"Daddy, what did you do in the class war?"

The technical basis of modern society is large-scale, mass-producing industry which can only be operated by co-operative labour. By its nature, it draws into the work of producing things millions of people the world over. These millions work not on their own; they work together. No person makes anything by him or herself; he or she only plays a part in the co-operative labour through which things are today produced. Farms, factories, mines, mills and docks are only geographically separate. Technically they depend on each other as links in a chain. They are only parts of a world-wide productive system. In other words, the world is one productive unit.

Common sense would suggest that, to take full advantage of this world-wide productive system, it should be owned and controlled as a unit. That it should belong in common to all mankind and be controlled by them for their own benefit. But of course, this is not so. The means and instruments for producing wealth are not owned in common by us all. They are the property of a few. Nor are they used to make what we need. They are used to make things to be sold. Instead of talking about social transformation our critics say the Socialists Party should be advocating more modest changes such as establishing workers' co-operatives and better welfare provision.

It is self-evident that to maintain an effective modern society, one in which we continue to eat, have clothes to wear, somewhere fit to live and so on that a certain amount of work is necessary. Jobs need doing. We have never heard of a house that built itself or of a cabbage that was self-planting, self-cultivating and self-harvesting that somehow manages to get itself to a greengrocer's shelf. Society has evolved to a point where we can produce an abundance of what we need. Technology gives us the possibility of having less work and more possible leisure. But only if we concentrate on what needs doing and discard that which simply preserves and maintains the status quo. John Lennon summed it up beautifully in his song Imagine. Humanity possesses not only the imagination but also the physical ability to make such a society possible. A society that only produces goods and services if they can be sold for a profit is an anachronism for it creates injustice and suffering on a scale that beggars belief. Wages are not a reward for a job well done, nor are they a share of the wealth a worker has produced, nor a cut out of his employer’s profits. They are the price of a person’s working ability; at any one particular time, the size of the wage represents what can be got for that ability on the labour market.

Many people mistakenly believe that money has always existed and that it therefore always will. The Socialist Party explains why money is out of date. Capitalism as a market system means that the normal method of getting what you need is to pay for it. The normal way for members of the capitalist class to get money is to invest their capital to produce rent, interest, dividends or profit. The usual way for workers to get money is to sell their labour power for wages. Imagine that all the things you need are owned and held in common. There is no need to buy food from anyone—it is common property. There are no rent or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to all of us. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers). In a socialist world monetary calculation won't be necessary. The alternative to monetary calculation based on exchange-value is calculation based on use values. Decisions apart from purely personal ones of preference or interest will be made after weighing the real advantages and disadvantages and real costs of alternatives in particular circumstances. The ending of the money system will mean at the same time the ending of war, economic crises, unemployment, poverty and persecution—all of which are consequences of that system.

The revolutionary change that is needed is not possible unless a majority of people understand and want it. We do not imagine all humankind's problems can be solved at a stroke. Reforms of the present system fail because the problems multiply and recur. It will take time to eliminate hunger, malnutrition, disease and ignorance from the world. But the enormous liberation of mental and physical energies from the shackles of the money system will ensure that real human progress is made.


 Fellow-worker—the future is yours to shape. Are you going to go on in the same old way as your fathers did, or are you going to make an effort to understand the world in which you live? Until you do, you are doomed. You are going to feel the cold, clammy hand of poverty. It is quite simple to understand the fundamentals of Socialism. One doesn’t require an awful lot of study to realise there are two classes in society. You, fellow-worker, belong to the working class, the useful section of society— makes all the wealth. You build the palaces, the mansions.  But you have nothing to sell but your labour-power, which you try to sell to the highest bidder, the amount received in return is only enough to replace your depleted energy and permit you to reproduce the species, so that there may be another slave to replace you when you are thrown on the scrap-heap, no longer fit to be a beast of burden, any more.
The other class—only a small fraction of the population—own and control all the means of living. Only when this tiny section of employers and owners can find a market for their goods is the machinery of production set in motion. Only when this section can find a market for their goods do the working class find employment. When goods are piled high and no market is to be found, the workers are unemployed and go hungry. Goods are produced for profit, not for use.
  Fellow-worker, you have a duty to your children. Your job is to seek knowledge and organise for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. In years to come, when your children ask you, "What did you do the class war. Daddy?” don’t let it be said you hung your head in shame and said, "Nothing” Rather let it be said. "I fought along with my comrades to establish socialism.” The world can be yours to share.

