Strike together and vote together

 

Socialist Party members are no wiser than you, but they have have studied the capitalist system more on just how it fleeces most of you. The Socialist Party inherits the collective wisdom of generations of socialists since its foundation, sufficient enough to place what we consider true facts before you, our fellow-workers. We do not preach that you follow us, but merely ask you to listen to what we have to say so that you will not be defeated by the betrayal of the henchmen of capital, masquerading as friends of the working people only to further entrench the power of the bosses and perpetuate their reign of robbery.

 

 They are in the capitalist class; you are in the working class. They are millionaires; you are paupers. They have everything; you do everything yet have nothing. They live in mansions on large estates; you in boxes with stamp-size gardens if you are lucky. They have mountains of money; you have heaps of saved-up pennies. The capitalist class are the masters; you their wage-slaves. These are the grim realities of the capitalist system. That is the basis of the class struggle. It is the question of the working class organising to overthrow the capitalist class, emancipating itself from wage-slavery. Can this be done? Anything can be done by working people.We only need to awaken to our power.

 

Individually you are helpless and your condition hopeless. As a class, you are a great force. As a class, you can break the chains that shackle us all. We must recognise the power of class unity and do all we can to bring it about. That is what is called class-consciousness. The class-conscious workers recognises the necessity of organisation, economic and political, and using every weapon at our command — the strike, the boycott, the ballot, and every other — to achieve our emancipation. We, therefore, join the union of our class and support the party of our class and give our time and energy to the work of educating our class for the struggle of our class. You cannot afford to remain in ignorance of the class struggle, or of what socialism really means. Revolutionary education and organisation is the vital need of the working class. Don’t take only our word: rely on yourself. You can only help yourselves. No one else can. If you don’t even know that you are slaves in the existing capitalist system, shame on you for your blindness and there is no hope for you but a miserable death. Class-consciousness is better than the unconsciousness of a corpse. He or she dies as a Judas Iscariot, a scab at heart in economic ignorance to the wages system, that is, the cause of your poverty and degradation. You have got to get rid of the capitalist leeches that suck your life blood. Future generations will wonder that such servility was ever possible, the shameful spectacle of rallying round the robbers of the working class, and defending them against your own people.

 

 Instead, join in solidarity with ourselves in the struggle for freedom so that we finally succeed in overthrowing the parasitic capitalist leeches and share with Marx and the other great revolutionaries, the vision of socialism before capitalism destroys us and our planet. The Socialist Party is built on correct ideas and is therefore indestructible. The workers movement failed because it threw away its correct ideas.

 

The Socialist Party would rather win the emancipation of the working class through peaceful means. We see participation in the electoral process as a vital essential tactic for building the struggle of the working class. The armed seizure of power by the means of insurrection and civil war can only lead to defeat and demoralisation. While the ruling class retains control over military forces possessing an extensive arsenal of weapons and can call upon them to shoot down their own people, our only success can be in the battle of ideas, winning over the armed forces to our side of the class war. The capitalists have exercised their dictatorship over the working class for hundreds of years by their control of the State.

 

The Socialist Party will use the vote as our weapon to capture the machinery of the State to ensure we can carry out the task of political and economic emancipation.

Hitler as A God Figure? How Nutty Can You Get?

 Police suspect that the murder of Mohamed-Aslim Zafis, who was stabbed to death, while volunteering at his Mosque in Toronto, was committed by a member of the Nazi-Satanic cult the Order of the Nine Angles, (09A).

 This lovely bunch include elements of Satanism, occultism and Nazism in their so called ideology. Hitler is a god figure to them because of his interest of the occult and his murder of 6 million Jews. 

They believe Hitler was trying to establish their Satanic Empire with his atrocities. They use the year he was born as the start of their calendar. These intellectual giants think it necessary to slaughter people to advance their beliefs. While their number, world-wide may be low, the Nazi's started out with a few members.

 Capitalism is a divisive system and this type of nonsense is as far out as divisiveness goes.

S.P.C. Members

It’s Up to Us, Claiming What is Ours

 There is no point in talking to you about the misery of today’s society. Any person with a heart  will agree that our life is not happy.  The Socialist Party wants to draw to your attention that the basic cause of all the ills of present-day society, which is normally attributed to the flaws of human nature, is in fact the lack of organisation of human society. 

This system answers our cries of need with blows of terror. It offers unemployment, hunger, homelessness, welfare cuts, and epidemics. We live in a world where hunger, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, racial and sexual discrimination, and many forms of repression, including the most barbaric are the lot of the majority of the earth’s inhabitants. Rivalries, war and the threat of war characterise the relations between countries, peoples, and nations.  Men and women are living under the yoke of capitalism. Essentially, capitalism is the result of the exploitation of the labour power of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, sole owner of the means of production. This exploitation is particularly brutal  in order to guarantee profits. The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves. They will achieve it through socialist revolution, which will suppress the private ownership of the means of production in order to establish socialist and collective property, and replace capitalist commodity production by the socialist organisation of production. 

