No freedom under capitalism

 

The modern world economy is dominated by the capitalist mode of production. Under capitalism, money is used to make more money. Profit drives production, not social need. And capitalist production does not proceed in a straight line upwards. It is subject to recurrent crises of “booms and slumps.” Capitalist businesses do not cooperate to produce the things and services that society needs. On the contrary, they compete with each other to sustain and increase their profit. To do so, they make workers work longer or harder, but they also increasingly use new technology to boost the productivity of labour to get more value. Under capitalism, slumps will reoccur and inequality will remain. The end of poverty and prosperity for the majority can only come through replacing private production for profit with democratically planned production for social need.

 

The Socialist Party maintains that our society is divided into classes based on groups of people standing in the same relationship to the means of production. It holds that the interests of these classes are antagonistic and irreconcilable and that a constant struggle goes on between them over the division of the wealth that. society produces. The owning class is the ruling class because it controls the government. The government protects the capitalist class by protecting the source of its economic strength private property. It is the will of the capitalist class that the rights of private property be protected. It uses its control of government to write down its will and call it law. It uses its control of government to enforce its will, the law. The law is the voice of the ruling class.

While wealth is produced for private profit only that number of workers will be employed that is required to produce for the effective demands of the market, plus those attending to the personal wants and pleasures of the capitalist class. With improved means of production — and war accelerates the improvement of these means — fewer workers are required to turn out a given amount of wealth. As these improvements are brought into being far faster than either the growth of population or the waste of the master class can keep pace with them, it is evident that, apart from temporary fluctuations, unemployment is bound to increase. Even the temporary fluctuations tend to decrease as capitalist control becomes more highly organised in multinational corporations.

None of the political parties at present in Parliament desire the abolition of the private ownership of the means of life. Conservatives, Labourites, LibDems and nationalists openly repudiate any such intention, while the left-wing by its support of, and endeavours to crawl into the Labour Party, shows its readiness to support capitalism in practice, contradictory though this may be to Trotskyist theoretical claims.

Only by abolishing the cause of unemployment, wars and misery can the workers achieve health and happiness. The workers must give their attention lo the abolition of this cause — the private ownership of the means of life.

The master class rule to-day because the workers have voted them into Parliament —the great law-making and force-raising portion of the political machinery. With this power in their hands the masters can dictate terms of living to the workers, because with the forces mentioned above at their disposal they can not only keep the workers away from the means of production but also from any wealth already produced. The workers lives are thus under the control of the capitalist class. In other words, the workers are slaves.

And slaves they will remain until they acquire—first the knowledge that they are slaves; then the will to attain freedom; and build up the organisation necessary to capture political power.

The only organisation capable of reaching that object is a socialist organisation. Until that organisation is sufficiently strong to put forward its delegates as candidates, it must continue its educational work of making socialists.

Capitalism was, and is, the economic system; the capitalists were, and are, the dominant class; and the workers were, and are, exploited. If you ask what is to happen to workers in the meantime, our reply is simple. You are poor and your position is hopeless because you are wage-slaves So long as you remain wage-slaves you will have to suffer from the evils that go with wage-slavery, and it does not matter whether that be under a Conservative,  a Labour government or a SNP one in Holyrood. We however urge you to recognise that it is the capitalist system which is at fault, and it does not matter to you what is the label of the political party which administers that system. Until you have overthrown capitalism you are going continue to suffer as you suffer now. You will not find a solution in binding yourselves hand and foot to the State machine of any government. As for the notion that your efforts can be well spent asking for instalments of socialism, that is based on utter illusion. This country is rotten with social reforms, and they are being added to every year; and yet not only have these brought no progress towards socialism, but the real foundation of capitalism is stronger than ever it was. The sooner you turn aside from the long-exploded quack remedies offered to you and set yourselves to the task of promoting and campaigning for socialism and organising the workers for its accomplishment, the sooner your problems will be solved, and the less will be the cost to you in poverty and suffering.

Years and years of reforms have not prevented a worsening of the workers’ condition, neither can it be shown how reforms of the future can remove the cause of those conditions, they would not fundamentally alter the relation of capitalist and wage worker, and if masquerading as a form of “socialism,” could only be in such guise to delay the advent of socialism a system in which class domination would cease to be. Only the working class themselves, understanding socialism, and organised for its establishment, can end capitalism. It is their task, not their masters’.

