For the Abolition of Capitalism

The Socialist Party makes no claim to finality. It attempts to raise questions and provoke discussion rather than to provide definitive answers to the question of the role which mass  organisations may play in the working class revolution.

In the 19th century Karl Marx referred to workers as the grave-diggers of capitalism.  Now some people are asking whether workers are not more likely to bury the revolution than make it. Working people are bombarded with contradictory contentions as to the present and future roles. Pessimists write off workers as hopeless. They think that they will have to find someone other than workers to make the revolution – or there won’t be one. Competition among workers, sectional and selfish interests, short-term favours and national and racial chauvinism have quite often diverted various groups of workers from a revolutionary role to one that is either passive or reactionary in its effect. A new generation seek to find a new course. Revolutions are made by facing problems, not by denying that they exist. Taking state power is a big job, still in the future. Meanwhile, things must be done to open the way. Workers are still the prime movers and shakers who shape the future.

The Labour Party has always accepted the profit system. They used to believe they could humanise it by social reform legislation. Not any longer. Bitter experience has taught them that where reforms and profits come into conflict, it is reforms that have to give way. The Labour Party fully accepts now that priority has to be given to profits and no longer promises more spending on social reforms. But, to distinguish itself from the Tories, Labour still wants to retain a reforming image. But how? By finding reforms which don’t come into conflict with profits. 

Today, despite all the promises of a better world, working people are once again in the grips of an even more dangerous social, economic and political crisis. Massive world-wide hunger is the legacy of the profit-system which has distorted the social development of the world. For example the resources they waste on war production could end malnutrition around the world. The computer revolution could liberate us from tedious and stressful jobs. Instead it leaves terrifying concentrations of knowledge and control in the hands of private corporations and intensifies job insecurity. It is a political question. What kind of society do we want to create with the most powerful new technologies and artificial intelligence since the industrial revolution? If harnessed to popular administration and planning, automation could help us achieve an era of abundance for all, release us from monotonous toil and enrich our access to information. The socialist option is the only choice. The flaws of capitalism are too basic, the power of the corporations too great, the gap between the compulsions of profit and the needs of people too wide, for anything less to succeed. Half-measures cannot meet the challenge. Government intervention — tinkering with monetary and fiscal policy has proven useless. Welfare state policies cannot correct deep-rooted structural faults. Legislative reforms and regulation, aimed at fixing the system have met with no success. Corporations hold governments hostage through their control of the economy. Capitalism has failed, and so have efforts to reform it. That failure puts the case for socialism on the immediate agenda.  

Under capitalism, labour is a commodity. Workers are used as replaceable parts, extensions of machines—as long as they provide dividends. Employers use their power of ownership to devastate the lives of workers through lay-offs and shut-downs. Our unions, despite all their gallant efforts, are ill-matched to counter management power.

The needs of people, not profit, is the motivation of a socialist society. Socialism means the democratising of all levels and parts of society. We believe in the ability of working people to manage their own productive associations democratically.

The Socialist Party is the party of the dispossessed and oppressed struggling to build a new world. We are a small political party aspiring to become a mass social movement to act in solidarity and support all struggles against the injustices of capitalism, striving for world peace, social equality and environmental sustainability. We can not offer  a blueprint to a better future. But we can become the vehicle for change. We offer an invitation to all working people to join us, as we join them, in our common efforts to eradicate a social system based on exploitation, discrimination, poverty and war. 

The capitalist system must be replaced by genuine social democracy. That is the only hope of humanity.

Mass unemployment is once more already a reality. Labour rights, our whole range of health and social services, are under fierce attack. Civilisation is threatened with destruction from global warming and humanity itself still remains under threat from the nuclear war drive fuelled by international militarism. Never have we stood in greater need of fundamental solutions.

Not content with strip-mining resources, capitalism proceeds to strip-mine humanity and even the source of life, the planet itself. The Socialist Party campaigns for the establishment of a free, equal and humane society. There can be a rational society sharing prosperity and abundance. Our organisation proclaims its determination to build the cooperative commonwealth as an alternative to the grinding poverty, stark injustice and storm-clouds of war that confront us.  We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a society from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated  and in which genuine democratic self-management, based on economic equality, will be possible. Our goal is socialism, a new social system based on common ownership of our resources and industry, cooperation, production for use and genuine democracy. Only socialism can turn the boundless potential of our people and resources to the creation of a world free from tyranny, greed, poverty and exploitation.

Not another referendum

Constitutional reform doesn’t interfere with profit-making. But does give rise to an illusion of change. The SNP’s return to proposals for a Scottish Parliament to be sovereign should be seen as completely irrelevant as far as ordinary people are concerned.  It leaves our lives and the problems the profit system causes completely unchanged. Exploitation through the wages system continues. Unemployment continues. A crumbling health service, a chaotic transport system, a polluted environment, failing schools, rising crime and drug addiction and the general breakdown of society all continue. As far as solving these problems is concerned, Scottish independence is just a useless irrelevancy. Naturally, the nationalists wraps its constitutional reforms up in radical rhetoric. A fully sovereign parliament  would be an extension of democracy, bringing power nearer to the people, so how can the Socialist Party not be in favour of this?

