A World for All

 

A socialist society will be an open and informed society. In socialism it will be a routine to constantly inform people about the needs and problems in the various areas of human life worldwide. In the socialist system it is the citizens and their democratic and transparent institutions that will constantly provide information of the economic, social and human needs, as well as of the scientific and technical development of the different sectors. Given the present technology, the organisation of such information interchange and of everyone’s constant access to it is feasible even right now. Socialist society will be a society in which people enjoy a much higher level of scientific education than today. Access to learning and participation in scientific activity is not a privilege of a particular social group; it is everyone’s elementary right. Just as once basic literacy of reading and writing was the privilege of a few we shall see computer literacy even in its relatively complex and specialised applications accessible to all.

The realisation of socialism is the result of class struggle, and this struggle is as much capable of victory as it is vulnerable to defeat. Not only is socialism a possibility but also capitalist barbarism. The Socialist Party is however  optimistic about the future.  Our goals are clear and the process of the social revolution itself will provide the practical forms of their realisation. To clarify the precise meaning of socialist aims, and to show the feasibility of their realization, it must be established, for instance, that the abolition of private ownership does not mean the introduction of state ownership, and that the organization of people’s collective control over means of production is practical without waged labour power as a commodity.

Socialism is a politics that cares about the future, about our species, about our planet. What cannot be done is to prepare a detailed blueprint of production and administration in a socialist society. Our job is not to make models and utopias, but to show in what ways socialist society differs from the existing one. For example, we show the process of the withering away of the state following a workers’ revolution by explaining the material basis of the state in class society and its superfluousness as a political institution in a class-free society, and not by issuing a programme in which the party has elaborated the step-by-step dismantling of state institutions and departments.

Capitalism is not just an economic system, but also an ideological and cultural system that functions as a powerful indoctrination force. displayed daily in the rise of the corporate-controlled media that has accelerated a culture of distraction. We live in a world that appears to have descended into Dante’s version of hell, an authoritarian nightmare of uncertainty, apprehensions, anxieties, the fearmongering nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment and bigotry  and the possibility of a civilisation abyss. The pandemic terror of rising infections, body counts and the daily risk of contamination, sickness and death cannot be separated from a broader plague of capitalism and relentlessly subjugation of workers, the elderly, the homeless, the poor, children, people of color, subjecting them to lives of despair, precarity, danger and death. The inequality, compulsory austerity, defunding of public health systems under capitalism are finally being acknowledged as the fundamental super-spreader behind the current pandemic. Capitalism cannot protect and maintain public health and safety because it pursues profits at the expense of more urgent social needs and values. This pandemic is now bringing that truth home to working people. All major political parties function as cheerleaders for capitalism under all circumstances.

 Capitalism has produced an age of uncertainty, fragmentation, despair and a dire foreboding about the future. Hope and dreams have been replaced by fear and dread. Capitalism is a toxic system that destroys lives. COVID-19 has exposed the cult of capitalism. Amid the corpses produced by capitalism and coronavirus, there are emerging signs of hope another deep longing for a collective movement of resistance to the capitalist system, a search of a new economy that benefits us all and not just a wealthy financial elite. It is a movement that refuses to accept consumerism, greed and self-interest that places profit over people, a movement attempting to reclaim a collective political vision for a more compassionate, equitable, just and inclusive society. Central to the task is the necessity to break through the corrosive belief that “there is no alternative.” We need to act en masse to bring about the end of capitalism. If a new understanding of politics and social and economic justice and equality is to be born, it is crucial to wage a war of ideas against those of the old order. 

For revolution to be re-born, it needs to resurrect the vision of socialism, re-think the politics of protest, to re-imagine the future. The issue is to breathe life again into the working class militancy.  

Freed from class chains

 The possibility of a catastrophic civilisation collapse exists if capitalism continues and we ignore a more radical and democratic vision of organizing production to integrate ecological knowledge and principles. Socialism will be the society of true freedom. We emphatically maintain that socialism should be identified with abolition of wage-labour and creation of economic equality between people. This clearly distinguishes us from all those currents who identify socialism with planned state economy or with redistribution of wealth, etc. We maintain that socialism requires the abolition of wage-slavery and the transformation of the means of production, into the common property of society. 

