Saturday, August 22, 2015

For a world-wide co-operative socialist commonwealth.

Social interests shape ideas. Ideas serve social interests. We are not uncritical idol-worshippers of Marx or Engels. We have learned what to do and what not to do.

In capitalism production is carried on not for the purpose of supplying the needs of the people but for the purpose of sale in order to realise a profit. Only those who have something to sell can get a living. Only those can obtain things who can afford to buy. This is the commercial system, and this is how it works out. If things were produced for use, nobody would spend time in the manufacture of shoddy goods, jerry-built houses, or adulterated food. Commerce is the only purpose of industry.

The worker has nothing to sell but labour power sold to an employer for so many hours a day for a certain price, that is, wages. Since one cannot separate labour power from one’s body it comes to this, that worker actually sells themselves like a slave. We socialists, call the workers of capitalist countries, “Wage slaves”. Wages are determined by what it costs to maintain a family. How many working people do you know who can save out of their wages? Very few and only the most frugal. They may be able to put something by in good times, but bad times invariably arrive and the savings are gone. It is a fact that on the average a working person is no more than two weeks or so removed from penury.

What does capitalism offer working people? A life of toil, a bare subsistence. Always the dread fear of the sack. A drab, colourless existence in the slum districts of the towns and, when unable to work any longer, to be discarded on the muck-heap. There are riches and luxury for the few, sweat and toil for the many. Palaces for the wealthy, hovels for the poor. Capitalism can offer workers nothing but wage slavery.

The capitalist will only buy labour if he can make profit out of it. Just compare the value of the goods you turned out in a day when you were in the factory, and what you received for your work. The difference between the two is the employer’s profit. Profit is the result of the unpaid labour of the worker. Under capitalism, the workers are continually robbed of the results of their labour. The capitalist will compel the worker to work as hard and as long as he can, for as little money he can possibly impose; whole industries in which absolutely inhuman conditions of work and pay still exist. Even through the efforts of the best-organised trade unions wages never rise higher than the cost of living. And even this is not secured. In the endeavour to produce as cheaply as possible, the capitalist continually introduces labour-saving technology, which enables him to produce more goods in less time and reduces the standard of skill required. As a result unemployment is continually on the increase. The same hopeless outlook for toil for another person’s profit lies before every worker from the cradle to the grave.

The only thing that will free us from wage-slavery is to make ourselves the owners of the means of production and distribution. We need to abolish capitalism and take the land, factories, mines and transport into common ownership by the whole people. Everything which industries produce goes not to enrich a small parasitical part of the community but to satisfy the needs of the whole community. The world becomes a huge cooperative society, and the working man or woman, instead of slaving to enrich the idle capitalist, creates wealth for the whole community. The worker enjoys the results of his or her labour, without having to pay tribute to speculators and profiteers. For the first time in history the world really belongs to the workers.

People will take a direct part in the management of industry, no longer a slave of another but as an equal member of a great community. Together we shall form a world-wide co-operative socialist commonwealth.

Under chattel-slavery the slave was oppressed and exploited by the slave-master. The wage-slaves of today - the working class - are exploited and oppressed by the capitalist employers. Workers are constantly struggling for better conditions and for the ABOLISHMENT OF CAPITALIST SLAVERY. The emancipation of humanity from all forms of slavery and oppression is the historical task of the working class and can only be realized by this class. The working class has a historical mission to muster under one revolutionary banner and to overthrow the capitalist class. The capitalist system is incapable of dealing with the problems facing the working class as it is the cause of all problems. The capitalists are quite conscious and acutely aware of the potential power of the workers. The capitalist governments are passing anti-working class legislation in order to continue depriving the working class of the right to organise and the right to strike. The capitalists will only undertake reform in order to strengthen the capitalist system. The working,class is basically disunited. There are no united struggles of the entire working class, and the capitalists have been able to split the working class into as many sections as possible. The Socialist Party maintains that in order to fight any battle with the capitalists, the unity of the entire working class is absolutely necessary and essential. Socialism was not built automatically but through a protracted process of class warfare. The abolition of classes is not achieved by dissipating the class struggle, but by its intensification.


Friday, August 21, 2015

Food For Thought. Reading Notes.

 In one article in the book, "The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2009)" Michael Specter writes in his article "Big Foot",referring to one's carbon footprint, "Greenhouse gas emissions have risen rapidly in the past two centuries, and levels today are higher at any time in at least the past 650,000 years. In 199 each of the six billion people on earth was responsible, on average, for one ton of carbon emissions. Oceans and forests can absorb about half that amount. Although specific estimates vary, scientists and policy officials increasingly agree that allowing emissions to continue at the current rate would induce dramatic changes in the global climate system. To avoid the most catastrophic effects of those changes, we will have to hold emissions steady in the next decade, and then reduce them to at least 60 to 80% by the middle of the century... Members of Congress tried repeatedly to introduce legislation to reduce sulphur dioxide levels, but the Reagan administration (as well as many elected officials, both Democratic and Republican, from regions where sulphur- rich coal is mined,) opposed any controls, fearing that they would harm the economy. When the cost of polluting is negligible, so are the incentives to reducing emissions." In other words, as we continually point out, to pollute or not, is a matter of the impacts on profits, and that alone. Specter later writes that he believes the market will solve the problems of pollution and mitigate global warming through a carbon trading system on the market whereby levels of pollution are set and those who exceed them would be able to buy credits from those who pollute less (cap and trade). In baseball, each team has a salary cap that cannot be exceeded or a fine will be imposed. The richest team, the New York Yankees, continually ignore the cap and buy just whoever they want, fines be damned. So it would be with carbon emissions. Capital will win out in capitalism. John Ayers.

Going Beyond The Unions

FOR A  NEW WORLD WITHOUT MONEY
The assumption, in our present system, is that workers may not be allowed to make fair wages, if it means employers are forced to take less profit for themselves.  It doesn’t matter that the corporate CEO makes millions, or that the shareholders make millions.  The system defends, at all costs, against a billionaire having to make do with one less jet or yacht. This is why the workers are screwed, big time and all the time.

Unions were the first means of defence developed by the working class in its struggle against capitalist exploitation. They were the result of concerted efforts by workers to organise and fight collectively for better working conditions, wage increases and a shorter working day. The establishment and organisation of unions is no gift from the capitalist class, but the result of the workers’ struggles against their exploiters. A glance at the miserable life imposed by capitalists on the unorganized workers in the early 1800s and the struggle to set up the first unions best illustrates this step forward. It also shows how the first unions developed in open conflict with capitalist legality. Working conditions were intolerable before unions were organised. The working day in factories had no limit other than the physical exhaustion of the worker. Workers needed union organizations to wage united struggles and develop labour solidarity so to present a common front against the employers and also the government. Revolutionary political education and socialist thought have been part and parcel of the union movement from the beginning.

