Turning the screw

From the February 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three years ago the company I worked for announced it was closing. It was part of an ailing industrial giant which was itself finally sunk soon after when the banks withdrew their support. During the three month run-down period rumours that a "consortium" of managerial staff was trying to buy the place kept our hopes alive. Those of us who had been kept on to finish outstanding work knew that if the consortium didn't employ us then we would have little chance of a job anywhere else so we worked like we've never worked before. That deal fell through but an American multi-national moved in and bought the company. We soon learned that not everyone still working there would be employed by the new owners so each of us redoubled his efforts in the hope of being offered one of the available jobs.

A week after the old company finally closed some of us, the lucky ones, started work for the new company. A few days earlier we had been interviewed and the terms of employment had been spelled out to us. The wages would be increased by a few pounds but there would have to be "flexibility" which meant doing work previously done by other workers, and although there was to be no anti-trade union policy there would be no closed shop either. This last part didn't bother me, for workers who have to be forced to join a union are no asset to it and may actually be a source of weakness.

None of us will ever forget the first few months of working for the new owners. If we had been going like the hammers of hell before then it was nothing compared to what we now had to go through. The management, obviously wishing to impress their bosses, hounded us from clocking on till clocking off. No longer did we dare linger over our newspapers for another minute after starting time, take an unofficial cup of tea in the afternoon or wash up five minutes early. Some of us, even though we had a job, were applying for every job we saw advertised in the press, even if it meant working away from home. Nothing, we felt , could be worse than this.

Around this time government ministers were crowing about how the growth of unemployment had produced a different climate in industrial relations. "There is a new sense of realism among workers today" they said, and added that because of this productivity in Britain was rising. If what was happening to us was typical of the rest of the country then no wonder!

Frequent reminders of what job prospects were like outside were provided by former workmates whenever we met them. "It's hopeless" they told us. "I've been everywhere and there's nothing doing". On top of this we were hearing of other places in our line of work having redundancies or even closing and so increasing the supply of labour on an already glutted market. In the circumstances the management could walk all over us and we just had to take it, even when the heating was left off as an "economy measure" during the bitter cold at the end of 1981.

As time passed the pace became less frantic and gradually conditions changed to something approaching sanity, although we still had to work harder than any of us had been used to. At the end of the first year we had a 10 per cent rise without any haggling and the order book, we were told, was full enough. More men were being taken on and extra machinery installed, so the future was looking more secure. We should have known better.

Then last month came the visit from "the Yanks". The place was spruced up for these representatives of the parent company and they duly paraded through the factory wearing safety helmets, protective ear-muffs and big smiles. It was noticeable that the works management who accompanied them weren't smiling. All week we heard stories that the visitors were less than impressed with how things were going and that harsh words were being spoken.

On the following Monday afternoon the shop stewards were sent for. When they returned they called a meeting of all the hourly-paid employees and broke the news that there would be ten redundancies. The men were stunned. How could this be?, they asked. There was plenty of work now and for some time in the future. No matter, the visitors had decreed that the work must be done with less employees. The factory, they had said, was still only breaking even and would have to become profitable by mid-1984 when the situation would be reviewed. The ten men to go (plus one from the office) would be told next day and everyone at the meeting began to look around and calculate how much better or worse his chances were compared to the others.

Inevitably, the usual divisions between the workers emerged. The factory personnel raged because only one office staff was to go. "Bloody ridiculous" they said, "we're producers, not them". National prejudices also had an airing. It was the greed of those "Yankee bastards" that was to blame, as if British employers would have acted any differently in the same situation. My workmates, like most other workers, haven't begun to understand that their jobs are only provided on the basis that they will produce a surplus over and above their wages. Some of them even claimed that they have "a right to a job" which also must mean that employers have a duty to employ them whether they need them or not. Investors put their cash in order to make a profit, not to keep workers in jobs. There is no other way in which capitalism can operate. Next day at two o'clock the foremen broke the news to the chosen ten and told them to collect their money and go. Within twenty minutes they had gone with two weeks plus two days pay. The rest of us were shocked at this treatment but there wasn't a lot we could do about it.

Next day our foreman gave us a little talk. What it boiled down to was that the arm and leg we had given the new owners still wasn't enough and we would have to do even better in future. Apparently, the company have a factory in America which makes the same product as ourselves and the visitors claimed that the American workers are making it faster than we do. The implication was obvious enough but it doesn't stretch the imagination too much to picture those American workers being told that it is we who are the danger to their jobs because we get paid a lot less.

What about my workmates, what are their ideas and how have they been affected by all these experiences? Like most other workers they aren't in the least interested in politics. In fact some of them don't even have a reasonable trade union consciousness and blame nearly all their problems not on the capitalist system, but on other workers. A few weeks before the redundancy I overheard one of them saying "What I'd like to see is a wee bit more money for us and a wee bit less for them". Curious, I asked him who "them" was. "The unemployed" he said. When I asked him why, he replied "because there's not a big enough differential between what I get and what they get". He shared the widely-heard belief that people on the dole receive huge payments, although this didn't prevent him being terrified later on when he thought he was to be one of the ten. Luckily for him he wasn't.

Almost all of my workmates buy tabloid newspapers like the Sun which reflect, rather than mould their generally reactionary ideas. The talk at tea and lunch breaks, besides being about the usual subjects like football and gambling, often resolves around pet hates like the English, "poofs" and blacks. Our shop steward even refers to the latter as "jungle bunnies". They have experienced living under Labour governments and they know what life is like in the "communist" countries, so none of them sees any hope that things could ever be different. They imagine that the present social order has always been and always must be. I do my best, but where else do they ever hear anyone arguing the case for a world of production for use, without wages, prices, pensions, privileges and bosses? Because I am on my own I can be dismissed as a political flat-earther.

And yet, I know that they, like me, felt anger and humiliation at having to scramble for a job. Nor do they enjoy the feat of the sack whenever we hit a "quiet patch" or having to jump if the foreman or one of the "big shots" appears. And they worry, not only about their own futures, but of those of their children. The only thing wrong with the socialist case is that is has too few adherents and because of this socialists are unable to take advantage of the massive working-class discontent which exists.

