Unpaid Overtime

 Analysis of the 2019 Annual Population Survey (APS) estimates that, on average, workers in Scotland do more than seven hours of unpaid overtime per week, equating to an annual total of 118 million hours.

The APS showed there to be 310,000 employees working unpaid overtime in the week that the survey was conducted, with 110,000 of them in the public sector. 

If each hour were paid at the average hourly rate of £14.07, this would mean that workers in Scotland have missed out on an additional £1.6 billion in wages.

‘Scotland’s economy is reliant on unpaid overtime,’ research reveals | Morning Star (morningstaronline.co.uk)

Now is the time to build a socialist party

 

Socialism is in principle a working class movement which organises and moulds the workers for the class struggle and the construction of a future new society. It is impossible even to imagine socialism as realisable within capitalist society where the robber class has always stolen power from the people. Only a working class party working for the propagation of socialismand for the success of the future social revolution can be recognised or supported. All other action must be resolutely condemned and combatted. A socialist society must be built by the expropriation of all land and capitalist property, and by the workers taking production and distribution into their own hands. From a Marxian point of view, the working class movement should take the direction of revolution, should prepare itself seriously for the event, and not seek to avoid it by other action.

Crises today are not caused by natural scarcity. In the past, when people starved, it was a result of harvest failure – there wasn’t enough to go round. Now such scarcity is artificially created. Now we have overproduction. Not too little, but too much is produced – ‘too much’ not compared to people’s needs, but to the profits of those who control the world economy. Capitalism, then, is an economic system based on production for profit. So long as society is bound to commodity production, it is only through the market that its needs can be satisfied. Capitalist society necessarily presupposes exchange. Present-day society does not even concern itself with determining the consumption capacity or needs of society, in order to make a corresponding adjustment of production.  The only social concern is the market on which the purchasing power depends.

Modern capitalist production is social in operation. The problem is that while the global labour of the workers is collective, what they produce is privately owned by a small number of millionaires and billionaires, who literally dominate billions of people. Powerful dynasties, multinationals, monopolistic corporations are the levers which direct capitalist production, so as to garner the highest profits based upon the most intensive, brutal exploitation of the worker around the world in an international division of labour. It is no exaggeration to say that the bulk of the earth's wealth is firmly in their hands.

In our present society humanity is but a cog in a machine. Early proponents of the cooperative tried to avoid the cruelties and barbarities of the capitalist system and establish an egalitarian society. The hope of the early Utopians, like Fourier, Robert Owen and others, was to set up cooperatives to free workers from their exploiters. The cooperatives could show that the capitalists are really not necessary, that they are an ulcer on society. They proposed that if the worker received the full product of his or her labour, minus the cost of administration and organisation, it would be easy to do away with the cruelty and extortion of the private capitalist establishments, who appropriated the unpaid labor of the workers. The unpaid labour of the workers, according to the Utopians, would then go into the common fund, for health care, housing and all human needs.

Cooperatives also sprung out of the necessity of survival where mutual aid was an imperative. Often it is the religious communities which depend on helping one another. The Amish and the Mennonites or the Jewish Kibbutzim are examples. After the American Civil War in the face of racial violence and oppression there was a period when ex-slaves survived by forming cooperative ventures together, caring for one another, an idea revived later in the years of the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, capitalism is a world system by that time with a world market. In order to undo the capitalist system, the cooperatives has to compete with all-powerful capitalist enterprises. Not only is the capital investment of these businesses formidable and overwhelming, but they had enormous capacity to undersell, even taking big losses, in order to drive the cooperatives out of existence or alternatively force the cooperatives to adopt the commercial practices of the conventional companies. The cooperative movement was relegated mostly to fringe areas of the economy. For the most part, it survived in those areas of the economy where the capitalists felt they couldn't obtain an adequate rate of profit, and driving co-ops out was not worth the effort. Many  cooperatives are short-lived and have disappeared. Any successful large cooperatives existing today are in reality capitalist enterprises with no affect on the devastating operations of the capitalist system. They are in essence an integrated element in capitalist production.

We know that the root of the social evils in the world today is the oppression of the working people suffering all the atrocities of capitalism. It is world  enslaved by a few capitalist bandits, who own all the wealth of the earth as their private property. The capitalist ownership of the means of production – this is the reason of reasons which explains the barbarity of the present order of things. To deprive the rich of their power by depriving them of their wealth is the paramount duty of the working class party of socialists.

The Age of Plenty is Within our Grasp

 Going into 2021 we are living in extremely frightening times. Life is becoming more difficult for most of us. Without a vision of a better world and the staying power organisation that goes with it, even mass protests of working people in response to injustice will likely not succeed. Witness the failures of the Arab spring and movements like Occupy. Yet the urgency for a socialist transformation has never been greater if we consider the existential crisis of civilisation posed by global warming. Without fundamental social change, our younger generations are facing a bleak future indeed. We are running out of time. There must be a mass world socialist movement, or there will be no future at all. Members of the Socialist Party have never wavered; never compromised; never doubted the principles and ideals of socialism, or the ultimate triumph of the world socialist movement.

