Why we oppose capitalism

The Socialist Party is pledged to establish the cooperative commonwealth. We propose to battle with all our energy and zeal to further the cause of socialism until its universal triumph is proclaimed. We shall not rest until slave and master have both disappeared and equal freedom of all has been established. We await no miracles that will end hunger and squalor in a world of plenty. Men and women will put an end to the wages system where no-one is master and no-one a slave. Each will contribute according to ability and receive according to need. Plenty banishes poverty. Work is no longer a curse to be deplored, and life, emancipated from despair, is worth the living. Join hands with us for the removal of the cause as the only way to alter the effect, and that in place of the present struggle for a miserable existence we may so alter the conditions of that existence that everyone shall work, and in return shall get all that he or she can require, not only food, healthcare and shelter, but leisure and means of enjoyment. This can be done by voluntary associated effort only. The world has never more unsafe. 

This is why we are opposed to capitalism and favour social change.

Capitalists keep saying they have solutions, but they all come down to one thing - tightening their belts around other people’s necks. To save their own necks the capitalists sacrifice millions of lives as they plunder other people. Things do not have to be like this. The working class possesses tremendous potential power to change the world, a fact that is shown every day in the process and product of its labour and in its many struggles against capitalism. It is the task of the working class to displace the rule of the capitalists and remake society to serve the interests of the great majority of the people. Working people are hard-working and have produced wonders through their labour. The world is rich in many resources, and because of the toil of generations here in many other parts of the world, we have achieved a high level of science and technology. 

The treasure-house of society’s wealth is created by the millions of workers who with their labour mine, grow, and transport raw materials, construct machinery, and use the machines to transform raw materials into finished products. The machines, raw materials and other means of production created by the workers are an important part of the productive forces of society, but the most important part is the working class itself without whose labour the means of production would rust and rot. But in the hands of the capitalists the means of production become tools for the continued enslavement and impoverishment of the working class. Under the capitalist system, production only takes place if those who control production, the capitalists, can make profit from it. And they can make profit only by wringing it out of the workers, and constantly pushing their wages down to the lowest level, allowing the workers only enough to keep working-and to bring up new generations of workers to further enrich capital. Part of the workers’ labour covers the cost of maintaining themselves and their families–their wages–and the rest is unpaid labour that produces surplus value for the capitalists, the source of their profit. This exploitation of the workers to create profit for the capitalists is the basis of the whole capitalist system and all its evils.

Capital chases after the highest rate of profit, as surely as iron is drawn to a magnet–this is a law beyond anyone’s will, even the capitalists’, and it will continue in force so long as society is ruled by capital. Each capitalist must try to enlarge his share at the expense of the other capitalists. Capitalists therefore repeatedly introduce new technology to try to produce goods faster and more cheaply, in order to capture more of the market from their competitors. Capitalists battle each other for profit, and those who lose out go under. While each capitalist tries to plan production, the private ownership, the blind drive for profit and the cut-throat competition continually upset their best-laid plans, and anarchy reigns in the economy as a whole.

Capitalists constantly pull their capital out of one area of investment and into another, along with bringing in new machines to speed up production. Some capitalists temporarily surge ahead and expand while others fall behind or are forced out of business altogether. With each of these developments, thousands of workers are thrown into the streets and forced once again to search for a new master to exploit them.

All this is why, from its beginning, capitalism has gone from crisis to crisis. And the way the capitalists get out of these crises only lays the basis for worse ones–they destroy goods and even the means to produce goods, scramble to grab up more markets, and a bigger chunk of the existing ones, and increase their exploitation of the workers. 

The strongest capitalists survive, and in surviving concentrate more of the means of production in their hands and hurl more of the smaller producers into the ranks of the working class. As capitalism develops, society more and more divides into two antagonistic camps – at one pole tremendous wealth and greater concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands; at the other pole tremendous misery for the millions who can live only by working for the owners and can work only so long as they produce profit for them.

Through all this, and especially in times of the sharpest crisis, the basic contradiction of capitalism stands out all the more starkly: production itself is highly socialised–it requires large concentrations of workers, each performing part of the total process and all essential to its completion, and it is capable of massive output on this basis; but the ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of the wealth produced is in the hands of a few, competing owners of capital.

The “democracy” of capitalism (bourgeois democracy) is really democracy only for the capitalist rulers, just as ancient Greek “democracy” was democracy only for the small minority of slaveowners. Capitalist rule is still a form of dictatorship, and capitalism still a form of slavery for the working class. For the workers, capitalist “freedom” means in essence the freedom to choose between slaving for some capitalist or starving-and in times of crisis even the first choice disappears for millions.

