AWAY WITH THE GARBAGE OF CAPITALISM

 COP26  has finally arrived in Glasgow and what has the blog of the Socialist Party’s Edinburgh and Glasgow branches got to say?

Legend has it that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Not to be outdone, the present ruling class is fiddling about while the planet almost literally burns.

While politicians, corporations, scientists and reformers endlessly argue over what to do with the impending impact of climate crises and how to decarbonise the economy as a matter of urgency, we’ve heard it all before. The only answer is to the throwaway society is to throw away the capitalist political economy, which has produced and entrenched this crisis. It is time now for a new egalitarian economy based on justice and shared prosperity. The claims that climate change is ‘unequivocally caused by human activities and ‘human-induced climate change’ are prominent media headlines but the suggestion that humanity, in general, is to blame is not a scientific claim. It is an ideological one. In this instance, it insulates the capitalist class from being culpable. It is capitalists who profit from the climate crisis while the poorest suffer. It is the capitalist system putting profit above all else. It is technically semantically correct to say that climate change is human-induced. The capitalist class are human after all. However, powerless working people have no choice over the fundamental conditions of production which are driving our climate to break down. Can the coal-miner be equated with the capitalist who exploits them by investing in corporate shares to profit? We are not all equally responsible for climate change. Those who are to blame don’t plan to do anything meaningful about it. Predictably, virtually nothing is being done. It is not the human species, but by that tiny minority element of the species that is befouling the nest of all species. There is no reason inherent in the human species that prevents us from living in harmony with our natural surroundings. Indeed, humanity is itself an integral part of the total environment and no more at odds with it by nature than dam-building beavers.

Capitalism's profit motive is the culprit. The profit motive and capitalism are bringing civilisation to the brink of disaster, and time is running out to take corrective actions where possible or to lessen the effects where the damage is already too advanced to be undone. It ought to be clear that the system primarily responsible for bringing humanity such dangers and which even now continues to ignore the warnings of scientists is not to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to avert or mitigate the dangers. The answer is to change the system. Environmentalists, limited in their worldview and lacking understanding of the capitalist system are prone to divorce their own particular specific environmental cause from the whole socio-economic fabric. These eco-warriors of capitalist society endlessly flounder, winning, at best, only a delaying action against the disintegrating effects of capitalism on the natural world. University libraries are bulging, research establishments are filled, publishers are glutted and periodicals are saturated with data, hardly anything seems to have escaped the scrutiny of scientists and researchers yet the obvious cause, capitalism, goes unchallenged and uncontested. The scientific community have drawn innocuous conclusions, that the economic system can continue with some modifications without the essential inference that environmental degradation is inherent in capitalist development. Such an inference would, of course, have led to only one conclusion: that meaningful action to repair our world can only be taken when the competitive pressures of capitalism, indeed the capitalist system itself, is abolished and socialism established.

Upon the basis of the evidence accumulated by today's environmentalists, a world socialist administration would take swift, positive and massive efforts to restore the environment. The first step toward doing so, of course, will be to change the basic purpose of social production, from production for profit to production for use -- inherently conservationist in its orientation.  Biologists, botanists throughout society will be part of this reassessment, but we can expect the workers of every industry to evaluate the repercussions of the productive processes they are engaged in where the measure of production will be humanity and the future generations of all living things.  The possibility for a true environmental movement lies within the principles of socialism, for only it can turn the accumulated mass of environmental evidence into effective action to restore and improve the world. This class-ruled society of ours wastefully squanders and devours resources.

Capitalism and its great waste of mankind and nature continue apace. And thus it will be as long as the prime incentive to the industry is private profit, instead of social use. Only with socialism will industry for social use be possible. Then humanity will produce to live, not to waste both the means by which we live and ourselves. Then we will work, not to destroy, but to build.

Green Reformism or Sustainable Socialism?

On the eve of Glasgow’s climate summit, we should make clear the position of the Scottish branches of the Socialist Party and its affiliates in the World Socialist Movement. We've been saying that a revolutionary change is the only way to solve the problems that arise under capitalism since 1904 and movement after movement, reform campaign after reform campaign, has arisen across all these years. If the focus had been paid to the fundamentals, then maybe we'd be nearer a solution.

There's many in the environmentalist movement who challenge an ideology that embraces growth where nations and corporations are locked into this international economic system and there's no way out of it for them. Society won’t be able to control the amount and kind of production as long as productive resources are owned and controlled by a minority. Replacing this by the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources under various forms of democratic control is an essential first step before anything lasting and constructive can be done. It is not enough to criticise capitalism but that its critics must put forward a realistic alternative. It is disappointing to find many eco-activists advocating ‘market socialism’ and putting financial capital at the service of people in the form of a universal basic income.  Both are impossible reforms to capitalism and would be meaningless in a world where the Earth’s resources had become the common heritage of all. The Earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labour, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need, a community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs.