Why has wealth piled up on one side and poverty on the other? Because the very root of capitalism is wrong. Because the basic idea is unsound. Because the foundation is illogical. Because the capitalist system is founded on a contradictions. It is the system in which the person who owns the means of production does not work them; and the one who works them does not own them. This is, the basic contradiction of capitalism. Capitalism pits worker against worker in a mad race for a crust of bread, for survival, for security. In an age when plenty is possible for all. Capitalism is more destructive than all the earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions ever visited upon our planet. Capitalism kills and cripples millions in its wars and in hunger and malnutrition, in preventable illnesses and occupational diseases, in malnutrition and child labor, in poverty and crime. It destroys the wealth of society in pollution and waste. In an age of plenty capitalism condemns the majority of the people to anxiety and insecurity. 

The question whether socialism was inevitable was sometimes approached from the stand-point that capitalism’s contradictions makes its indefinite continuation impossible, to be dissolved by a complete transformation.  The efforts of labour in its building of a practice  of class struggle, were viewed by the ruling class as a disturbance of the social peace—something that eventually could be regulated or ironed out by conciliation of contending interests. The contradictions of capitalism—the great basic ones that are involved in the working class struggle for power over the means of life—cannot be smoothed out even by an iron heel. 

 One of the capitalist attempted solutions to civil strive - fascism - is not just political dictatorship, not just right-wing reaction, not just the curtailment of civil liberties, not just the way of trampling the rights of labour, and not just a process of race-baiting either. We have had all these things before the ideology of fascism arose. None of them needed the corporate state; none of them tried to regiment the whole of daily life and regulate it to a plan; none of them sought to invent a new type of society. To run the world economy under an iron heel, where every petty bureaucrat of a supreme oligarchy is looking for his graft for doing his dirty work, where everyone is in a state of discord and discontent, where the military command is incessantly needed to maintain order and thus made mindful of its own opportunity to become supreme, is to enter a period of chaos and waste than we suffer from now. Fascism is not a forward looking plan nor a far-sighted realism. It is a blind retreat. It rallies its support with an irrational appeal, to be fought by no other means than power. The road to fascism is paved with liberal good intentions. Its means of operation is the regulation of capitalism in an alleged public interest. Every regulation over workers, whether by union officials or by public bodies on which such union .sit, is another brick for its world-wide prison. Capital establishes fascism, albeit reluctantly, for the same reason that it establishes and supports any form of government, all the while for more business in government and less government in business. It is done to police working people. 

Our world economy could readily enough be coordinated on the basis of a community of interests to effect the highest possible standard of living for all—if run by producers for producers. We are upon the threshold of new social system that offers abundance to all, that privilege of a class society for none. The great historic role of the working class more readily visualised today than ever before is a planned economy of plenty that can be effected by the one big union of working people.

What is the future of mankind?

 

In this time of pandemic, climate emergency and nuclear weapon arsenals do we stand upon the threshold of death and destruction for the whole of mankind? Or do we stand upon the threshold of a new age of unparalleled peace and plenty, a harmony of humanity?

The association of socialism with austerity is a misleading one.  All around us are the signs that we can produce more than enough for everyone. The Socialist Party says that the age of plenty for all is already possible on the basis of productive powers we have achieved over last several decades. Today it is no longer a matter of it being possible but being postponed. Everybody knows it is an example of something crazy about this capitalist system we live under. So many intellectuals endeavour to deny such a realist and declare that scarcity of resources is the situation we all face. Yet there is TOO MUCH of everything, and people suffer hunger.

We have the factories and the resources that can produce a world of plenty. We have the willing brawn and brains to do the requisite tasks. All we have to do is let the one work on the other, and distribute what is produced. But society as a whole doesn’t own the factories and technology. It has nothing to say about whether they’ll be used and for what because all these are owned by a small handful of capitalists who won’t let a machine run unless they can make a profit.

In a socialist world of plenty, people are at long last freed of the dominance of economics, the tyranny of economics. We will for the first time be free to develop the full potentialities and capacities of the human individual, and see the full flowering of humanity’s spirit. This is the goal worth fighting for today. It is the real freedom.

The Socialist Party teaches that the workers of all lands must regard each other as brothers and sisters who stand together in solidarity on behalf of the interests of working people. These interests demand that in order to gain a world of plenty for all, freedom, and a permanent peace, the capitalist system must be abolished and replaced with a cooperative commonwealth of planned production for use.