The Fragment of Machines

A wise old bird indeed was Marx.

It is this section in The Grundrisse 1857.
https://www.marxists.org/archive...

Quote:
"As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis."
 http://www.marxists.org/archive/... )

Incidentally, this is (I think) the only passage where Marx uses the word breakdown ( "zusammen") in relation to capitalism. What he is saying is that if capitalism continued long enough it would eventually reach a stage where, thanks to mechanization, an individual product would have so little labour (indirect as well as direct) embodied in it that its value, and so its price, would be virtually zero. At which point the change-over to production to give away or take freely would become a necessity for the survival of society.

I don't think that Marx thought that this stage would ever actually be reached, but was merely extrapolating trends discernable under capitalism to their logical conclusion (a bit like he did too with his mathematical demonstration that eventually the rate of profit must fall).

Capitalism is nowhere near this stage now over 160 years since Marx wrote and, despite robotics, is still (very) far away from it. Hopefully, the workers will have put an end to capitalism long before it reached this theoretical breakdown point. Marx must have thought so too. Otherwise why was he active as a socialist in his day?

Mechanization, automation, robotization are all manifestations of the same trend under capitalism where, under the lash of competition, capitalist firms are driven to constantly strive to reduce the cost of production of what they are producing for sale, i.e. to increase productivity. But productivity does not proceed at the rate that some people sometimes mistakenly assume that it does because they take into account only the last stage of production.

What has to be taken into account is the labour that has gone into the production of a commodity from start to finish. So robots introduced at just one stage of the whole process will only have an impact at that stage. Which is why the increase in productivity in the economy as a whole has been at a rate of only about 2 percent a year, a rate that the capitalist economy can absorb.

Excuse Me

Recently I was excused jury duty by expressing the socialist position in relation to the entire legal apparatus, which by itself would not be worthy of mention.

 What is was the fact that in a room full with about 250 prospective jurors, an approximate quarter filled in forms requesting they be excused. Admittedly some of their reasons may not be commendable, like racist ones for example, but nevertheless, it is heartening to see so many people reluctant to help capitalism's legal Joe boys administrate the stinking system. 

 Steve and John.

A religious decline

A senior clergy leader in Scotland has called for urgent action after Catholic marriages in Scotland fell to their lowest level since 1941.

Monsignor Peter Magee, the head of the Scottish Catholic Interdiocesan Tribunal has suggested that one day in the calendar year be dedicated to the promotion of marriage, as a way of arresting the slide.

last year just 1,346 marriages in Scotland were conducted by clergy from the Roman Catholic Church. This is down from a high of just over 7,000 in 1970, and is the lowest number for 75 years.

Half of all marriages carried out in Scotland in 2016 were civil ceremonies, those carried out by a registrar, a trend that has also resulted in declines of marriages carried out by religious celebrants, with the number of religious marriages falling by 44 per cent since 1975.

The Catholic Church has blamed an overall fall in marriage rates (with 2009 the lowest rate since 1858) on what they characterised as “aggressive secularisation”.

This is a world of potential plenty.

The Socialist Party attitude to Marx is that he was a pioneer socialist, who placed socialist theory onto a scientific footing. We accept his labour theory of value, his materialist conception of history, and his view that socialism must be the outcome of the political struggle of the working class to free itself from capitalist exploitation so call us "Marxists" (despite the shortcomings of this term) but we do not regard Marx as some infallible source of wisdom who never made a mistake.