What every worker must realise is that through trade union struggle we are not fighting the causes which is capitalism but only its symptoms. We are fighting against the effects of the system as Marx points out, and not against the system itself.

When we fight for a demand like a pay rise, we are merely fighting against the effects of capitalism. Not merely that. We are demanding it from the capitalists. In other words, we envisage the continuation of the capitalist system. What trade union struggles really do is to fight to improve the conditions of the working class within the framework of the capitalist system. They do not challenge capitalism itself. What all workers must understand is that their misery is due to exploitation carried on by the capitalist class. Trade unionism merely restricts their struggle to attempts at lessening this exploitation. It does not fight to end exploitation i.e. to end the capitalist system and replace it by socialism. This is the fatal limitation of trade union struggles.

Trade unions as we explained are not revolutionary organisations and fight only for limited demands within the system. Furthermore, once rank-and-file workers force the boss to recognise the union (and they must force it; bosses never volunteer to deal with a militant union), the next step for the bosses is to attempt to reverse that workers’ victory. The bosses attempt this because a strong, militant union will eat into their profits and because such a union will become a vehicle for still greater struggle by the workers. Out of this struggle longer-range, revolutionary ideas and goals may be learned. Within it are the seeds of understanding necessary to final overthrow of the system which can take root. What is wrong is to limit ourselves always to trade union struggles.

We do not, of course, therefore oppose trade union struggles or refuse to participate in them. Very often, it is only in the course of these fights, that the workers learn about the system of capitalist exploitation and the need to abolish it. Trade union struggles can educate the workers. What is wrong is to stop at that stage, limiting ourselves always to trade union struggles. Workers, at some stage, should transform the economic struggle into a political struggle for the capture of state power by the working class. If we do this we would be doing revolutionary work. Otherwise we will invariably sink into the morass of reformism. We should prepare for revolutionary action to overthrow the system of exploitation itself. We must not only fight for wage increases. We must go further and abolish the wage system itself.

The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation and it can only be realised by the workers themselves being master over production. The employing class have never concerned themselves with the positive aspect of socialism, which is the liberation of the working class from all forms of oppression and exploitation and the assurance of abundance and freedom for all. Their idea of what socialism is, is simple enough. It is the threat to the profits and privileges they derive from their ownership of the means of production and exchange which socialism would abolish. Socialism is uncompromisingly opposed to capitalism. But if socialists were merely an anti-capitalist movement and nothing else, it would be exceedingly primitive, simple-minded and even subject to all sorts of reactionary perversions. If it simply took the view that what is good for the capitalist class is bad for the working class, that what hurts the capitalist class automatically promotes the interest of the working class, or that the aim of the working-class movement is to take revenge against capitalists for their exploitation and oppression – it wouldn’t have the progressive character which gives it its fundamental power. Feudalism, for example, is opposed to capitalism and stands in the way of its development. But the feudal opposition to capitalism has never promoted the interests of the working class and it never merited the name or the support of socialism.
 
TOWARDS WORLD SOCIALISM
Workers, enraged by capitalist exploitation, at one time unleashed their fury against the modern machines which were the means of exploiting them. But the smashing of the machines which took the place of primitive handwork was, at bottom, futile and reactionary; and even if it was painful to the capitalist, it did not advance the interests of the working class.  Socialism opposes capitalism only from the standpoint of promoting the interests of the working class, only from the standpoint of speeding the working class to control of the economic and political power throughout the world, only from the standpoint that this control alone will enable society as a whole to dispense with all forms of class rule and therewith develop in full freedom from all social fetters. The more acute the problems of society become, the more urgently the working class is called upon to break all its ties with capitalism and to resolve these problems in a socialist democratic way. If the working class fails to destroy capitalism it will suffer the penalty of its own destruction.

Stopping war crimes

After a fourteen day trial, a group of activists known as the Thales Ten (members of Glasgow Palestine Action) received their verdict in Glasgow Sheriff Court last week. Five were convicted, and five acquitted, of the crime of breach of the peace. The group scaled onto the roof and blockaded entrances to the Thales UK factory on 23rd September, 2014 in response to the war in Gaza. They hung a fifty foot Palestine flag and several banners. One read: ‘Another Scotland is Possible: Stop Arming Israel’.


Human Rights Watch documented 87 killings through drone strikes on the Gaza Strip during the Israeli named ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008-9. Thales manufacture components for Israeli drones at the plant in Glasgow. According to their own trade regulations, the UK is not allowed to sell arms to countries that violate international law. Concerning arms sales, criterion six of the Consolidated EU and National Export Licensing Criteria compels the British government to take into account the buyer’s respect for international law. The United Nations mandated Goldstone Report, investigating the conduct of the belligerents during ‘Operation Cast Lead’, contained damning evidence of Israel’s violations of international law.

Strikes at the Museum

The Public and Commercial Services union said 120 members at the National Museum of Scotland were due to take part in seven days of strike action over the removal of a weekend allowance from staff. The strike will begin on Monday. The action is part of a union campaign, now in its 18 month, to get the allowance reinstated for all staff working on a Saturday and Sunday. National Museums Scotland (NMS) withdrew the allowance for new staff. It resulted in two rates of pay for staff working weekends, those who get the allowance because they were employed before 2011, and those who do not.

The withdrawal of the allowance could reduce an individual's pay by £2,000 to £3,000.


Lynn Henderson, Scottish secretary of the PCS, said: "Our members are determined to win this dispute. It is heartening to note that the support is as strong with members who get the allowance as with those who don't. We call on NMS management and the Cabinet Secretary Fiona Hyslop to right this wrong. It is one thing to say that you oppose austerity measures and low pay but when it's in your gift to do something about it, for relatively little money, the Scottish government choose to do nothing about it.” 

Thursday, August 20, 2015

The Revolutionary Working Class

Everywhere people are waking up and fighting against the oppression and exploitation which is a daily fact of their lives. The lies of the ruling class about “prosperity” are being further exposed every-day. There is prosperity alright – but it is for a handful of rich capitalists – the conditions of the working people are getting worse and worse. This system of capitalism is set up with one thing in mind – to make the most profits possible for the handful of people who own the big banks and corporations. It is the system under which we, and our parents and grandparents before us, have done all the work. We mine the mines, build the buildings, manufacture all the products: and then get just enough to live on – if we fight hard enough for it! On the other hand the small capitalist class builds up huge fortunes off of our labour. The Socialist Party stands for the complete overthrow of the world capitalist system. There is only one class capable of conducting the struggle for a successful socialist revolution. That class is the working class. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win!