"What A Lot Of Bollocks"

Federal Minister for Indigenous Relations, Carolyn Bennett, said on August 16 First Nations women will be treated the same as men under the changes to the Indian Act. 

Until now, Indian women lost their status when they married non-Indian men, but men did not if they married non-Indian women. This also means women born before April 17 1985 who lost their status can reclaim it. To quote Ms.Bennett, ''What we are saying now is that there will now be gender equality for all of the Early Peterborough union activists at GE women.'' 

Another quote worthy of mention and thoroughly appropriate is the one used frequently by Inspector Brakenreid on Murdoch Mysteries: ''What a lot of bollocks!''

 As if the new law will make a difference to its beneficiaries as wage slaves. For all this talk of equality, there is only one kind of equality worth striving for - a society where all will stand equal in social relation to the means of life.

Yours for Socialism, 

SPC contributing members

Only Sheep Need Shepherds

We address all workers. We cannot sit down and wait patiently for capitalism to collapse.

Political power is wielded by social classes through political parties. The transference of power from one class to another is not an automatic process. The Socialist Party faces a well-organised capitalist class highly conscious of its interests, and we must strive to excel the class enemy in organisation and determination. It cannot, if it is to reach the historic goal, be an amorphous all-inclusive society of dabblers in reforms and palliatives. We mobilise humanity so that society determines its own social and technical fate, master of its production and distribution and of all the products of its manual and intellectual labour.

Capitalism is a society based on a system which creates a wealthy few above the masses of poor and develops a huge contrast between wealth and poverty. Capitalism spreads the false illusion that we can all have a share of that wealth if we toil hard enough, are clever enough or ruthless enough. In capitalist society the working person is not, in fact, a person at all; as a wage-worker, he or she is simply merchandise, commodity to be bought and sold on the labour market. What is your status in society today? You are not a human being but a resource, a wage-slave. There is no hope for you in this system. No master ever had the slightest respect for his slave. But why don't you understand that you do not need the capitalist. He could not exist an instant without you. You would just begin to live without him. You do everything and he has everything. He consumes, you produce. If you don’t change this relation, he certainly won’t. Ask no favours from capitalists. t there is nothing in common between capitalists and wage-workers. The capitalists own the tools they do not use, and the workers use the tools they do not own. The capitalists, who own the tools that the working class use, appropriate to themselves what the working class produce, and this accounts for the fact that a few capitalists become fabulously rich while the toiling millions remain in poverty and dependence. Workers must make themselves the masters of the tools with which they work. Between the two classes there is an irrepressible conflict. You must organise upon the basis of this fact. You are the only class essential to society and without you society would perish. You produce the wealth, you create and conserve civilisation. Every cog in every wheel that revolves everywhere has been made by the working class, and is set and kept in operation by the working class; and if the working class can make and operate this wealth-producing technology, they can also develop the intelligence to make themselves the masters of this machinery, and operate it not to turn out millionaires, but to produce wealth in abundance for themselves. You cannot afford to be content with your lot in life. You ought to aspire to be free, not a wage-slave subject to the command of the capitalist. Mankind is the expression of his or her environment. Just as a majestic tree towers aloft made possible only because the soil and climate are adapted to its healthy growth. Transfer this tree from the sunlight and the fresh atmosphere to a place of polluted poisoned air and see it wither and die. The same applies to human beings; the industrial soil and the social climate must be adapted to the development of men and women, and then society will cease producing the defiled diseased deformities. The workers are the saviours of the human race and the planet.

The Socialist Party proposes to end capitalism. We want a system in which the worker shall get what he or she produces. We hold a the vision of the world without masters and without slaves, a planet regenerated and resplendent

Rally to the call for complete emancipation! In answer to the oppression of the capitalist class let our battle cry be:

"The World for the Workers. The Workers for the World"

Lesson Capitalism Teaches Workers Over and Over Again.

On August 8 CBC showed a documentary about the General Electric plant in Peterborough, Ontario, which mercifully was shut down two years ago. The program focused on the attempts of a group who called themselves the Coalition of Widows, to get compensation from Ontario's Workplace and Safety Board for the deaths of relatives who worked with toxic chemicals at GE, such as asbestos, cyanide and PVC, which they were told were not harmful.

 Most of the deceased were long serving workers at GE, some of whom had questioned if their work was safe, but three Mayors of Peterborough took no action against GE, it being the Cities main employer. 

Of the 250 claims submitted to the Board only 71 were compensated, causing one ex-employee to ask, ''What chance does a guy with a grade ten education have against a powerful corporation with all the resources in the world?'' 