We are not committed to applying socialist principles in precisely the same way as Marx did a hundred years ago. This is because conditions have changed considerably. When Marx in his day was politically active, the workers were only just beginning to organise politically and industrially. He considered it his task to encourage this, even if the organisations the workers first formed were not explicitly socialist in character. He expected, somewhat over-optimistically as it has unfortunately turned out, that the workers would soon move on to become conscious socialists. In Marx's time, the world political scene too was different. In the capitalist European countries where the bourgeois revolution against the landed nobility had taken place reactionary feudal powers, especially Tsarist Russia threatened. Opposition to Tsarist Russia became something of an obsession with Marx and led him to take up positions, such as supporting the British-French-Turkish side in the Crimean War, and Poland's independence which we have no hesitation in saying was wrong. What Marx favoured was the further development of capitalism since he knew that this would ultimately remove the threat the reactionary feudal powers posed. Developments since Marx have made his tactics (but not his principles) outdated. developments have also made it possible to establish a society of abundance, with from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, now without any transition period while "the forces of production are raised". Production has already been raised immensely since Marx who lived in an era of the horse and carriage and steam-power. The material conditions for socialism have now long been in existence. All that is needed is for the majority of the working class to realise their common interest in abolishing capitalism.  This great and final act as members of the working class will free them from the chains of the wage-labour and capital relationship which now holds them in its grip. Then they will emerge as men and women in a class-free society. The rat-race, the poverty and all the other evils which arise from property society would then have gone from the scene of a truly human society. Men, women and children would then be free to develop their potential and their relations with each other as human beings.

 the Socialist Party has been saying for a long time that sufficient for all could be produced but isn’t being produced. The fertile fields and rich mineral deposits are there in abundance, so are the highly developed and productive machines, the railways, roads, ships and aeroplanes, and everything else needed for production. So are the human beings who could do the work needed to put everyone far beyond the fear of poverty and deprivation. The Socialist Party is well aware that enough is not being produced at present, and this in spite of the curious thing that there are numerous instances of production being deliberately restricted and goods destroyed. It is because the people who want these things have not money enough to buy them, and the people who have money do not want to buy any more of them. So destruction and restriction go on in spite of the well-established fact that if the hundreds of millions of poor people in the world were suddenly told that they could satisfy their needs free of charge there would be an immediate and immense shortage of the necessities of life. End capitalism and have the means of production owned by the whole community, then goods will be produced for use alone, and the supply of them will not be hindered by artificial barriers of profit and private interest.

Free distribution of wealth is now possible because modern industry and agriculture can turn out an abundance of the things people need. A world of plenty is now possible. There is no need for any man, woman or child in any part of the world to go hungry, be badly clothed or live in slums. The technical problem of producing plenty for all has been solved for a long time. The problem now is that the present social system, capitalism, which exists all over the world places a fetter on production because it operates, and must operate, according to the rule of “no profit, no production.” What the world suffers from today is not overpopulation, but the chronic underproduction that is built into capitalism. Not only does world capitalism hold back production, but it also misuses and wastes the resources of the world. Think of the waste involved in training and equipping armed forces and of the destruction of wars. Think of the waste of commerce and finance — of banks, insurance companies, salesmen, ticket collectors, accountants, economists, cashiers. Indeed, it is probably true to say that only a minority of the world’s population is actually engaged in producing useful things.  Once you take account of this artificial scarcity and organised waste of capitalism, you realise that socialism (where people will cooperate freely to produce an abundance of wealth from which they can take freely according to their needs) is not only possible but is also the only solution to humanity’s current problems.  

What is the purpose of government?

The purpose of government at home is to manage and protect the affairs of the dominant class in society by governing 'over' the citizenry to this end to enable the exploitation of the vast majority by the parasitic ruling class in the interest of profit . This is done using both ideological state apparatus, and repressive state apparatus. This is true regardless of the political hue, conservative or liberal, of the government. This is true also regardless of the forms of capitalist ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. production, whether private, corporate or state owned.

 From time to time governments may adjudicate over the affairs of the domestic capitalist class, when conflict arises, financial capital versus industrial, service economy versus agribusiness. Small busines versus big business and so on. One persons 'levelling of the playing field' is anothers 'regulationary infringement' upon legitimate business.
Abroad the purpose is the same to protect, steal and pursue and invade in the interests of the nation state, conditions for gaining markets, raw materials and combining in spheres of geo-political advantage to those ends. War is business by other means just as it is politics also.
Both poverty and war are inevitable concomitants of capitalism.

 The nominal freedom of the citizenry as to appearing to have power by the ballot, just amounts to the freedom to be 'governed over' in the interests of the parasite class. 

The illusory choice is that between Tweedledee versus Tweedledum.

Another Reason For Abolishing Capitalism

An article in the Canadian Jewish News of July 20, by Ron Csillag (RCSILLAG@THECJN.CA), repudiates the claim, made in the book "Canada and the Global Community," published by Nelson Education Ltd., that Israel uses child soldiers. 