Contrary to those over-population catastrophists output of food, raw materials and manufactures had risen steeply, far outstripping the growth of population. There was enough and to spare to feed, clothe and house the working billions of the world. The environmentalist Cassandras’ evaluations are both pessimistic and myopic.

The coming social revolution must place the new technology in the hands of the people. Robotics and other forms of automation will be the foundation for a whole new world. Abundance, created by Artificial Intelligence and people working for the common good rather than the profit of the few, will forever end poverty, exploitation, oppression and war. Our organisation is increasingly structured around this vision, the creation of a cooperative, communal society based on the application of computerised, labour-saving production. Ours is a revolution for a better world, a vision of a world of abundance. Society now has the capacity to satisfy the needs of all.

 If production is planned and its products shared fairly, there is no reason why anyone should be short of anything – nor why the environment should be degraded in the process. Our aim is to end as much as feasible the dirty, dangerous, demeaning work and its drudgery, and instead direct people’s lives towards education, recreation and leisure. A socialist planned economy will be production for need, not for exchange, not one of commerce. Poverty is not inevitable; that is true. But it is inevitable so long as capitalism exists, so long as the profit-economy reigns. An improvement in the global standard of living is possible, but not on the basis of capitalism. Freedom is possible and necessary, but it cannot be achieved under the system of capitalism, not in a class society where the reality of the social order increases national and racial antagonism as the means of keeping the ruling class in power. Genuine freedom and real democracy are possible, but only in a free economic society.

Capitalist economics is the the economics of enforced scarcity in a world of plenty. The struggle for socialism has become the fight for the very survival of civilisation and instead to strive towards a world of plenty. Abolish the capitalist profit-suckers. Take over our economic world, organise it democratically. Common ownership – that’s socialism.

 

What our Goal is

 No single individual really rules. A CLASS rules. The capitalist class. Like all previous class rule, capitalist rule is the rule of a tiny minority, based on the foundations of scarcity economy. The only way a minority has or can or ever did rule over the majority is either by brute force or the use of deception and lies. When we take over the economy we’ll have real democracy, social democracy. Working people will be running things in our own interests. There will be no prime ministers or presidents. Organise with us to overthrow the whole rotten system. Get people to together to fight for socialism.

 

 Capitalists own all the factories, the mines, the transport and everything we work at. We just own our debts, empty bellies and our muscles. We have to give the capitalists our muscles so we can pay our debts and fill our stomachs. But we also have the possibility of running the world to benefit the majority.

 

For socialists if human rights are to mean anything each one of us has the right to share in the social heritage of human beings by an equal right to the use and benefits of the products of the social brain and the social hand by in order to be able to develop his or her own potential, that everyone has the right to be able to develop their full potential and capacities through democracy and participation in our workplace and community, and that we all possess the right to live in a society in which human beings and nature can be nurtured by a society in which we can develop our full potential in communities based upon cooperation and solidarity. The association of producers becomes an opportunity to meet our needs by meeting each other’s needs.

 

From their stocks and shares capitalists can enjoy a windfall of rewards without lifting a finger.  Meanwhile, the people who work the hardest, the unskilled workers, domestic servants, etc., make the least amount of money. Workers must constantly struggle against unrelenting downward pressure on their standard of living. Socialism is more than being well paid for the work one does. It truly revolutionises how society operates. The capitalist system, in which a small number of capitalists are allowed to subordinate everyone else’s interests to their own pleasures, is replaced with a democratic structure in which the working class itself collectively directs the economy according to a conscious plan that was chosen after a full debate with all the relevant information and a democratic vote. In other words, a whole new culture will be created in which all of the members of society will become informed and encouraged to participate in determining the fundamental policies that will guide the direction of society. Such a transformation will allow us a qualitatively better life. It will enable us to end the anarchy of capitalism, where every individual capitalist enterprise pursues its own self-interest, with an economy that is planned to efficiently satisfy the vast majority of the population’s needs in the most sustainable manner to identify and maximise everyone’s well-being while eliminating whatever undermines this goal. A better world is indeed possible. 

 

Humankind can produce such abundance that society can be free from hunger, homelessness and backbreaking labour. The only thing standing in the way is this system of exploitation and injustice.  We invite all who see that there’s a problem and are ready to do something about it to join with us. With our organised strength, we will liberate the thinking of working people and unleash their potential energy. We can inspire fellow-workers with a vision of a world of plenty. New technology provides better and more products with less and less labour. Society now has the capacity to satisfy the needs of all.

 Radical changes in the way a society produces its wealth call for radical changes in how that society is organised. The capitalist class cannot convince the people to believe in their system while destroying their hopes and dreams. We can arouse working people with a society organised for the benefit of all. A society built on cooperation that puts the well-being of its people above the profits and property of a handful of billionaires. When the class which has no place in the capitalist system seizes control of all productive property and transforms it into the common property of all, it can reorganize society so that the abundance is distributed according to need.