Another said, ''As long as they were making money they didn't give a damn about the health of their workers.''

 And that’s a lesson capitalism teaches workers over and over again.

Yours for Socialism,

 SPC contributing members 

The Future Is Up To Us

Barbarism or Socialism is no mere rhetoric. Socialism or barbarism is not an exhortative admonition; it is a grim fact. At its core, capitalism rests on the domination of the overwhelming majority by a small minority. Our objective is a society in which “the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all” as stated in the Communist Manifesto. This cannot be achieved by authoritarian methods. If self-emancipation is the goal, it must be the means as well. Part of our job as socialists is to help people see through the illusions of capitalism, to understand that we are faced with this stark choice of socialism or barbarism, and to encourage a vision of self-emancipation as both the means and our end , the only means of creating socialism and the essence of what socialism will be. The Socialist Party alone carries the banner of uncompromising struggle and holds the promise a new finer better world. Socialism hasn’t failed because it had never been tried. Socialism as a movement has still to fulfil its potential. Socialism is a system that allows every person to contribute to society, to express self worth, the foundation of happiness. It is the rational distribution of the necessaries of life according to need. These needs differ today from two hundred years ago, when a person’s needs were more basic in demands for food and shelter. Today, our needs now include education, health care, culture and entertainment. Working people do not compare their present situation with what their grandparents or great grandparents endured but compare themselves and their lives to the wealthy, to what they know society can deliver for a privileged few, and they question why it is not available for all. The huge potential which capitalism has opened up for improving our lives but yet the simultaneous crushing of that potential by the drive for profits leads to the expectation that things should get better which can contribute towards the formation of increased class consciousness. We cannot precisely define needs, but each level of satisfaction is bound to produce greater longings and needs which can be satisfied with the ever expanding technology. We can determine what type of food production is possible. What agrarian techniques. In which places Which materials to produce. In which localities. Under capitalism production is for profit and not for use.

The working class is called upon to refashion an economic system which has served its purpose and now can produce only crises and war; a class which has shown that it can learn and take action to meet its needs. Our goal is not only to explain the world, but to change it so that it may better serve the needs of the working people. We have always said that the future belongs to socialism, even though in recent years that seems a dim prospect. The very word “socialism” had almost dropped out of the political vocabulary, so complete there appeared an abandonment of the concept but now there is an increasing positive recognition given the word. The threat of global warming tied up with our current social system is forcing people to wonder if there is not some way out. That they now begin to consider the ideas of those people who call themselves socialists. There are clear signs of a re-awakening is the discussions. 

The principal task of the Socialist Party is to try to restore the credibility of socialism in the consciousness of millions of men and women. We are not the evangelists of a new revelation. Our society if organised properly can give a dignified life to everyone. None of this is dogmatic or utopian. Priority must be given to solidarity and cooperation. The practice of socialists must be totally consistent with their principles. We must not justify any alienating or oppressive practices whatsoever. We must struggle against all conditions in which human beings are alienated and humiliated. If our practice is consistent socialism will once again become a political force that will be invincible. We do not believe in the permanence of capitalism. We are dedicated to the task of promoting the liberating workers' revolution. We aim to help build – and we invite you to join us in building – a mass socialist party, an honest party that tells the truth to the workers, a party united with workers in all lands in one army for one idea, one program, one goal – Socialism. There is no middle road. The whole history of humanity shows that there is another road – the road which the oppressed in every society sooner or later take, the road not backward but forward – the road of resistance against and the overthrow of the capitalist oppressors, the only road to real freedom.

People Power

There are many antagonisms in our existing social system, arising out of the conflict between social production and individual ownership which cannot be harmonised so long as there is a wage-paying class and a wage-receiving class. The Socialist Party advocates that capitalism must be ended before any thorough reorganisation and reconstruction can take place, wage-slavery being finally done away with by the abolition of capital, industrial democracy at once taking its place. Many of us feel powerless to do anything about the political, social, and environmental injustices we face. There are many ways to use our voices to speak up for social justice. People have always banded together to work for change and have organised for action.

It is up to the working people to make the necessary resource allocations to meet the needs of the whole society. It is up to the working people themselves to determine, democratically, the organisation and operation of labour in the enterprises. Self-management is global and cannot be limited to a region or to the level of the enterprise, all each acting on its own. It a question of dealing with a multitude of enterprises in every sector, working under varied conditions. Self-management is not different enterprises acting each for itself and in uncontrolled competition. Self-management is integrated into a social plan, which is applied and worked out democratically. This does not presuppose a rigidly centralised command economy. This is the only kind of socialism which will be worth achieving. The idea of the social and economic democracy must be put back on the political agenda. Under capitalism there can be no real democracy – no rule by the people as a whole – all the while the means of production are owned and controlled by a small minority, the capitalist class. Their control of the economy and the state apparatus means that they can resist and obstruct any serious threat to their class interests. It is quite clear that we can only achieve real control over our lives by getting rid of the capitalist system as a whole and this can be done only by means of revolution.