Yes, we are in favour of democracy, and socialism will be a fully democratic society, but full democracy is not possible under capitalism. Supporters of capitalism who talk about “democracy” always mean only political democracy since economic democracy–where people would democratically run the places where they work–is out of the question under capitalism, based as it is on these workplaces being owned and controlled by and for the benefit of a privileged minority.

You can have the most democratic constitution imaginable but this won’t make any difference to the fact that profits have to come before meeting needs under capitalism. The people’s will to have their needs met properly is frustrated all the time by the operation of the economic laws of the capitalist system which no political structure, however democratic, can control.

It is not imperfections in the political decision-making process that’s the problem but the profit system and its economic laws. And the answer is not democratic reform of capitalism’s political structure but the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

As a society based on common instead of class ownership of the means of production, socialism will fulfil the first condition for a genuine democracy. Because it will be a classless society without a privileged wealthy class everyone can have a genuinely equal say in the way things are run. Some will not be more equal than others, as they are under capitalism, because they own more wealth. Socialism will be a society where the laws of profit no longer operate since common ownership and democratic control will allow people to produce to meet their needs instead of for the profit of a few as today.

We are not nationalists – in fact we are implacably opposed to nationalism in whatever form it rears its ugly head – and we see the establishment of an independent Scotland as yet another irrelevant, constitutional reform. One of the last things the world needs at the moment is more states, with their own armed forces and divisive nationalist ideology.

Nationalism is based on the illusion that all people who live in a particular geographical area have a common interest, against people in other areas. Hence the supposed need for a separate state and a separate government to defend this separate interest.

This flies in the face of the facts. All over the world, in all geographical areas, the population is divided into two basic classes, those who own the productive resources and those who don’t and have to work for those who do, and whose interests are antagonistic.

The non-owning class have a common interest, not with the owning class who live in the same area, but with people like themselves wherever they live. The interests of workers who live in Scotland are not opposed to the interests of those who live in England – or France or Germany or Russia or Japan or anywhere else in the world. Nationalists like the SNP who preach the opposite are spreading a divisive poison amongst people who the Socialist Party say should unite to establish a frontier-free world community, based on the world’s resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity, as the only framework within which the social problems which workers wherever they live face today. This is why socialists and nationalists are implacably opposed to each other. We are working in opposite directions. Us to unite workers. Them to divide them.

 In the end the point at issue–a mere constitutional reform which will leave profit-making, exploitation, unemployment and all the other social problems quite untouched–is so irrelevant that it is not worth taking sides.  We don’t see any point in diverting our energies to changing the constitution but we certainly want things to change. We want people to change the economic and social basis of society and establish socialism in place of capitalism. So we’ve nothing in common with them.

The unionists too, are nationalists. Not, of course, Scottish nationalists, but British nationalists, since that is what the unionists are, spreading the poison that it is all the people in the British Isles who have a common interest against people everywhere else. But the Socialist Party is just as much opposed to British nationalism as we are to Scottish or any other nationalism. Just because we are not prepared to back the efforts of Scottish nationalists to break away from the United Kingdom – and vigorously oppose their efforts to split the trade union movement – does not mean that we are unionists. We don’t support the Union. We just put up with it while we get on with our work of convincing people to reject world capitalism in favour of world socialism.

If you want socialism, we urge you to support world socialism and reject both Scottish nationalism and the unionism of British nationalism.

There Is Only One Form Of Equality Worth Fighting For

The first Monday of August is a Civic holiday in Ontario, in honour of Lt.Gov John Graves Simcoe, who, in 1793, passed the British Empire's first anti-slavery bill, 40 years before it was abolished in the rest of the Empire. 

One may celebrate however much one sees fit, or unfit, but nevertheless there is a difference between emancipation and equality. 

Black people are more likely to be treated unjustly than members of other minority, more likely to be suspended or expelled from school, to be carded or questioned by police, to face unemployment rates higher than the national average, earn less money than their fellow workers who are white for the same job and 20 times more likely than whites to be shot dead by police. Yet blacks still demand equality with whites, as if whites have equality with each other. 

What they mean is equality under the law which is the law of the capitalist class which exists to protect their property ownership and which, by its very nature, pits worker against worker. 

There is only one form of equality worth fighting for - a society where all will stand equal in relation to the tools of production and distribution of goods.

S.P.C. Members.

GENOCIDE. Will Not End Till Capitalism Itself Does

Things don't change under capitalism; sure technology improves, but people remain the same.

 In 1945, millions were horrified at the Holocaust, yet it continues. The Chinese government have embarked on a program, or should I say pogram, of persecution of their Muslim population. Between one and two million Muslims have been reportedly imprisoned in hundreds of detention centres, which have been compared to concentration camps. Mass sterilizations, forced abortions, reports of rape and torture, lengthy prison terms and brutal efforts to eliminate their traditional language and religion, are some of the details which have leaked out. 

Since WW2 there have been sixty cases of genocide and it will not end till capitalism itself does.

S.P.C. Members.

House Prices - The New Clearances

In an open letter community figures have warned that rising property prices in the Hebrides, Western Isles and Skye are preventing locals from buying a home.