There is a socialist organisation in this country — THE SOCIALIST PARTY — the only organisation that works for the emancipation of the workers. As a sufficient number of the working class is not yet desirous of establishing socialism to permit of any candidates being put forward at  elections, we call upon all those who wish for socialism to express their wish by going to the ballot-box and voting for socialism by writing it across the ballot paper. Among other things this will help to advertise the number who wish to see socialism established. Any use of the vote to support any of the candidates in any election would merely be a vote for capitalism.  Whichever side wins we will still remain slave to the master class, because the private ownership of the means of life — the cause of the workers’ enslavement — will still continue. When the workers understand their slave position they will organise to contest an election for the purpose of taking control of political power with the object of attaining their emancipation and establishing socialism.

STUDY SOCIALISM. BECOME SOCIALISTS. THEN ACHIEVE YOUR EMANCIPATION.

Lanarkshire Child Poverty

  End Child Poverty coalition estimated that a quarter of children across Lanarkshire are living below the poverty line.

16,604 children in North Lanarkshire, or 26.5 per cent of young people, live in poverty

In South Lanarkshire, the number of children living in poverty is 12,840, amounting to 23.1 per cent of youngsters

Free the People

 Capitalism is always an ugly, depressing, restrictive system whichever party tries to manage it. It must always condemn the majority to lives of exploitation and poverty. Poverty remains the main cause of a considerable amount of ill health. Millions of children die each year from malnutrition and infection in the Third World. Even in the more affluent countries workers have higher mortality rates than the rich as a result of working in stressful, polluted, alienating environments and living in poor housing conditions.

The primary purpose of the present system is profit. All other things are secondary. Profit is its lifeblood and when it shall cease to flow the system will be dead. Profit first; life, love, liberty — all these must come second. Under such a system workers are shackled by the chains of wage slavery. Working people have been dictated to by the courts, assaulted by the police, duped by the press, condemned by church-leaders, deceived by politicians, betrayed by turn-coats by renegades, preyed upon by careerists, infested by opportunists, deserted by cowards, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders. But still, we rise up. The power of the socialist movement lies in its capacity to power to shed light, to feed the brain of the working class, arouse them from their torpor, develop their faculties for thinking, teach them their economic class interests, effect their solidarity, and imbue them with the spirit of the impending social revolution.

 Today the world is in the hands of billionaires-owners of the largest corporations, the biggest banks; in short, owners or controllers of the huge monopolies. These capitalists, not only own or control the chief means whereby we work and live, but, in fact, control the whole governing machine. They pull the strings. And they use their power to make themselves richer and richer—at our expense. They hire workers to make a profit out of their labour; their capitalist production is for profit, not for use: and to get more profit they slash wages, carry through speed-up and worsen conditions. This mad race for profits ends in a crisis; and then they try to get out of the crisis—at our expense.

But it is not only poverty and insecurity and unemployment which threatens the majority of working people. For the great capitalist employer and financiers have one last use for us all and that is to recruit us for war. The cause of capitalist war is the attempt of each national capitalist group—British, EU, American, Chinese, etc.—to beat its competitors on the world market and to win bigger and bigger profits for its own millionaires. For capitalism has now reached the stage when war is probable. The multinationals and big banks are dominating at home, are dominating through their investments abroad, and that other countries have been divided up amongst them. Therefore the Great Powers are rivals of one another in the world market. This rivalry becomes fiercer and fiercer, firstly by tariffs, quotas, and other economic measures in a trade war but eventually transforming into actual military conflict either directly or by proxy.  The most fearsome, ghastly and deadly armaments are being piled up. Science and inventive genius are prostituted to discover and perfect the means of death and destruction of millions, in order to win new markets, territory, and spheres of profitable capitalist investment, to bring rent, interest and profit for a handful of employers, bankers and landlords.

British workers are not blind to the fact that the British capitalist class is just as ruthless and savage as any other capitalist class. British workers must face the fact that all capitalism has to offer them today is poverty and low that they nor their families have any hope or future under capitalism. There is no need for a single worker to be overworked or in dread of losing his job; no reason why an unemployed worker should lack the necessities of life. All over the world millions of workers are year by year coming to realise these facts and to see that nothing except the existence of capitalism prevents them from building up for themselves a decent and secure world. Everywhere the workers are becoming less and less willing to put up with an entirely unnecessary state of destitution. They are showing themselves more and more determined to insist upon their right to food, good health and shelter for themselves and their families. But to get this, capitalism must be overthrown. To get this is only possible by the building up of socialism, giving peace and prosperity, happiness and new life to the whole working population of the world.