195 countries have adopted the UN Convention of the rights of the child, which forbids the use of children under 15, in armed conflicts, the book added. It also says that since 2000, child soldiers, most of whom were kidnapped and forced to fight, were used in armed conflicts in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mali and Yemen.

Of course, it is horrifying that children should be allowed to fight in wars, whether forced or not, but isn't it also horrifying that adults should fight too? So why not abolish war? And if that isn't possible within capitalism, then abolish that A.S.A.P. 

Steve and John

Those with money, eat; those without, don’t.

Money dominates Mankind almost completely in modern capitalism. Humankind's history shows no other human invention to which we have been so subservient towards. Most people have only vague notions about the nature of money. It is credited with magical, mystical powers which really stem from its users. It has no use or existence apart from men in society. Men do not derive power from money, but money derives its power from men.

It would be reprehensible for those in the Socialist Party to sneer at the myriad worldwide charities and NGOs all vainly striving to address and redress the countless oppressions and outrages that abound around the globe. Such activity is actually testimony to the highly social nature of the human species even in this most cut-throat capitalist society. Nevertheless, all these well-meaning, good-intentioned people have yet to grasp that their own activities, however benign, are actually serving to prolong the very conditions they seek to alleviate. Capitalism can only function in one way – the pursuit of profit. In specific, transitory circumstances where adequate profits cannot be realised, then crops will not be grown (or alternatively, be stockpiled or destroyed), and governments, as the agents of the dominant class, simply help facilitate this process. The plain incontrovertible truth is that there is but one root cause of world hunger and that is capitalism. The aid organisations responded in the best and only way they know to the obscenity that is world hunger. Ever-generous both with their time and their funds they keep requesting more and more of both. It is tragic that they never make that leap of the imagination to realise that no matter how much the capitalist system is tinkered with, it cannot be made to operate for the benefit of humanity at large. Lock, stock and barrel, the capitalist system has to go.

In capitalism everything produced by labour is reduced to money terms; has a price. All spheres of human activity are measured by cost. Every human relationship is either directly affected or tainted by money considerations. Working-class family life, particularly, centres around the wage-packet, which determines the standard of living, amenities and social status enjoyed, type of clothes and education of the children, the future wage-earners. Success is measured by pay, irrespective of the usefulness of work. The basic capitalist relations of buyer and seller, employer and employee, landlord and tenant, into which all enter, are regarded—almost revered—as indispensable, yet they need not exist at all at society's present technological development.

The rich are not rich merely because they have money, but because they own the means of production and distribution. The rent, interest and profit they accumulate, derived from the sale of commodities, produced by workers but owned by capitalists, represents their real wealth. The poor, on the other hand, are not poor because their wages are low but because, not owning means of production and distribution, they are compelled to continue as workers for wages whether high or low. Humanity has transformed the Earth yet the fruits of science and technology are not readily available to us. The money-system's straitjackets and stifles our every move. Millions still starve and live in slums. Capitalism's antiquated social relationships prevent abundance for all.

Rather than the social division into rich and poor, those contrasting extremes of wealth, the Socialist Party points the way to the next stage in social evolution, a world-wide, money-free, class-free society in which all the productive means would belong in common to all humanity. In socialism the means of life would be produced in abundance solely for use and distributed freely, not exchanged or sold, rendering money unnecessary. Freed from the debased motives engendered by capitalism, all individuals could realise their full physical and intellectual powers. We inhabit a world of potential abundance for all, but it is also the case that we have trapped ourselves within a social system of mass deprivation. Throughout the world, millions upon millions of men and women are denied their basic needs. Even in the so-called rich countries, poverty is the lot of the majority. Poverty characterises the life of every worker who is deprived of access to what society could provide for them, but they cannot afford to buy.

Socialism will discard the old rules of the buying and selling game of the market and will distribute what is needed on the basis of free and equal access. Money will be abolished: you cannot buy from yourself what you commonly own. The satisfaction of human needs will involve people giving according to their abilities and taking according to their needs. Free access means that no human being will need to buy anything. Anything that society can produce will be there for the taking. Decent food; the best houses possible to build; gas, electricity, water; TVs, computers, entertainment; all medical and educational services - all completely free and available for all.