Vic Vanni

Glasgow Branch

Understand the world to change it (2)

The Socialist Party believe that in order to save humanity from the economic chaos, social injustice, and environmental destruction caused by global capitalism, it is necessary to abolish the capitalist system altogether and replace it with a humane, democratically-run planned socialist economy. It will be necessary for people, worldwide, to adopt the principle of socialist revolution. There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about what “socialism” means. A big barrier to building the alternative to capitalism is confusion about what socialism actually is. This is not accidental. For those who are not familiar with it, let’s get one misconception out of the way right at the start. Socialism is not what existed in Soviet Russia, even before Stalin, or in China, even under Mao. No totalitarian or autocratic system can be considered socialist. Socialism also is not the same as the “social-democratic” capitalism that exists in Scandinavia and some other countries with welfare-states. Socialism is an economic system under which all natural resources, as well as all means of producing goods and of organising the delivery of services, will be owned in common by all and managed by a democratically-run for the benefit of the society as a whole. Rational planning, not competition for profit, will drive the allocation of resources, with the goal of meeting the needs of society as a whole. Under capitalism, advances in technology are used to replace workers, so that the wealthy owners of large enterprises can increase their profits, while the displaced workers are thrown out on the street and left to fend for themselves. Under socialism, in contrast, advances in technology – intelligently designed and environmentally sustainable – will be planned and implemented so as to reduce the level of human drudgery. Advances in productivity will result in reducing the length of the work week and raising the standard of living for everyone, rather than enriching a privileged elite. Everyone will reap equal benefits from, and thus have an equal stake in, improving the way goods and services are created and delivered. All workers – not just those in a few lucky occupations that possess a certain degree of job satisfaction – will be motivated by a positive desire to help others, rather than by the need to avoid hunger and homelessness.

The class struggle -- the conflict between the capitalists and the workers -- is at the very heart of the capitalist system. The great bulk of people would vastly prefer to live in a world free of poverty, unemployment, racism and war. This kind of world is only possible under socialism. Many today would readily agree that this is the kind of world they would want for themselves and future generations. But they think it’s a pipe-dream. Previous historic systems like feudalism and other more primitive societies were overthrown when they outlived their usefulness and could no longer bring humanity forward. Likewise the capitalist system is now retarding further advances for humanity. It is the working class which allows the economic system as a whole to run. Nothing can be built or moved without us. Yet, the vast majority of workers have no real stake in maintaining capitalism because we don’t own any means of production or businesses; we aren’t bosses. Indeed, workers have to sell their labour power to employers in exchange for wages. As the fundamental source of their profits, our strategic economic position gives the working class the power to forge decisive change but there are good reasons for workers’ current skepticism about the power of our class.  One of the biggest reasons is the misplaced trust placed in leaders. They have engineered decades of defeat for the working class. It is they who have made us feel powerless to change things. The so-called vanguard of revolutionaries undermine the unity of the whole working class. There is no need to “instigate” fellow workers: it is the conditions of capitalism itself which eventually force workers to act to defend ourselves, to engage in mass fight-backs. The best way for workers to see their own power in action and workers become confident and radicalised. The working class searches for its own alternative to capitalism only when it knows its own strength to actually achieve big changes. Today capitalism is on a global offensive that is wiping out past gains. As profit margins have fallen in the system as a whole, competition between capitalist firms and nations has become ever more vicious. The “race to the bottom” in which capitalists try to outdo each other in finding the cheapest labour possible is prevalent. The needs of the ruling class to boost profit rates mean they are well aware of the need to escalate their attacks against workers, to increase the number of low-wage jobs with harsher working terms and less generous benefits.  Workers’ pensions has been one focus of this onslaught. Pension funds have been underfunded for years. The previous stock market boom hid the fact that the bosses weren’t meeting their fund obligations with hard cash. When share prices crashed, the funds ended up short of cash. Now the bosses are demanding that workers either pay into the pension funds themselves, accept inferior plans or give up on their claims. However, now there is the return of the value of stock, there is no reciprocal rise in pensions being offered. The profits are being retained by the bosses.

Given capitalism’s necessary priorities, the desperate plight of people and the planet, only the working class, through socialist revolution, can end this nightmare. Capitalism will destroy the human race. It is absolutely clear that the ruling class will continue to put the drive for profit ahead of everything, even our own existence as a species. Capitalists are incapable of changing. Even when they individually recognise the dangers, collectively they cannot cease doing what they do, making profits, accumulating capital, re-investing for more and more new profit, growth for capital’s sake. If capitalism is not overthrown, humanity is most likely doomed. Socialism is the only solution. The only way out is the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. And the only means to do this is by socialist revolution.

To win abundance for all, the working class will have to take matters into our own hands. In order to build toward this future we urge interested workers to get in touch with the Socialist Party to learn more. Let us know what you think of our views. If you agree, let us know. If you disagree, let’s discuss it. Members of the Socialist Party are optimistic because we recognise that the best hope for a new future are the resilient working class. Nobody needs fundamental change in this corrupt, top-down economic and political system like we do. We reject in advance any argument that the social problems and crises are so critical that it stands above politics there is no time to wait for socialism to replace capitalism. We don't propose waiting for anything — we are campaigning all the time and are trying to drive the struggle forward right now. But the basic point still stands: the capitalist class is leading humanity to absolute disaster and its class position means it cannot and will not do anything else. What is necessary is to prise their mad grip from the steering wheel and carry out a drastic change of course. Can this be done? Ever since class society that came into existence had to face the resistance of the oppressed. There have been an endless series of revolts and uprisings — whether by slaves, peasants or workers. The dream of a society where there is no inequality, no division into rich and poor — i.e., of a classless society — is a persistent one. As been already said, the working class is essential for the operation of the social means of production but itself owns none of it. Its conditions of life make it cooperative and collectivist in outlook. Its objective interest is to collectively appropriate these means of production and establish a classless society. This makes it revolutionary — at least potentially. It is the sole authentically revolutionary class. It has no interest in setting up a new system of class oppression but can only end its alienation by destroying the whole edifice of class domination. The class at the very bottom of the social heap — struggles for power in order to construct a socialist society where all forms of oppression and exploitation are eliminated.

Reformists have denied the need for revolution and instead held out the fantasy of gradually humanising capitalism. The Socialist Party holds to our basic principle that objective conditions are being created in which the socialist movement can grow and attract a significant working-class following to mount a challenge to the system and allow the real history of humanity to commence, free, cultured human beings living in a collectivist society of social solidarity and cooperation. People cannot live without hope for the future. Our task as socialists are to inspire, to instil confidence that the future will be better than the present if only they strive to make it so. The world will be changed by people who believe in the boundless power of themselves. 

'Against state and capital – for the revolution'

One in five Germans believe that revolution, not reform, is the only way for living standards in Germany to be improved, a new study by the Free University of Berlin suggests.

Nearly a third of Germans believe that capitalism is the cause of poverty and hunger and a majority think true democracy is not possible under that economic system.

The report authors noted overall that a sizeable proportion of the German population are moving increasingly towards the left of the political spectrum, and are more likely to hold both anti-fascist and anti-capitalist views.