Murray Bookchin was one of those in the ecology movement who opposed a trend of anti-rationalism and anti-humanism which he called the "counter-Enlightenment". He pointed out in his book ”Remaking Society”  that human beings are both a part and a product of nature; that, despite what "deep greens" say, humans do have a unique significance in nature since they are the only life-form capable of reflective thought and so of conscious intervention to change the environment. It is absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force since humans are precisely that part of nature that has evolved that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so. It is quite true that at the present time the form human intervention in (the rest of) nature takes is upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that humans, unlike other life-forms, are capable of changing their behaviour.

If humans have a "place" in nature, says Bookchin, it can only be to consciously intervene not just to meet their needs but also to ensure nature's balanced functioning; in this sense, the human species is the brain and voice of nature, nature becomes self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system which mediates their intervention in nature. Bookchin is explicit enough on what this change must be: a change from capitalism, in both its corporate enterprise form and its bureaucratic state-capitalist form.

The Demand is for Socialism

 

The essence of socialism is cooperation, organisation, concerted effort and united action on the part of the working class for their own advancement and their own emancipation.

The Left’s attitude toward reforms, in general, does not differ essentially from that of the out and out capitalist reformers. In its anxiety to capture political office, it seizes upon everything that agitates the mind of the people, regardless of whether it concerns the workers as a class or not. The Socialist Party does not refuse ameliorations offered by the capitalist class, but contends that the more revolutionary the workers become, the stronger they make their economic and political organizations, the more ready and more anxious, will the capitalist class be to throw sops to them in order to keep them contented

The Socialist Party holds that the working class the world over is indivisibly one; that as victims of the capitalist class their interests are common, regardless of nationality, colour or gender.

Many on the Left maintain that immigrants cause a keener struggle and lower wages for the workers already here. The fact remains that while immigration does add to the number of workers, and to that extent increases competition among the workers, it is a drop in the ocean compared to the real cause — the introduction of labour-saving machinery and concentration of capitalism. Even if every foreigner from now on were excluded, the misery of the workers would remain. Since this is so, and realising that injecting the question of racial superiority or inferiority foments racism, and to that extent prevents the organising of the workers, the Socialist Party condemns such a stand  as anti-unsocialistic

Taxes are paid by the property-holding classes out of that portion of wealth, produced, true enough, by labour, but which labour never pocketed. In other words, taxes are paid out of those values, produced over and above the wage which the worker receives and which are generally known as surplus value.

 Whether it be in the environmentalist movement or anti-war work, women’s and labour organisations, civil rights groups or what have you, socialists must look beyond the immediate situation and outline a vision of a future society. The issue is how goods are produced and distributed, who owns the means of production and how work is organised and administered,  overcoming scarcity and meeting people’s elementary material needs for food, healthcare, shelter, etc.

The planet cannot possibly sustain this wasteful, toxic capitalist consumer lifestyle on a global scale. People themselves have become commodities, reduced to little more than another expendable raw material. We must transcend the growth model of capitalism itself to adopt a model of socialism based not on ever-expanding production’ and consumption but one that establishes a new ecological relationship between human needs and the environment. In other words, a socialism that is not only democratic, non-exploitative, egalitarian, and internationalist but one that thoroughly replaces the expansionist model of capitalism. Struggles need to be linked up with 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. A better future will not come about automatically or simply because many people want it. It will only come about if we are able to draw enough people into the struggle to create it. But the effectiveness and success of that struggle are not predetermined. Those who are serious about socialism must be serious about the principles and programmes to achieve it.  

The Socialist Party seeks a democratic and revolutionary alternative to the reign of capital and profit. The fundamental aim of socialism is the creation of a class-free society. Socialism is about working people desiring a society free of exploitation and oppression. If socialism is not about creating a society without oppression and exploitation then it is merely another version of capitalism. And if working people do not understand or are not willing to organise for such a society then socialism is unattainable. Most of what the Socialist Party has achieved is to keep together a determined political party, committed to the goal of socialism that has not given up on the prospect that the class struggle would create conditions of anti-capitalism and anti-reformism.

