For Industrial Freedom

We are living under a political and economic system which is increasingly exposed as the enemy of humanity. It has vast productive potential, but yet only means poverty and oppression for most people. While it produces a food surplus it brings starvation. It imposes draconian austerity cuts in living standards on the already poor  simply to serve the interests of the capitalist class and create still greater profits for it. 

Capitalism is responsible for the destruction of the environment. The profit motive is incompatible with safeguarding the world’s resources. So long as it is profitable, environmental destruction is perfectly ’logical’ under capitalism. Humanity’s problem is not limited resources but the waste of resources. Its armaments industry monopolises most of the world’s research and development which cynically benefits from a series of destructive wars. The root cause of all this is as always capitalism’s quest to accumulate capital, which takes precedence over any human need. 

Capitalism as a system threatens the future of humanity as such with its plunder of human and natural resources. Capitalism brings nothing but misery and exploitation. It is  an obsolete system, and the all the productive forces and technology it has created will have to be made to benefit humanity as a whole under a new social system. 

Capitalism cannot be reformed. The only solution is to end it and build a new social system. Sustainable world socialism living in harmony with nature is the real alternative to the capitalist exploitative system. Socialism will provide the opportunity for a society planned for the majority rather than for profit, a society in tune with land and nature. Worldwide, a movement for socialism is bound to come. It is more and more apparent that profit is an absurd principle by which to organise the world’s resources. The socialist society of the future will draw its strength from the new organisational forms to administer production and distribution, laying democratic foundations for a new society.

 People should have the right to collectively own and control the planets resources and the Socialist Party strives to ensure they will possess the power to achieve that. Working people built this World, its industries, its farms and its cities. Our planet is rich in natural resources and is capable of satisfying the needs of all its peoples. But for us, the future is less and less certain. Things grow worse every year. All this misery is created so a small clique of very wealthy individuals can continue to fill their pockets. Capitalists get rich by appropriating the fruits of our labour. The bosses get rich, not because they have “taken risks” or “worked harder,” as they would have us believe. The more they keep wages low or raise productivity, the more they can steal from us and the greater their profits. And if the boss thinks he can make more profit somewhere else, he just closes his factory and re-locates. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. A handful of parasites live off the backs of the workers. It is clear that it is the vast majority of the people who carry the burden of capitalism. Working people have only one choice: either submit to this wage slavery or abolish it.

All the material resources for a socialist economy are present in abundance – raw materials, industrial plants, energy enterprises, transportation, agricultural produce. The truth cannot be hidden. The natural resources and the means of production now in the hands of the ruling class , and which are the source of their economic and political power, must be taken from them–and become common property of all. A socialist system established by a politically conscious working class, aroused and made resolute by full knowledge of the truth by freeing themselves, will end the horror of poverty and war forever and liberate the working people of the whole world.

Who owns the North Pole - yet again

NATO Exercise Cold Response 2020 will take place next month when  7,500 American combat troops will travel to Norway to join thousands of soldiers from other NATO countries in a massive mock battle with imagined invading forces from Russia to “conduct multinational joint exercises with a high-intensity combat scenario in demanding winter conditions.”

The melting of the Arctic ice cap and the accelerated exploitation of Arctic resources are lending this area ever greater strategic significance. The region is prized as a source of vital minerals, especially nickel, iron ore, and phosphates, this remote area is now the center of extensive oil and natural gas extraction. With temperatures rising in the Arctic twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet and sea ice retreating ever farther north every year, offshore fossil-fuel exploration has become increasingly viable. As a result, large reserves of oil and natural gas — the very fuels whose combustion is responsible for those rising temperatures — have been discovered beneath the Barents Sea and both countries are seeking to exploit those deposits. Norway has taken the lead, establishing at Hammerfest in Finnmark the world’s first plant above the Arctic Circle to export liquified natural gas.

 In a similar fashion, Russia has initiated efforts to exploit the mammoth Shtokman gas field in its sector of the Barents Sea, though it has yet to bring such plans to fruition. For Russia, even more significant oil and gas prospects lie further east in the Kara and Pechora Seas and on the Yamal Peninsula, a slender extension of Siberia. Its energy companies have, in fact, already begun producing oil at the Prirazlomnoye field in the Pechora Sea and the Novoportovskoye field on that peninsula (and natural gas there as well). Such fields hold great promise for Russia, which exhibits all the characteristics of a petro-state, but there’s one huge problem: the only practical way to get that output to market is via specially-designed icebreaker-tankers sent through the Barents Sea past northern Norway. he exploitation of Arctic oil and gas resources and their transport to markets in Europe and Asia has become a major economic priority for Moscow. It requires assured access to the Atlantic Ocean via the Barents Sea and Norway’s offshore waters. Think of that waterway as vital to Russia’s energy economy in the way the Strait of Hormuz, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean, is to the Saudis and other regional fossil-fuel producers.