Socialists do not have a narrow conception of need. We would not wish to give the impression that socialism will do no more than satisfying basic living requirements - although doing that alone will be a momentous step forward for the millions of workers now denied the satisfaction of their most elementary needs. More than that, socialism will allow humans to be creative and to explore our wider needs. 

 For too long our needs have been over-influenced by the selling process and the crude mind manipulation of the advertisers: in a socialist society we can begin to think about what we really require to be happy human beings and we shall set about supplying ourselves with the resources needed to live as fully as we can.  Socialism will not only be able to satisfy our existing needs, but it will enable us to question and challenge those needs - to escape from the poverty of capitalist-determined needs. Needs are social. We are only free to have goods and services to use if it is technically possible to produce them and if there are people ready to do so. In a socialist society, there is not going to be a sudden, utopian-like abundance of everything: the skies will not rain with goodies. Socialism will release from the constraints of profit the abundant resources of the planet and these will be used to allow us to live decently and well. We will have to realise that living in a world of cooperation entails giving as well as taking. In a worldwide human family, there will be no shortage of willing volunteers to ensure that those who cannot work are cared for; there will be no problem of people refusing to do what cooperation demands of their humanity. In a world of free access, it will be a pleasure to fulfill the necessity of working to produce goods and services, sure in the knowledge that one is not doing so to make a boss rich but to make all of our fellow inhabitants of the global village rich in the quality of life. No-one will be forced to do anything as a matter of compulsion in a socialist society: if anyone declines to participate in work he or she will simply be regarded as very odd. The last thing anyone will do once he or she is free to live in cooperative equality will be to spurn sociability and intercourse.

For years members of the Socialist Party have argued the case for such an exciting alternative of living. For how much longer we will remain a small minority? Will our fellow-workers continue to accept a world of misery and insecurity in the midst of potential plenty? Or will they unite to build a social system where never again will the cry of a hungry child whose parents lack the money to feed it be heard ever again?

Pro-Life Until The Money Runs Out.

Assisted Suicide in Canada: What doctors think – the times.co.uk

I will leave it up to the reader to look up the article but the main idea is the hesitation with assisting a person's wish to die. I have always been a pro-choice person and over the years my ideas did not change a bit. 

A system that extorts you to death, will keep you alive if it means more profit. They will keep you hooked up to a machine and make you breathe even if you do not want to. That is until the money or funding runs out. I am so over with the sentimental, religious or pro-life approach. If a person does not want to participate in this system or society anymore, instead of finding it horrible/unbearable/unbelievable, just honour the person's wish at least. People get told what they should believe in, how they should live and how they should die, how they should love and even how they should make love.

 It is the time that society honours each person's wish as at least a small step towards respecting self-determination. Capitalism is the arch-enemy of self-determination even though the rhetoric sounds like it is pro-choice. Pro-profit it is and it will remain until we toss it into history's graveyard and put a stick through its heart so that it does not rise from death. Socialism is pro-choice and socialists respect people's right to self-determination. 

Steve and John.

Does support for Marxism make any sense today?

I don't think you need to support Marxism but understand what it is and is not. It is an indispensable analytical tool in cutting through the crap of capitalist economics.

It has nothing to do with any of the post-feudal or state capitalist developments of the last century or this one. Russia, China, Cuba, Korea etc are all examples of state capitalist dsevelopments. Discount any references ot socialist/communist/ socialistic countries. They do not exist.
Marx essentially was analysing capitalism.

One criticism of Marx’s Capital is that, written 150 years ago, it is describing conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain which have long since disappeared. It does do this, but this is to miss the point. Marx was analysing an economic system, not the particular political, sociological and historical conditions under which it happened to operate in his day. It was written not, or not just, as a criticism of conditions in mid-Victorian Britain but as an analysis of capitalism in general, of the capitalist economic system as such irrespective of the conditions in which it operated.

As Marx was writing in mid-19th century Britain, most of his concrete examples are drawn from the experience of capitalism in and up to that period. Then, the main industry was textiles whose products were exported throughout the world; the main source of energy was burning coal in steam engines; and the dominant form of ownership of means of production was a factory owned and managed by an individual capitalist family.