Talk of revolution is not at all fashionable these days but the task of working people today is not to wring our hands in despair for one thing is for sure, the material conditions which gave rise to a socialist world revolution still persist. The necessity for change is as strong as ever. But there are people who think of themselves as socialists - reformists - people who think that we’re going to get socialism by a gradual accumulation of reforms. They voice anti-capitalist sentiments. They think politicians and parliament rule and all that is required to make capitalism less exploitative are a few palliatives passed into law. They don’t understand that capitalism needs to end.

Many people across the world are in a state of absolute poverty of the most basic kind: they simply do not have enough food to stay alive while others suffer from nutrition deficiencies in their diets which means that they are susceptible to various illnesses and likely to die relatively young. Inequality has been widening with the well-off getting richer and the worst off becoming poorer. Even in the developed countries working people have been experiencing a decline in real incomes while actually working longer than they did before. The real revolutionaries today are not the leftwing who – as they always have done – try to keep alive illusions alive with campaigns for reforms. One part of the process of putting socialism on the political agenda again is to remind and inform people of what capitalism is and another part is for the renewing of the struggle for socialism is to rethink and revive the various struggles to resist capitalist oppression and exploitation. Defensive, reformist struggles will not fundamentally change capitalism but once people discover that they can fight back and protect themselves it will help them realise that the system is not impregnable and this can lead on to thoughts about getting rid of and changing the whole rotten system. The task of the Socialist Party is to encourage this trend.

In the recurring crisis that engulfs the World, there is only one solution - Power to the People

Capitalism: Social Disorder

It is impossible to discuss any important political problem of our time, let alone take a part in resolving it, without a clear understanding of what socialism really signifies. It is just as impossible to get such an understanding from the writings and speeches of capitalists, their statesmen, politicians, hangers-on, apologists, or any other beneficiaries of their rule. The true social significance of socialism escapes them because they precisely are prevented from doing by their own social interests and prejudices. Whoever does not know the real relationships between the social system of capitalism and the social system of socialism, may well be ever so intelligent in fields like physics or but in the most important field of social knowledge, he or she is helpless.

Working people are free when they do not serve as a means of achieving the goals of the ruling class but, instead, are themselves the chief goal of society, the object of all its plans and production. Where there is the abolition of exploitation, of hunger and of poverty. Socialism begins with the interests of the individual— not just the chosen few but all working people. There is not a single popular movement anywhere in the world that proclaims its allegiance to capitalism. The most that capitalism can expect from the people nowadays is not support but cynical tolerance, as a lesser evil compared with the alternative of universal anger, disillusionment, bitterness, hostility and open warfare directed against it. Capitalism has never able to solve a social problem.

A socialist looks upon the social system not as stationary but as constantly in motion. Evolution prepares the way for revolution; revolution is only a part of the evolutionary process. The social system is made up of a net of social relations, the most decisive of which are the economic, that is, those productive relations which result in the satisfaction of our basic needs, food, clothing, shelter. The struggle for life becomes the struggle for the means of life, which more and more becomes a struggle for the means of production of the necessities of life. Here we have the basic factor of all society, the forces of production.

While production is a social act, the appropriation of the product, under the present system, is individual. Under capitalism thousands of workers co-operate in the production of a single article, yet the article does not belong to them but to the owner of the means of production. The workers are merely paid wages for the use of their labour power. Simultaneously the owner of the industries becomes progressively more divorced from the productive process. As small partnerships become big corporations or are driven out of business by the monopolies, the original entrepreneurs become mere rentiers, share dividend collectors. The corporation also develops, becomes more and more a public utility. The state begins to take a hand, and to run the industry. The former individual owner now becomes a purely parasitic hanger-on, his dividends paid regularly by the state apparatus which he controls in the form of government bonds. Within the factory a rigid hierarchical dictatorship, where the dead machine rules over living labour, where the person is transformed into a cog of the machine, where work becomes wage-slavery. Outside the factory dictatorship is replaced by economic chaos, mankind ruled by prices which it cannot control, where the wild forces of the market make people the victim. Even in “prosperity” the life of the worker is not a very happy one. It is only through the hectic fluctuations of supply and demand, it is only through the frantic rush of “successes” and bankruptcies that society “decides” and “plans” the production of social wealth.