 Mothers want and try to give their children the right kind of food - food that will build strong, active, healthy young bodies. What prevents women of the working class from taking proper care of their children is lack of money – time – energy. 

The government is turning from neglect to attack – police brutality and incarceration, immigration raids and deportations  and other forms of terror. At present there are over seven billion human inhabitants on the surface of this planet. For the majority of them – of us – poverty, hunger, disease, are the “normal” human condition. Our response is socialist reorganisation of the world economy. 

On a global scale the most important political development over the last decade has been the transformation of climate change from a scientific prognosis to a palpable political movement. Those who rule our planet, both the owners of the giant corporations and the governments of the major powers, are well aware of the environmental threat to civilisation. They have access to all the data, they have been repeatedly warned by experts, that they acknowledged the reality of climate change. Yet they have effectively done little about it. What needs to be done is simple and well understood: the world economy, not you, not your local community, not one country but the world economy, has to switch from fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) to renewable and sustainable sources of energy (wind power, solar power and tidal power). This has to happen on a huge scale and it has to happen quickly. Nothing else and nothing less will do, but this is precisely what is NOT happening sufficiently nor urgently enough

 Massive layoffs and millions out of work, debts piling up and rent arrears coming due, education and health care falling apart - to a great number of its people this world has become a living hell. The capitalist rulers, continue to rule and maintain capitalism, plunging country after country into one war after another. The corporations despite honeyed words to placate climate change protests persist with their policies of environmental harm to the planet in their quenchless thirst for more profit. Politicians and economists keep saying they have solutions, but they all come down to one thing-tightening the noose around necks of working people. The capitalists demand that the people sacrifice t permit them to plunder more people.

All over the world people are rising up to resist. Unrest and discontent are sweeping the world. Some people are now talking of revolution. At the very heart of the struggle is the basic conflict between the working class–the millions who have no means to live except through their labour, and whose labour is the driving force in society – and the capitalist class – the handful who do no productive work but live and accumulate billions from the labour of the workers, and continually grind the workers down in accumulating more. Working people possesses tremendous potential power to change the world and to remake society to serve the interests of the great majority.

This planet is rich in many resources, and and its peoples have achieved a high level of science and technology. Production is on a massive scale, but with the present  capitalist relations, the basic producers, the workers, are deprived of its benefits. Under the capitalist system, production only takes place if those who control production, the capitalists, can make profit from it. And they can make profit only by wringing it out of the workers, and constantly pushing their wages down to the lowest level, allowing the workers only enough to keep working-and to bring up new generations of workers to further enrich capital. Part of the workers’ labour covers the cost of maintaining themselves and their families–their wages–and the rest is unpaid labour that produces surplus value for the capitalists, the source of their profit. This exploitation of the workers to create private profit for the capitalists is the basis of the whole capitalist system and all its evils.

The capitalist class arose within the feudal system, finally overthrew the feudal system and established the capitalist system. And now it is the turn of the workers to overthrow the capitalist system and build a completely new society, removing our masters and breaking all social chains that enslave us and shackle production itself.

Socialist Standard No. 1395 November 2020

 

 

 

PDF version

 

 

• Editorial: Science, Politics and Profits

• Pathfinders: Burning rain

• Socialism or Nationalism?

• Quote: John Lame Deer

• Letters: Chomsky replies

• Cooking the Books I: The really big slump

• Class Control

• Material World: ‘Too old to work, too young to die’

• Engels as Utopian Socialist

• Engels’s Political Testament

• Engels, pioneer socialist

• Trump and lying as a tactic

• Peace? In Capitalism?

• Cooking the Books II: The National Debt: whose debt?

• Proper Gander: Rubber Reboot

• Reviews

• 50 years Ago: Cathy – no home to go to

• Meetings

• Rear View

New times require new actions.

Sickness, poverty, starvation and wars are running rampant over the face of the world. These problems are the inevitable result  of capitalism, an outworn and vicious social system. To the socialist accusation that capitalism produces only for profit, not for people, the apologists justify its continuance by saying: “It’s the best” and that there is no system better. But all people are offered is the choice between different cancers.  There is a hidden kind of hunger. No question about that. Maybe those who are hungry starve aren’t falling   dead in the streets. There are other ways to starve that are slower, less obvious, and less public pride. The upstanding figures of capitalist society don’t care how they make profits, so long as they are big enough. Capitalism cruelly and relentlessly functions to make profits.