That the Soviet Union was not socialist was always clear to a  those who called themselves socialist. This was even admitted by various capitalist thinkers and Soviet analysts. Th identification of the Soviet Union with Marxism and socialism was and is a propaganda weapon against Marxism and genuine socialism. They say socialism has been defeated so that they may defeat it; that socialism has ended, so that they may end it. The Soviet Union and its satellite states did not by any criterion – economic, political, administrative or ideological – represent socialism. Instead of common ownership of means of production, state ownership of means of production was adopted. Waged employment, money, exchange value, and the separation of the producing class from control of means of production, all remained. As Marxists stress, a workers’ revolution is doomed to defeat unless it carries out a social revolution in society’s economic basis. Without this economic revolution, every political victory eventually ends in failure. Socialist revolution is not divisible; it must win in its totality. It must really be a revolution and not reforms in the existing system. The basis of this revolution is the abolition of the system of wage labour and the turning of means of production and distribution into common ownership, a society worthy of free human beings. This was never done in the Soviet Union.

Everyone knows that today’s society all comes down to profits and labour productivity. At the back of their mind, everybody knows what the state stands for, what the police and the army have been built for. All know that there is an incessant conflict going on within society between worker and capitalist, the employee and the employer; that any trace of freedom and humanity has come to be linked to the degree of power of worker and working-class organisation, against capitalist business and their parties and states. People naturally expect labour organisations to be against exploitation and discrimination, to stand for social welfare, and so on. Workers identify with freedom and welfare. Therefore, nationalists, reformists, and a whole host of tendencies had turned socialism into a medium through which to express their grievances. When socialism was in fashion, they became socialists. The term Marxist-Leninist, just like much other Marxist terminology became a word to express non-socialist ideas and interests. Marx was a free-thinking and egalitarian revolutionary. Marxism is represented neither in the ideas and actions of the ruling parties in the Soviet Union, China and Albania. All were built on a complete falsification of Marx and his ideas. Marx was an enthusiastic representative of equality, freedom and humanity. You can’t, with any justification whatsoever, lay dictatorship, bureaucracy, national persecution, and food queues at door of Karl Marx. For anyone who regards socialism not as an ornamental ideal but as an urgent and practical cause, who is concerned about the actual realisation of socialism and workers’ revolution, Marx will always be, as a political thinker and a rich source of learning and inspiration. Marxists intend to build a system which is based on this economic justice. Marxists regard economic growth, technological development of the productive capacities, and the raising of the level of consumption, welfare and leisure of human society as absolutely vital. Re-division of scarcity and sharing of austerity is not our solution. Socialism is an economy for development of people’s abilities, an economy of the fulfilment of everyone’s material and intellectual needs.

 

This  much more efficient economic system for humanity has been possible all throughout the last century. If humanity is not now living under socialist relations this is because the capitalist system has been defending itself tooth and nail, by killing and torture, by intimidation and deception. The claim that capitalism is the best economic system is the biggest lie in human history. This system is drenched in blood. While hundreds of millions of people have no home, no health care, no education, no happiness, and even no food, the means to produce and satisfy these needs are available and lie idle. Tens of millions of people able to employ these means of production and end the shortages have been kept out of work. We don’t need to take examples from the undeveloped world. In the United States  millions of people exist below the poverty line, not covered by medical insurance, with homelessness rife from New York to Los Angeles. All over the world prostitution is a way of earning a living. Drugs production and trafficking is a respectable way of amassing wealth. In Britain they have been so good as to keep the subways open at night so that the homeless would not perish from cold. Economically, this society cannot stand on its two feet without dehumanising the majority of the people of the earth and without ignoring their basic needs.