They may not mean what we mean but it is a promising sign that ideas are changing for the better

Understand the world to change it

The notion of socialism can be traced back centuries in various forms, notably among the earliest Christians (Acts 4:34-5:11); and the model of “gospel” communism as in the Anabaptist and other religious movements, with individuals owning nothing except what they collectively shared. But the roots of modern socialism lie in the period of the industrial revolution. The goals and ideals of socialism had their beginnings in 19th-century pre-industrial movements and organisations, which cultivated in workers a keen sense of common identity. The Industrial Revolution had many profound effects on European civilization. It rendered much of the old aristocracy irrelevant, boosted the capitalists to economic and political power, and drafted much of the old peasant class into its factories. The result was naturally a shift in attitude toward wealth. Capitalist wealth seemed to have no natural limits. Partly because the new industrial modes of production had no pre-assigned place in feudal order of things, the industrialists viewed themselves as the creators of their wealth. Dependency was considered self-destructive, so the poor were punished for their poverty by harsh laws designed to drive them to work. Ideas still very familiar to us today with attacks on benefit claimants and how investment is viewed, now as then, as the engine that drives the economy. Any measure which can encourage investors to buy more stock is viewed as beneficial to society as a whole. This class also created the various movements for democratic government which swept across Europe; and it was only natural that they should have viewed their economic and political ideals as functioning hand in hand. Democracy was necessary to wrest power from the old nobility, to pass laws enabling business to thrive, and to guarantee their property rights. 

Not everyone agreed that the shift of power into the hands of the new rich was entirely benign. In the newly industrialising countries of England and Germany, people suffered under many forms of exploitation. The old feudal restrictions which had fixed peasants in place on the land and limited their income had also guaranteed them a place in the world. They may not have prospered, but they were often able to fend off starvation and homelessness simply because they had been born onto estates from which they could not be removed against their wills. The dissolution of this old order meant that workers could be hired and fired at will and had to sell their labor for whatever the going rate was--and that rate was determined by their competition with each other to work cheaply enough to gain them an advantage in the job market. Traditional rules and protections went by the board in the new factories, which often ran for twenty-four hours a day (two twelve-hour shifts), seven days a week under the most inhumane conditions. Women and children were absorbed into the work force as well, often preferred because they cost much less than men. Industries severely polluted their environments, their machinery maimed and killed many workers, and food in the new factory towns was often of poor quality and in short supply.  Living standards and educational levels actually declined in many areas. Even many well-to-do people became concerned over the wretched conditions under which the new working class toiled, as reflected in the novels of Charles Dickens.

The late 1830s and 1840s saw the development of a mass movement known as Chartism, which demanded an end to political corruption and the introduction of democratic reforms. Chartism was not exactly a socialist movement, but it was a very important early, mass-political movement that tapped into the political energies of the working class. In the 1840s, Karl Marx was just one of a diverse group of socialist thinkers who gained adherents because he provided a solid historical justification for socialism. According to Marx, human societies had progressed through a series of economic stages determined by the forces of production, each one calling forth the next through an unavoidable conflict between old and new forces of production. Thus, the slave societies of the ancient world had given rise to feudalism, which in turn had been supplanted by capitalism. Marx further argued that capitalism was planting the seeds of its own destruction by first creating - and then increasingly oppressing and impoverishing - the working class (the proletariat.) The logic of competition and profit accumulation inherent to capitalism tended to keep wages at the minimal level necessary to physically sustain the proletariat.

The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation, all the means of production and distribution. Workers sell their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers ability to labour, but pay them only a portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of paying workers’ wages and other costs of production — unpaid labour that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits. This surplus is the source of profit. These profits are turned into capital which capitalists use to further exploit the sources of all wealth — nature and the working class. Capitalists are compelled by competition to seek to maximise profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid labor of workers, by increasing exploitation what capitalists often call increasing productivity. Under capitalism, economic development happens only if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our times. With the rapid advance of technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximise profit and exploit new markets.

"Socialism" is an exceedingly fuzzy term which has been used to label an extraordinarily wide array of political and economic beliefs. But generally socialists advocate a democratically controlled economy run for the benefit of all. The unfettered competition of capitalists is replaced by cooperation and the anarchic business cycle by planned stability. Private ownership of industry and land abolished and replaced by a moneyless society in which market forces play no role, in which production is for the use of the producers, in which lands and factories are commonly owned and in which the State - and with it, war - is abolished.

The Dole Changes People

New research suggests long stints of unemployment can have long-term effects on personality traits, changes that may become near-permanent.

It's accepted knowledge that unemployment can have negative psychological consequences. Not only is a person's job status is not only often tied inextricably to a person's self-worth, but it's the life jacket that keeps the rising tides of poverty at bay. But how does unemployment affect the psyche long-term?

researchers found that men who spent several years looking unsuccessfully for work tended to demonstrate higher levels of "agreeableness" during their first two years of unemployment. Agreeableness is one of the Big Five personality traits identified by psychology's five-factor model (FFM) -- along with openness, conscientiousness, extroversion and neuroticism. The testing showed after an uptick in agreeableness during the first two years, men's agreeableness levels began to quickly slump, with long-term agreeableness levels consistently lower for unemployed men than for those with jobs.

"In early unemployment stages, there may be incentives for individuals to behave agreeably in an effort to secure another job or placate those around them," the researchers wrote in the new study, published last week in the Journal of Applied Psychology. "But in later years when the situation becomes endemic, such incentives may weaken."

Men who spent longer amounts of time without a job also demonstrated ebbing levels of conscientiousness and openness.

"The results challenge the idea that our personalities are 'fixed' and show that the effects of external factors such as unemployment can have large impacts on our basic personality," Christopher J. Boyce, a psychologist at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, explained. "This indicates that unemployment has wider psychological implications than previously thought."

Our Goal Is Socialism

Working people around the world have always sought a future without war, exploitation, inequality, and poverty. They strive to build a brighter future, one based on democracy, peace, justice, equality, cooperation, and meeting human needs. That future is socialism, a system in which working people control their own lives and destinies, and together build a better world. The Socialist Party is in existence to build this authentic social revolution. Socialism will usher in a new epoch. The great wealth of our planet will for the first time be for the benefit of all the people. Socialism is not a dream, but a necessity to working peoples’ lives. Only socialism has the solutions to the problems of capitalism.

Anyone who thinks even for a moment about the enormous productive capacity of our world cannot but ask: why it with such sophisticated means of technology that we are unable to guarantee the well-being of people? Why is the curse of unemployment and the plague of falling wages and living standards undermining the lives of millions? Why do millions of people go without needed medical care? Why have people all across the world always crying poverty? It is because these modern means of production – which can only be set in motion through the cooperative socialised labour of the whole working class – are owned by a tiny class of capitalists. A few thousand plutocrats control the economy and constitute a real financial oligarchy which commands the economic life of the world.

The necessity for socialism is rising to the surface, demanding recognition but the capitalist system is blocking the way forward. It is the capitalist system which is denying a livelihood. It is the system of private property which exploits human labour and creativity and turns society into a slave-market in which the rich live off the sweat and suffering of the poor. It is the system of private property, the capitalist system, which is poisoning the air we breathe and the water we drink, wilfully destroying the natural environment in the pursuit of maximum profit. Environmental activists face corporate power when they try to stop pollution, stop the dumping of industrial waste, or stop the ravaging of the remaining wilderness areas for profit.