All the resources for a world of abundance, without pollution, disease and squalor, exist at the present time in skill, technique and science. They are the same resources used to produce pollution and destruction. They cannot be used for constructive purposes till the capitalist system of profit-making is overthrown. Grim reality teaches that the alternative posed by Marx and Engels of democratic socialism or barbarism has been transformed into a united world socialist society or annihilation. While capitalism remains, the resources produced by the labour of the workers will be squandered. Marx did not speak of ‘state-socialism’ [state-capitalism], which he opposed strongly, but of "the association of free and equal producers", directing their work themselves. It is not possible for a centralised bureaucracy of planners and experts to ascertain all needs, prescribe all the work and supervise all the processes in their details; all the proposed systems lead to arbitrariness in distribution by a ruling minority. Self-rule of the free and equal producers, on the one hand, is able to regulate production and distribution without difficulty.

Humanity is at a crossroads. Capitalism’s continued rule offers humanity nothing but more wars, more mass acts of terror and grinding exploitation and poverty. The capitalist system was erected on unspeakable violence, Cromwell and Robespierre weren’t known for squeamish scruples. The world’s working class, the one class with no essential interest in oppression or exploitation, has the potential to put an end to capitalist barbarism. If it rises up to overthrow the capitalists in revolutions the planet over, it can take hold of the productive power of the world economy to put an end to poverty and build a world of abundance for all. It can end the racism, chauvinism and sex and gender oppression that thrives on capitalism’s world of want and competition. Only by building a global socialist movement can the working class prepare itself for the titanic task of undoing the disasters the capitalists keep making—and building a new world in their place. A socialist society is not created by steps toward socialism. Socialism is a result of conscious social building, planned and conducted by the organised workers who have won political power and supported by the majority of the population. There are no short cuts. There are several parties around that call themselves “communist” or “socialist”. We have important disagreements with them. These parties all have one thing in common – they all dress themselves up with high-sounding revolutionary phrases, but underneath they are defenders of capitalism.

Socialism is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and exchange, upon production for use as against production for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions, class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance that the struggle for material needs is completely eliminated, so that humanity, at last freed from economic exploitation, from oppression, from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Much can perhaps be added to this definition, but anything less you can call whatever you wish, but it will not be socialism.

Marxism is our guide to action. We need the theory because it helps us win. But it is not the Party’s personal property. It belongs to the working class and is a mighty weapon of the working class. It is the business of all advanced workers to grasp this theory and use it in the struggle to liberate our class. The struggle for worldwide socialist system is long and arduous. Unfortunately, the movement of the working class does not proceed in a straight line. Setbacks are inevitable, but they cannot erase the class struggle which must go on until it has been solved by the removal of exploiting classes. The working class is revolutionary because it must be.



Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Never Enough Money

On June 12, Statistics Canada said that for every dollar Canadian householders earn, they owe $1.63 in consumer credit, mortgages, and other loans. This is among the highest of all time and shows the depth of the faltering economy and the desperation out there. It's high time we got rid of all debt and its attendant anxiety. John Ayers.

Compassion? It Depends On What Matters

In its issue of June 6, The Toronto Star focused on the plight of an eighty-five year-old who is being evicted from her apartment in New York's Little Italy. The bitter irony of it is that the woman, although a child of Italian immigrants, the building's new owners who want her out are the Italian-American museum. She can afford the current rent of $820 a month but not the five fold increase demanded by the new owners. This shows that under capitalism compassion and feeling for fellow compatriots count for nothing, beside war of course where you are expected to fight for king and country, only money does. John Ayers.

Towards the Socialist Commonwealth

Socialism is rule by the people. They will decide how socialism is to work. The task of the Socialist Party therefore is to help and guide the transfer of power from capitalists to working people. To use the word “socialism” for anything but people’s power is to misuse the term. Nationalisation is not socialism, nor does this constitutes the socialist sector of a mixed economy. Such nationalisation is simply state capitalism, with no relation to socialism. Nor is the “Welfare State” socialist. Socialism will certainly give high priority to health, education, art, science, and the social well-being of all its members, 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. Anyone who attempts to convince a group of workers that socialism offers the only solution for the problems of the working class suffers under a severe handicap. For he or she is immediately confronted with the task of explaining conditions under the old Soviet Union. Most people are under the false impression that socialism existed in the Soviet Union, and knowing what they do of the dreadful oppression which workers suffer in that country, they tend to be prejudiced against any speaker urging socialism as the solution for the ills of society. In spite of conditions in the Soviet Union we in the Socialist Party are convinced that a real socialist society is practicable and will actually solve the problems of mankind.

Workers are, and have been, in a position to take over state power, on the one condition that they themselves wish to do so, i.e. that they understand that this is both necessary and possible. However, almost the whole working people today in our country are capitalist-minded. Why is this? Because they have been capitalist-educated in a capitalist society.  The world about us is falling to pieces. The need for revolution is increasingly widely realised. Technically there is no major problem. The difficulty is a social one. Who are the one class that no society can do without? Those who work. Today it is those who work who have the responsibility together with the opportunity, to reorganise our world. It is going to be difficult, but it is essential. Therefore it must be done. Capitalism is maintained by class power and will only be displaced by other class power. If the working people want power they will have to take it. It will not be given to them. We have to remember that all politics is about power. The socialist calls for power to the people. The reformist is a hypocrite prepared to exercise power on behalf of the exploiting class while claiming to do a bit of good on the side.


Another 2.3 billion people are expected to be added to the planet in just 35 years. By 2050, new systems for food, water, energy, education, health, economics, and global governance will be needed to prevent massive and complex human and environmental disasters. Even if all CO2 emissions are stopped, most aspects of climate change will persist for many centuries. Hence, the world has to take adaptation far more seriously. The Millennium Project’s futures research shows that most of these problems are preventable and that a far better future than today is possible. The interactions among future artificial intelligences, countless new life-forms from synthetic biology, proliferation of nanomolecular assemblies, and robotics could produce a future barely recognizable to science fiction today.

The future can be much better than most pessimists understand, but it could also be far worse than most optimists are willing to admit. It is increasingly clear that humanity has the resources to address its global challenges, but it is not clear that an integrated set of global and local strategies will be implemented together and on the scale necessary to build a better future. As Pope Francis said in His Encyclical Letter, “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster.” Our challenges are transnational in nature, requiring transnational strategies. Doing everything right to address climate change or counter organized crime in one country will not make enough of a difference if others do not act as well. We need coordinated transnational implementation. Humanity needs a global, multifaceted, general long-term view of the future with bold long-range goals to excite the imagination and inspire international collaboration and the World Socialist Movement argues that this can only be accomplished by the establishment of a socialist society – a cooperative commonwealth.