Capitalism is tremendously wasteful and destructive of men, goods, power, land. The ultimate destiny of all useful goods is to be consumed. Yet under capitalism goods are not produced to be consumed, but for profit, and if a greater profit can be made by destroying the goods, the destruction takes place. Imagine a farmer who will plough under his crops while millions are starving and in want simply to maintain its market price. Here it becomes crystal clear how capitalism throttles the productive forces and how, if mankind is to develop and to grow, capitalism must be wiped out. At a time when millions are starving we must watch mountains of the necessities of life deliberately destroyed. Can a crazier system possibly be imagined? What is the way out of these contradictions and who is to show the way? Capitalism creates such a tangle of contradictions and conflicts as to be absolutely insoluble. The capitalists and their political servants in the seats of government are blinded by their self interest, by the profits which they make as beneficiaries of the present system. The ideas of the ruling class will always be along the line of protecting their private property and their right to exploit their workers. The socialists see that nothing can free society from its convulsions except the change in the mode of production from a capitalist one, of private ownership of the means of production, to one where the means of production are socialised and classes are no more. The capitalist class and the working class hold opposing interests. Who, then, can provide the way out? Certainly, it is clear that it is not the capitalist class. It is, us, the working class, who bear the full weight of capitalism upon our backs. As workers we fight against the increasingly worsening conditions imposed upon us and we come to the realisation that the only way out is to take what we have produced. To take over the means of production, the mines, mills, factories, resources, utilities and run them for our own benefit. Then we will have production for use and not for profit. Then we will end both despotism in the factory and anarchy in the market. Then society will administer and allocate its resources according to a social plan that will benefit all. The capitalists want to keep the old relations of exploitation. They resist the rise of the workers' power but our victory cannot be forever delayed. The Socialist Party will continue to push forward to where humanity will have reached a rational system of society, no longer choked by out-dated redundant social relations and where society will be a free one and mankind emancipated.

The Threat to Mankind

There is only one solution to this madness. Take control of science and technology out of the hands of the capitalists through the establishment of a socialist world. There is no time: mankind stands at the crossroads now. Mankind must make its choice now. And there are but two choices: Life or death, and life requires socialism. This is the plain fact: We as socialists must understand this above all. Nothing can save humanity but those who understand and teach, day and night, that there is but one possible way: Socialism. Mankind has to choose and this means that mankind faces the ultimate choice: Socialism or death. 

Should we make the wrong choice, there will probably be some surviving groups of the human race to start civilisation again up the weary path through the countless ages of barbarism. If some deep green environmentalists want to be cynical, they would say: good riddance to mankind, that humanity can start all over again. We would, however, have to wait for who knows how thousands of years for a new civilisation to be flourish, which could again give mankind the plenty which our technological society is capable of providing today. People will die and suffer in misery just as they had died and suffered before through the ages, until they face once more the same dilemma that today confronts mankind: socialism or barbarism.

The fear of the people about the climate crisis and global warming has resulted in conferences, forums and resolutions to seek some way to avoid an impending catastrophe but while there is the perpetuation of this system of private profit, no resolution is in sight. With profits and dividends rolling in, the capitalist ruling class is in danger of continuing “business-as-usual.” Socialism will unlock doors that have been locked to humanity throughout the whole course of our existence and enable us as a social species to consciously transform not just the external world, but, for the first time, ourselves.

The form of society in which men live is determined by the way they make a living, that is by what is called the mode of production. When the mode of production undergoes a change, the form of society changes accordingly. The material world including society undergoes constant change. It evolves. It is never static in any absolute sense. What you produce and how you produce it, they held, is the basis of your relation to property; what you’re going to own, if anything, depends on what kind of a class set-up is demanded by the mode of production. A change in the mode of production brings about the abolition of classes and a new evolution of humanity begins. Capitalism can be characterised by the fact that by and large all human needs can be bought and sold in the form of commodities. Among other commodities the worker sells his or her labour-power to the boss who employs him or her. Now by capitalist law, whatever the worker produces belongs to the employer, who in return pays the worker only part of the value of his product in the form of wages. The value retained by the capitalist in this exploitative process is called surplus value. Under capitalism the class struggle centres about the relative portions of the value produced by the worker that go to the worker in the form of wages and to the capitalist as surplus value. The exploiters are oppressing the overwhelming majority of the people of the world to such an extent that the people are hardly able to survive and have to unite and fight against this exploitation and oppression, because they cannot exist, much less make progress in any other way. This struggle, therefore, is natural and unavoidable.
 

