Why we are socialists

A widespread misunderstanding and confusion exists about socialism. Socialism was often called the society of the free and equal, and democracy was defined as the rule of the people. Socialism is not some Utopian scheme. Capitalism has created the economic conditions for socialism. Today there is social production but no social ownership. Socialism will bring social ownership of social production. With socialism, the working people will take over the economic forces developed by capitalism and operate them in the interests of society. The end of exploitation of one person by another will be an unprecedented liberating and transforming force. Socialism will not mean government control. Government involvement in the economy is a form of state capitalism. When the government intervenes in the present economy, it does so to help, not hurt, capitalists. Socialism, the historic mission of that class, cannot be indefinitely postponed.

Socialism must be the aim. The aim of the Socialist Party is the abolition of class rule and class conflict, with all their evil consequences, and the development of a society in which the few shall no longer be able to enjoy a life of luxury and ease at the expense of work, want and insecurity of the majority.   This is today a thoroughly practicable idea. Science and technology has increased our productive powers that an abundance of all the good things of life for the whole population can be produced without drudgery or toil. To assure plenty, security, leisure, and freedom for all, it is necessary that the existing property system, the existing forms of economic control and distribution of wealth are taken into the hands of the producers themselves. Only by the socialised ownership and democratic control of such productive wealth, doing away with exploitation and making the satisfaction of human wants the ruling motive in production, can the ideal of a class-free society be realised. 
What is socialism? What are we actually wanting?

State capitalism (misleadingly mis-called State Socialism) is capitalism by the state and for the state.

It is capitalism by the government and for the government.
It is capitalism by the ruling classes and for the ruling classes.

Socialism rejects state ownership, rejects State capitalism. State capitalism is not socialism and never can become socialism.

The abolition of the State is a necessary precondition for the emancipation of the working class. Socialists do not blindly equate ‘the state’ and ‘society’. State property is administered by civil servant officials and they must obey the vertical hierarchy of command, at the top of which stand the government. The State and social ownership are not the same. The nature of the work process will remain unchanged, although the responsibility in the line of command will have shifted away from the individual or corporate capitalist entrepreneur towards the state as owner and administrator. The workers will presumably continue to receive a wage, to clock in every morning and clock out every evening. 

The state only exists because of the antagonism between the ruling and the ruled class and one of  the first acts of the coming revolution is the abolition of the state. Socialism will require no political state because there will be neither a privileged property class nor a downtrodden propertyless class: there will be no social disorder as a result, because there will be no clash of economic interests.

“In the last analysis state ownership is more a means of controlling and regimenting the workers than of controlling industry... The attempt of the state to control industry is therefore the attempt of the ruling class to dominate labour.” William Paul of the SLP, explained. 

State capitalism accentuates and sharpens class divisions. State capitalism regulates and directs capital and labour; it seeks to realize the Utopian peace between the classes, the suspension of the class struggle. The first task of the workers, is not to destroy, but conquer and capture the state and with the implementation of socialism, will come the dissolution of the state and the establishment of the cooperative commonwealth. Free men and women, the producers will decide in common everything concerning production and distribution instead of being the puppets of economic forces beyond their control.

We know much better today than before what the needs of mankind are — one of the great developments of modern times is this consciousness of human needs and of our duty to do something to meet them. The facts are that we are now in a position where feeding the hungry, providing housing for the homeless and so forth, satisfying the needs of every human being is possible now, but have been for decades and decades. Nevertheless the hungry are still there, and very little effectively is being done to feed them. It’s not because the food isn't there or that it couldn’t be brought very easily to those who need it. There is available enough to feed everybody.There are large tracts of good arable land which are untilled. In fact, the tragedy is if we look into the possibilities of ways of improving conditions, we see that it is not a question of doubling harvests, it is a question of getting ten-fold or more. Need need not exist. What is lacking is not that people just need things, but that they lack what is called ‘effective demand.’ An effective demand is that of a person who has got the money to pay for what he or she wants. On these strictly economic lines, hundreds of millions have starved and most people still go hungry.