Marx’s examples are drawn from the 1860s but, even before he died in 1883, things had begun to change. The production of machines was becoming more important than textile production; coal was about to be used to raise steam to drive electricity-generating turbines; the joint stock company with limited liability was becoming the dominant form of capitalist ownership. But these developments did not alter how capitalism worked as an economic system. It continued to operate in the same basic way that Marx had analysed.

Technology and the political and sociological framework are even more changed today but capitalism as an economic system still works in the same way. The fact that Marx never saw a motor car or an aeroplane or radio, television, electronic computers or knew of nuclear power or genetic engineering does not affect his theory.

That Marx’s analysis of capitalism was not tied to conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain is shown by the fact that the same economic laws, the same economic drive to accumulate capital out of surplus value created by wage-labour, operated also in the former USSR. The institutional framework there – the absence of individual capitalist ownership and the almost total state ownership of the means of production, and the distribution of the consumption part of surplus value amongst various layers of state officials – was quite different from what obtained in the West. Yet capitalism existed there. Even the abolition of private capitalists and capitalist private property rights is compatible with the existence of capitalism.

Marx’s analysis of the way capitalism works is valid wherever there is sectional ownership and control of the means of wealth production and where production is carried out by wage-workers for sale on a market with a view to profit. As this is undoubtedly still the case today, Marx’s Capital remains valid and relevant.

( Edited abridgement  of an article by Adam Buick in September 2017 Socialist Standard Entitled 'Analysing an Economic System.)

Matthew Culbert

Fight Ineos - The Anti-Union Bosses

The Unite union is to challenge the decision by Ineos,the owners of the Grangemouth petrochemical plant, to refuse it official recognition. The union said most workers at the plant still wanted Unite to represent them. In April, the firm said it was ending collective bargaining agreements at the plant.

Unite said it has balloted the workforce and found more than 50% of workers still wanted the union to represent them. It now plans to challenge Ineos through official channels. This will involve an application to the independent Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) to require Ineos to recognise Unite. If the union can demonstrate a certain level of membership and support for recognition, then the CAC can issue a declaration making recognition compulsory.

Unite's assistant general secretary Howard Beckett said: "We now have a considerable majority of the workers who have signed up to say they want the union recognised at the site as is their legal right. The company must now negotiate a new deal."

Post-Scarcity Socialism

The world is haunted by a spectre - The spectre of abundance. Scarcity has been conquered. The resources, technology and human skills already exist to produce enough to amply satisfy likely human needs and wants. Many thinkers, whether be they admirers of John Lennon or Karl Marx, have envisioned the world in which there is no need for money, no market exchange, and no property.

Down through history, a visionary slogan has been whispered by a few held n ancient dream. Ever since human beings developed money, they have hated it and tried to rid themselves of it. The abolition of money the most radical demand of every social revolution for centuries past. We must not suppose that it is therefore destined to remain a Utopia, that the wheel will simply turn full circle once more. Today there is an entirely new element in the situation: Plenty. All previous societies have been rationed societies, based on the scarcity of food, clothing and shelter. The modern world is also a society of scarcity, but with a difference. Today's shortages are unnecessary; today's scarcity is artificial. More than that: this scarcity is achieved at the expense of strenuous effort, ingenious organization and the most sophisticated planning.

Money means rationing. It is only useful when there are shortages to be rationed. No one can buy or sell air: it's free because there is plenty of it around. Food, clothing, shelter and entertainment should be free as air. But the means of rationing scarcity themselves keep the scarcity in existence. The only excuse for money is that there is not enough wealth to go round but it is the money system which makes sure there cannot be enough to go round. By abolishing money we create the conditions where money is unnecessary. The money system is obsolete and anti-human. The world is crying out for change. Millions of children die each year of starvation while the rich spare themselves no luxury or indulgence.

The Socialist Party is propagating the notion of a money-free world. We must stop thinking of a moneyless society as an 'ultimate aim' with no effect upon our actions now. We must realise that the abolition of money (and prices and wages) is the immediate demand. A practical proposition and an urgent necessity, not something to be vaguely worked towards.