Concentration of wealth is increasing. Income gaps are widening. Jobless economic growth seems the new norm with future technologies replacing much of human labor. Long-term structural unemployment is a business-as-usual forecast. The nature of work and the economic system will have to change or else there could be massive long-term unemployment. Future artificial intelligence that can autonomously create, edit, and implement software simultaneously around the world based on feedback from global sensor networks is a unique historical factor in job displacement. It will affect the whole world, just as the Internet has, however more so. It might be possible that more jobs will be created than eliminated, as in the past, but the speed and integration of technological change and population growth is so much greater this time that long-term structural unemployment is the much more plausible future.

An additional 2.3 billion people received access to safe drinking water since 1990— an extraordinary achievement—but this still leaves 748 million without this access. Water tables are falling on all continents, and nearly half of humanity gets its water from sources controlled by two or more countries.

According to the latest analysis from the UN’s population division, the planet is on course for a population greater than 11 billion by the end of this century

In a simple sense, population is the root cause of all sustainability issues. Clearly if there were no humans there would be no human impacts. The issue is whether there is an optimal number of humans on the planet.

Discussions on population growth often start with the work of Thomas Robert Malthus whose ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ published at the end of the 18th century is one of the seminal works of demography. Populations change in response to three driving factors: fertility – how many people are born; mortality – how many people die; and migration – how many people leave or enter the population.

Malthus’ first error was he was unable to appreciate that the process of industrialisation and development that decreased mortality rates would, in time, decrease fertility rates too. Higher living standards associated with better education, in particular female education and empowerment, seem to lead to smaller family sizes – a demographic transition that has played out with some variations across most of the countries around the world. This may explain how populations can overcome unsustainable growth, but it still seems remarkable that the Earth can provide for a 700% increase in the numbers of humans over the span of less than a few centuries. This was Malthus’s second error. He simply couldn’t conceive of the tremendous increases in yields that industrialisation produced - the “green revolution” that produced a four-fold increase in global food productivity since the middle of the 20th century relied on irrigation, pesticides and fertilisers.

If industrialised agriculture can now feed seven billion, then why can’t we figure out how to feed 11 billion by the end of this century?

First, some research suggests global food production is stagnating. The green revolution hasn’t run out of steam just yet but innovations such as GM crops, more efficient irrigation and subterranean farming aren’t going to have a big enough impact. The low-hanging fruits of yield improvements have already been gobbled up.

Second, the current high yields assume plentiful and cheap supplies of phosphorus, nitrogen and fossil fuels – mainly oil and gas. Mineral phosphorus isn’t going to run out anytime soon, nor will oil, but both are becoming increasingly harder to obtain. All things being equal this will make them more expensive. The chaos in the world food systems in 2007-8 gives some indication of the impact of higher food prices.

Third, soil is running out. Or rather it is running away. Intensive agriculture which plants crops on fields without respite leads to soil erosion. This can be offset by using more fertiliser, but there comes a point where the soil is so eroded that farming there becomes very limited, and it will take many years for such soils to recover.

Fourth, it is not even certain we will be able to maintain yields in a world that is facing potentially significant environmental change. We are on course towards 2 of warming by the end of this century. Just when we have the greatest numbers of people to feed, floods, storms, droughts and other extreme weather will cause significant disruption to food production. In order to avoid dangerous climate change, we must keep the majority of the Earth’s fossil fuel deposits in the ground – the same fossil fuels that our food production system has become effectively addicted to.

But to be reminded 50% of food is lost before market or after purchase. So there’s an opportunity to hugely increase food “production” (or the amount that can be consumed). If the world is feeding 7 billion now and will need to feed 11 billion, this requires a 58% increase. The target is closer with such a simple remedy. Changing diets from a predominantly meat one to a much more vegetable and grain diet is perhaps just as important as growing more food. So there are two simple ways of finding the food to feed an extra four million,
a) by cutting food waste to a bare minimum and
b) humans eating crops directly instead of feeding them to livestock

The immigration threat did not appear out of nowhere and nor is it one only popularised by the far right. One fact is that the migrants are enduring or have endured lives that the majority of Europeans would find it difficult to imagine, except perhaps by those who suffered in the series of Balkan Civil Wars.

All of the talk of preventing Mafia-like trafficking of migrants, and sending aid to countries to support their own populations is nothing but political propaganda. It has often been Western involvement in many of these nations acts which have been the destabilising factor creating the refugees, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria - all places that have been victim to Western intervention. Not to mention those fleeing from the chaos of many African nations, and the long-lasting implications of colonialism by the French and the British.

Isolationism has been the expressed policy for many on the Right and reflected in the strength of even anti-EU movements everywhere. And for the more “internationalist” pro-EU supporter, this is replaced by the doctrine of “Fortress Europe” such as British foreign secretary Philip Hammond labelling displaced human beings as "marauding" people potentially hammering Europe's living standards, ignoring his own part in the austerity policies that have lowering welfare benefits, affordable housing, living wages and working conditions, a much stronger influence on native workers than the effect of newcomers on the standard of living. They equally neglect to cite the obvious detrimental role of the ECB’s economic sanctions upon the Greek people. No migrant movement has possessed the similar power of the Troika in creating poverty. It isn’t the migrant who is raising the rents of houses, leading to the gentrification and the social cleansing of our cities.

Political leaders in Hungary and the UK are simply exploiting popular opinion and giving voices to the nationalists most active in their parties. General Secretary of the Italian Episcopal Conference, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, warned against "a handful of cheap peddlers willing to say extraordinarily inane things just to get a vote". In France a supposedly “socialist” government are often unable to offer policies that provide alternatives to those of the right and are busy deporting migrants back to Italy. Such anti-immigrant sentiments is appeasement and an appeal to the nationalism. Right-wing politicians have, for years, been influencing mainstream parties regarding immigration and discussions on citizenship and belonging.

“From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs”

It is a sign of the times that more and more people are discussing the meaning of socialism. The words socialist and communist are changing their meaning just as the word christian did. The Socialist Party has always visualised socialism as the highest stage of human society, economically and socially. All technological power created by the genius of mankind, all that science and art had given to the human race in generations is to be utilised, not for the few, but for the benefit of mankind as a whole. Based on the common ownership of the means of production and distribution, a new economic system is to be built, ending all social oppression by dissolving the hostile classes into a community of free and equal producers striving not for sectional interests, but for the collective good. This socialist commonwealth, liberating the individual from all economic, political and social oppression, would provide the basis, for real liberty and for the full and harmonious development of the personality, giving full scope for the growth of the creative faculties of the mind. 