 A socialist society will make inequitable distribution and poverty amid plenty impossible. For under the socialist society the means of production will be free to provide for the needs of the people. The capitalist profit-makers will have passed into the limbo of history. The working people will be in control of production and its management. Life may not be perfect. A little confusion may arise now and then, a little stupidity shown on occasions.  However, not as the characteristics of socialism, as they are the characteristics of capitalism; but merely as the natural mistakes made by fallible human beings but also with a democratic process to correct mistakes and errors. Reason and rationality teaches that the people of the world unite to create a cooperative commonwealth. The natural resources of the earth and the new technology made possible by science, all can be used and distributed according to human needs – with common sense international planning by the working people of the world. THAT IS SANE. THAT IS THE ONLY SANITY. THE OUTCOME IS WHETHER THE WORKERS SHOULD CONTINUE TO RELY ON ANY VARIETY OF BOSS POLITICS OR START RELYING ON INDEPENDENT WORKING CLASS POLITICS. Workers must raise its voice now – as an independent political force. The road of class-conscious political action leads beyond the bounds the confines of the capitalist system – it leads to socialism. The yearning of the peoples of the world for lasting peace and good will among men and women can be fulfilled only through a social system based on human needs. That is world socialism.

The working class must make its stand against its own capitalist system – whose lust for profits and interest, for investments, markets and expanded capital, for raw materials and cheap exploitable labour, can mean only exploitation at home and abject slavery abroad. the working class – not the intellectuals, idealists – is today the only possible agent of civilisation. It is the class with the revolutionary mission of ending capitalism. It is the class with the revolutionary mission of creating the world-wide brotherhood of mankind, unexploited and unoppressed by ruthless, profit-seeking, capitalist class. The socialist knows that the principles of democracy now reside only in the exploited, oppressed working people of the world. The democracy that is social and economic democracy. There is no other democracy left.

For the peoples of the world to arrive at the longed-for destiny of humanity to produce the necessities of life in peace and plenty, they must rid themselves of the motives of capitalist profits. That is saying that international capitalism is their enemy. Humanity needs a socialist world! World socialism is the goal of humanity. It is the only way to have peace and security.

The choice is between things as they are and things we can all make them if we stop relying on fake messiahs and rely instead upon our own STRENGTH AND ABILITY. The hope for a new life that can be lived in freedom in justice and decency is not crazy. What is insane is to suppose that such a life can come while capitalism still exists. There is a way – a sensible way – whereby mankind can peacefully share all the resources of the world needed for modern life. That is the way of the working people emancipated from domestic and foreign bosses, producing for human use, according to human needs. It is possible for the working people of the whole world to have economic security, work for all, plenty of the goods of life, permanent peace and determine their own destinies. Yes, such sanity is possible on this earth. Not, however, through the aberrations of capitalism – but through the united struggle of the international working class – through socialism. Workers  cannot rely on any supporters of this system which inevitably favours the bosses. The working class itself must pave its own path to a better life. Only by using their economic and political might can the workers improve themselves. No more waiting.

WITH ORGANISATION THERE IS STRENGTH.
WITH ORGANISATION THERE CAN BE ACTION.

The Riches of the Scottish Aristocracy

  Duke of Buccleuch, one of Scotland's biggest landowners, has seen the profits made by a group owned by his family quadruple.

The latest accounts for The Buccleuch Estates show the business made £51.3 million profit after tax in the year to October 31 2019, compared with £12.4m in the preceding year.

Ideology or Ideals?

 The WSM’s position is not ideological, when its actually practical/strategic. If anything its our opponents who portray it as some sort of puritan ideological position. Sure its a big issue for others on the left, but its just the sensible tactic for now.

I envisage a growing revolutionary movement may need to more actively engage with reformist opportunities provided for working class gains - I have no ideological objection to that, but we'd be doing it from a position of strength with the capitalist class in desperate retreat. As to the present, I think there are grey areas (i.e. as to what is trade union activity and political activity) and we in WSM do definitely sometimes make it seem like its clear cut, when it really is not.

 

Campaigning against government cuts for example is often about both defending jobs as well as advocating for free access to healthcare, education, libraries etc. - so it gets messy, but individual socialists can sort that out for themselves on a case-by-case basis. "Mostly on track"? I think we at best aspire to that!

Returning to the Labour Party, the main thing I would want to highlight (to anyone interested in the SPGB or the WSM) is that we have no leaders and never have in 116 years of existence. No secret meetings, no slates, no power grabs: decision-making is entirely led by members. We have an executive committee (anyone can attend the meetings) but it's there to carry out the memberships wishes, it cannot initiate resolutions, only branches can. We accept no ring-fenced funding and are immune to being taken over or influenced by media or others.

We can do this because our members are equal. We can say this because all members when applying to join have to satisfy their local branch that they are not a "follower", that their views are consistent with being a revolutionary socialist with no prejudices, and a clear understanding of capitalism and socialism.

 

Some think this requirement to join is elitist; in fact its the very opposite. The Labour Party long ago allowed itself to be open to anyone with the vaguest commitment to social justice and a chequebook. The suspension of Corbyn may be shocking to many Labour members. Corbyn may have genuinely been the leader you wanted him to be, but the Labour Party? - it has never been the party you thought it was.

Brian Gardner

(slightly adapted)