We have today ample resources for producing all the things we need. Today we are both unemployed and unable to get the things we need. The two things go together. For we are unemployed because the capitalists want to have their profits and will not let us produce what we need. Deprivation and unemployment can only be ended by taking over and running the industries to give us all a decent standard of living. The workers will produce far better and more willingly under their own management than they do now. For the first time, the British workers will know that greater productivity will no longer be a threat to their livelihood but will make it possible to raise the whole standard of living and shorten the hours of labour.

The Lottery, A Very Minor Benefit For Very Few People.

 

Toronto city officials are considering a lottery system that will allow tenants struggling to pay rent to apply for affordable units as early as 2023, boy they just can’t wait. Toronto is aiming to increase its affordable housing supply by 40,000 units by 2030. it now has 8,000 units guaranteed. This is in a city with about half a million tenant households, nearly half of whom are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. When Toronto Community Housing Corp. offered 75 affordable units in 2018, 2773 people applied. There was a bit of a stink when reporters for the Toronto Star revealed that the head of Toronto's real estate agency had offered below market rent apartments exclusively to his own employees. 

The best one can say is the lottery scheme is a very minor benefit for very few people, especially when one considers a bachelor will be $1,211 a month and a one bedroom, $1,431. 

But under capitalism very few people do well anyway.

S.P.C. Members.

The Capitalist Class Don’t Care For Un-Productive Workers.

There are an estimated 20,000 people over the age of 65 in Toronto who are home-bound, meaning they cannot leave their homes, and 75,000 across the province, according to Dr. Samir Sinha, a member of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table. Though most of them can make it to a vaccination clinic, with help from relatives, there are 5,000 who can’t, only 1,000 of whom have received the vaccine at home. Advocates for home-bound seniors said a plan should have been made months ago and implemented as quickly as possible if the province were serious about health equity. 

But since when did the capitalist class ever care about members of the working class who are no longer productive?

S.P.C. Members.

We need change

 

In spite of the dire straits many people find themselves in, most still think that capitalism is the best and only economic system. The World Socialist Movement, however, is convinced that the capitalist world economic system, is an irrational system. It is a system that is a disaster for over 90% of the world’s population. We hold a vision of a future world that is worth getting on board with. We think that an economy should produce real goods and services. 

 Movements like the environmentalists which hope to persuade governments of capitalism to operate this destructive system in a more gentle way are doomed to failure.

We live in a society in which we are bombarded from an early age with the idea of the nation. We are said to be "British" or “American”. And yet, for most people, this just happens to be the place in which we sell our ability to work in order to survive.  The amount of land most of us truly own could be fitted into a window-box or flower-pot.

The flag-waving of nationalism is not just childish pomp and pride. The countries for which we are asked to kill are not ours. Those who do have a stake in the nation are those who own it: the class of employers, landlords and investors referred to politely as "the business community". And what are they in conflict over? They are quarrelling — at the conference table where possible, over the battlefield and our dead bodies where necessary — about the dividing of the spoils which are derived from the productive work of the majority. There are four main bones of contention between the various national groupings of capitalists.

1. Markets

Employers only receive profit if they sell the goods we have produced for them. In trying to sell goods, they are in competition with one another. States look after their local capitalists in this respect, by organising import controls and other ways of turning trade to the advantage of some capitalists at the expense of others. These moves are always backed up by force.

 

2. Raw Materials

Just as important to capitalists, in their pursuit of profit, is the need to gain and defend sources of minerals and other raw materials. This applied in the nineteenth-century Franco-Prussian wars over the coal and steel of Alsace-Lorraine and inspired the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1897 as well as the Russian repeat performance years later. 

 

3. Territory

Thirdly, there is the constant struggle between the various states of the world, whether private- or state-capitalist, over the control of the earth itself, divided as it is into artificial fragments by national boundaries. Since the Second World War, for example, there has been an almost constant series of border disputes between India, China and Russia.

 

4. Trade Routes

Finally, in order to sell their goods and realise their profit, the capitalist class of the world have to be able to transport goods and materials freely. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 in which Egypt was in conflict with Britain, France and Israel, was a conflict over a vital trade route.

 

Of course, these economic factors leading to warfare have to operate through the agency of human consciousness, with all its complications. The many popular rationalisations of war suggest that religion or culture are leading us to the battlefield. These are often the concepts employed by governments to persuade individual workers to flock to mass suicide, but they are not the root cause of the conflict. Having recognised that it is the system of production for profit that causes war. we have no option but to seek to replace it with a system of production for use. The capitalist class do not, in general, profit from war, but their system is beyond even their control. When the market dictates they invest in weapons to protect their investments, they have no choice but to follow where their share prices lead.