The cause of socialism still faces powerful enemies who must be thoroughly defeated in every field; Only then will the socialist society be brought into being. We must understand that socialism is the greatest cause in human history, which will eliminate exploitation and classes once and for all, emancipate mankind and bring humanity into a world of happiness and beauty, such as it has never known before. Given the continued existence of capitalism, the world faces the danger of the extinction of civilisation. The issue is: either capitalist barbarism, the death of civilisation, or socialism. It is as obvious that the capitalists can’t plan for a sustainable world! Expansion and growth is in the bloodstream of capitalism. What meaning do the petty objections to socialism assume in the face of this? When faced with barbarism or socialism, there is no longer a choice. The rejection of socialism can be likened to the man who would rather drown than get into a lifeboat. The choice is ours. Sink or swim – socialism or barbarism.

Liberty in Solidarity

All socialists in the Socialist Party works for humanity’s fulfilment for humanity doesn’t yet fully exist, only barely so. Society is torn apart by the inevitable class conflict between the capitalist oligarchy and the working class. We look upon the miseries that overwhelm humanity with sadness and anger. Between nations there exists a barbaric regime of hatred and violence. Even in a state of peace, they bear the scars of yesterday’s wars, and the fear of tomorrow’s. To change the world and to create a better one is the reason for the foundation of the Socialist Party. Building a new world for a better future by our fellow-workers' own hands is both necessary and possible. It is a movement for changing the world and creating a free, equal, human and prosperous society. Socialism is not a design or recipe conceived by well-meaning know-it-alls, a bunch of utopian reformers and saviours of humanity. Socialism is a social movement arising from within capitalist society itself, a movement that reflects the vision, ideals and and interests of a vast section of society – the working class. All the propaganda and campaigns of the Socialist Party is aimed at the single goal of the complete liberation of the workers, the collective emancipation of the producers.

Only socialism, by ending all classes through the common ownership of the means of production, can resolve this antagonism and reconcile humanity with one another. Socialism, which will abolish all classes restores humanity to its highest level. Socialism alone can give true meaning to the whole idea of human justice. The Socialist Party maintains that the means of production and wealth accumulated by humanity should be at the disposal of all humankind and should be used to free them. According to us, every man and woman has a right to the means of development which society has created. Socialism when instituted will welcome all human beings from the hour of their birth, and assure to them their full development. Socialism is not an academic and Utopian conception, it is in closest touch with reality, a great vital force which will soon be able to administer society. Working men and women will secure justice only when they control the machinery and technology of society. The potential for a human way of living is already in being. Socialism is not a utopian vision, but the realisation of possibilities which are already here. In humanity’s efforts to find its way out of the nightmare world we need a socialist party. Political freedom without economic liberty is a pretence. The workers necessarily strive after a fundamental transformation of society, the result of which must be the abolition of classes, a system of society in which all men and women will enjoy the good things of life. These are the demands of social justice.

“Reformism” is the doctrine of those who, while saying they are in favour of a social transformation having as it objective establishing society on principles and foundations opposed to that which exist, propose to arrive at this result by a more or less a series of reforms .“Reformist” is the name to designate a person, group, or party that considers the whole of these successive and legal reforms as the best, if not the only means of transforming society rather than substituting the socialist world for the capitalist world. Those political parties who say they are of the “vanguard” and proclaim themselves revolutionary are all more or less reformist. The more reformist they are, the less revolutionary they are, and — and this is the logical consequence - the less revolutionary they are, the more reformist they are. The Socialist Party is frequently accused of professing the doctrine of “all or nothing.” In this accusation there is some element of truth, but only some. It is perfectly true we will fight until not even one stone remains of the capitalist citadel. It must be totally destroyed, so that no vestige of the edifice remains. We understand that the improvements toward which reforms tend are only agreed to by the capitalist rulers on condition that they don’t fundamentally infringe upon the authority of the rulers or the profits of the capitalists. Workers are reasonable people with common sense. We want 100% and that’s all. But if we can only achieve 10%, we'll pocket that as a down payment and demand the rest.

Experience has proved that the isolated organisation are no more powerful than are the isolated workers. Even if all workers' associations of a single country were united it would not be sufficiently powerful to stand up in conflict with the international combination of all profit-making world capital. The emancipation of the worker is no national question. No country, no matter how wealthy, mighty can accomplish a social revolution without the countries of the world. Its only possible through an worldwide socialist movement, founded upon justice and freedom for all mankind. For the triumph of the social revolution itself, violence will be unnecessary. The Socialist Party struggles for the complete emancipation of those who are exploited and enslaved by the capitalist system, advocating that our fellow-workers administer themselves. We want humanity’s happiness.

