Thursday, September 03, 2020

Another world is possible. What does this mean? 

Capitalism has not been abolished, but its instability is quite obvious. Nowhere in Marx is there to be found a detailed account of the new social system which was to follow capitalism. Marx wrote no “Utopia”.  However from Marx’s writings  was able to discern and outline the features of the new society and the way in which it would develop. An actual socialist society, like all previous forms of society, would only come into existence on the basis of what already existed before it; that is to say, it would be a society emerging from capitalism. A socialist society is not create out of nothing.  The new society inherits from the old.

The first step in building a socialist society must therefore be to give society the product which it has made; and this means that society as a whole must own the means of production – the factories, mines, machinery, transport, etc., which under capitalism are privately owned. One of the favourite arguments of the anti-socialists used to be that everything will be divided up equally. This has absolutely nothing to do with Marx’s conception of socialism. Wealth is not divided out among the people. The people have everything that is available. Increased production means increasing the quantity of goods available and therefore the quantity taken by the people. Where profit is the motive force, there can be only anarchy in production. In socialist society, where production is not for profit but for use, a plan of production is possible. Is this Utopian? Human beings have no fixed characteristics and outlook, eternally permanent. In primitive tribal society, even in those forms of it which have survived to recent times, the sense of responsibility to the tribe is very great. In later society, after the division of society into classes, the sense of social responsibility was broken down, but still showed itself in the form of the “commons”. But capitalist society is the most extreme disintegration of social responsibility: the system makes “each for oneself” the main principle of life. But even within capitalist society there is what is known as “solidarity” among the workers – the sense of a common interest, a shared responsibility. This is not an idea which someone has thought of and put into the heads of workers: it is an idea which arises out of the material conditions of working-class life, the fact that they get their living in the same way, working and living alongside one another. Of course, the ideas of the dominant class – the competition and rivalry instead of cooperation – tends to infect the working people. The working class are the people without property who in order to live must from lack of alternative sell the use of themselves in the labour-market. To-day we are the vast majority in every country of political and economic importanceThe worker lives by selling the use of his body—the employer lives by buying that use. It lies in the nature of things that the buyer should on instinct struggle to buy cheap and the seller to sell dear. Hence it was a foregone conclusion that the history of the relations between employer and employed—between “capital” and “labour”—should be one of constant enlarging and intensifying conflict between these two interests. A constant battle over the price of the commodity labour-power—over wages, hours, and working conditions—such is the history of the relation of capital and labour once capitalism appears. Single-handed the worker is powerless. As capitalism grows and the boss class draws together into closer and closer union so grows the workers’ need to join together in struggle against the ever magnifying power of the Boss. 

We know what we’re against, but what we are for.  Socialism will be absolutely nothing like the dictatorships in the former Soviet Union, or China, Vietnam and Cuba

The Socialist Party aims at replacing the present capitalist system by socialism, understood broadly as a system where there will be common  ownership of the means of production and distribution. We envisage socialism as a society where material wealth will be in the hands of those who produce it, where the exploitation of man by man will be ended, where production will be used not for private profit, where individual men and women will find the possibilities to develop their abilities. Socialism is a proposal for the reconstruction of social arrangements. The aim of the Socialist Party is to transform the present system of privately owned industry to where the ownership of the industries will be vested in the community and they will be managed by the workers. The capitalists oppress you, exploit you, and when you revolt they use the power of the government against you.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. If there were a general will to establish socialism a way will be found.



Wednesday, September 02, 2020

Another Independence Referendum?

A NEW PASSPORT - A NEW RULING CLASS
Sturgeon on Tuesday pledged to publish draft legislation for a new Scottish independence referendum, including the question and timing of the vote, before the country’s parliamentary election next year.

“Before the end of this parliament, we will publish a draft bill setting out the proposed terms and timing of an independence referendum as well as the proposed question that people will be asked in that referendum,” Sturgeon said.

Next year’s election to the devolved parliament is expected to provide a fresh platform for the Scottish National Party to press for a new referendum. The nationalists are expected to win a majority and aim to use that mandate to push Johnson to grant a fresh vote on the issue. However, it is ultimately up to the British parliament to decide whether Scotland can hold another referendum, and Johnson’s Conservative government in London has repeatedly said it will reject any demand for a fresh vote.

The position of the Socialist Party remains unchanged from the previous referendum in 2014. A constitutional re-arrangement of the British state is not the business of the Scottish working people. It does not advance the interests of the Scottish working class.  The Socialist Party remains committed to the end of all nations rather than the creation of new ones.

Capitalist Despotism or Socialist Liberty


The left wing has a lot of problems such as understanding how the system of capitalism operates. It is basically an economic system where such terms as profits, wages, exploitation, refer to economic phenomena. 

Capitalist economics, the economics from the business and commerce point of view, is the economics that is taught in the schools and universities. It is the economics that is used by the media and government officials for propaganda purposes, etc. Consequently, business economics is the only one that the average person comes in contact with. Very few are familiar with Marxist economics. Since people are unfamiliar with socialist economics, they draw on the only economic information they are familiar with– the capitalist economic analysis, fraudulent ideas are smuggled into daily discourse by academic theoreticians who do not have the best of intentions.

In a capitalist society, however, where all the lands and the natural resources of the earth, and all the instruments of production and distribution (railroads, mines, factories, etc.) are already privately owned and controlled, Labour, the world’s true magic-maker, is shut off from the productive processes and from the power of producing a living, or of earning a living, except upon the terms laid down by the capitalist class.