From its very emergence, the working class has been locked in a struggle against capitalist exploitation and the capitalist class. All who work for a living - the vast majority of the people - face a relentless, vicious, and amoral enemy: the capitalist class. We are oppressed by one of the most controlling entrenched capitalist ruling classes ever, concentrating enormous political, economic, and military power in the hands of a few. The overwhelming majority of the workers still live in a state of job and economic insecurity. Just to maintain their physical existence, the workers are forced to fight the capitalists over the issues of wages, hours of work, working conditions and so forth. In addition, the working class wages continual struggles in the political sphere, asserting its rights in opposition to and struggle against the capitalist class and capitalist state. The workers have won many victories in their economic and political battles but still the fundamental problem remains unresolved and the same issues come up again and again. Every movement for change and progress is challenged by the power of the employers. One day the workers are able to establish union organisations and gain higher wages; but the next day, the capitalists are able to smash the union and cut wages. These days it is easy to see that such social and political victories as workers gained over decades of struggle are again under attack. The root of the problem is precisely the capitalist system which, at its very foundation, is based on the exploitation of wage-labour. Capitalism recognises the worker only as a seller of labour-power, only as a beast of burden to be exploited. The bosses and their paid hacks in the media constantly proclaim that competition requires lower wages, fewer benefits, fewer holidays, gutted pension plans, continuing wage differentials and discrimination, and the out-sourcing of jobs to other regions. People are misled as to their real interests, blinded by the propaganda of fear and scapegoating, used to divide working people and achieve extra profits by relentless efforts to drive wages down to the lowest possible level and by attempts to destroy unions and all protections won by workers through struggle

All this is not an aberration that can be adjusted by some thoughtful legislation and well-placed reforms but is normal and necessary to the functioning of the capitalist system. Our environment is being destroyed by the greed of a few obscenely wealthy capitalist groupings. Our world is threatened by the ravages of carbon emissions and global warming. We shouldn’t let this continue – we can't let it happen. We need radical solutions, real democracy, and real unity. We, the people, need to take power from the hands of the wealthy few, their corporations, and their political henchmen. We need real solutions to real problems, not the empty promises of politicians and corporate bosses. We need socialism. The Socialist Party believes that the working people have the power, if organised and united, to run the whole wide world, to create a democracy of the people, by the people, for the people. We can eject capitalist class through the election process.

Snouts in the trough

BONUSES paid out to financial sector workers since the start of the 2007 crisis are likely to break through the £100 billion barrier this year, campaigners said today. The revised total from the Robin Hood Tax campaign comes as the big banks gear up to report their 2014 full-year results, triggering fresh bonus payouts and stoking public anger. Today’s report is based on analysis of Office for National Statistics data which shows that bonuses paid out in the financial sector – including insurers – since the start of the crisis in October 2007 have already reached £91bn. By the end of the 2014-15 financial year, this figure is likely to have surpassed the £100bn mark, the campaign noted.

The Socialist Path

The path of the socialist revolution is not an easy one and the history of the working class movement proves this as it has been full of false shortcuts and wrong turnings, leading to class collaboration and compromise. Humanity has gone through the two most savage and bloody wars of its history. For a hundred years the world has known no rest or respite as poverty, hunger and war has continued to wreak destruction. Tens of millions of men women and children perish needlessly. The threat of a new world war hangs over our heads permanently as the crisis over Ukraine brings back the Cold War and this time there can be no debate of its cause, it is a battle not of ideology but a war for economic advantages. Humanity’s resources are wasted in senseless adventures while people’s basic needs remain unsatisfied and our environment is spoiled. There is an increasingly imbalance between civilisation’s capacity for progress and the wretched misery that hundreds of millions of people must live under daily.

We ask: why this? Who is responsible? What economic, political, and social system creates and perpetuates this? How can things be changed? And the answer is that, despite diversity in political regimes, in language, and in culture and beyond differences in race and nationality, the vast majority of the people of the globe share a common condition: that of living in a society where the owners of the means of production impose their will over those who possess nothing or little. In other words, the vast majority of people live in a society divided into social classes where the propertied classes, the capitalists, dominate those of us who have little or no property, the working class. The economic base of this social regime is the capitalist system.

The reason for existence is in its name – employers and investors own the means of production and distribution for the purpose of the accumulation of capital; a capitalist who does not constantly expand is, as a general rule, a capitalist condemned to disappear.Yet, the capitalist has nothing if he cannot find in society a large number of people who have no other means of subsistence but the sale of their labour-power in exchange for a wage equivalent to the strict minimum for survival. The secret of capitalist exploitation lies precisely in the fact that what the capitalist buys from the worker is not his or her work but rather labour-power. If the capitalist had to pay for the work furnished, he would not be able to make the profit he does. Let’s look at an example to illustrate this.

Suppose that a worker produces 10 pairs of shoes a week which sell for $25.00, thus making a total value of $250.00 per week on the market. This worker receives a weekly wage of $100.00. Where does the value of the shoes come from? The raw materials – the leather, thread, and glue – along with the other means of production such as electricity, the machines, etc. alone account for $75.00 to which is added the value added by the worker’s labour, i.e. $250.00 less $75.00 or $175.00. This sum represents the amount that the worker added by his work to the value of the materials that he was given at the beginning. If the capitalist paid the worker according to the value of his labour, he would have to give him $175.00. However, this is not what happens because the wages paid to the worker do not correspond to the value of the work he furnishes; rather, they correspond, on the average, to what it costs the worker to reproduce this labour-power or, in other words, to recuperate his energies and ensure his subsistence given the cost of living and the living conditions at a given time.

There lies the essence of capitalist exploitation: the worker gives a certain value of work to the capitalist but his or her wages do not correspond to this value but to only a fraction of it. The value of the non-paid work is called the surplus-value; the capitalist appropriates this non-paid fraction which constitutes the source of his profit, the source of capital. Here lies the key to the exploitation of the employed by the employer, the key to the enrichment of the bosses on the backs of workers.

“The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.” There is good reason to always recall this elementary truth in the “Communist Manifesto”, for it is a truth that capitalist ruling classes are always seeking to camouflage. In Scotland various factions within the ruling class have been exhorting workers to abandon its own interests for the sake of the Scottish “nation”. For the members of the ruling SNP government in Holyrood, to fight unemployment and poverty, English “colonialism” must first be fought. As far as they are concerned, the role of the Scottish worker is to supply the foundation blocks of the “homeland”, and to make it into an independent State. Sturgeon declares “Elect me, I am the saviour of our country, forget about your exploitation and your misery for the time being. Instead, help us get more subsidies and more powers: then you’ll get more jobs...” While the Labour Party rivals and the aspiring Murphy insert their own nationalist demands with their grandiose defence of UK unity. Both have one aim: getting people to abandon the point of view based on its specific class interests so that it falls into rank behind their particular section of the ruling class, getting the workers to postpone its main objective forever; putting off putting an end to the real source of exploitation, of oppression and of crises, capitalism itself. This boss class has learned how to exploit the spirit of sacrifice that the people has demonstrated under difficult conditions, in order to get it to serve its own interests using its lies and demagogy to divide and rule. They can also count upon its lickspittle lackeys and mouthpieces to appeal to national loyalty “Be more productive and things will be better for the country...” that’s what they say repeatedly to justify their latest model of class collaboration. Its media, newspapers, radio, and television, never let up in their calls for peace between the classes.