Socialist Standard No. 1390 September 2019

• Editorial: Save the planet, share the Earth
  
• Pathfinders:
  
• Letters
  
• Cooking the Books I: Who, where or what is NAIRU?
  
• Wood For The Trees: The Scale Of It All
  
• Material World: India Goes Dry
  
• No Outsiders: Class Inclusivity
  
• Mental Health: In a Mad, Mad World
  
• Africa: Can it help feed us all?
  
• Capitalism and Climate Change: Cause and effect
  
• Game of Thrones: Medieval Clichés
  
• Reflections on the Tolpuddle Festival
  
• Easy rider: Remembering Peter Fonda
  
• Cooking the Books II: The Next War
  
• Proper Gander: Can’t A Cleaner Like Avocados?
  
• Reviews
  
• 50 Years Ago: Man Ape in Wolfs Clothing?
  
• Meetings
  
• Rear View
  
• Free Lunch

Workers have a world to win, not a nation to fight for.

So the pro-Irish nationalists in Glasgow were met with opposition from British loyalists. The Irish Unity march, led by the James Connolly Republican Flute Band, was met by counter demonstrators which resulted, according to the police, in "significant disorder" along Govan Road and the deployment of riot police to separate the two factions. Once more the toxic politics of nationalism poisons the atmosphere.

Workers in Scotland need socialism, not independence. Nationalists do not want to abolish capitalist exploitation. A sovereign Scotland or an United Ireland can only serve capitalism. To pretend that the UK Union is the cause of all the problems is to deliberately fool the people. 

Nationalism is an attempt to rally the working class behind the cause of the local bosses seeking better profits or a more secure market. Nationalism does not oppose capitalism. Nationalists acts in the interests of an aspiring ruling class. There are no shortcuts to the socialist revolution, and those who followthe nationalist path set back the revolutionary movement by chasing fake enemies. Nationalism is predicated on the myth of a common identity uniting all the citizens of a given country. This has been cynically and opportunistically promoted by the Scottish and Irish nationalists.

The Socialist Party wants to abolish the private ownership of the means of production and expropriate the capitalists. Workers fight each other instead of attacking the system itself. Nationalism emasculates the workers. It is used to divide the workers among themselves so they can ignore their real enemy. Separatism would divide the workers of Scotland from their fellow-workers in England and Ireland. National divisions are a hindrance to working-class unity, and national jealousies and differences are fostered by the capitalists for their own ends.

It is nationalism that divides the workers so that the workers of one nationality struggle against the workers of another nationality for a few illusory crumbs the rulers throw out exactly for that purpose. If the working class divides its forces, this can only seriously hold back its victory. But if it remains unified, it will be able to triumph.

In the struggle to win the hearts and minds of the working class the Socialist Party has to contend with sacred beliefs and obstacles such as nationalism, the loyalty and patriotism felt by many for "their” country. Nationalism is at the top of the list of political illusions used to blind capitalism's victims. For the Socialist Party nationalist movements represent the interests of the capitalist class but politically they can take on a "right-wing" or a "left-wing" form. The Scottish nationalists choose to present themselves as the latter. However, once the native ruling class has captured and consolidated its power, then nationalism becomes a conservative force. Workers should reject the nonsense idea of nationalism and should unite for their common good to abolish capitalism and work for socialism.

The Socialist Party opposes all nationalist movements recognising that the working class has no country. Feelings of loyalty to a nation-state are purely subjective, having no basis in reality. The working class in Scotland has more in common with the workers in other countries than it has with a land-owning laird. We resolutely oppose the politics of capitalism in which some people support the British version of nationalism against the Scottish brand of nationalism. Since we hold that workers own no country, why should we care which section of the class of thieves owns which national portion of the world? Workers own no country, so why should we care which section of the class of thieves owns which national portion of the world?

You don’t enhance the power of workers in their economic struggles against the capitalists by taking the same side as those sitting opposite you at the negotiating table and fraternally regarding them as your 'fellow citizens'. Yet depressingly large swathes of the Left have opted for a course of action that effectively submerges and obliterates working class identity in favour of national identity. We witnessed the Scottish Socialist Party convenor sit alongside a hedge-fund manager in the 2014 referendum. And back in history James Connolly took the working class Citizens Army and allied it with those who only a few years earlier it was formed to resist. 