There is a commonly held view that automation and robotics are going to ensure that money will disappear as consequence of new technology. This is quite wrong. Today's capitalist society only automates to increase profits and for no other reason. Employers even take machines out and put workers back in if they find that labour-power is cheaper.  The argument for the Universal Basic Income (the citizens' wage) is that useless workers in industry will be gradually be laid off and paid for not working. The process will be extended until money can be abolished. In the meantime, those being paid for doing nothing will do what they like. What is wrong with this projection? Many things, but chiefly two. First, it fails to take account of the systematic nature of society. Second, it assumes that present-day society exhibits a harmony of interests. The matter is that workers are working not for the sake of the production of goods but the production of profits. Today's world is a jungle of conflicting vested interests. The abolition of money will represent the liberation of wage-slaves, but also the dispossession of master-class. Proponents of “free money” ignore the economic imperative of capitalism, enforced through competition, to accumulate more and more capital out of profits, and so profits must come first before meeting the consumption needs of the population. Catering for these is kept to the minimum to maintain productive efficiency or, in the case of 'free money' payments to the poor, to the minimum needed to avoid bread riots.

Some ask, that without the incentive of monetary reward, who will do the dirty work in a socialist society? Co-operative socially conscious adults will perform these tasks, as they will do everything else. Of course, some presently unpleasant jobs can be made pleasurable or unnecessary, but given that men and women will still have to do some things they dislike we can only suggest that it is better to live freely and engage in occasional chores than to be compelled to do so because of our poverty. Remember, in socialism individuals will have the opportunity to experience a variety of occupations; to do different things at different times. If there are shortages in socialism (and this could be so in times of natural disaster), society will democratically have to distribute available goods according to need. ‘From each according to ability to each according to need’ will be the economic law of socialism. Those who do not wish to co-operate in a socialist society will be free to stand aside. But why should anyone refuse to co-operate when it is in his or her material interest to do so? Socialism can only be achieved when men and women are conscious of the need for collective co-operation.

The Socialist Party is called Utopians because it dares to suggest that we could run our lives in a much more harmonious way, instead of succumbing to the prevailing view that things must carry on more or less as they are. The idea of socialism stopped being an unrealisable dream once capitalism reached the level of industrial technology for the potential to produce an abundance of goods to meet everyone's needs and had developed sufficiently to allow the working class to become politically organised. There's nothing utopian about suggesting that we could organise a better world now. The real dreamers are those who rather muddle along hoping that this or that reform will somehow make the profit-system behave humanely—something it has never done so far and never will. William Morris saw the dangers of treating the problems of capitalism separately by reforms and insisted on the need to work for a socialist society and nothing else. He argued that "it is essential that the ideal of the new society should always be kept before the eyes of the working classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people should be broken, or lest they should be misdirected".  

In which sense did Karl Marx favour the progress of democracy?

It's often pointed out that our political system is completely corrupted by money yet history teaches that people's influence on their governments is much more powerful than we usually imagine. It's weakened primarily by people's failure to do anything and the mistaken belief that we don't have the power to shape the world as we wish it to be.

Marx and Engels strongly supported political action in the sense of participating in elections. They stressed the importance of the vote. Engels explains that universal suffrage "in an England two-thirds of whose inhabitants are industrial proletarians means the exclusive political rule of the working class with all the revolutionary changes in social conditions which are inseparable from it."

Marx argued along the same lines, for example, in 1855, he stated that "universal suffrage . . . implies the assumption of political power as means of satisfying [the workers'] social means" and, in Britain, "revolution is the direct content of universal suffrage."

In 1852 Marx wrote, concerning the Chartists:

“But universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but only landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England would, therefore be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the continent. Its inevitable result, here is the political supremacy of the working class.”

His meaning is clear - a working class majority in Parliament, backed by a majority of the population, can bring about the real transfer of power.

If there is any remaining doubt that this was indeed Marx’s position twenty years later, in a speech at Amsterdam, he said:

“We know that heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such as America and England and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may attain their goal by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour.”

Peaceful means meant electoral means to Marx. He reaffirms “the way to show political power [in Britain] lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work.”

Engels in 1891 argued in his critique of the draft of the Erfurt program of the German Social Democrats:"If one thing is certain it is that our Party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown."

Later Engels in 1887 comments that in the USA the workers "next step towards their deliverance" was "the formation of a political workingmen's party, with a platform of its own, and the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal." This new party "like all political parties everywhere . . . aspires to the conquest of political power."