The only true solution is socialist revolution. There is no middle path between capitalism and socialism. The capitalist swindlers have launched a most savage attack against the working class. The difficulties which the capitalists are presently facing brings it to bear upon those that creates its wealth, onto the backs of the working masses. The capitalist class has joined ranks to use its instrument of repression, the State, to inflict laws, one more oppressive than the next, upon the heads of the people in its efforts to intensify its exploitation in order to increase its profits. Impoverish and divide is their austerity policy. The capitalist owners use their state power, their government, to shift responsibility for the young, the elderly, the disabled and the sick, the impoverished. Social reforms gained in the past the capitalist class now wants back. Pauperisation, a large reserve army of the unemployed working class, our weakened trade unions, necessities for capitalist recovery, provides the leverage in the bosses' drive against the entire working class. The propertied 1% keep coming at us, relentless and ruthless, and their resources—political and financial—are large. Class struggle waxes and wanes. Certain workers have become demoralised and embittered, making them susceptible to conspiracy theories and they become the feeding ground for right-wing and fascist-minded groups who try to scapegoat other workers, both native-born and foreign newcomers for the faults of capitalism.   

We are advancing along a difficult path, one which places us in irrevocable opposition to the capitalist bosses and their allies. The objective of any movement dictates or determines its activity, its work, its demands. It follows, therefore, that for a movement to be a revolutionary one, or aspire to be one, it must have a revolutionary objective. Capitalism is a system that can and has absorbed and integrated many reforms and it automatically rejects all reforms that run counter to the logic of the system (such as completely free public services which cover social needs). The structure can only be abolished by overthrowing it, not by reforming it. We must continue to demonstrate that we stand for the emancipation of all men and women and that our aim is to end forever the exploitation of man by a small exclusive class. It is regrettable that we still have people who have not learned from former experiences, who still insist that it is possible to achieve freedom with the weapons and instruments of former times. This self-appointed minority wish to impose ‘freedom’ on people, who themselves form an elite, without any contact or support from the mass of the people, those who make the question of violence and insurrection the focus of the struggle are going to find themselves isolated and will surely fail, as other efforts of a similar nature failed in the past. The task of the Socialist Party is to organise the people not for revolt, not for rebellion, not for insurrection but for revolution. A social revolution that will change the entire political and economic system.

One of the basic problems of today is lack of class consciousness among the people. We, as socialists \do not believe that capitalism will suddenly collapse as a result of some miracle or inner contradictions. We do not believe we should sit on the sidelines and interpret current events hoping for some revolutionary event happening. We must build a movement of people who are aware and conscious of all the many avenues that are open to the movement. We accept the key teaching role that struggle has, and of the experience born from such struggles. We understand that it is only by trying to expand actual living working class struggles against the employers and of the capitalist system, can a rise be achieved in working class consciousness. Only through such struggles can the workers build the actual organs through which they can tomorrow take over the administration of the economy and the State, freely elected workers committees at factory or street level which will federate themselves afterwards locally, regionally, and thenworld-wide. That is that the conquest of political power by the working class really means. This will be a long path but if we build our foundations on a conscious people we cannot but succeed.

“However, our politics must be working-class politics. The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy.” — Friedrich Engels, Apropos of Working-Class Political Action

We Are Many, They Are Few

What is the place of socialism in the world and what is its future? These questions are inseparably tied to the more relevant question, “What is our view of socialism?” If socialism is being advocated what kind of socialism is it? Are we being utopian in the sense of advancing a pleasant but impossible dream?

Apologists for capitalism have long devoted enormous efforts to arguing against socialism. They argue that it is a completely utopian exercise that flies in the face of human nature but more seriously some on the left suggest that talk by the Socialist Party of a peaceful transition to socialism is nothing but naiveté, a denial of history’s lessons. But is this true? While there are examples of ruling classes using force to block social change, there are also instances where corrupt and discredited regimes have been swept away without mass blood-letting. The brutal South African apartheid regime gave way to the forces of freedom without the country being thrown into civil war; Russia and its Eastern Bloc satellites jettisoned the Communist Party dictatorships and state-capitalist economies practically bloodlessly. Iran threw out the Shah, Philippines rejected Marcos. Thus a peaceful transition is possible. We would be organised in the workplaces and communities so as to defend democratic change.

Today millions of people feel alienated from the political process (nearly one-third of the population doesn’t vote.) Many people see politics as disconnected from their day-to-day lives, even an obstacle to their aspirations. But the Socialist Party is well aware that along with political action to capture the state machine, new popular institutions and indirect forms of governance will likely emerge during the revolutionary process that draw millions into struggle and devolve and disperse political power to the grassroots. We need a radically different political system: a system of participatory democracy that empowers the people who are currently excluded from genuine decision making power. This would be based on organisations of popular democracy in localities, workplaces and schools which could directly make decisions affecting their respective communities. Any administrators or officials elected by these bodies should be subject to recall through a simple process if their electors are dissatisfied.

The problems we face are not the result of mistaken policy positions by government or a poor choice of leaders. They are the inevitable product of a system based on the interests of a tiny minority. Under capitalism, a tiny handful of people—the capitalist class, “the 1%”, control the means of production, distribution and exchange. They own the corporations that own the mines, factories, banks, transport networks, supermarket chains, media empires, and so on. It is not enough to simply appeal to the better nature of the current rulers or try to persuade them by clever arguments to make changes. Even to win very limited reforms and improvements within the current system requires the pressure of a popular mass movement. This is because the corporate elite fight ferociously when their interests are challenged. We need revolutionary change. Revolution doesn’t mean a violent coup by a minority: a revolution can only come about when the majority of people see the need for radical change, and are actively involved in bringing it about. A revolution is a mass struggle to create new and far more democratic forms of political power and a new social system.

If our vision of socialism is simply a modified version of what presently exists today, don't expect too many to embrace it. Only a vision that is forward looking will capture the imagination which places people at the centre of a new society and, and this is paramount, its creation. Our picture of socialism must be painted in many colours. Socialism's vision and practice must be democratic, emancipatory but above all humanistic.

Economic crisis alone, however, is not the sole cause of revolutionary change. It doesn't follow that it will simply automatically emerge out of everyday struggles. As someone once said, people do not live by bread alone; they also need ideas, understanding and inspiration. The soil in which our revolutionary ideas take root is prepared by the cumulative effects of many different material conditions - economic, political, social, and moral - taking place over time, during which people's understanding grows deeper and their political consciousness expands in sophistication going beyond the simplistic "the system sucks".  Cut-and-dried formulas, simplistic answers, and high-sounding slogans with no reflection in concrete reality are of little help. The old determinist idea that an economic breakdown is followed by "the revolution" should be discarded. Socialism must be the product of a united and politically engaged majority. The point of political action isn't to conjure up illusory shortcuts to socialism. It is to change the world. If we struggle for the new society then it must really be new.

