Crime and Socialism

Capitalism has no remedy for crime. Crime is to be explained by the capitalist environment in which we live.

Crime did not flourish in early communistic communities because there was no private property and sex relations were free. It grew with the development of private property.

Crime consists of infringement against the social rules of the time. These rules in turn depend upon, or rise out of, the nature of the human communities. In the early communities these social rules were based upon communism and were formulated freely by the community as a whole. With the growth of private property the owners of private property became the rulers and law makers. Infringement of their laws became “crimes.” For example, to-day sex is a private property institution and sex relations outside of wedlock are regarded as crimes, except in circumstances where it suits the rulers—when the birthrate of prospective workers and fighters is going down, rich appetites have to be met, or the needs of soldiers attended to for the sake of morale.

What constitutes “crime" has varied as communities have developed. Among the Spartans in early Greek times thieving was a virtue because the Spartan ruling class was a small body among a host of subservient, and their wits had to be developed to the highest pitch for the purpose of repression. In Elizabethan times piracy by English sailors was a virtue because it brought maritime wealth to the English ruling class. In the later centuries private property owners stole millions of acres of common land from the people, but this was not regarded as crime because the new laws based upon private property excluded from their influence the land that had no individual owner but was free for the use of all. In our own day millions of men are trained to strangle, drown, blow to pieces, shoot and maim their fellow-men, but this large scale slaughter and destruction is not regarded as criminal because the rulers of a capitalist society justify it on suitable abstract principles.

 If a poor man kills another man no abstract principles will save him from the hangman. If a rich man kills another man he has many avenues to escape from the hangman.

Prostitution, over-drinking, over and under eating, the blind pursuit of wealth and the enslaving of native people, war, and the strain of modern life are all consequences of capitalism, and have a demoralising influence on people. All these things contribute to a weakening of the social instincts. They were present in previous forms of society, but have reached their highest expression and their greatest power for evil in the capitalist system.

Poverty and laborious lives induce a low intellectual condition and a brutalised outlook on life. These together with prostitution and unhealthy sex unions produce degeneracy and insanity.

Crime ratios are misleading. Large numbers of people commit crimes but never appear in criminal courts because they are rich or crafty. The poor prostitute figures in records, the rich rarely. While proof is difficult, it can hardly be doubted that much evasion of tax and similar regulations is carried on by monied men who are in a position to “know the ropes," or who can afford expert legal advice on ways of finding loopholes.

 The rate of crime depends upon the influence of the social factors mentioned above in the countries and among the people in question. What greater volume of crimes have Catholics committed than those committed by Protestants upon native peoples and upon men. women and children in the mines and factory hells of this country during the last century? The opera “Madame Butterfly" is based upon the attitude of Western man towards his Eastern sister, and many of those who go to see it and enjoy the luxury of shedding tears over the tragedy of Madame Butterfly are blind to their own share in similar tragedies.

We would remind fellow-workers that an understanding of the cause of crime requires also an understanding of what crime is.

When wealth becomes commonly owned and each can obtain what he needs, there will be no crimes against property, the intellectual condition of people will rise, and the heritage of degeneracy and insanity will disappear; when woman has no economic need to sell her body, prostitution will disappear; when the relations between the sexes are free and partnerships can be made and unmade according to the emotional requirements of each, sex crimes will disappear. Then at last we shall really live, healthy, happy and crimeless—morals, biology, psychology, religion, race, heredity, and every other ology notwithstanding!

An Open Letter to Those Describing Themselves as Socialists

As the old year draws to a close and a new one approaches perhaps we should make yet another appeal to our fellow-workers and urge them to make 2020 the year they begin the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism.

We state below some of the principles on which, from our point of view, a genuine socialist party must be based and we hope by making a useful contribution to your discussions. We have divided our report into four parts:

I Socialism
II The Path to Socialism
III Futility of Reformism
IV A Model of Socialist Society

I. Socialism

1) The socialist party must first be clear in its socialism, that socialism must be a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of production and distribution and in the interest of the entire community. Socialism is a global community without borders, where goods are produced only for use. Buying and selling, and with them prices, wages, money, profits and banks will disappear. Instead, everyone will have free access to the common store according to his need. Socialism is a fully democratic society. The coercive state machinery of class society will be replaced by the simple democratic administration of the affairs of society.