No piecemeal reforms or partial solutions can bring an end to this state of things. We must resist the efforts reformists to sow illusions about offering palliatives, and instead build our movement with the perspective of overthrowing it. If you want to fight the only battle worth fighting, for the socialist revolution – join us.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

A Better Use Than War.

The costs of war are enormous. The US led war on Afghanistan, for example, still not over, recorded 149,000 deaths in that country and Pakistan, 26,270 of whom were civilians, including 298 aid workers. 73% of deaths by drone bombs were civilian. And 2014 was the worst year for civilian deaths with 3,669.

Staying on war, global military expenditures have reached $1.7 trillion (US). The Toronto Star asks 'what could you do with the money – pull every country out of poverty, cure infectious diseases? Not a thought in capitalism where everyone else is a potential enemy – you have to be prepared, as the Boy Scouts taught us. Last year the US spent $610 billion. It would cost about $5 billion to control malaria for one year, $9.1 billion to support those displaced by climate change for one year, and $32.76 trillion to convert the world's energy to solar, less than twenty years of military spending. Unfortunately the priority in this system will always be profit for the owning class. John Ayers.

Why Class Struggle

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.” Marx, Wage, Labour and Capital

It is true that the standards of living have improved considerably since the days of Marx and Engels. Karl Marx never said that the workers under capitalism would all end up as “paupers”.
In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx wrote:
‘The lowest sediment of relative surplus population [unemployed] finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the ‘dangerous’ classes, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only to glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade.’
Marx continued,
‘the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer, the victims of industry, the mutilated, the sickly and the widows, and so on.’

And is this the reality we see with the present austerity policies of the ruling class. So Marx was correct when he said “misery” would increase in the course of capitalist growthand will  fluctuate along with the ups and downs, with “booms” and “slumps”. Marx pointed out, firstly, unlike the peasant or artisan, members of the working class are devoid of any means of production, they must work for one or another capitalist, or starve. With the growth of capitalism and technology their livelihood becomes ever more precarious. In the “depressions” millions of them are forced into the ranks of the unemployed. All methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought, about at the cost of the labourer.

Marx goes on to explain:
‘All means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producer ... degrade him into the appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil . . . they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness.... It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.’

One might think that Marx still lived with such an insightful description of today’s economic malaise. Marx said of the worker “be his payment high or low”, his labour is still drudgery, the job speeded-up and intensified.

Many think that Marx meant that “increasing misery” simply spelled reduced wages, with the workers reduced to the status of “paupers”, as do many other “critics” of Marx. As you see, nothing is further from the truth. It is but an aspect of it. The gloomy predictions of Marx that the rich would become richer while the poor would suffer ever greater hardship has unfortunately been vindicated on an international scale.

American commentators have increasingly been vocal in the disappearance of their ‘middle class’. Yet they pay no heed to the Communist Manifesto prediction:
‘In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty-bourgeoisie has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie  and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society.The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.’

In each “recession” tens of thousands of small enterprises are ruined. In each ‘boom’ period, large numbers of small enterprises, have sprung up again, the middle-class “renewing itself.”

Presently, the renewal process is ever more difficult. Whole sections of independent proprietors have already disappeared. Where today is the independent hotel-keeper? Everyone knows that the hotels are owned largely by corporate chains and the independent owners are indeed a vanishing race.  The managers, “overseers, shopmen and bailiffs” have, taken over, as Marx said; the so-called “managerial revolution.” The so-called ‘managerial revolution’ in the shape of the oligarchy of CEOs has resulted in a more ruthless efficiency in the exploitation of people, in maximum profits.The class of small entrepreneurs has shrunk, while the number of those who work for wage or salary has grown. Small businesses are going into bankruptcy. That is the process of expropriation of small capitalist by the cartels.

The change from capitalism to socialism, from capitalist dictatorship to rule of the working class, is a revolution, the most far-reaching revolution in human history. What tactical methods are used, whether by majority vote or by the General Strike or by insurrection, cannot alter that fact. As genuine socialists we do not consider that socialisation is a piecemeal process as visualised by the reformists.


Our aim is the unity of the working class movement, and, ultimately political unification in one party based on socialist principles. While capitalism lasts, so too will the inevitable class struggle proceed.


Monday, August 17, 2015

'The Referendum and Its Aftermath' - Public Meeting


A talk by Vic Vanni

Wednesday, 19th August - 7:00pm
Venue: Maryhill Community Central Halls,
304 Maryhill Road,
Glasgow G20 7YE

The ten months since the referendum has provided the opportunity to consider the results and its implications for the future.  The most striking outcome of the referendum has been the collapse of the Labour Party in Scotland.

The SNP's biggest problem was its inability to break Labour's grip on the heavily populated central belt.  It has now achieved this as Labour voters appear to have decided that the Labour Party is no defence against the Tories.

Are Scottish voter so desperate to be rid of the Tories that they will at some point opt for independence?  And could an SNP government enable Scotland to avoid the inevitable problems which capitalism brings?  These and other views concerning the outcome of the referendum will no doubt be discussed.



Digging the grave of wage slavery


We live in a world rife with misery and oppression in many various forms. Hunger, poverty, unemployment, racial and sexual discrimination, and political repression are still the lot of the majority of the people of the world. Ever since the earliest class-divided societies, the exploited have aspired to a better life. They have yearned for a society where all injustice would be banished forever. The dreams of the past have become real possibilities for a future. Socialist revolution is the only way that working people can ensure the abolition of all exploitation.

Socialism will mean the rule of the working class. It will put an end to the exploitation of man by man. It will bring freedom to all those oppressed by capital and open up a new period of history for people. The enormous waste of capitalism will end. Socialism is the future of humanity, a radically new society where classes and the state will have been completely eliminated.

In the end it is possible to do away with classes and the state since these only exist during a specific period of society’s development. Humanity has not always been divided into classes. In the primitive communal societies all the members cooperated together to assure their survival. But as mankind progressed, as the productive forces – the way in which man made his living – developed and it became possible to accumulate wealth, society was split into antagonistic classes. Since that time all of human history has been the history of class struggle; the struggle between slave and slave owner, between serf and feudal lord, between worker and capitalist. Each of these major periods in the development of society – slavery, feudalism and capitalism – corresponds to a particular level of development of the productive forces. Each of these societies is marked by a sharp division between the masses of toilers on the one hand, and a small handful of exploiters who live in luxury on the other.