Socialism cannot be achieved without the support and activity of the majority of people. Marx and especially Engels thought that universal suffrage, for example, is big step forward and important weapon in hands of working class. Marx wrote in the Statute of the First International that liberation of working class must be done by itself. It is expected to be done by it and only by it because if socialist revolution is fundamental change of one society with another, if it means that the class of owners who ruled for centuries have to disappear economically, it is impossible to reach this aim only with activity of political organisation, no matter how well organised, mass and supported it is. It is said that new society is in the interest of great majority of people. If this society is to come, this majority have to understand and accept it as its interest and ideal. You can't liberate those who don't want liberation. The substance of socialism is that there is no a group of people who will be in position to hold the power and in that way to exclude all others from exercising democracy. The Paris Commune was the best example of self-governing society. Marx highly evaluated this experience which had so strong impression on him. Engels also described the Paris Commune as a form of dictatorship of proletariat, although it proclaimed political freedoms, multi-party system and workers' self-management in enterprises. Rosa Luxemburg insisted that, “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.” Hence, the requirement of “socialist democracy,” she insisted, “begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and the construction of socialism.” Socialist democracy is not to be conceived as applying merely to the political sphere, narrowly conceived, but would have to extend to all aspects of public and private life. Socialism is not just a dream or a utopia that can be wished into existence. It depends on workers taking over the massive wealth of capitalism and using it for human need.

“Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes [people].” - Lewis Henry Morgan

Power to the Workers?

Words take on less meaning every new day. Historically, the demand for workers’ control was a socialist demand because it was seen as a way of rationalising the production process, allowing the development of workers’ creative capacities, and creating the means for realising the socialist ideal of equality in power and wealth. Genuine worker self-management is only possible in a socialist society. Worker self-management models adopted by many co-operatives are a local and defensive tactic. These coops exist and are part of a capitalist economy that they do not control. Consequently, the workers’ self-directed activity remains fundamentally constrained by capitalist competition and the market. There have been many examples of workers’ cooperatives that went wrong, there have even been some that have ‘succeeded’ – in capitalist terms that is! All that they have succeeded in, however, has been to transform themselves into profitable capitalist enterprises, operating in the same way as other capitalist firms. There is no way in which they can pose any solutions for the working class as a whole.

It is important to realise that what happens in each self-managed enterprise is directly and closely interdependent with what happens in other economic units. To restrict self-management to single industry, let alone individual factories is to reduce it to a mere façade. We contend that it is misleading to say that it’s enough to give workers decision-making power at the level of the factory to create a real industrial democracy. What is the point of giving workers the power to make decisions when this turns out to be a mere sham and when the decisions taken at factory level are continuously overturned by the operation of market laws. The only solution is to democratically regulate industry at a social level. The more power given communities as a whole the less opportunity for sectional in-fighting and the internecine struggles of different groups of workers. From the outset factories do not have the same productivity so, if they compete with each there will be conflicts of interest. Certain decisions are inevitably taken at higher levels than the work-place, and if these decisions are not consciously made by society as a whole, then they will be made by other forces in society behind the workers’ backs. Whether it’s in terms of tools, machinery, equipment and even local situation was a matter of luck or of social factors, there is no possible justification for those who are fortunate enough to work in above-average factories to enjoy an economic advantage over those who are employed in below-average factories.

We do not support centralisation nor believe that centralisation implies the necessity of a new division of labour within the working class between a small group of managers, professional administrators and bureaucrats on the one hand, and the majority of the workers on the other, incapable of centralising its own management in a democratic way. We support delegated self-management organised around interconnected workers’ councils as broadly-based as possible to involve the maximum number in the exercise of power. It is because it is only in a complex structure where self-management takes place at all levels of economic and social life that it is possible to involve the maximum number of workers at different levels of decision-making. We have a very simple formula to apply in this context: decisions must be taken at the level where this can be done most effectively. It is unnecessary to call a general congress of workers’ councils to work out a bus timetable for London; Londoners are quite capable of working that out for themselves without the interference of any bureaucratic institutions. There’s no need to organise a general congress of workers’ councils to organise the production process in a work-place: the workers in that factory or even department are quite capable of sorting that out on their own. On the other hand, when it comes to making decisions industry-wide on production targets, or how to end industrial pollution then a general congress of workers’ councils is necessary, since this sort of decision can only be taken at a regional or world-wide level. In economic matters each decision must ideally be taken at the level at which it can be most effectively and efficiently implemented.

In our debates we have found many are wedded to the idea that a socialist economy would be a centrally planned economy - that is, one in which there would be one single society wide plan covering to the totality of inputs and outputs for the entire economy and specifying in advance the quantitative targets for each and every single conceivable good that would be produced. There are several different arguments they make against this proposal but the most important of which is the informational complexity argument, chiefly associated with FA Hayek. Hayek's argument is that the dispersed nature of knowledge in society necessitates a self-regulating market. Trying to concentrate this vast amount of information within the rigid framework of a single giant plan is totally unrealistic. Moreover, we are talking about millions upon millions of different kinds of goods, from 3-inch screws to stainless steel tumble-dryers. Trying to reach a decision about how much each of these goods ought to be produced is daunting enough in itself; trying to reach that decision democratically would be infinitely more difficult. How on earth is the global community going to decide on the global output target for, say, 3-inch screws? The whole idea is a preposterous.

So Hayek and his ilk are correct in that respect and they are also correct in deducing that if you are going to have centrally planned economy in this classic sense it almost lends itself to a form of governance that might be called a technocracy - rule by a tiny technocratic elite.  The logistics of decision making under this hypothetical arrangement virtually guarantees such a form of governance. The socialist response to such arguments present by these critics is to say this is a complete straw-man argument. Socialism will not and cannot be, a centrally planned economy but, on the contrary, will be a mainly decentralised economy  Indeed, most of the decisions that will be made in a communist system will not even need to be subjected to democratic control at all but will simply be part and parcel of an automatic self-regulating system of stock control.

For example Production Unit X123 receives an order for 200 cans of baked beans from Distribution Centre Y445.  You don't needs a democratic debate on whether to meet that order; you just do it!  Because a communist society is about meeting needs which needs are expressed as an order for 200 cans of baked beans in this case. This kind of response, of course, always floors our anarcho-capitalists since they imagine in their folly that they cornered the market in the idea of a "self-regulating system of production".  The market is such a system but there is another much more effective version of that which dispenses with the market altogether: real socialism.