2) The government ownership of industry, or nationalisation, is state capitalism. Workers in state industries are still exploited for profit by the wage system and still need to organise into unions and to strike to protect their interests. The nationalised industries are run on capitalist lines to produce for sale. This has absolutely nothing in common with socialism. Socialism and communism are not different systems of society, both describe the same society based on social ownership. For us, the words "socialist state" or "workers' state" are contradictory. Where there is socialism there is no state , and where there is a state then there is no socialism.

II. The Path to Socialism

3) Socialism can be established only by the political majority of the working class who want and understand socialism. To establish socialism, the working class must first gain control of political power and to do so, we must organise a political party.

4) That the majority should want and understand socialism has been a principle that has always distinguished us from all other parties who call themselves socialists. Once the nature of socialism is understood as a free society based on voluntary work and free access to all the fruits of this work, it is clear that socialism can only be established by the conscious action of the majority. The voluntary cooperation and social responsibility that socialism demands cannot be imposed by a minority of leaders. The principle of leadership is anti-socialist.

5) When it is recognised that there must be a majority of socialists who understand and want socialism , a majority with a socialist consciousness, then violence is not necessary, unless the pro-capitalists use it first. The socialist majority will use the popular vote as it is to show they are a majority and also to send its delegates to parliament and local councils, thus gaining control of the state apparatus.

6) We maintain that barricades and street battles are out-moded revolutionary tactics. In the modern political situation - the overwhelming numerical superiority of the working class, universal suffrage, political democracy, an army and civil service recruited among workers - the working class can and must use the elections and the parliament as a way leading to power for socialism. A socialist party should contest as often as possible elections, but only on a socialist programme . Where there are no socialist candidates, the party should advocate blank or spoiled ballot papers but does not engage in anti-election propaganda of the anarchist type.
The idea of an anarcho-syndicalist general strike of industrial unions as a means of overthrowing the capitalist yoke is obviously impractical because it would leave the means to crush such a strike, the state apparatus, in the hands of the capitalists.

III. The Futility of Reformism
7) The party that the working class use as a tool to gain political control must be organised on a democratic basis. The structure of the socialist party will have to reflect the democratic nature of the society it is seeking to establish. Its policies and administration must be entirely in the hands of its members, there should not be leaders and those who are designated to perform different functions must be accountable to members. Full free and frank discussion of party policy should exist. In keeping with the tenet that working class emancipation necessarily excludes the role of political leadership, the SPGB is a leader-free political party where its executive committee is solely for housekeeping admin duties and cannot determine policy or even submit resolutions to conference (EC meetings are public and the EC minutes are available for public scrutiny on the web as proof of our commitment to openness and democracy). All conference decisions have to be ratified by a referendum of the whole membership. The General Secretary has no position of power or authority over any other member. This is the basis of the SPGB party structure.
At a certain level of development of the socialist movement in each country, socialists should organise themselves into a party, with its own democratic rules, rather than remain discussion or study or reader groups that may have been previously more convenient and appropriate. A political party can only be what its members are. If a socialist party wants to remain as such, it must recruit only the socialists in its ranks. This is particularly necessary in a democratic party where all members have equal votes on policy decisions. Passing a test on basic knowledge of socialism must be a condition of admission to the ranks of the party of socialism.

8) Moreover, to remain socialist, the party must seek support solely on the basis of a socialist programme. Inevitably, in the present circumstances, the result will be that the party will be comparatively small in number, but there is no other logical way to build a genuine socialist party. History showed us the fate of the social democratic parties, which despite a formal commitment to socialism as an "ultimate goal", admitted the non-socialist to their ranks and sought non-socialist support for a reform programme of capitalism rather than a socialist programme. In order to maintain their non-socialist support, they were themselves forced to drop all talk of socialism and become even more openly reformist. Today the social democratic parties are firmly committed to capitalism in theory and in practice. We say that this was the inevitable result of the admission of non-socialists and advocating reforms of capitalism. That is why we have always advocated socialism and never called for the reform of capitalism. We are not saying that all reforms are anti-working class, but as a socialist party advocating reforms, it would be its first step towards its transformation into a reformist party. Regardless of why or how the reforms are advocated, the result is the same: confusion in the minds of the working class instead of growth of socialist consciousness.