Socialism means tremendous progress. In all the former societies, the state was an instrument for the domination of a minority of exploiters over the vast majority of working people. Under socialism, the state serves the vast majority allowing it to keep its hold over a minority of capitalists. In socialist society all social inequalities will have been banished; there will be no rich and no poor, and all members of society will contribute to the common good. With socialism, the immense advance of the productive forces and the tremendous abundance of social wealth will allow for the application of the principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Each person will contribute to society according to his or her ability, while society in turn provides for his or her needs. The differences between workers and farmers, town and country, and manual and intellectual work will have disappeared. In socialist society, each individual will develop to his full potential. Socialism is not an end to human development but just the beginning – the beginning of a further development of production, the people’s well-being and all facets of human society. But before we arrive at this goal we must take the first steps forward. We must take power from the ruling class. Reformism regards socialism as a remote goal and nothing more. Reformism advocates not class struggle, but class collaboration. We must draw a clear line of distinction between ourselves and the enemy, i.e. the bosses and their bureaucrats.

For Marx, the wage-system is not a feature of socialism but of quite a different system, capitalism. Marx spoke of the ‘free association of real producers’. It is through such a free association, when labour in all its aspects becomes controlled by the workers themselves that production will rest not upon decisions of the planners, but of the freely determined wishes of the producers themselves. Socialism will have no need of the irrational remnants of a past age, such as money and prices. The Marxists strive for the free association of completely free men, where no separation between ‘private and common interest’ existed: a society where ‘everyone could give himself a complete education in whatever domain he fancied’. For ‘man’s activity becomes an adverse force which subjugates him, instead of his being its master’ when there is ‘a division of labour’; everyone must then have a profession, that is a ‘determined, exclusive sphere of activity’ he has not chosen and in which ‘he is forced to remain if he does not want to lose his means of existence’. In a socialist society, on the contrary, a man would be given ‘the possibility to do this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to go fishing in the afternoon, to do cattle breeding in the evening, to criticise after dinner’, as he chose’ (The German Ideology).

Marx designated the working class the ’grave-diggers of capitalism’ – the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. The working class is not the gravedigger of capitalism by virtue of any intrinsic merit it possesses as a class qualifying it for that role, but because of the objective role it plays in the production process of capitalism. Thus it can be, and indeed has always been, that the very class which alone is capable of destroying capitalism and with it all class society, is itself deeply imbued with the ideology of the ruling class it is historically destined to overthrow. The contradiction between the objective role of the working class as an agent of social revolution, and its own lack of consciousness of that role, makes necessary a battlefield of ideas so that workers are conscious of their role as the agent of social revolution.  

According to socialist theory, the development of capitalism implies the polarisation of society into a small minority of capital owners and a large majority of wage-workers. This concentration of productive property and general wealth into always fewer hands appears as an incarnation of ‘feudalism’ in the garb of modern industrial society. Small ruling classes determine the life and death of all of society by owning and controlling the productive resources and therewith the governments. That their decisions are controlled, in turn, by impersonal market forces and the compulsive quest for capital does not alter the fact that these reactions to uncontrollable economic events are also their exclusive privilege. The producers have no direct control over production and the products it brings forth. At times, they may exert a kind of indirect control by way of wage struggles, which may alter the wage-profit ratio and therewith the course or tempo of the capital expansion process, but generally, it is the capitalist who determines the conditions of production. Unless the worker accepts the exploitative conditions of capitalist production, he is ‘free’ only in the sense that he is free to starve. This was recognised long before there was a socialist movement. As early as 1767, Simon Linguet declared that wage-labour is merely a form of slave labour:
“It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? ... He is free, you say. Ah. That is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsman costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him ... These men, it is said, have no master – they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”
Almost three hundred years later, this is essentially still the same. Although it is no longer outright misery which forces the workers in the advanced capitalist nations to submit to the rule of capital and to the wiles of capitalists, their lack of control over the means of production, their position as wage-workers, still marks them as a ruled class unable to determine its own destiny.

The goal of socialists is the abolition of the wage system, which implies the end of capitalism. Social development will no longer be determined by the uncontrollable fetishistic expansion and contraction of capital but by the collective conscious decisions of the producers in a classless society.

The cooperative movement came into being as a medium of escape from wage-abour and as a futile opposition to the ruling principle of general competition.  Producers’ cooperatives were voluntary groupings for self-employment and self-government with respect to their own activities. Some of these cooperatives developed independently, others in conjunction with the working class movements. By pooling their resources, workers were able to establish their own workshops and produce without the intervention of capitalists. But their opportunities were from the very beginning circumscribed by the general conditions of capitalist society and its developmental tendencies, which granted them a mere marginal existence. Capitalist development implies the competitive concentration and centralisation of capital. The larger capital destroys the smaller. The cooperative workshops were restricted to special small-scale industries requiring little capital. If they became a threat, the better resourced capitalist companies drove them out of business.

Consumers’ cooperatives proved to be a little more successful and some of them absorbed producers’ cooperatives as sources of supply. But consumers’ cooperatives can hardly be considered as attempts at working class control, even where they were the creation of working class aspirations. At best, they may secure a measure of control in the disposal of wages, for labourers can be robbed twice – at the point of production and at the market place. The costs of commodity circulation are an unavoidable faux frais of capital production [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faux_frais_of_production], dividing the capitalists into merchants and entrepreneurs. Since each tries for the profit maximum in its own sphere of operation, their economic interests are not identical. Entrepreneurs thus have no reason to object to consumers’ cooperatives. Currently, they are themselves engaged in dissolving the division of productive and merchant capital by combining the functions of both in the single production and marketing corporation.

The cooperative movement was easily integrated into the capitalist system and, in fact, was to a large extent an element of capitalist development. Even in bourgeois economic theory it was considered an instrument of social conservatism by fostering the savings propensities of the lower layers of society, by increasing economic activities through credit unions, by improving agriculture through cooperative production and marketing organisations, and by shifting working class attention from the sphere of production to that of consumption. As a capitalistically-oriented institution the cooperative movement flourished, finally to become one form of capitalist enterprise among others, bent on the exploitation of the workers in its employ, and facing the latter as their opponents in strikes for higher wages and better working conditions. The general support of consumers’ cooperatives by the official labour movement – in sharp distinction to an earlier scepticism and even outright rejection – was merely an additional sign of the increasing ‘capitalisation’ of the reformist labour movement.  The division of ‘collectivism’ into producers’ and consumers cooperatives reflected, in a sense, the opposition of the syndicalist to the socialist movement. Consumers’ cooperatives incorporated members of all classes and were seeking access to all markets. They were not opposed to centralisation on a national and even international scale. The market of producers’ cooperatives, however, was as limited as their production and they could not combine into larger units without losing the self-control which was the rationale for their existence.