 

The basis of this society is that a majority, must in order to live in a world it has been born into sell its physical and intellectual powers to a minority. It is a society where the production of people’s necessities has been tied to the profitability of capital. And this is the root of all these inequalities and deprivations. Wage labour, division of society into worker and capitalist, into wage-earner and wage-giver, degradation of work from being a productive and creative activity to a ‘job’, to a way of earning a living, are in themselves verdicts of the bankruptcy of this system.

 

Whoever calls the existing economic system the best and most feasible is admitting to its savagery. The Socialist Party proclaims possibility of a superior economic and social system and has even sketched its outlines: a society based on people’s complete equality and freedom, a society based on collective creative work to satisfy human needs, a society in which means of production belong to people collectively. A world community without classes, without discrimination, without countries and without states has long been feasible. The slogan `from each according to ability, to each according to need’ is entirely based on the recognition and guaranteeing of the right of every person to determine his or her position in society.

 Socialism is a society in which human beings gain control over our lives, are freed from the chains of blind economic laws. This liberation of entire society from the blind economic laws is the condition of emancipation of the individual and the restoration of humanity and human specificity of every individual. The basis of socialism is the human being – both collectively and as an individually. Socialism is the movement to restore mankind’s conscious will, a movement for freeing human beings from economic necessity and enslavement in pre-determined production moulds. It is a movement for abolishing classes and people’s classification. This is the essential condition for the growth of the individual.

Protecting the Peatlands

 Peatlands are among the greatest stores of carbon, trapping billions of tonnes in places as remote as Kamchatka and Sakhalin in Russia, the Falkland islands and Tierra del Fuego.

Ecologists estimate that while peatlands cover only 3% of the Earth’s land surface, they hold 30% of the carbon stored on land. 

They calculate the Flow Country’s peatlands,  an area of about 1,400 sq km of the most pristine peatland in Caithness and Sutherland, are up to 15 metres deep after more than 10,000 years of plant deposition and expansion, alone hold 400m tonnes of carbon – roughly twice the total carbon content of all the woodlands and forest in the UK.

Prof Des Thompson, NatureScot’s principal science adviser, explained, “It’s the single largest peat deposit in the world and therefore it’s the single largest carbon repository in the world; it’s the world’s largest in terms of one block, one expanse of blanket bog. If they are intact and functioning well, they are absolute life savers. But where they are degraded and pouring out carbon, an absolute liability,” Thompson said. “It’s so vital to restore them, to preserve our carbon balance.”

Peatlands are under sustained threat from climate change, which is warming the chilly and moist northern and southern latitudes where peatlands thrive, and also by agriculture, commercial forestry and industrial expansion. They release carbon as they dry out, fragment and degrade. On contact with air, the dry particles oxidise into carbon dioxide. In central Scotland, 60% are degraded; across the Pennines of England, 85% are damaged; on Exmoor it is 90% and in Wales 50%. Up to 85% of Ireland’s substantial peatlands in Kerry, Wicklow, Donegal and Connemara, strip-mined to fuel power stations and supply garden centres, are degraded.

In the UK, aggressive action funded by previous governments to dry out peat moorland has contributed to flooding of large towns and cities. So, too, has significant forestation of peatlands, subsidised by successive governments and previously used as tax-avoidance investments.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which owns 22,000 hectares of the Flow Country. The RSPB has felled about 1,000 hectares of forestry from its land. The RSPB plans to remove all the forestry on its reserve and the miles of road cut through the peat for forestry machinery.

 “It was inappropriate planting: it shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” said Darrell Stevens, the reserve manager.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/13/world-heritage-status-for-scottish-peat-bogs-could-help-uk-hit-net-zero-goals

A Party with Vision

It is impossible to provide more than a basic picture on how we will achieve socialism and how a socialist society will be run. This system of capitalism is running humanity into the ground. For those of us who seek a radical way forward out of the misery and madness of capitalism, a tremendous leap will be taken to give birth to the new society. The Socialist Party possesses a vision of a new economy, democratically structured to answer to people’s needs instead of the profit imperative. If you like that idea, then welcome to the movement for socialism. The Socialist Party is made up of those working men and women who have transcended nationalist inter-capitalist rivalry by posing the alternative of a genuinely world socialist community without money, wages, classes, states or frontiers. Our hope for socialism is liberty, equality, fraternity for all mankind in this and every land, a time radiant with new ideals, new hopes of true democracy.