9) The preservation of the environment is a social problem which requires humanity to establish a viable and stable relationship with the rest of nature. In practice this implies a society which uses, as far as possible, renewable raw materials and energy and practise the recycling of non-renewable resources; a society which, once an appropriate balance with nature has been formed, will tend towards a stable level of production, indeed towards “zero growth”. This does not mean that changes are to be excluded on principle, but that any change will have to respect the environment by taking place at a pace to which nature can adapt. But the employment by capitalism of destructive methods of production has, over two centuries, upset the balance of nature.
It is not “Humanity” but the capitalist economic system itself which is responsible for ecological problems. It is only after having placed the means of society’s existence under the control of the community that we will be able to ensure their management, no longer in the selfish interest of the capitalist class, but in the general interest.
Most environmentalists accept the economic dictatorship of the owning minority since they don’t understand the link that exists between the destruction of the environment and the private/state ownership of the means of production. Because by definition capitalism can only function in the interest of the capitalists, no palliative can (nor ever will be able to) subordinate capitalist private property to the general interest. For this reason only the threat of a socialist movement setting down as the only realistic and immediate aim the establishment of social property of society’s means of existence so as to ensure their management by and in the interest of the whole community, would be able to force the capitalists to concede reforms favourable to the workers for fear of losing the whole cake. Yet more reason to advance the maximum programme of socialism.

10) As the trade union movement stands to-day it is still craft and sectarian in outlook, still mainly pro-capitalist.The struggle on the economic field has to be, and is, carried on by socialists and non-socialists alike. The ideal trade-union, from a socialist point of view, would be one that recognised the irreconcilable conflict of interest between workers and employers, that had no leaders but was organised democratically and controlled by its members, that sought to organise all workers irrespective of nationality, colour, religious or political views, first by industry then into One Big Union, and which struggled not just for higher wages but also for the abolition of the wages system. This cannot become a full reality until large numbers of workers are socialists. We cannot have a union organised on entirely socialist principles without a socialist membership. The small number of workers who really understand the meaning of socialism is such that any attempt to form a separate socialist economic organisation at present would be futile, for the very nature of the workers' economic struggle under capitalism would compel such an organisation to associate in a common cause with the non-socialist unions during strikes and all the other activities of the class struggle. A socialist party, therefore, urges that the existing unions provide the medium through which the workers should continue their efforts to obtain the best conditions they can get from the master class in the sale of their labour-power.

11) A socialist party must oppose nationalism in all its forms. The interests of working people are the same in all countries and they should never be enemies of each other. Anti-imperialist nationalism is the ideology of an actual or aspiring capitalist class that seeks the way to its own independent state ; they are striving to carve out a place for themselves within the existing system, not to overthrow it. The logic of such movements is to subordinate the interests of workers to those of the capitalist leadership. Socialists have always said clearly that workers have no country.

IV A Model of Socialist Society
Socialists caution against the creation of blueprints. There is no point in drawing up in advance the sort of detailed blueprint of industrial organisation. For a small group of socialists, as we are now, to do so would be undemocratic. We also recognise that there may not be one single way of doing things, and precise details and ways of doing things might vary from one part of the world to another, even between neighbouring communities.
Socialists cannot determine what the conditions will be when socialism is established. As the socialist majority grows, when socialism is within the grasp of the working class, that will then be the proper time for making such important decisions. It is imprudent for today’s socialist minority to be telling people how to administer a socialist society. When a majority of people understand what socialism means, the suggestions for socialist administration will solidify into an appropriate plan. It will be based upon the conditions existing at that time, not today.
We can, however, reach some generalised conclusions based on basic premises and can outline broad principles or options that could be applied. We do not have to draw up a plan for socialism, but simply and broadly demonstrate that it is possible and therefore refute the label of “utopianism”.

