economic interests of its ruling class. What we would have would be an administration of 'things' rather, than one in control over people, but it would be self-administered with delegated recall where this was deemed appropriate. Workers, unlike the peasants before who at least had some land and crops of their own, have no country to be independent in. It belongs to a local, regional and global capitalist class. Capitalism is a global system which requires a global working class response to it.

Abolish the wage system.

Wee Matt

The One Percent and the Rest of Us

The case for socialism is one which has to be understood and implemented by the world's working class seizing control of their own destiny. It is not something which can be given or gifted by a political party dropping it onto people’s laps like the proverbial 'Manna from Heaven'.

It requires the development of a political consciousness which understands that capitalism is already obsolete as a useful social system. Which draws these conclusions from its never-ending crises, wars, two world wars last century, war science on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still doing war dances in the North Sea, the Arctic Circle, the Middle East and the South China seas over raw materials, trade routes and spheres of geo-political interests.

On June 20th the United Nations Refugee Agency released their annual global trends report which contained the startling news that 65.3 million people have been forcibly removed from their homes. This is an all time high record and it means one in every 113 people is a refugee. The causes are due to on-going persecution, human rights violations and war. In 2015 more than 1 million reached Europe, fleeing conflict and persecution in Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan. If this 65.3 million were a nation it would be the 21st largest in the world.

The dominant ideas of any time are those of the ruling class (Ideology). How can it presently be any other way? The electorate is persuaded through the education system, the media, slavish fellow workers espousing 'common sense', that capitalism is the only system around.

To this end all capitalist political parties do attempt to appeal to electorates that all of the above madness is quite normal, inevitable, due to human nature, but with their husbandry, as the 'lesser of the other's evil', war-mongering, poor-bashing, immigrant and refugee scapegoating, better outcomes or reforms can be achieved. A demonstrably monstrous lie. Capitalism cannot be reformed. All the above are not fixable, nor reformable aberrations of capitalism, but entrenched parts of it.

The onus is not on us to put it to the electorate, but for you to engage your intellect, to put it to yourself and ask yourself the question, why so many wonderful things are happening lately. In Britain the Brexit vote caused stock markets to plunge trillions of dollars. Five cops were shot dead in Dallas. Suicide bombers killed 36 at Istanbul airport. In the U.S. they seem ready to elect a racist moron as president. In Venezuela, starving people were shot dead as they stormed grocery stores to get food which their fellow working class people produced. In Africa and Asia women are being violated by the armies of war-lords. Global warming continues unabated.

Doesn't it occur to you that something is fundamentally wrong in society and that being such, something should be done about it?  Poverty absolute or relative, war, (business by other means) either total or by proxy, are inevitable concomitants of capitalism. The world’s workers produce all of the world’s wealth yet can only access a fraction of it rationed by wages or salaries. The world’s workers run capitalism from top to bottom although this is not in their ultimate interest.

Tim Di Muzio, senior lecturer in international relations and political economy at Wollongong University in Australia, in ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership’. He further states that “The market and price system were imposed on humanity not as a matrix of choice but as a mechanism of domination.” Di Muzio reveals that the 12 million high net worth individuals (HNWIs) on a global scale represent 0.2% of the population. the top ten percent own 85 percent of the world’s wealth, the bottom 50 percent scarcely one percent. The 1%-ers have almost 40 times more than the bottom 50 percent. The goal of capitalists is differential accumulation – to primarily increase the wealth gap between themselves and others: i.e., they seek greater wealth inequality. At the corporate level, the goal is the same: to gain a larger share of the wealth pie than competitors. For this reason, the capitalist system cannot rid wealth inequality or significantly reduce the inequality. Di Muzio writes: “this addiction for wealth and power is destroying the planet for future generations.”

All of the above problems can be swept away easily as anything by the establishment of a commonly owned production for use society, without markets, without buying and selling, without money, where we would all be better off and in delegated democratic control of our commonly owned world as a fellow human family.

The task of creating the socialist post-capitalist, production for use, free access, commonly owned, world is that of the working class itself. There is no short cut to this. It is you, and I and our fellow workers worldwide who have to aspire to this task. There are some anarchists with whom we can share a degree of affinity, Bookchin,  anarcho-communists or such, others are as crazy as fervid leaderist bolsheviks and would get workers heads blown off, instead of trying to capture the state initially, to prevent this outcome backed up by the populace already organised to implement common ownership and production for use. For us, it is peacefully, if we can violently if we must. The end determines the means, which is why it has to be a democratic majority-led movement and not seized or gazumped by a political clique.

We still had to have two world wars, innumerable small ones and wars by proxy, over trade routes, raw materials, spheres of geopolitical interest, war science on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fire-bombing of Dresden, by the 'good guys', bombing of Britain by the 'bad guys'. 'Homes fit for heroes after WW1, the introduction of reforms ,'from the cradle to the grave’ after WW2, the failure of state capitalism in Russia all to show that, war and poverty absolute or relative are intrinsical concomitants of capitalism and that capitalism cannot be reformed.

Capitalism is based on the ownership and control of the means of production by a 'privileged few' and production for the market with a view to profit, the source of their high incomes and privileged lifestyle. Capitalism runs on profits. Any government, whatever its intentions, has to respect this and give priority to profits and conditions for profit-making, unless they want to provoke an economic crisis and slump. This means putting profit-making before meeting the needs of 'ordinary working-class families'. All governments have done – have had to do – this, some Tory governments with relish, some Labour governments reluctantly, but they've all done it. Capitalism cannot be 'socially responsible', i.e. responsible to society as a whole. It is a profit-driven system that can only work in the interest of the privileged few who are the profit-takers.

The reason given by the majority of Labour MPs for wanting to depose Corbyn is their perception that, with him as leader, the Labour Party is unelectable and so cannot, as some of them have been tearfully proclaiming, get into a position where it can govern in the interest of – of course – the working class.

Are they any more sincere – or insincere – than May and her Conservatives? Not that it matters. It is not a question of sincerity but of what is practicably possible, and it is not possible to govern capitalism in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. Both the Labour Party and the Tory Party stand for capitalism, and no government, not even one under Corbyn, can make capitalism work for the working class.

It is time we all got a life, ended the tyranny of capitalism, its anarchy of the market place and production only for the profit of the few and ushered in the, commonly owned, democratically controlled by us all, free access, production for use, post-capitalist future.

We have a world to win for all the world’s people. Socialism would be a global system, as capitalism is at present. There wouldn't be any foreign powers organised in nation states. Workers worldwide would be organised by themselves, locally regionally and globally, to administer resources in the cooperative world commonwealth There would be no government over people, (this is only needed in a minority class dominated competitive society), government ceases to be, other than the collective administration and sharing of resources, (an administration of things rather than people) that in capitalism war is waged over.

It is workers who presently run capitalism from top to bottom in the interests of the capitalist parasite class, they will be more than capable to run the post-capitalist world with a production for use, free access distribution, with no top-bottom dichotomy, or elites in privileged conditions.

We don’t really care less what it is called, socialism, communism, anarchy or macaroniHow long, how long? We advocate what socialism was, originally prior to the reform parties of capitalism utilising its popular appeal to their own, doomed to failure, gradualist and reformist ends and Lenin's gross distortions into two phases, to justify Bolshevik control of their aspiration to state capitalism revolution. They called us "Impossibilists", but reforming capitalism is what proved impossible.

Educate! Agitate! Organise!

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

Wee Matt