As regards Britain in 1881 he observes, "where the industrial and agricultural working class forms the immense majority of the people, democracy means the dominion of the working class, neither more nor less. Let, then, that working class prepare itself for the task in store for it - the ruling of this great Empire . . . And the best way to do this is to use the power already in their hands, the actual majority they possess . . . to send to Parliament men of their own order." In case this was not clear enough, he lamented that "...everywhere the labourer struggles for political power, for direct representation of his class in the legislature - everywhere but in Great Britain."

The 1st of May, 1893, saw Engels argue that the task of the British working class was not only to pursue economic struggles "but above all in winning political rights, parliament, through the working class organised into an independent party" (significantly, the original manuscript stated "but in winning parliament, the political power").

Some so-called Marxists insist that Marx and Engels opinion about capturing the State changed with the Paris Commune and will quote “The Paris Commune... had shown that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’ but Engels points out specifically that “[This quote from The Civil War in France] is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes.”

Elsewhere Engels writes “[In Holland] only a few changes will have to be made to establish that free self-government by the working class”

And
“...the only organisation the victorious working class finds ready-made for use, is that of the State. It may require adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at such a moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the working class can exert its newly conquered power” (Engels)

And

“the republic... is the ready-for-use form for the future rule of the proletariat.”

In his introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France. Engels proposes the use of the ballot box as the ideal way, if not the only way, for the party to take power. He noted that "[w]e, the 'revolutionists', the 'overthrowers'" were "thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow" and the bourgeoisie "cry despairingly . . . legality is the death of us" and were "much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers' party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion." He argued that it was essential "not to fitter away this daily increasing shock force [of party voters] in vanguard skirmishes, but to keep it intact until the decisive day."

Engels was very critical of those suggesting the general strike was the means. Engels had argued in the 1870s against the Bakuninists for thinking that "a general strike is the lever employed by which the social revolution is started." He accusing them of imagining that "one fine morning, all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use the opportunity to pull down the entire old society."

He stated that it was universally admitted that to carry out the general strike strategy, there had to be a perfect organisation of the working class and plentiful funds. He noted that that was "the rub" as no government would stand by and "allow the organisation or funds of the workers to reach such a level." Moreover, the revolution would happen long before "such an ideal organisation" was set up and if they had been "there would be no need to use the roundabout way of a general strike" to achieve it.

Socialists are in favour of using the vote to introduce socialism in accord with Marx and Engels who argued in April 1883 he and Marx “... have always held that . . . the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organised political force of the State and with its aid stamp out the resistance of the Capitalist class and re-organise society."

As Engels put it in 1886, Marx had drawn "the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a 'pro-slavery rebellion,' to this peaceful and legal revolution." ["Preface to the English edition" in Marx, Capital]

The companion parties of the World Socialist Movement differ from those who wish to “smash the state”. As Engels said "the only organisation the victorious working class finds ready-made for use, is that of the State. It may require adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at such a moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the working class can exert its newly conquered power." and that the state "is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another" and "at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible."

When Engels wrote "Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.", the Socialist Party  can only add that since its formation in 1904 this to has been its object.

Universal suffrage was, to quote Engels, "a splendid weapon" which, while "slower and more boring than the call to revolution", was "ten times more sure and what is even better, it indicates with the most perfect accuracy the day when a call to armed revolution has to be made." This was because it was "even ten to one that universal suffrage, intelligently used by the workers, will drive the rulers to overthrow legality, that is, to put us in the most favourable position to make revolution."

"The big mistake", Engels said was "to think that the revolution is something that can be made overnight. As a matter of fact it is a process of development of the masses that takes several years even under conditions accelerating this process." Thus it was a case of, "as a revolutionary, any means which leads to the goal is suitable, including the most violent and the most pacific." However as he elaborated from experience since writing in The Communist Manifesto calling for "violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie") Engels now judged "the conditions of struggle had essentially changed. Rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades . . . , was to a considerable extent obsolete."

The closest that Marx or Engels came to advocating workers councils was in 1850 when Marx suggested that the German workers "establish their own revolutionary workers' governments" alongside of the "new official governments". These could be of two forms, either of "municipal committees and municipal councils" or "workers' clubs or workers' committees."

The Socialist Party remains true to Marx and Engels for using the ballot box to achieve the socialist revolution although this does not preclude utilising such other organs as seen as necessary once political power is seized by those means.

Matthew Culbert