It is reasonable to assume that productive activity would be divided into branches and that production in these branches would be organised by a delegate body. The responsibility of these industries would be to ensure the supply of a particular kind of product either, in the case of consumer goods, to distribution centres or, in the case of goods used to produce other goods, to productive units or other industries.
Since the needs of consumers are always needs for a specific product at a specific time in a specific locality, we will assume that socialist society would leave the initial assessment of likely needs to a delegate body under the control of the local community. In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period, would enable the local distribution committee to estimate what the need for food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period. Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants, builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the bodies charged with coordinating supplies to local communities.

The individual would have free access to the goods on the shelves of the local distribution centres; the local distribution centres free access to the goods they required to be always adequately stocked with what people needed; their suppliers free access to the goods they required from the factories which supplied them; industries and factories free access to the materials, equipment and energy they needed to produce their products; and so on. Production and distribution in socialism would thus be a question of organising a coordinated and more or less self-regulating system of linkages between users and suppliers, enabling resources and materials to flow smoothly from one productive unit to another, and ultimately to the final user, in response to information flowing in the opposite direction originating from final users. The productive system would thus be set in motion from the consumer end, as individuals and communities took steps to satisfy their self-defined needs. Socialist production is self-regulating production for use.
To ensure the smooth functioning of the system, statistical offices would be needed to provide estimates of what would have to be produced to meet peoples likely individual and collective needs. These could be calculated in the light of consumer wants as indicated by returns from local distribution committees and of technical data (productive capacity, production methods, productivity, etc) incorporated in input-output tables. For, at any given level of technology (reflected in the input-output tables), a given mix of final goods (consumer wants) requires for its production a given mix of intermediate goods and raw materials; it is this latter mix that the central statistical office would be calculating in broad terms. Such calculations would also indicate whether or not productive capacity would need to be expanded and in what branches. The centres for each world-region would thus be essentially an information clearing house, processing information communicated to it about production and distribution and passing on the results to industries for them to draw up their production plans so as to be in a position to meet the requests for their products coming from other industries and from local communities. The only calculations that would be necessary in socialism would be calculations in kind. On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products.
Stock or inventory control systems employing calculation in kind are, as was suggested earlier, absolutely indispensable to any kind of modern production system. While it is true that they operate within a price environment today, that is not the same thing as saying they need such an environment in order to operate. The key to good stock management is the stock turnover rate – how rapidly stock is removed from the shelves – and the point at which it may need to be re-ordered. This will also be affected by considerations such as lead times – how long it takes for fresh stock to arrive – and the need to anticipate possible changes in demand.

As we have seen , socialism will be a self-adjusting decentralised inter-linked system. A socialist economy would be polycentric, not centrally planned. The problem with a central planning model of socialism is its inability to cope with change. It lacks any kind of feedback mechanism which allows for mutual adjustments between the different actors in such an economy. It is completely inflexible. Socialism does not necessary involve the creation of new layers of administrations but simply the transformation of them. It is not a command economy but a responsive one to provide for a self -sustaining steady state society.
And we can set out a possible way of achieving an eventual zero growth steady state society operating in a stable and ecologically benign way. This could be achieved in three main phases.

1) There would have to be emergency action to relieve the worst problems of food shortages, health care and housing which affect billions of people throughout the world.

2) Longer term action to construct means of production and infrastructures such as transport systems for the supply of permanent housing and durable consumption goods. These could be designed in line with conservation principles, which means they would be made to last for a long time, using materials that where possible could be re-cycled and would require minimum maintenance.

3) With these objectives achieved there could be an eventual fall in production, and society could move into a stable mode. This would achieve a rhythm of daily production in line with daily needs with no significant growth. On this basis, the world community could reconcile two great needs, the need to live in material well-being whilst looking after the planet.

A money-free society can calculate opportunity costs and allocate resources rationally by :-
1) Calculation in kind
2) A self-correcting system of stock control - which identifies quantities of stocks available and provides a reliable indication of consumer demand (via the depletion rates of stocks)
3) The law of the minimum - whereby you economise most on those factors of production that are relatively scarcest
4) A social hierarchy of production goals - which sorts out the allocation of scarce factors where competing demands are placed upon them.