 It was the problem of workers’ control over their production and products which differentiated the syndicalists from the socialist movement. In so far as the problem still existed for the latter, it solved it for itself with the concept of nationalisation, which made the socialist state the guardian of society’s productive resources and the regulator of its economic life with respect to both production and distribution. Only at a later stage of development would this arrangement make room for a free association of socialised producers and the withering away of the state. The syndicalists feared, however, that the state with its centralised controls would merely perpetuate itself and prevent the working population’s self-determination. The syndicalists envisioned a society in which each industry is managed by its own workers. All the syndicates together would form national federations which would not have the characteristics of government but would merely serve statistical and administrative functions for the realisation of a truly collectivist production and distribution system. To speak of workers’ control within the framework of capitalist production can mean only control of their own organisations, for capitalism implies that the workers are deprived of all effective social control. But with the ‘capitalisation’ of their organisations, when they become the ‘property’ of a bureaucracy and the vehicle of its existence and reproduction, it follows that the only possible form of direct workers’ control vanishes. It is true that even then workers fight for higher wages, shorter hours and better working conditions, but these struggles do not affect their lack of power within their own organisations. To call these activities a form of workers’ control is a misnomer in any case, for these struggles are not concerned with the self-determination of the working class but with the improvement of conditions within the confines of capitalism. This is, of course, possible so long as it is possible to increase the productivity of labour at a rate faster than that by which the workers’ living standards are raised.

The basic control over the conditions of work and the surplus-yields of production remain always in the hands of the capitalists. When workers succeed in reducing the hours of their working day, they will not succeed in cutting the quantity of surplus labour extracted by the capitalists. For there are two ways of extracting surplus-labour prolonging the working day and shortening the working time required to produce the wage-equivalent by way of technical and organisational innovations. Because capital must yield a definite rate of profit, capitalists will stop producing when this rate is threatened. The compulsion to accumulate capital controls the capitalist and forces him to control his workers to get that amount of surplus-labour necessary to consummate the accumulation process. He will try for the profit maximum and may only get the minimum for reasons beyond his control, one of which may be the resistance of the workers to the conditions of exploitation bound up with the profit maximum. But that is as far as working class exertions can reach within the capitalist system.

The workers’ loss of control over their own organisations was, of course, a consequence of their acquiescence in the capitalist system. Organised and unorganised workers alike accommodated themselves to the market economy because it was able to ameliorate their conditions and promised further improvements in the course of its own development. Types of organisations effective in such a non-revolutionary situation were precisely reformist socialist parties and centrally-controlled business unions. Capitalists no longer confronted the workers but their representatives, whose existence was based on the existence of the capital-labour market, that is, on the continued existence of capitalism. The workers’ satisfaction with their organisations reflected their own loss of interest in social change. While it may still be necessary to fight for immediate demands, such struggles no longer bring the entire order into radical question. In the fight for socialism more stress must be laid upon the qualitative rather than the quantitative needs of the workers. While there cannot be socialism without workers’ control, neither can there be real workers’ control without socialism. To assert that gradual increase of workers’ control in capitalism is an actual possibility merely plays into the hands of the widespread demagoguery of the ruling classes to hide their absolute class-rule by false social reforms dressed in terms such as co-management, participation or determination. Workers’ control excludes class-collaboration; it cannot partake in but instead abolishes the system of capital production. Neither socialism nor workers’ control has anywhere become a reality. State-capitalism and market-socialism, or the combination of both, still find the working class in the position of wage workers without effective control over their production and its distribution. Their social position does not differ from that of workers in the mixed or unmixed capitalist economy. Everywhere, the struggle for working class emancipation has still to begin and will not end short of the socialisation of production and the abolition of classes through the elimination of wage labour.

Reforms presuppose a reformable capitalism. Improved conditions have become the customary conditions, and continued acquiescence of the workers requires the maintenance of these conditions. Should they deteriorate, it will arouse working class opposition. Even though the ‘value’ of labour power must always be smaller than the ‘value’ of the products it creates, the ‘value’ of labour-power may imply different living conditions. It may be expressed in a eight-hour day, in good or in bad housing, in more or less consumer goods. At any particular time, however, the given wages and their buying power determine the conditions of the labouring population as well as their complaints and aspirations. When capitalism is forced by economic developments that brings the conditions which lead to the formation of class consciousness, it will also bring back the revolutionary demand for socialism.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

'Not Socialist enough' (1965)

DICK DONNELLY at The Mound
A FREQUENT SPEAKER IN EDINBURGH IN THE 60s
Letter to the Editors from the September 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sirs,

Today I listened to a SPGB speaker at the Mound, Edinburgh's centre of informal political discussion. This speaker criticised and denounced the whole British Labour Party in politics as well as its whole organisation. Why? Because it is not Socialist enough, he argued.

Now, I gather from your aims, published in the Socialist Standard that you are for political as well as economic democracy. The only means of political democracy is an elective, representative house, and this means "politics" in its most common meaning.

This is the stumbling block—temporary though it is—to the progression of Socialism from the direction of the Labour Party. It is all very well for the SPGB to criticise the Labour Party but in our political democracy, Socialism must at times be suspended for reasons of political expediency. Otherwise Socialism in politics is crippled, and the day for which we struggle no nearer.

This is the reason for the Labour Party's slow, actual movement leftwards. In theory it is as Socialist as your Party, but for the fulfilment of and the progress towards the Socialist aim through the machinery of politics, its progression must be necessarily slow.

The SPGB does a great job. It must be constantly winning supporters if not members, of the Socialist cause. But it would be mistaken of you, I think, to challenge the Labour Party in politics. We must have a united British Socialist movement, for this is the quickest way to success. The SPGB's purpose should be to won members and supporters, and to influence the Labour Party policy in all its aspects. Political rivalry is the quickest, surest way to Socialist disunity—rather the quicker path of Socialist unity to our common goal.

Of course one can criticise Labour short term  and current policy, but your speaker implied that he and you disagreed with Labour's long term, overall plan. What are your views?
Fraser Grigor
Edinburgh, 


REPLY:
Of course our speaker "criticised and denounced the whole British Labour Party". Why should he do otherwise? The Labour Party is more a Socialist organisation than the Conservatives or Liberals. It seeks votes on a programme (long term and otherwise) of administering and reforming capitalism and must therefore earn our condemnation as much as the others—including those leaning "leftwards" like the so-called "communists".

If our critic thinks we are being unjust, it is up to him to produce evidence that the Labour Party is Socialist; all we can say is that we have studied the Labour Party for the well-nigh sixty years of its existence, and it is obvious that the membership have not the foggiest idea of what the word Socialism means. Mr. Grigor thinks that Socialism must be suspended at times for reasons of political expediency, which is condemnation enough of the Labour Party's activities when it is remembered what over half a century of "suspension" has meant in terms of working class misery and the horror of two enormous wars (both Labour supported).