 

Socialism for the People

 

Socialism also seeks to avoid the over-centralised system of some past command economies. Instead, it strives towards a system where the means of production and social services are owned and managed by communities of direct producers. Under capitalism, the economy always responds to the logic of the world capitalist market. Socialism is not Luddite worship of a romantic pre-industrial idyll. Socialism places special emphasis on the development of science and technology. Economic progress and improvement of the people’s standard of living are largely dependent upon the capacity to produce our own means of production. What is important is to identify needs that must be met and to develop appropriate technologies to realise these. A socialist society will guard against the uncritical adoption of capitalist technology. While the instruments might be neutral, these are parts of a technological system designed for the exploitation and control of workers. Furthermore, technology that leads to the wanton destruction of natural resources must be avoided. A socialist science and technology must always be conscious of the need for technology that does not alienate, but rather enhances the humanity of the worker. Such technology must therefore be in the control of the people. 

Material progress in a socialist society can be sustained only through a stable and adequate resource base. Hence the conservation of natural resources and the maintenance of ecological balance must be integral principles of socialism. Our natural resources, whether organic or inorganic, are not infinitive. They will not last unless necessary policies and measures are undertaken to preserve them. This task is both immediate and long-range. It is urgent because of the continued depletion and deterioration of our natural biosphere due mainly to the intensive, wide-scale agricultural and industrial activities of corporations and capitalists. The result has been widespread poverty among working people, especially in the countryside. Among others, this task entails a transition process involving: the phasing out of unecological capitalist production technology (i.e., pollutive, disruptive and inappropriate); the regeneration of ruined and weakened ecosystems (i.e., upland areas, inland and coastal waters, agricultural soil and air) towards a new balance, and the establishment of an optimum equilibrium between human population and nature’s limits (i.e., the capacity to provide space, food and other raw materials).

Socialism must be directed towards the ultimate fulfilment of the total potential of every individual. The subordination of citizens to a one-party powerful State, the ensuing of life, the imposition of a puritanical lifestyle and culture are not outcomes of socialism that are aimed at the fullest development of each person. Far from being neutral, above classes, the state is an instrument of class rule. It is the final guarantee of class power. Reformism starts out trying to use this state. It ends up serving its class interests.

Socialism is not spontaneous. It does not arise of itself. It has abiding principles according to which the major means of production and distribution ought to be socialised if exploitation of the many by the few is to be prevented. The liberation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. A prerequisite for socialism must be the conquest of political power by the working class. There is nothing automatic about this; there are no guarantees. First and foremost it is necessary to build a movement that dedicates itself to rebuilding the socialist cause.  Every person who desires to put an end to this society of war and starvation must find a place in assembling the revolutionary socialist movement, 

Socialism is impossible without democracy, both in how we organise and in what we organise for. As socialists, we are interested in what empower people and give them the sense that they can work with others to change and manage their communities.  Our job, as socialists, is to find a way to propose ideas and democratic practices, to reinforce and build democratic commitment. Socialism is people collectively running society. Instead of being subject to anarchic capitalist competition and the mad rush for profit at any cost, it is working together for the common good. Our co-operative power would be controlled, not by a ruling class in the search for ever-greater profits, but democratically and for the fulfilment of human need.

Overpopulation is not the problem

 

It is guaranteed that the persistent and pervasive overpopulation bogeyman will resurface in Glasgow at the COP26 summit with some attendees conjuring up imagery of hordes of migrants storming the gates of the West.The overpopulation argument serves as a scapegoat for the shortcomings of capitalism at a global level to provide security for the poor  and vulnerable displaced by the economic consequences of the market system. It exposes the impossibility of capitalism to satisfy the world population’s need. For the apologists of the profit system the ‘overpopulation problem’ helps to explain its failures.

 

At  many environmentalist events, population numbers will feature as a major culprit  for ecological degradation. The arguments of Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich,Garrett Hardin and the Club of Rome will in one way or another be cited to blame the climate crises on too many people. Credibility will be offered by scientific sounding equations such as IPAT - Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology to emphasise the role of population to environmental destruction. IPAT neglects the structure of population, its ethnicity, gender and class composition, crucial differences in resource use and technology application. As a result IPAT places the responsibility of  the ecological destruction upon the people with the lowest carbon footprint  and the least access to resources and services.

 

Neo-Malthusian NGOs will be blaming the poor for exacerbating their own poverty and increasing damage to nature with their high fertility rates. Conservation groups will accuse the billions in the undeveloped and developing world of collectively accelerating and intensifying unsustainable pollution and consumption. The view that overpopulation is the real problem is reinforced in education, in the media and political circles. It diverts from the role that the rich and powerful play in depleting the planet of its natural resources.

 

The more humanitarian of them will call for increased spending on family planning. The less scrupulous will demonise and impose eugenic solutions.

 

In his “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” Engels called the concept of overpopulation “the crudest, most barbarous theory ever existed, a system of despair.”

 

Population patterns cannot be blamed for the deteriorating condition of the environment. Such arguments ignore the role played by far more powerful actors, the influence of corporations with their control over the political-economic system. The poor are forced into unsustainable resource use because of the lack of alternatives and restricted availability of such necessities as land.