No less than Russia’s giant energy firms, its navy must be able to enter the Atlantic via the Barents Sea and northern Norway. Aside from its Baltic and Black Sea ports, accessible to the Atlantic only via passageways easily obstructed by NATO, the sole Russian harbor with unfettered access to the Atlantic Ocean is at Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. Not surprisingly then, that port is also the headquarters for Russia’s Northern Fleet — its most powerful — and the site of numerous air, infantry, missile, and radar bases along with naval shipyards and nuclear reactors. In other words, it’s among the most sensitive military regions in Russia today. Putin has substantially rebuilt that very fleet, which fell into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet Union, equipping it with some of the country’s most advanced warships. In 2018, according to The Military Balance, a publication of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, it already possessed the largest number of modern cruisers and destroyers (10) of any Russian fleet, along with 22 attack submarines and numerous support vessels. Also in the Murmansk area are dozens of advanced MiG fighter planes and a wide assortment of anti-aircraft defense systems. Finally, as 2019 ended, Russian military officials indicated for the first time that they had deployed to the Arctic the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, a weapon capable of hypersonic velocities (more than five times the speed of sound), again presumably to a base in the Murmansk region just 125 miles from Norway’s Finnmark, the site of the upcoming NATO exercise. Eight  nuclear-armed subs are, in fact, assigned to the Northern Fleet, which means about 110 missiles with as many as 500 warheads — the exact numbers remain shrouded in secrecy — are deployed in the Murmansk area.

Exercise Cold Response 2020 must be viewed in the context of all these developments. 

https://countercurrents.org/2020/02/war-in-the-arctic

The movement for a workers’ party

This system of capitalism is set up with one thing in mind – to make the most profits possible for the handful of people who own the big banks and corporations. It is the system under which we, and our parents and grandparents before us, have done all the work. We mined the mines, built the buildings, manufactured all the products: and then receive just enough to live on – if we struggle hard enough for it! On the other hand the small capitalist class builds up huge fortunes off of our labour and do no work themselves, except running all around the world spending the money that we made for them.

The Socialist Party stands for the complete overthrow of the capitalist system, and the establishment of a socialist system. Once it is no longer possible to make a profit from racism, sexism, from bad housing and from the general misery of people, these problems can be quickly solved.

There is only one revolutionary class, only one class capable of leading the struggle for a successful socialist revolution. That class is the working class.

“The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win!”- Marx and Engels.

In order to accomplish the socialist revolution, our class must have a political party. Such a party cannot be formed until men and women want it and join it. The road is long and tortuous, but the future is bright for the people of the world. There are several parties around that call themselves “communist” or “socialist”. These parties all have one thing in common – they all dress themselves up with high-sounding revolutionary Marxist phrases, but underneath they are defenders of capitalism.

 Marxism, “the science of the working class movement,” is of importance to all working people. Marxism cannot be regarded as a system of abstract theories unrelated to real life but as a developed science verified and enriched by the acid test of experience. The economic, philosophical and political theories on which Marxism based and the tactics which have been developed and tested in practice have as their ultimate aim, the realization of the abolition of all forms of exploitation of man, by man, of all forms of oppression and injustice, through the achievement, of a socialist society. 

Marxism holds that the leading force in transforming society from capitalism to socialism is that class which is itself a product of capitalism, the working class or, as Marx more precisely defined it, the proletariat, i.e., wage workers who earn their livelihood through the sale of their labour power and have no other means of existence. By working people is meant all who work for a livelihood and do not exploit the labour of others; a category which includes a large section of the farming population and of the “middle class”.

 Marxism, then, constitutes a “guide to action” for the working class to follow in the struggle to achieve political power and to build socialism. Marxism maintains that the interests of the working class (the proletariat) and the interests of the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) are irreconcilable and that therefore, the interests of the working class can not be served through collaboration or alliance with the capitalists but in opposition to them. From these conflicting interests of the two basic classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, capitalists and workers, arises an antagonism, a struggle, between the two classes: the class struggle. The class struggle is not an invention of the Marxists but something which has manifested its existence in all countries of the world without exception.

 What Marxism does do is recognise the class struggle as the motive force of history, as the means by which society moves forward and achieves higher forms of civilisation. Consequently, the strategy and tactics of Marxism are also the strategy and tactics of the class struggle of the working class. To give direction and guidance to this struggle, which is essentially a political struggle, the working class must of necessity develop its own Marxist political party, apart from and independent of all other political parties. Marxism is the doctrine of the class struggle.