Incidentally, it amazes us how, even after only a short dose of the present Labour administration, our correspondent can think that they have the slightest interest in a classless, moneyless world of common ownership and democratic control. Imports and exports, wages and prices, god and dollar reserves, etc.—these are their obsessions. They are in fact up to their necks in the mire of capitalism.

We are told—and how many times have we heard it—that we should not challenge the Labour Party, but try to influence its policy instead. Presumably this means we should act as a ginger group, either boring from within or nibbling from without, but for what earthly purpose? As members, we would run the risk of expulsion and either way we would earn the hostility of the Labour rank and file. Certainly we would stand no chance of swinging the organisation over to Socialism—we might just as well try our luck with The Primrose League.

Our party learned this lesson from its inception, when some of our founder members were expelled from the old Social Democratic Federation for trying to preach Socialist ideas. We saw then that a Socialist Party must be completely independent of and hostile to all other parties, and must have Socialism as its sole aim. Only in this way have we been able to keep the idea alive—not an easy task and one which has not been made any lighter by the confusion and misunderstanding caused by the Labour Party.

Socialism is the only answer to the problems of the world today and we work ceaselessly for the time when the working class of the world will unite to achieve it. Far from agreeing that it should be shelved for any reason, the need for it grows more urgent with every passing day.
Editorial Committee.

Goodbye to the Future

Climate change and global warming are the most pressing threats facing the world today. Hardly a day goes by without some mention in the media of climate change. We cannot build a green capitalism and even if we could we cannot build it in time. The two degrees increase in global warming signals the point at which ‘dangerous’ climate change is unleashed. Given the amount of devastation by extreme weather events that is already taking place around us, it is sobering to think what ‘dangerous’ climate change might actually look like. Most scientists predict that unless drastic action is taken the speed of global warming is set to accelerate and the consequences will become irreversible. All the available evidence points to a simple conclusion; even if green capitalism is possible, it cannot be adopted in time to stave off increasingly severe eco-system collapses. Paris agreements for implementation tomorrow is too late. Let us pledge ourselves not to a far-off future but system change right now. Technology that previously worked people must be turned into the means of emancipation. The current system of production poses an existential threat. The answer to this terrible threat is to build on the spirit of the revolts against capitalism but to go beyond protest to a social revolution that ends the threat of human and environmental disaster. The future of society and the environment depends upon the global working class wresting control of society and production from those who control it now. If we do not succeed in doing that then the future is going to very bleak indeed. If we do succeed it will mean we have the chance to reorganise production, using the fruits of a scientific understanding to re-build a world whose beauty we can safeguard for future generations. It is not less human intervention we need, but more – intervention that enables human beings consciously to control their own social labour on a world scale, instead of leaving it to the blind workings of the capitalist market. The ceaseless drive for profit leading to the neglect of everything that stands in the way of this has created ecological havoc from one end of the planet to the other.

Too often socialists have been accused for only opposing and not proposing. That has never been a valid criticism. Today’s need is not another centralised global institution, but the deconcentration and decentralisation of decision-making power, and the creation of a pluralistic system of organisations interacting with one another, guided by broad and flexible agreements and understandings. We are not talking about something completely new. Workers since the 19th C have called for the international organisation of the working class and raised the need for collaborative international workers’ struggles to raise wages, reduce hours and alleviate the nationalist-induced rivalries within our class. Socialists have tried to show that workers everywhere have an underlying common interest around which to unite and it is the capitalists who cannot overcome their divisions. An enormous hatred is growing against the many horrors of capitalism. Industrial pollution and ecological damage have provoked resistance in various countries. That hatred has to be turned into dedication to overthrow the entire capitalist system.

The threat to the environment, a direct result of capital’s uncontrolled expansion, can be answered only by the collective action of humanity as a whole. The “Greens” have done vital work in drawing attention to environmental issues. However, they only too often offer the wrong answers to the very questions they ask. For example, technology is not the enemy, but its perversion by the power of capital. The crisis of the ecological situation is a global problem. Its solution lies in the plane of rational and humane, that is to say, wise organisation, both of production itself and care for nature, not just by individuals, enterprises or countries, but by all humanity, linked with a clear awareness of our planetary responsibility for the ecological consequences of civilisation. Politicians and corporations of all hues now declare their commitment to do something about climate change and believe it or not but some of those who run world capitalism actually understand that the environment on which their system depends is in danger of disintegrating within a generation or two. There is no longer much dispute about what is happening.

Governments and businesses have a genuine interest in slowing down climate change, much the same as their predecessors had a genuine interest in eliminating the smog from the slums. But they cannot achieve their goal without slowing down the momentum of capital accumulation, the very basis of their system. The factory chimney stack smoke that were causing bronchitis in working class tenements have now become greenhouses gases threatening to devastate the whole of humanity. It is precisely because this is a global problem that those who support the system find it difficult to deal with. Capitalism is in the process of destroying all our futures. The environmental activists within the Green movement see climate change as the issue that overshadows all others. Everything else has to be subordinated to building a campaign such as has never been seen before in an effort to force governments and firms to take the necessary action. They are raising much-needed awareness of what is happening. But campaigns focused purely on climate change will not be the answer to the problem for deep-seated change is required. Fossil fuel industries are intertwined with every aspect of the system’s functioning, including the lives of those of us living within it. Recognition of this leads many environmental activists to the conclusion that the only solution is for people to change their individual lifestyles as we all seem to be part of the problem. Yet, it is not just a question of people individually being selfish. For the great mass of people there are no other ways to fulfil our basic needs at present.  Recognition of this reality then leads some people who once looked upon individual life-style choices as the solution to now look to the state for action. The counsel us that we can compel the governments of the world’s most polluting states to implement mitigating measures. But these reformist Green activists end up tailoring their demands to what they think can be achieved without too great a disturbance to the present system. So they lobby for countries to sign up to various ‘practical’ agreements such as carbon taxes on the grounds that ‘at least it is a start’. But let’s be honest, corporations that are expert at cheating taxes by use of tax havens, will easily find ways to fiddle their emissions by carbon trading.

The capitalist system depends for its existence on continued expansion and accumulation, and any serious and effective solution to climate change is going to open enormous fissures within the system. Are we to imagine the ruling class will sacrifice their interests for the rest of us? There have been previous instances of civilisations collapsing due to ecological devastation as did the Maya civilization. Capitalists and states will react to the need to do something about global warming by price and tax measures that will inevitably hit the living standards of the poor.

The only sure protection against climate change is the replacement of a society based on accumulation for profit with one based on production for need. There is but one way to reverse climate change. That is through challenging and ending capitalism as a whole.

Act Today to Save Tomorrow
A World to Win, a Planet to Save