So what place has democracy in this mainly decentralised communist scheme of things?  The need for democracy arises where there is a potential conflict of interests and this has somehow to be resolved.  This can happen at different levels of spatial organisation - local regional and national.  It would not make much sense, for example, for the global community to debate on whether my local community should go ahead and construct a childrens’ nursery but it would make sense for the global community to talk about action to counter global warming for example. The level of decision making should be appropriate to the kind of decision that needs to be made and vice versa. This is why self-management is impossible without real socialist industrial democracy with workers making real decisions with unfettered access to real information. If the wage system is to be abolished, decisions on allocation of resources has to be established. The people themselves have to disentangle the complexity and this can be done by means of democratic decisions, from the level of the enterprise up to the highest levels of administration.

Post-Script

The aim of nationalisation is to remove the ownership of the country’s principal means of production (banks, industries, commerce) from the hands of big capitalists and transfer them to the whole ‘nation’. This transfer of ownership is carried out by the State, which is supposed to represent the interests of the national community. The State is the expression of the collective interests of the dominant class in a particular society, and takes the form of an articulated series of institutions. Therefore, to bring something under state ownership does not mean to ‘nationalise’ it (‘nationalisation’ in the sense of ‘socialisation’, where ownership is transferred to the ‘nation’, the whole society). To bring something under state ownership, simply by having the workers get their wages from the state rather than from private bosses, is not sufficient to transform social relations in a socialist sense. The most widespread image of a so-called ‘socialist’ regime is one of the planned economy under state ownership, directed by “the Party”. This means the virtual fusion of State and the Party, with the unions reduced to the role of a transmission belt for State requirements aimed at the working people. Since the State is defined as “socialist” and the Party described as “revolutionary” the conclusion is that these institutions are the same thing as the power of the working people. Of course, this was never the conception of Marx. Nationalisation is not socialism. It is socialisation what is needed. Who runs the economy? With nationalisation it is the state and its officials. In such circumstances the position of workers haven't changed. Instead of one capitalist, who is a private owner, workers get another one, who is by Engels called "ideal capitalist". Marx knew the difference between the private character of appropriation and private character of ownership. Private character of appropriation is possible also without private ownership. Marx found the root of exploitation in the fact that those who create surplus value are not its controllers. In the liberal capitalism capitalists were controllers. In state capitalism the controllers were the state and we do not have situation that the controllers of surplus value are those who make it. Socialism is not possible in society where workers create but don't decide about products of their labour.

Come rally, comrades…

Since Marx first called for a society "from each according to ability, to each according to need" this vision has been a driving force in history. But it has also raised the problem: how do we win, how do we build a revolutionary movement capable of creating socialism? Despite the many setbacks, we remain convinced the working class will understand its revolutionary potential. Socialism is closer today than we recognise. If there is a single word to characterise our time, that word is change.

Everyone knows the economy is undergoing a profound change. This change is fundamental and irreversible; it is so great it is causing great change in every aspect of life. The content of the change in the economy is the replacement of human labour by new and ever expanding automated technologies, the core of which is computer-controlled robotics. Every employer understands that the surest way to increase profits is to have the worker produce more for the same amount of wages. Huge sections of the population are locked into “McJobs” or permanent joblessness. The new poor includes the throw-away workers — temporary staff with no benefits, the part-time workers on zero hour contracts.

In the history of this planet such fundamental changes in the economy have always forced revolutionary changes in the social system.  Economic revolution has always precipitated political revolution. Social reorganization becomes inevitable because basic necessities of life must be paid for with money. We make money by going to work. If the robots do the work, then how will we get the food, housing and clothing we need? If there is going to be production without wages, then there must be distribution without money! We must guarantee that the change result in a better life for the people. We must guarantee the new technological revolution reach the potential for common good through common ownership. Can we who understand today visualise tomorrow with enough clarity to accept the historic responsibilities of revolutionaries?

Under capitalism, the capitalists own the means of production. Workers are forced to sell their labour power and the capitalist exploits them. In socialism, the means of production are owned by the working class. The technology exist to produce all that we need. For the first time in history, a true flowering of the human intellect and spirit is possible. The Socialist Party fight is to reorganise society. Our vision is of a new, cooperative society of equality, and of a people awakening. Important in understanding socialism is understanding what it is not. Distortion upon lie upon distortion have been piled so high that genuine socialism is now buried underneath a pile of deceit. There are now so many people with diametrically oppose socialist ideas who nevertheless claim to be socialists that the term has become almost meaningless. Socialism is not a movement of reformist social legislation while the workers play either a passive or merely supportive role. The real socialist tradition rejects the identification of socialism with the actions of small minorities in which a few hundred or even several thousand armed insurrectionists liberate the masses on their behalf.

Socialism rejects the establishment of one-party state bureaucracies, or the gradualist approach that asks the working class to put its faith in well-meaning politicians. Ordinary people must themselves organise, creating their own institutions of struggle and of administration. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves is a principle which means our class needs independent organisations it controls in order to secure its liberation. Self-emancipation requires that the working class gain power in society. A self-managing society needs a structure through which the people make and enforce the basic rules of the society and defend their social order.

Green capitalism is still capitalism

Today, many Greens promote community-centred economics based upon small businesses, municipal-owned enterprises and cooperatives. Such a small business-based market economy would supposedly permit us to avoid the problems of corporate capitalism and bureaucratic state-ownership. They accept the idea of private property and competition for profit are natural where small businesses must serve the public, because they can never be powerful enough to manipulate the public or control the government. This is all an idealistic fantasy of a make-believe capitalism. There is nothing "natural" or ecological about private property, capitalist competition, or the profit motive. These are part and parcel of class society.

Greens insist that many small mom and pop businesses and small farmers are kindly and benevolent. Perhaps so. But to be sustainable, every single small capitalist would have to be a saint, would have to give away his profits to his competitors and to the community if he started winning too much at their expense. That is impossible. And if we talk about workers' cooperatives, or the various utopian schemes put forward by the populists for broad employee-and-community-shared stock ownership, the same problem applies. With competition for profit, most such cooperatives will eventually go under, while a few will survive. Competition always intensifies, because the rate of profit tends to fall. Capitalists, big or small, cooperative or corporate, compete with each other on the market, and they do so by cutting their prices. The best way to do this is to replace their workers with machines. This works out for the first capitalist who gets the new technology: he can undercut his competitors. But then his surviving competitors get the same technology. Since profit is based upon human labour, profits, in general, fall, as they get squeezed between falling prices and higher technological costs. As profits fall, competition for profits intensifies. As competition intensifies, there will be a strong temptation for relations even within cooperatives to become hierarchical, for a few "elite" members to drive the rest to work harder, so that the cooperative can compete better, externally. In the case of both small businesses and cooperatives, as they compete with other concerns for survival, their decisions will be based upon profit and survival rather than upon what is good, in the long term, for the environment, the larger community, or even for their own workers and their smaller shareholders. The more powerful and larger businesses will use their superior wealth and power over the economy to ensure that their candidates will win, so as to distort the electoral process, the law, and the state to favor their own interests.