This is true in spite of the fact that all the capital in all the world is incapable of producing one loaf of bread, one pair of shoes, one house, one suit of clothes. Not one wheel would ever turn productively, not one machine would ever operate, not one train would ever move without the hands and brains of labour.

Capital is utterly incapable of increasing itself. Unless he is able to filch the swag from some other capitalist who has exploited labour, the only way a capitalist may force his capital to multiply and bear the fruit of still more capital, is by the employment of labor. Without the hands and brains of labor, capital would remain forever stationary. 

Capitalism brought an increasingly greater concentration of industrial production in factories and mills, with ownership concentrated in the hands of a small class of capitalists. Stripped of any means of survival other than the sale of their labour power; workers were forced to compete against each other, thereby enabling profit-hungry capitalists to drive down wages and force long hours and inhuman conditions on the masses of people. In this situation of wage-slavery, workers are bound to resist. 

What has the rule of capitalist autocrats brought to us?

In a world, fertile enough to feed everybody, by their private ownership, and anarchistic control, they have given us  underfed children, constant want, everlasting insecurity against hunger for the majority of the people.

The rule of capitalist anarchy has given us increasing unemployment and closed factories despite a desperate need for the factory products. Capitalist rule has brought poverty and despair to the productive many, and idleness and power to the unproductive few. It has filled our prisons with those who have been forced down into “crime” through poverty and despair.

There Is Only One Real Solution – Socialism

Industrial democracy means the rule of the workers as opposed to what we have known all our lives-the rule of autocracy, or the rule of the capitalist few. Nothing has ever been done for the working class until the workers began to exercise power to force these things. Nobody but yourselves is going to do anything for you now. You must organise politically, and carry on the work of education as you have never done before. And what you want done you will have to do yourselves.

There is only one thing that will cure the world of wars, of poverty, of unemployment, insecurity and parasitism, and that is socialism, where social planning and system shall take the place of the capitalist anarchy that has brought the foundations of the social structures tumbling down in chaos about us. In socialism, there will be no wages at all. There will be no prices or market values in the sense of goods obtainable only on the basis of paying for them. Goods are produced for the use of men and women and NOT for the profits which they bring in to bosses. Labour power is no longer regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is not purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. Men and women, inside socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs and for their mutual development. People will no longer be fettered by the necessity of working not only for their own material maintenance, but for the bosses’ even more material profits, will be freed to live more fully. The time that each must work will be small, yet the goods produced for all to enjoy will be plentiful. Socialism is the ONLY answer.

Tuesday, September 01, 2020

For a higher civilisation and a better world

In Marxist analysis, capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers through wage labour. Capitalism, as Karl Marx pointed out long ago, separated the producer from his or her tools. The owner of the tools (factories, machinery, transport, etc.) buys labour power (or hires workers, as we would say) to operate them. The more they produce, the higher his profit. When it is not profitable to produce, he lays off the workers. Under capitalism, labour is never paid enough to buy back all that is produced. If it were, the capitalist would not retain a margin of profit, since it is the difference between what is paid to labor and what the capitalist receives for his products that determines his profit.

Once the workers have introduced a socialist system of production, then more production will mean more for everybody. The more we produce, the more we would eat. The more backlog of products we would have, the less we would work until we had used them up. This will be so because socialism will wipe out the distinction between the owners of the machine and the users of the machine. The working class will become the owners AND operators. The separation between the worker and the means of production introduced by capitalism will be ended by socialism. Until such a socialist system prevails, wage labor will remain a commodity to be bought on the market by capital. The wages of labor will continue to be determined by the cost of living. It must therefore be the aim of labor to fight for higher wage rates and a shorter work week and let the capitalists worry about production. As with any commodity, the value of labor power is based on the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the worker’s maintenance and reproduction. This cost must be covered by the workers’ wage. Thus the wage is not an individual payment; it also has to maintain all family members who do not work. This value is not just the bare minimum needed for physical survival. To repeat, then, productive labor under capitalism is labor that produces surplus-value for a capitalist. To produce surplus-value, workers must sell their labor-power to a capitalist.

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 luxury and ease at the expense of overwork, want, and insecurity for the majority. This is today a practicable idea. So great have science and technology increased our productive capacity that an abundance of all the good things of life for the whole population could be produced without subjecting any person to drudgery or exhausting toil. The continued existence of poverty  can be overcome.

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, be changed. Property institutions are the creatures of law. By law they have been changed in ages past, and by law they can and must be changed in the years to come.

The Socialist Party does not condemn personal possessions. It condemns the private ownership of the socially necessary means of production, under which the workers are employed only on such terms as assure and unearned income to the owners and are thrown into unemployment whenever the owners cannot profit by their labour. Only by the common 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. The interest of the wage-working class demands this change.
The choice before us is either to permit the uncontrolled development of capitalism to concentrate all power further into the hands of an oligarchy  and reduce working people to abject servitude, or to assert the right and duty of the people to control and remodel its economic life.

The first principle of the Socialist Party is the wholehearted dedication to democracy. No dictatorship, whatever its avowed purpose, can be trusted to bring liberty, plenty, and peace. The institutions of political democracy must be defended. The appeal to insurrection  must be repudiated. It is unnecessary and unjustifiable in any country where the orderly and peaceful methods of democracy are available,
In the name of freedom, in the name of honesty, in the name of civilisation itself, for the good of those now alive and of the future generations yet unborn, we call upon the workers of the  world to join us in winning the good new world which is within our reach.

Socialist Standard No. 1393 September 2020