There is no longer any need for material scarcity whatever. This reverses all the basic law of economics — economics was always described as the science of scarcity and it was right to do so, because before there was sufficient knowledge, there was real scarcity. Now, all scarcity — and this is really the most important thing — all scarcity, all felt need in the world, is henceforth due to human interference, human stupidity and human greed. The means are there, the knowledge is there, and what is needed is the will to apply it. The difficulty is a human difficulty and not a material difficulty.

The Socialist Party seeks a new society from which want and poverty and war have been abolished. No-where does the ruling class offer the people a way out of the nightmare of suffering that has been imposed upon it. No-where can they offer a way out.

But there is a way out. There is a way out by freeing all those who are in chains. The Socialist Party is a political organization that stands irreconcilably opposed to capitalism and works for the establishment of world socialism. We are here to prepare for the coming socialist revolution to rid this world of the capitalist system

Capitalism means profits come first.

The working class, like the capitalist class it seeks to overthrow, is an international class, bound by a common global exploitation and the task of winning liberation through socialism. A truly socialist transformation of society cannot occur in any single country only worldwide socialism, the product of revolutions in many single countries, can insure a humane civilisation freed of racism, sexism and nationalism. We support the revolution to transform it into one world socialist society

Down through the ages mankind has been inspired with the vision of a world free of war and strife, without national rivalries, without racial and national conflicts. For the Socialist Party it is not nationality nor race but principles which is its highest aim of political conduct. Nationalist and patriotic sentiment is our enemy. Our solidarity is based on the principle of class and not on race or territory. Our internationalism compels the Socialist Party to constantly oppose national or racial prejudice. The Socialist Party neither seeks to retain  existing nationalities nor to constitute new ones, because by becoming free it will abolish classes: the world will be its homeland. The socialist revolution, which will put an end to capitalism, must be international. Therefore, the workers must not think so much of their country as of their solidarity with the workers of all countries. The common interests of the propertyless class of wage-workers whose historic mission is to abolish private property at its source, the means of production, transcends all national boundaries and differences. The necessity for a world organization of society arises today out of the reality of everyday conditions. Modern means of communication and transportation have bridged the vast distances and linked the peoples of the entire planet into a close and intimate community. The universality of productive forces and technology is breaking down the differences between advanced and backward countries. The national state, always an artificial barrier against which clashed the productive forces and world division of labour, is now a total anachronism producing only reaction and barbarism.

Forget the SNP - It is the SPGB people need

So the results are in. The UK remains under the grip of the Tories and Boris Johnson. While Scotland once again has the Scottish National Party as the overwhelming majority party. 

The SNP is the party of a certain segment of the Scottish capitalist class. The SNP has gone out of the way to reassure the business community, including the transnational corporations, that they have nothing to fear because an independent Scotland would not threaten their interests. There can be no question that the SNP will act to protect the interests of the capitalist class, even though this means defending the interests of huge transnational corporations based outside of Scotland. The SNP has been skilful in presenting one face to the people and a very different one to the corporations. To the former the SNP claim to be social democrats who believed in greater equality and to the latter, the SNP stands for a strong economy and continued growth. The SNP leaders support a continuation of capitalist exploitation in an independent Scotland. This was summed up in their  proposal to bind the trade unions into ‘partnership’ . In practice, this means accepting attacks on their wages and working conditions for the so-called “national interest”. The SNP has "tacked leftwards" in rhetoric, though not at all in policy implementation. The SNP seek to be masters in its own house. The SNP seek to make maximum use of the state to foster the development of the Scottish capitalist class. Voting for nationalist parties simply helps to confuse and divide an already confused and divided British working class even more. Scottish workers should not be fooled by sugar-coated patriotism used by the bosses to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

Nationalism abandons notions of workers solidarity and seeks an outcome that necessitates the dividing of workers, denying any role for English or Welsh trade union activists. The history of the British labour movement is the history of the intertwined fates of the Scottish, English, and Welsh working class, for example, the legendary Keir Hardie was an MP for a London and then for a Welsh constituency. The links between Scottish, English and Welsh working people have forged through common struggles and shared experiences a potentially powerful political force. Rising support for nationalism means Scottish workers are turning their back on class unity and joint struggle with their brothers and sisters south of the border, and strengthening reformist illusions that hope lies in a new constitution and a sovereign Edinburgh parliament.