 The only true Peace Movement is one that stands for the abolition of all weapons, through the abolition of the social system which has made them necessary. We can talk seriously about the prospect of permanent world peace only on the basis of transforming social relationships. This is a practical proposition; to hope for the competition in the marketplace between rival gangs of robbers to be carried out without murder is an idle dream. At the moment we are human commodities, watching our lives being bought and sold on the labour market. But we can use the power of conscious cooperation to reverse the current trend towards collective suicide. The only way to avoid war is to create a socialist society. 

Together we can win

 

Socialism means a society of associated producers that is characterised by common ownership of the means of production, the immediately social nature of labour and the planning of production to satisfy needs (production of use-values and not commodities). It means a class-free society without a state, without, that is, special organs or apparatuses for administrative, managerial or decision-making that is divorced from the mass of citizens. Such a society can exist only if it is managed by the producers and consumers themselves and only if it takes its destiny into its own hands. It must free itself from the tyranny of the “laws of the market” (the law of value), from the tyranny of despotic authorities, and from that of the state. 

 Socialism can only be fully realised on a world scale; it must, that is, encompass the main countries in the world. A worldwide administration does not preclude a large number of decentralised mechanisms at the local, regional, and neighbourhood levels and in the various branches of social and economic activity, nor of organisations in which democratic choices can be made at the base.

Socialism does not mean an earthly paradise nor the establishment of perfect harmony between the individual and society or between man and nature. The aim of socialism is more modest. It is to resolve certain social problems which have for centuries caused human suffering on a mass scale. There must be the end of exploitation and oppression and to halt wars and large-scale violence between human beings. Hunger and inequality will be banished forever. Institutionalised and systematic discrimination against women, against races, ethnic groups, and national or religious minorities, which are regarded as being “inferior” needs to cease. There must be no more economic or ecological crises. In terms of progress and emancipation, both for humanity as a whole and for the individuals who make it up would be a great a leap forward.  Such social advances are possible only if private property, commodities, and money are abolished. Their abolition is a precondition for the elimination of classes and the withering away of the State. The alternative is the possible collapse of human civilisation.

 The acquisition of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and the threats hanging over the ecological balance resulting from climate change makes even the possibility even the extinction of the human race feasible. The alternative is no longer “socialism or barbarism.” It is “socialism or death.” But all living species have an instinct for self-preservation and cling dearly to life. Mankind is no exception. And that is why attempts to prevent catastrophes will always prevail. That is why the struggle for socialism will continue in the face of defeatist and fatalist views of the future of mankind.

 All the threats to people and the planet result from the subordination of technological and scientific developments to the tyranny of capital, to the logic whereby each firm seeks to maximise its own profits, regardless of the long-term consequences for the labour force, for society as a whole or for the ecological balance, because it is subject to the implacable imperatives of competition and capital accumulation. Socialism is necessary because private property and the market economy, the logic of the quest for private wealth and, above all, the mechanisms of universal competition that they stimulate in every area of individual and social behaviour, are feeding an infernal dynamic which is leading us to disaster. Manufacturing goes on at any cost, regardless of the natural resources it destroys.

The productive forces have developed to such an extent that they have now created the preconditions for the abolition of poverty and commodity production on a world basis. This would, of course, require a radical redistribution of resources and the elimination of the under-utilisation or wasteful use of resources (arms production, products harmful to health, etc.). It would also require a redeployment of resources in order to prioritise the satisfaction of basic needs on the basis of the democratically determined preferences of producers and consumers, and not on the basis of arbitrary allocation by a technocracy.  

We are convinced that existing resources would make it possible to resolve these problems within a reasonably short space of time. There is no reason to suppose that poverty is inevitable and that there are not sufficient goods and services to cover basic needs in terms of food, clothing, housing, culture, leisure, and transport. It is not utopian to speak of the abolition of commodity production. It is certainly possible to feed all the men and women who live on our planet without destroying the ecological balance.

A worldwide redistribution of the resources required to eliminate famine and poverty does not necessarily imply a fall in the standard of living enjoyed by the average person in the developed world. Redistribution could to a large extent be achieved using resources that are now wasted or make no contribution to living standards. 

Socialism will finally become a new social system capable of reproducing itself automatically when cooperation and solidarity between producer-consumers replace the selfish urge to acquire private wealth. Cooperation and solidarity were prevalent in earlier societies and must eventually become once again universal human characteristics. It is not utopian to speak of cooperation replacing selfishness. None of this can be realised unless commodity production and the competition it generates disappear.