Humans behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in. Human behaviour reflects society. In a society such as capitalism, people's needs are not met and people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard goods because possession provides some security. People have a tendency to distrust others because the world is organised in such a dog-eat-dog manner. To establish socialism the vast majority must consciously decide that they want socialism and that they are prepared to work in socialist society. The establishment of socialism presupposes the existence of a mass socialist movement and a profound change in social outlook. It is simply not reasonable to suppose that the desire for socialism on such a large scale, and the conscious understanding of what it entails on the part of all concerned, would not influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other. In socialism, status based upon the material wealth at one's command, would be a meaningless concept. The notion of status based upon the conspicuous consumption of wealth would be devoid of meaning because individuals would stand in equal relation to the means of production and have free access to the resultant goods and services. Why take more than you need when you can freely take what you need? In socialism the only way in which individuals can command the esteem of others is through their contribution to society, and the stronger the movement for socialism grows the more will it subvert the prevailing capitalist ethos .
Free access to goods and services denies to any group of individuals the political leverage with which to dominate others (a feature intrinsic to all private-property or class based systems through control and rationing of the means of life). This will work to ensure that a socialist society is run on the basis of democratic consensus. Decisions will be made at different levels of organisation: global, regional and local with the bulk of decision-making being made at the local level.

Anything less than the demand for full free access socialism does not go far enough. In the final analysis, those who oppose it lack the confidence that either there are sufficient resources on the planet to provide for all, or that human beings can work voluntarily, and co-operate to organise production and distribution of wealth without chaos, and consume wealth responsibly without some form of rationing. In the end, these critics remain fixated to the laz

y person, greedy individual critique of human behaviour.

Thoughts on socialism

There are many organisations claiming to fulfil the requirements of a workers’ party. We are not the only group calling ourselves socialist. Anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with present-day society will come across others, all having some such word in their names as “socialist”, “workers”, “revolutionary” or “communist”. Most of these will be of Leninist or Trotskyist origin and have aims, theories and methods which are not shared by ourselves. By fostering wrong ideas about what socialism is and how it can be achieved these organisations are delaying the socialist revolution. Their basic position is that ordinary people are not capable of understanding socialism, that only a minority of people can understand socialism and are organised as a “vanguard party” with its own hierarchically-structured leadership to lead the workers and hand down “the party line” to the rank-and-file. 

Contempt for the intellectual abilities of the working class led to the claim that the vanguard party should rule on their behalf, even against their will. Having satisfied themselves that the task is impossible, they then proceed to matters of the moment, reaching an accommodation with capitalism and endeavouring to reform it. Vanguardists may protest at this summary, they may insist that they are very much concerned with working class consciousness, and do not assert that workers cannot understand socialist politics. 

However, an examination of their propaganda reveals that ‘consciousness’ means merely following the right leaders. Their basic idea that most people are not able to understand socialism is just plain wrong. Becoming a socialist is to recognise that present-day society, capitalism, because it is a class-divided and profit-motivated society, can never be made to work in the interest of everyone. These are conclusions which people can easily come to on the basis of their own experience and reflection and in the light of hearing the case for socialism argued. Not only can people understand socialism, they must understand it if socialism is to be established. What has been lacking is the understanding and will among those men and women who would most benefit from it. This view held by the Socialist Party, that socialism can only be established when a large majority of the working class understand it, is constantly being attacked. If left-wing parties refuse to take up the revolutionary position which aims at the abolition of the wages system and the conversion of state and private property into common property, then they remain parties of capitalism regardless that they claim to oppose it. Socialism depends on working-class understanding in the same way as capitalism depends on working-class acquiescence and support. The socialist transformation of society is different from all previous ones. It must be the work of the majority acting for themselves by themselves.