The left nationalists urge Scottish workers to reject this historic solidarity with their English and Welsh fellow-workers, on the grounds that it is impossible to achieve progress at a British level; only in Scotland. But they are wrong if they think that a more radical, more socialistic agenda will emerge in an independent Scotland. The new Scottish state would find its policies constrained exactly the same sort of undemocratic, technocratic, neo-liberal rules of globaliSation that left nationalists stringently oppose. As with the formation of the Irish Republic, the political landscape will be dominated not by a consciousness of class but of “national interest”.

A new Scottish state would have an overwhelming incentive, like Ireland, to cut business taxation to gain a competitive advantage over its larger neighbour and would actively discourage collective co-ordinated action by workers across all of the nations of the United Kingdom. Scottish English and Welsh workers do not respond to an abstract appeal for “international solidarity”, they don’t need one, they act out of their already existing unity. The fact is that we live in a single state with a single economy and trade unions have created an organic unity with identical interests and a common consciousness. Independence will tear the fabric of unity apart. In Britain a division of the working class along national lines would be a huge step backwards for the workers movement, even from the weakened state it is currently in.  For though class struggle is at a very low level, those struggles that have taken place, including in Scotland, have arisen out of nationwide disputes.  The creation of an independent Scotland would break that unity and make the task of advancing the workers movement more difficult.

 

For too long, the left nationalists has accepted the orthodoxy that there exists a “right to national self-determination”, and that we should support any struggle to that end. At first hearing, the very sound of a “struggle for national self-determination” suggests that it is democratic and progressive. To throw off the yoke of imperialism, to fight the oppressive occupiers and the foreign corporations. The Left is wrong, and that the damage caused by this mistaken idea is second only to that caused by the corruption to the socialist cause from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

 

SCOTLAND NEEDS SOCIALISM

Socialism Is About Self-Emancipation

The idea of socialism is very simple. A small minority of rich people exploit the poor people who produced the wealth of the world. If we, the vast majority, got ourselves organised, we could easily take the wealth and the means to produce it out of the grasp of the rich and into our own hands. Then with rational democratic planning we could ensure a decent comfortable standard of life for all with the major problems of social life resolved. If we tried hard enough, we could set up a new way of living. But sadly ‘socialism’ is nowadays interpreted as little more than another name for bureaucratic state-ownership, with a some social welfare policies added. Meanwhile, the continued existence of capitalism entails ever-increasing misery that eats away at the brain and heart of society. A handful of multi-billionaires control huge multinational corporations while billions of people starve. All this is well known.

Our opponents say repeatedly that socialism seemed a good idea ‘in theory’ while sceptics ask: ‘Who will do the dirty work?’ or ‘If there was plenty of everything for everybody, why should anyone work?’ Our answer, of course, is under present conditions, people were understandably selfish and competitive, driven to fight each other for scarce means to live, once provided with a decent way of life, they would respond accordingly. Human nature is not a constant and it can change.

Marx conceives of communism (or socialism – for him, the words are interchangeable) as ‘a free association of producers’, a ‘truly human society’, where ‘humanity’ means the process of free social creation and self-creation, ‘the free development of individualities’.

Marx worked to demonstrate that living humanly, in a manner ‘worthy of and appropriate to our human nature’ (Capital, Vol. 3), would mean a free association of human individuals, an association in which ‘the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of all’ (Communist Manifesto). He shows that individuals are ‘alienated’, dominated by the relations between them which they themselves have made. A truly human way of life is incompatible with private property, wage-labour, money and the state, but is actually in accord with nature, and the way that humanity, at whose heart lies free, creative, social activity, emerged from the blind activity of nature. Today, we treat each other and ourselves, not as free beings but as if we were things - objects. Wherever labour-power is bought and sold, what is already implied by the simple exchange of commodities for one another comes into the open: individual humans are treating each other and themselves as if they were objects. We cut ourselves off from understanding human freedom.