No matter the starting point, competition will always lead to the corporate capitalism abhorred by the Greens. The only alternative to capitalism is community based, democratic socialism, a theory of sharing and living in common dates back to prehistoric times, even being mentioned in the Christian New Testament as a way in which some of the early Christian communities ordered their lives. When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labour without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action or "dot-communism" is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and Flickr is astronomical. Add to this the millions of videos served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fan sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless. Not only that but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally, if not outright communistically, your picture is my picture. Sites like Reddit and Twitter let users steer public conversation as much as newspapers or TV networks.

Organised collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program's full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism. We've become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Instead of money, the peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product free, it can be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and the GNU licenses, were invented to ensure these "frees." The tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production such as Linux that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.

While cooperation can write an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, no one is held responsible if the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of agreement doesn't endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small-scale collectivist groups have tried this operating system. We find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale. A company that tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. That's almost the size of General Motors' workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they're not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren't paid yet continued to produce automobiles. The biggest efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work have poured into last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a decentralised town or village. The number of people who make things for free, share things for free, use things for free, belong to collective software farms, work on projects that require communal decisions, or experience the benefits of decentralized socialism has reached millions and counting. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model of free access is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions. Collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step. We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? 

The force of online socialism is growing. Some people abhor the term because of its connotations but the only alternative is socialism, where property is owned and administered in common by all the people and not merely one section. We know the principle works because we witness it with the collaborative nature of the internet everyday.

A return to nature

“Many people look at these expansive views and call them beautiful,” says Alan Watson Featherstone, looking out over the remote hillsides north of Loch Ness. “But what we’ve really got is a barren landscape that is almost entirely devoid of native woodlands and predators. What we’ve done here, and across much of rural Britain, is to allow herbivores [deer, sheep and cattle] to run wild, destroying flora and fauna,” he says. “At the same time, we’ve hunted all their natural predators to extinction.” He goes on to say “By eliminating our native forests and replacing them with non-native and fast-growing pines, we have stripped out the bottom layers of the eco-system. In places the rampant deer population and forestry has shaved the earth, so we have exposed peat hags of ancient tree stumps. These are an open sore on our landscape.”

 Featherstone is a leading advocate of rewilding – a strand of the conservation movement with ambitious plans to revive the biodiversity of rural Britain by reintroducing native species. He wants to see the return of birch, oak, Scots pine and aspen across the Highlands but his plans don’t end with flora. If the rewilders have their way, wild boar, lynx and even wolves could soon be restored to sylvan Britain, where they once roamed more than 1,000 years ago. But Featherstone insists the reintroduction of natives species is not about “returning to a particular time or age in natural history”.

He adds: “What we are doing, by planting trees and bringing the top predators back, is kickstarting nature’s evolution in circumstances where she can no longer do it on her own.”

It may well mean an end to those artificial grouse and deer shooting estates to permit some real wildlife which is not 'managed' for profit. We may have a few whingeing lairds and landowners but that is nothing new.

Dick Talking Socialism

Sadly, the Socialist Courier blog has to inform its visitors that Richard "Dick" Donnelly has died. He had been a member of Glasgow branch of the Socialist Party since the mid-1950s and was a regular outdoor and indoor speaker, a writer for the Socialist Standard and frequently a contributor to this blog. Dick would probably be the first to tell comrades, "Don't Mourn - Organise!"

The Socialist Party website has a few recordings of Dick that are well worth listening to.

The Principles of Socialism  (16 April 1976)

How Can a Real Revolution Be Achieved?Debate between Dick Donnelly, SPGB, and Albert Meltzer, 'Black Flag' (anarchist) (12 February 1987)

Why Is Socialism Still Relevant (12 June 2004)

Your World, Our World, One World

“Arouse, ye slaves! Declare war, not on the capitalist, but on the capitalist system” – Eugene Debs

Many sneer at socialism as unattainable. But we in the Socialist Party maintain socialism is practical. Is it necessary to prove that socialism is not dead? We need only see what is going on all over the world today. Socialist ideas are everywhere. Socialism is not an academic and Utopian conception, it is ripening and developing in closest touch with reality.

The objective of socialism is a free individual in a free society, the well-being of each assured by the well-being of all. Socialism is that social system under which the necessaries of production are owned, controlled, and administered by the people, for the people. Class rule is at an end. Socialism is rule by the working people. They will decide how socialism is to work. To use the word “socialism” for anything but working people’s power is to misuse the term. Nationalisation of mines, railways, steel, etc. is not socialism, nor does this constitutes “the socialist sector of a mixed economy”. Nationalisation is state capitalism, with no relation to socialism. Nor is the “welfare state” socialist. Many good men and women have viewed the sufferings of the working class and have attempted to make reforms which would ease the misery of the masses. But these reforms have inevitably failed, not because the intentions of those who proposed them were not good, but because they did not fit in with the force dominant in social and industrial life –capitalism.  Socialism will certainly give high priority to health, education, art, science, and the social well-being of all its members. That is why it exists, that is the purpose of its economy. But “welfare” in a capitalist state, to improve the efficiency of that state as a profit-maker, is not socialism but another form of state capitalism. It can be an improvement on capitalism with no welfare, just as a 40-hour week is an improvement on a 60-hour week. But it is not socialism. Socialism is the society of the free and equal. It is simply a question of capitalism or socialism, of despotism or democracy?

Socialism is the only remedy. Its philosophy of cooperation is rational, humane, and all-embracing. The trend is toward the cooperative commonwealth. It is the hope of the world. Capitalism is the breeder of selfishness and greed. Capitalism has spawned a brood of vices.  In the wage system you and your children, and your children’s children, if capitalism should prevail, are condemned to slavery and there is no possible hope unless by throwing over the capitalist and voting for socialism. What you must do is to organise your class and assert your class interests just as the capitalists do to rob you. What we want is not to reform the capitalist system. We want to get rid of it. What is wanted is not a reform of the capitalist system, but its entire abolition. Socialism is not a reform, it is a revolution. The working class must get rid of the whole brood of masters and exploiters, and put themselves in possession and control of the means of production. As soon as capital shall cease to govern, wage-labour and the rest of slavery will be abolished. Freedom and equality will then be no longer empty and cheap phrases, but will have a real meaning; when all people are really free and equal they will honour and advance one another. It is therefore a question not of “reform,’ the mask of fraud, but of revolution. The capitalist system must be overthrown, class-rule abolished and wage-slavery supplanted by the cooperative commonwealth.

We are educating, we are agitating, we are organising. If all the working class were to use their eyes to see; their ears to hear; their brains to think, how soon this Earth would be transformed. No sane person could be satisfied with the present system. Socialism struggles for the emancipation of all in every stratum of society, fighting against all exploitations and all oppressions. It is the defender of all the exploited and all the oppressed. To let the working class speak clearly is the mission of the socialist movement of the world

 “The rich man is he who, being young, has the rights of old age; being old, the lucky chances of youth; vicious, the respect of good people; a coward, the command of the stout-hearted; doing nothing, the fruits of labour.” - Victor Hugo