Since our inception in 1904, our objective, has remained the same - "The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole."
From this statement, it follows that a socialist society must be one without social classes, the abolition of nation states and governments, the end of money and prices and wage-labour. We socialists speak of a community based upon co-operation, free labour, of free access to all goods and services produced by society for all, based on their own self-determined needs, of democratic administration but the absence of government; a society where the fundamental needs of every human being could be met. Democratic control is not an optional extra of socialism. It is its very essence. Socialism is a society based on the common ownership of the means of life but, since something cannot be said to be commonly owned if some have a privileged or exclusive say in how it is used, common ownership means that every member of society has to have an equal say. If there wasn’t such democratic control there wouldn’t be common ownership, so there wouldn’t be socialism. This being so, socialism cannot be imposed against the will or without the consent and participation of the vast majority. It simply cannot be established for the majority by some vanguard or enlightened minority. That is our case. The socialist revolution can only be democratic, in the sense of both being what the majority of people want and of being carried out by democratic methods of organisation and action. No minority revolution can lead to socialism. Hence our conclusion that the movement to establish socialism, and the methods it employs, must “prefigure” the democratic nature of socialism. The very nature of socialism as a society of voluntary cooperation and democratic participation rules out its being established by some minority that happens to have got control of political power, whether through elections or through an armed insurrection. People cannot be led into socialism or coerced into it. They cannot be forced into cooperating and participating; this is something they must want to do for themselves and which they must decide to do of their own accord. Socialist society can function on no other basis. Socialists place participatory democracy at the very core of our social model.

The word democracy comes from the Greek: "demos" and "kratia". It essentially means "people power" or "rule by the people", i.e. it is about the majority being able to make decisions and put them into effect. Socialism and democracy are complementary; more than complementary – indivisible since the only possible basis for creating an enduring, truly democratic, community is through the conscious choice of strong, independent, politically aware individuals. Capitalism is the antithesis of democracy. Mainstream political theory and practice tries to separate politics from economics. "Political democracy" is allowed in an approved form, but economic democracy is impossible because of economic inequality; the majority are deprived of ownership and control of the means of life. Only when people have real, democratic control over their own lives will they have the freedom that is socialism. Socialism will do away with the inequality of capitalism. With free access to what has been produced, everybody (that's absolutely everybody) will be able to decide on their own consumption and living conditions. Poverty will no longer limit people's lives and experiences. There will be no employment, no employers and no capitalist class. Nobody will therefore be able to make decisions about the livelihoods and, indeed, the very lives, of others. Nobody will have privileged access to the media and means of communication and so be in a special position to influence the views of other people.The uncontrollability of the capitalist economy will be a thing of the past. Production will be for use, not for profit. A free environment of free people will have no private property, consequently no exchange of property, therefore no need for a medium of exchange. With all the paraphernalia of money, prices, accounting, interest rates, there will be no obstacles to people producing what is wanted.

Socialism will involve people making decisions about their own lives and those of families, friends and neighbours - decisions unencumbered by so many of the factors that have to be taken into account under capitalism. The means of production (land, factories, offices) will be owned in common, and everybody will help to determine how they will be used. This need not mean endless meetings, nor can we now give a blueprint of how democratic decision-making in socialism will work. Quite likely there will be administrative structures at different levels, local, regional and so on. This will not just be the trappings of democracy but the real thing - people deciding about and running their own lives, within a system of equality and fellowship. The essence of democracy is popular participation not competing parties. In socialism elections will not be about deciding which particular party is to come to "power" and form the government. Politics in socialism will not be about coercive power and its exercise and so won't really be politics at all in its present-day sense of the "art and practice of government" or "the conduct of state affairs". Being a classless society of free and equal men and women, socialism will not have a coercive state machine nor a government to control it. The conduct of public affairs in socialism will be about people participating in the running of their lives in a non-antagonistic context of co-operation to further the common good. Socialist democracy will be a participatory democracy. The socialism, as envisioned by the Socialist Party, in the words of Marx, will be "a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle", a society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Voluntary solidarity, not compulsion. The greatest degree of individuality is found where there is the highest social organisation and co-operation. This will apply to human beings in socialism. Individual self-expression, self-interest and social responsibility are the natural incentives for human activity, and will prevail in a sane socialist society. In socialism we wouldn’t be free to do whatever we wished. A socialist society will have to operate according to rules. But the constraints on our personal freedom would be self-determined by local communities agreeing as equals and not imposed on us by the state.

It benefits the workers of the world to organise to defend and extend democratic rights; to widen the democratic space as much as possible. For democracy is the way in which we can unite to free ourselves from the insanity of the profit-system and domination by a minority ruling class. We can replace oppression with equality, waste of resources with production directly for use, and systemic competition with cooperation for the common good. We can create the world that we want, fashioned by the majority, in the interests of the majority. All past changes were due to humans acting in their interests. We have the opportunity to act in ours. Engels wrote that “when it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act”.