 Capitalist society is laid upon a foundation of individualism, conquest and exploitation, with a total disregard of the good of the whole. A society built upon such wrong basic principles is bound to hold back the development of all men and women because it tends to divert people’s energies into useless channels. The result is a false standard of values love of gain, cunning and selfishness — are fostered. But the people — the great "common herd" — are finding out what is wrong with the social, political and economical structure of the system of which they are a part.

The Socialist Party has a vision of a very different kind of world. Its members spend their lives fighting against the pain that capitalism inflicts on us and on our people–and we know that as long as this system exists, it will oppress and exploit and wage war. Unless we succeed in finding a way to share that understanding and offer real alternatives to people, our politics have no effect in the real world. In the electoral arena the Left makes the socialist vision secondary to the election of liberal or progressive politicians and the oppressed and exploited people never hear what we have to say about the system that controls our world. Because no matter how “liberal” the politician may be, we never hear any of them talk about ending capitalism. Capitalists rule through a combination of illusion, force and accommodation. And the majority of people have been taught to defend the interests of their enemies, to identify with them–and to vote for them. And most people mark the right to vote for their oppressor as a symbol of their freedom. Without belief in the authority and righteousness of capitalism, the stranglehold of the ruling class on society’s belief systems would be in jeopardy. It is our job as socialists to challenge those structures and expose the illusions that they create–those illusions that keep our masters strong, and the people weak.

Capitalists rule through the illusion of choice. It maintains its power through a two-party system. There are differences between those two parties.

The Tories and the Labour Party (or the Democrats and the Republicans) are not exactly alike, but they’re not exactly different either. Both are instruments of the employing, owning class; they differ in their tactics, not in their allegiance to capitalism. They exist as a system–they work in tandem–and both have their roles to play.

The role of the Tories (or Republican Party) –in working class and oppressed communities–is to be the greater of the two evils. The role of the Labour Party (or the Democrats) is to be the lesser of two evils, to seduce the people with the promise of hope. And just sometimes, when the power of the people’s organisations outside of the political structure is strong , and on the conditions of the economy, the lesser evil actually doles out some relief. Just enough to divide our ranks, defuse our anger and co-opt the activists, just enough to maintain the illusion that they are serving us. It derails attempts toward independent politics, and locks us into “dependent” politics. The belief that the Labour Party (and the Democratic Party) is, or can be, a party of the people is the chief obstacle to the formation of an independent political vehicle. The two party system is a good system, which works for the people who invented it. It’s been working for them for quite some time now. The “good cop-bad cop” dance routine has convinced some of the people that some politicians can be pressured to protect our interests.

It does not help the people to reject capitalism (because they don’t understand that those horrors are the product of capitalism)–it has just helped some to reject the right-wing, and to run instead (if they are still interested in running anywhere) into the open arms of the left-wing. The Socialists understand how the game is played. We know the Labour Party and the Democratic Party are not a parties of the people. We know their job is to put a human face on corporate rule and to legitimise capitalist power. Our goal is the transformation of society. We are revolutionaries. Our job is to show that their rule is illegitimate. Our job is to show that capitalism’s hunger for profit and power is responsible for wars throughout the world, for the poisoning of the planet, the waging of class war against the working people of the world. Our job is to tell the truth about the system we live in–to tell it in a way that is understandable, that helps to explain the life experience of the people we work with. That is hard to do if we encourage people to vote for the lesser evil. It is hard to communicate our vision when we are asking people to endorse the boss class. In the struggle for people’s hearts and minds, it is not our job to validate the proponents of the capitalist system. It is not our job to tell people to choose between two unacceptable choices. If we say we trust in the wisdom of “the people,” but steer them back to institutions that we know to be oppressive–that is wrong.  If we hold that “the people” have the potential to emancipate themselves and transform society, but then shy away from creating the workers own organisations, that is wrong.