The socialist revolution does not just imply a change of regime, or a new economic system, but ‘the alteration of humans on a mass scale’ through their own conscious activity. Socialism means releasing human potential in a community of freely-developing individuals. This movement transcends private property. What belongs to me cannot belong to you. The products of social labour become attached to particular individuals, who often have played no part in their creation. The proletariat, the producers of wealth, who are oppressed and exploited, against the power of capital which they themselves create, would emancipate humanity as a whole.

Capitalism promises the people of the world not amelioration of conditions but austerity, oppression, dictatorship and perhaps destruction of mankind by climatic armageddon or nuclear annihilation. Only through an irreconcilable struggle against capitalism and the establishment of socialism, will the people of the world find the full freedom, equality and democracy for which they aspire. Human society, when we get it, will be a free association of social individuals, a true democracy

NO TO PSEUDO-SOLUTIONS

 Neither Marx nor Engels ever drew any blueprints of the society of the future. At most they simply outlined in broad brush-strokes certain general features of socialism. They assumed, expressly or implicitly, that economic phenomena which they saw as being peculiar to capitalism would vanish with capitalism or would not survive into the age of socialism. Wages, profit and rent represented such social relationships, peculiar to capitalism and unthinkable in socialism. The same was true of the modern division of labour, especially the separation of brain work from manual labour.

The image of a future society held by Marx and Engels was a free association of completely free men and women, where no separation between ‘private and common interest’ existed: a society where ‘everyone could give himself a complete education in whatever domain he fancied’. For ‘man’s activity becomes an adverse force which subjugates him, instead of his being its master’ when there is ‘a division of labour’; everyone must then have a profession, that is a ‘determined, exclusive sphere of activity’ he has not chosen and in which ‘he is forced to remain if he does not want to lose his means of existence’. In their society, on the contrary, a person would be given ‘the possibility to do this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to go fishing in the afternoon, to do cattle breeding in the evening, to criticise after dinner’, as he or he chose.

To most reform-minded leftists these  views of the future have always seemed either too unreal or too remote to be taken very seriously. The reformists have tried to find a compromise transitional stage between capitalism and socialism. They imagined socialism as a “re-modelled” capitalism rather than being abolished.

In a socialist world we would work, but work would take on a new meaning. It would not be synonymous with employment, which is merely the means of getting a living wage, but since it would aim at the full satisfaction of people’s needs, it would be also a way of expressing and developing ourselves to the fullest extent. True we would work to live because that is essential in any society, but we would also live to work. We should think that monotony and frustration would be well-nigh impossible under such conditions, not least of all because the heavy specialisation demanded by capitalism would disappear. And we won’t need any psychologists to try and teach us how to kid ourselves we’re happy when we’re anything but.

The establishment of socialism is prevented because the majority of the world's population do not want it: at every election they vote overwhelmingly to continue running society in the interests of the capitalist class. This is done through the State machine—the armed and police forces, judiciary system and so on. which are all controlled by Parliament. Any attempt to bypass this State machine is doomed to failure. Socialism can only be brought into being when the working class understand it and want it and express themselves by sending their delegates to the seats of control over the State machine to carry through the formal process of liquidating capitalism. This will not involve the use of soldiers and policemen to impose Socialism upon an unwilling population—indeed, when Socialism is established, the State and all its oppressive instruments will cease to exist. This is the meaning of the phrase “. . . converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation . . ." in Clause 6 of our Declaration of Principles. There is no alternative to waiting for the people to understand but the day of enlightenment can be brought nearer if organisations like the Trotskyists and Leninists stop spreading confusion. Socialism has one meaning and one meaning only. Socialism means, and can mean, nothing less, that the community is to take all the means of production into its own hands, and that private enterprise and private property is to come to an end. That is socialism and nothing else is socialism.

  Social Reform is when the State, based on private enterprise and based on private property—recognises that the result can only be obtained by respecting private property and encouraging private enterprise, asks men to contribute towards great national, social and public objects. That is social reform.