They described the situation as akin to an "economic clearance" that was threatening the sustainability of the islands. They said young islanders could not compete with offers made by buyers from elsewhere in the UK.

The letter's signatories - which includes crofters, development officers and Gaelic campaigners - said 40% of housing stock on both Tiree in the Inner Hebrides and West Harris in the Western Isles were holiday homes. They pointed to reports of people across the UK looking to relocate to the Highlands and Islands, and having the means to make higher offers than local buyers.

Their letter said: "Part-time residencies do not sustain our communities and we should therefore ensure that houses are bought with the intention of being a primary residency. Inaction will allow this economic clearance to be consolidated in history."

The letter comes after concerns were raised that Gaelic speakers among the islands' communities could vanish within 10 years.

Researchers said daily use of Gaelic was currently too low to sustain it as a community language in the future. The letter's signatories include Pàdruig Morrison, a Uist crofter, researcher and musician and architect and Gaelic campaigner Martin Baillie, from Skye. Uist businesswoman Emma Axelsson and crofter Fiona NicÌosaig have also signed it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-54028339

The ‘educator must first be educated’

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.

 The State had little to do with representative institutions; on the contrary, the State was something through which the will of the ruling class was imposed on the rest of the people. In primitive society there was no State; but when human society became divided into classes, the conflict of interests between the classes made it impossible for the privileged class to maintain its privileges without an armed force directly controlled by it and protecting its interests. Its function is maintaining the existing order, which means the existing class division and class privilege. It is always represented as something above society, something “impartial,” whose only purpose is to “maintain law and order,” but in maintaining law and order it is maintaining the existing system. It comes into operation against any attempt to change the system. It is an apparatus of force, acting in the interests of the ruling class.

 The extension of the vote did not in any way alter this situation. Real power rests with the class which is dominant in the system of production; it maintains its control of the State machine, no matter what happens in the representative institution.

The Socialist Party has always supported democracy. We see its defence as one of the fields of the class struggle. Parliaments of today can serve as instruments for winning concessions and at the same time rousing the workers for the decisive struggle for power to bring the new order of society. Therefore the struggle for parliamentary democracy is not purposeless. It is about as Marx explains, “winning the battle of democracy.” Socialism can and will be attained by only the fullest realisation of democracy. That is what the Socialist Party teach. The Socialist Party does not subscribe to any doctrine called Leninism, Trotskyism or Maoism. When the workers form a majority and are conscious of their importance to society, their voting for the Socialist Party signifies that they have recognised their strength and are determined to make use of it.

The class struggle and the State will continue through history as long as human society remains divided in classes. But when the working class takes power it does so in order to end the class divisions – to bring in a new form of production in which there is no longer any class living on the labour of another class; in other words, to bring about a class-free society, in which all serve society as a whole. There will be no class conflict because there are no classes with separate interests, and therefore there will be no need of a State – an apparatus of force – to protect one set of interests against another. The State will “wither away” – in one sphere after another it will not be required, and such ministries that remain will be for the organisation of production and distributed. As Engels put it: “Government over persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production.”

Marx himself had argued that what enabled socialism (ie workers’ control of production, full political democracy, full equality) was the development of the productive forces to a sufficient degree to provide plenty for all the first time in human history. Without this affluence any attempt to establish socialism must fail because to quote Marx, “without it only want is made general and with want, the struggle for necessities and all the old crap would necessarily be reproduced”.

Socialism has had quite a few self-appointed saviours and messiahs. Socialism from ‘above’ always has an appeal as long as we live under a system of domination, hierarchy and exploitation. When struggles are defeated or when workers are beaten back, the loss of confidence that ensues allows for ‘substitutionism - when organisations or individuals step in claiming to liberate the masses ‘from above’

A myriad of groups and individuals preached their schemes to transform the world. There were also well-meaning attempts at building perfect communities. Robert Owen was a Welsh socialist, who owned a factory in New Lanark.He realised that productivity would increase if his workers were given a share of the profits, leading him to suggest communism as a way by which people could live in cooperative communities. He built his workers schools and planted gardens. The problem was that he believed that all it took to change the world was for caring individuals, with a blueprint for change, to lead by good example. His motto was build the perfect community and the world will follow you. It didn’t quite work out as he had hoped and Owen ended up rejected by Victorian society and building utopias in the USA, which fell apart one by one. The utopian reformers both believed that the masses needed to be ‘educated’ and led by ‘good example’. The mass of people were seen as passive, not as active agents of social change. For all their weaknesses the ‘utopian’ socialists did develop serious critiques of capitalist society, elements of which were very important to the development of socialist ideas.

Marx stated in the third of his Theses on Feuerbach that the ‘educator must first be educated.’ He was then drawn to the understanding that the revolution must be a process of mass self-emancipation. The revolt of the working class is a combination of transformation of the world and the transformation of itself. Revolutionary struggle is necessary, not only to destroy the old order, but for ‘the alteration of men on a mass scale’. This process can be seen again and again in every workers uprising. What differentiates the Socialist Party from the the Left is its focus on self-activity and its criticism of elitism and of all substitutes for the self-activity of the working people.