The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and there are no followers. Everybody in the Socialist Party has equal value and equal power. As previously explained many of the so-called socialist parties do not accept the statement of Marx that the emancipation of the working-class must be the work of the working-class itself, but contend that the workers must be aided and guided by the more enlightened. The Socialist Party is committed to a policy of making sure that hearing the case for socialism becomes part of the experience of as many people as possible. It is committed to treating other workers as adults who are capable of being influenced by open discussion, public debate and rational argument and will not to try to hoodwink or manipulate them. It commits us to opposing the whole concept of leadership, not just to get socialism but also for the everyday trade-union struggle or community action to survive under capitalism. We do not seek to lead such struggles but limit ourselves to urging workers to organise any particular struggle in a democratic way under the control of those directly involved. Our own party is organised on this basis and we envisage the mass movement for socialism, when it gets off the ground, being organised too on a fully democratic basis without leaders. The Socialist Party doesn't have a leader because leadership is undemocratic. If there are leaders, there must be followers: people who just do what they are told. In the Socialist Party, every individual member has an equal say, and nobody tells the rest what to do. Decisions are made democratically by the whole membership, and by representatives or delegates. If the membership doesn't like the decisions of those it elects, those administrators can be removed from office and their decisions overridden.

The more who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able to get our ideas across. And the more experiences we are able to draw on and the greater will be the new ideas for building the movement. That is where the Socialist Party can come in, through making socialists, through that and that alone—making people committed heart and soul to working class interests, democracy and the establishment of socialism. When workers have a strong emotional and practical commitment, they can make grass roots democracy work. It's up to us to encourage that commitment. Because we want socialism, we see our party’s task as to concentrate on spreading socialist ideas. The Socialist Party does not advocate reformism, i.e. a platform of reforms with the aim of gradually reforming capitalism into a system that works for all. While we are happy to see the workers’ lot improved, reforms can never lead to the establishment of socialism and tends to bleed energy, ideas, and resources from that goal. Reforms fought for can, and frequently are, taken away or watered down. Rather than attempting gradual transformation of the capitalist system, something we hold is impossible and has been proven by a century of reformist platforms of so-called workers’ parties which have led instead to the reform of such parties themselves to accept capitalism, we believe that only socialism can end forever the problems of our present society such as war, poverty, hunger, inadequate health-care and environmental degradation. Social harmony is to be sought not by a legislative reform, but by removing the causes of antagonism.

We socialists have never tried to forget the obvious fact that the working class does not yet want socialism, but we are encouraged by the knowledge that we, as members of the working class, have reacted to capitalism by opposing it. There is nothing remarkable about us as individuals, so it cannot be a hopeless task to set about changing the ideas of our fellow workers - especially as they learn from their own experience of capitalism. The self-emancipation of the working class remains on the agenda. It is not the wish of the Socialist Party to be separate for the sake of being so. The position is that we cannot be a popular reform party attempting to mop up immediate problems, and revolutionary at the same time. We cannot have a half-way house; nor can we accommodate the more timid members of our class who abhor what they describe as "impractical" or "impossible" policies, and spend their time looking for compromises. The socialist case is so fundamentally different, involving as it does the literal transformation of society, that we must expect mental resistance before socialist ideas have finally become consolidated in the mind. The master-and-servant mentality is imbued in the worker. Left -Wing propaganda offering leadership adds to the impression that he is an inferior being who is incapable of thinking, organising and acting. If workers do not accept the need to establish a revolutionary system of production based on democratic control and common ownership, there is no other way open to them to achieve their release from capitalism. It is all or nothing. There has been no shortage of diversions along the way. How much stronger would we be if our fellow workers had not experienced that bitter disillusionment of failed reformism and the indignity of abandoning principles for the sake of short-term gains? Pitiful has been the wasted energies of workers who, instead of uniting uncompromisingly for the socialist alternative, have gone for reformist or other futile options. We have seen a century of cruelly extinguished hopes of those who heaped praise upon the state-capitalist hell-holes which posed as "socialist states" which pseudo-socialists promoted. The system which puts profit before need has persistently spat the hope of humane capitalism back in the face of its advocates. The progressive enthusiasm of millions has been stamped out in this way. Dare we imagine how different it will be when all that energy which has gone into reforming capitalism goes into abolishing it? As for the claim that the capitalists might use violence to stop the establishment of socialism, well they might, but what chance would they stand against a conscious movement of well-organised workers? Would the army and police (just wage slaves in uniform) allow themselves to be used to murder their brothers, sisters, parents and friends? 