The obsession about Scottish independence is one which socialists meet all the time. We encounter it from Leftists who divide their time between paying lip service to the idea of workers of the world uniting and endorsing the nationalism of the SNP or Sinn Fein. Nationalists have always argued that workers would be better off in their own country, free from British rule. Socialists regard it as an irrelevance whether local capitalism is ruled by a Scottish/Irish capitalist state or by a British capitalist state or the multinational corporations..

For the worker in there is but one hope. It is to make common cause with the workers of other countries for the end of all forms of exploitation: saying to both English and Scottish and Irish capitalists: “A plague on all your houses."

For the true battle-cry of the working class is broader, more significant and more inspiring than mere nationalism, and that rallying cry is:

THE WORLD FOR THE WORKERS!

WORKERS FOR THE WORLD!

The real future of the Earth

Socialism is a call for sharing and caring, and is a product of love for people and desire for beauty. Socialism does not seek to rape the planet and does not worship profits at the expense of people and nature. It has its basis in social democracy and the nature-based, materialist outlook which grew out of a deep reverence for and understanding of the real, natural, ever-changing, material world.

Socialist philosophy places mind-feelings-ideas in their physical and historical context as effects, not as basic causes. Yes, ideas and feelings can change the world, but people must still have bodies before their minds and emotions can function. Matter itself can neither be created nor destroyed, but all matter–in nature, society and the human mind–changes constantly through tension and contradiction. All things are interdependent and in a continual process of coming into being, changing and passing away. The capitalist system itself was born, matured and will die, because of its inherently contradictory nature–social production (by large groups of workers assembled in one plant)on the one hand, and private, capitalist ownership and appropriation of profit on the other. The application of the materialist dialectic to history is called historical materialism–a revolutionary science of society. It is the sociology of institutional changes caused by the interplay and conflict between the developing productive forces and the kind of world created by this technology.

Historical materialism teaches that all social life is evolutionary and revolutionary, and that human beings can learn to understand nature, production and social relations, and change them in a rational manner. The kind of economy we live in determines the nature and level of our laws, government, culture, ideas, feelings and ethics. The competitive, class warfare system of capitalist production produces a destructive, anti-human science and culture. Socialism is infused with equality, fraternity and liberty.

Historical materialism promotes the synthesis of ecological balance, social harmony, personal freedom and material comfort that is mankind's birthright. A loaf of bread, the work of the farmer, the activity of a baker or the equipment for baking are not just material objects or processes. They are nodes in the network of social connections: the customer’s relationship with the baker, the farmer who produced the wheat, the engineering worker who made the machinery, and so on. All these lives are bound together. To be human is to be both social and at the same time a particular individual, a person. You have a unique place in the world: you speak a particular language in your own inimitable manner, you like food or music of a particular sort, and so on. None of the things which make you exactly who you are exists except through the entire history of humankind. We can be conscious of our own humanity only because, and to the extent that, we act humanly, and that means creating ourselves. We are not some kind of machine, nor are we passive victims of evolutionary history, governed by ‘instincts’ which can never be understood or controlled. What distinguishes humanity from the rest of nature is the conscious, active relationship we have with everything else, with each other and with ourselves. No human individual is an isolated entity. Each human is – potentially – a ‘social individual’, and a ‘universal individual’. The human individual is free, self-created, but only in his or her true, social being. 

Capitalism has produced many things, good and bad, in the course of its evolution. But the most vital and valuable of all the social forces it has created is the working class. The capitalist class brought into existence a vast army of wage workers and set it into motion for its own purposes, to make and operate the machinery, factories, and all the other production and transportation facilities from which employers profits emanate. The exploitation and abuses, inherent and inescapable in the capitalist organisation of economic life, provoke the workers time and time again to organise themselves and undertake militant action to defend their elementary interests. The struggle between these conflicting social classes is today the dominant and driving force of world and history. The class conflict is the motivating force of history. It is the working-class that, if mobilised, can change the direction of political activism.

Socialism is the anathema of the ruling class. It has become the powerful tool of the exploited and oppressed in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. The real battle line lies between capitalists (of all colours) and the workers (of all colours). The only alternative to socialist revolution is a bleak defeatism, to passively accept the inevitability of eco-catastrophe is not revolution. And nothing can be more impossible than the goal of nationalist self-survival on a ruined planet. This is the politics of despair, pie-in-the-sky. But scarcity and privation need not be the future. There is a better way for suffering humanity – to go forward together to establish the democratic common ownership of the means of producing life’s necessities. Many environmentalists are not yet ready for this and blame the conventional scapegoats of overpopulation for problems, blinded by all-too-commonplace prejudices and mistaken analysis. The Socialist Party does not retreat into a bunker mentality of isolationism but will strive to flourish along with a liberated humanity as a whole.