The time for apathy is over

Brian Larkin, a Coordinator of Edinburgh Peace & Justice Center and Media Coordinator for XR Peace, the coalition of peace groups that aims to address the links between war, militarism and the climate crisis, wrote an article on Extinction Rebellion. 

Did he bring anything new to the table? Disappointingly, no.

“...Personal change has to be part of the solution. We need to drastically reduce consumption. Less meat, fewer new clothes, fewer cars, fewer flights. But, with the ice caps melting, with permanent drought in the southern hemisphere, with coral reefs dying personal change will not turn this around fast enough. Governments must act quickly. But they’re not going to do that unless we force them…At COP 2020 in Glasgow governments must make commitments to cut emissions  by 7.6% emissions every year we CAN limit global warming to 1.5°C. As the host nation the UK government has the opportunity to lead on this. We need to push the government to do that this year.”

The debate on whether climate change is man-made or not has well and truly ended. The debate on what to do about it, is not. Despite his good intentions and being well-meaning, Brian Larkin takes us no further than lobbying the government to do something about the environmental emergency as if it is a neutral body.

In order to replace capitalism with an ecological benign society we need a socialist revolution. Capitalism is the reason our civilisation is on the verge of collapse and the only way humanity and the rest of planet’s species can thrive is by ending capitalism. The insolubility of the climate crisis through capitalism is very evident. Those who profit most from the capitalist system have proven time and time again that not only are they unwilling to give up the rapacious economy that is destroying Earth, but that they even refuse to admit that it is that system which is the cause. We can no longer continue the pretense that the cure for capitalism’s deadly excesses can be found in capitalism itself. The reforms undertaken are not sufficient to help us to continue a world that remains liveable. The Socialist Party message is that civilisation as we know it now cannot survive if we allow the pursuit of profit to determine our future. To assume that any corporationhas an interest in acting according to an ethical standard higher than what is obliged or enforced by law is problematic. The very nature of corporations as profit-accumulating mechanisms contradicts and undermines their ability to regulate themselves. Relentless cost-cutting and aggressive expansion of market share in order to maintain its rate of profit form the core dogma of any business.

A willingness to pose the revolutionary challenge to capitalism is often the best way to win changes from the system but only if the revolutionary challenge succeeds, will it stave off climate disaster. Only in a socialist society can the ecological problems capitalism creates be solved. The climate movement has put forth some demands which can perhaps be possible within capitalism, but the Socialist Party continually emphasise the necessity of transcending capitalism and creating a new society based on democratic control of resources and production as a permanent solution. Capitalism’s drive to expand, private ownership of natural resources, production for profit rather than social good, the inability to plan, and alienating of humanity from nature makes it inherently ecologically destructive. 

The progressive role of the industrial and scientific revolutions of the 18th through 20th centuries, brought many benefits to all humanity but in the process it also brought massive damage wreaked upon the environment by its blind industrial expansion and capital accumulation. Now the progress of human civilization is about to go into reverse and face us with the real possibility of collapse. The good news is that the alternative is increasingly understood.

The climate crises offers socialists an unprecedented opportunity for discussing profound fundamental change to our society. Global warming is becoming an issue of struggles and protests. The inability of capitalism to manage the economy sustainably or in the general interest has grown clearer to many, and the relevance and necessity of socialism is now becoming prominent in the debate. It is unrealistic to expect capitalism to take it upon itself to become a kinder and gentler . If we truly wish to see real change for the better in our lives we must stand up for our own interests. It is up to all of us. We have the bleak prospect now that world socialism, a new society not dominated by the needs of capitalist accumulation, must now be accomplished under conditions of strict time limits for humanity to restore conditions that will secure the long term survival of our own species.