 

The focus upon overpopulation blames individuals themselves for their predicament. It exonerates the structural inequalities of capitalism with its abundance of wealth yet widespread scarcity. 

#Uproot the System

 Greta Thunberg has announced she will be taking part in climate protests in Glasgow next week, also inviting Glasgow workers who plan on striking to join her in the march.

She confirmed she would be in Glasgow during Cop26 to take part in the protests on Friday, 5 November. The protest, arranged by Fridays for Future Scotland a group inspired by Thunberg’s activism, will march at 11am from Kelvingrove Park in the west end of Glasgow to George Square in the city centre.

Thunberg invited thousands of striking street cleaners, railway and refuse staff to join the climate protests. The Swedish activist appeared to support the workers’ strike in her invitation. Around 1,500 Glasgow City Council staff in refuse, cleaning and catering roles are set to strike in the opening week of Cop26 over a pay dispute.

She wrote: “Climate justice also means social justice and that we leave no one behind. So we invite everyone, especially the workers striking in Glasgow, to join us. See you there! #UprootTheSystem.”

Society must change

 

Each new day demonstrates that capitalism is damaging humanity and the planet. We need a different society, which produces to satisfy the living needs of the majority and not to satisfy the economic profits of a small minority.

Capitalism thrives on exploitation. Its logic is that of profit. Its morality is that of self-interest. Socialism, on the other hand, stresses the cooperative rather than the selfish behaviour of human beings by eliminating the conditions that promote the self-centred lust for property. The primary contradiction of any capitalist order is between the social character of production and the private appropriation of surplus. Socialism resolves this contradiction through the socialisation of the ownership of the means of production.

Since private ownership of property produces inequality and feeds on the exploitation of the majority, a socialist society must be based on the common ownership of the means of productive property, the operation of which required collective labour-power. Hence, under the regime of private ownership, it serves as a means for exploiting others. This concept may also be extended to land and natural resources, the private appropriation of which deprive others of their means to live. Common ownership of the means of social production does not mean absolutely no form of personal possessions or having to borrow each other’s toothbrushes. Objects of consumption properly belong to the personal and private sphere. Also, tools of production which are not used to exploit or deprive others, are retained as individual possessions. Personal property is respected, but not ownership of property that is used to exploit others and to create wealth only for personal consumption. There will therefore be no confiscation of personal property in a socialist society. In the process of building a socialist society, a large amount of redistribution will have to be undertaken. This includes, for example, the redistribution of private property that has been used, not for personal enjoyment, but for the oppression and exploitation of the majority. The goal of socialism is to enable everyone to have access to more personal property such as food, housing, clothing, books and leisure. But to accomplish this, the ownership and control by a few over the means of production must be eliminated. Poverty has been the lot of the majority in capitalism. They cannot be any poorer.

Socialism means the creation of a society where the people, not a few property owners, own and manage the affairs of the community. In such a society, production would be basically oriented to need, not to market demand. This can only be accomplished through rational social planning. A planned economy requires the identification of basic needs that must be met and an efficient distribution system. These can only be achieved through the effective participation of people in the determination of national goals. It is crucial, therefore, that a planned economy be the result of decisions popularly participated in by all sectors of society. This is the only way through which real needs can be arrived at, people motivated to act collectively and sacrifices made based on rational choices. A planned economy must also ensure a wide and even dispersal of industries in the countryside in order to create work opportunities for a vast number of people and avoid centralization of development only in selected areas. Democratic social planning is thus in complete contrast to the anarchy of capitalism where surplus is expropriated from those who produce by the social classes who own the means of production.

Our aim is a world cooperative commonwealth without the State and without classes, in which the workers shall administer the means of production and distribution for the shared benefit of all. Yet everywhere the capitalists cry: “More production! More production!'’ In other words, the workers must do more work for fewer wages, so that their blood and sweat may fix the debts of the ruined capitalist world. In order to accomplish this, the workers must no longer have the right to strike; they must be forbidden to organise so that they may be able to negotiate concessions from the bosses. At all costs, the labour movement must be halted and broken. To save the old system of exploitation the capitalists unite and chain the workers to the new technologies of industry. The capitalists will do this unless the workers declare war on the whole capitalist system, overthrow the capitalists and make all wealth the property of all the workers in common. It is the ONLY way for the workers to free themselves from industrial slavery, and to make over the world so that the workers shall get all they produce and nobody shall be able to make money out of the labour of working men and women. Reforms wouldn’t solve the problem, even if they could be achieved. So long as the capitalist system exists a few will be making money out of the labour of the many. All reforms of the current system merely fool workers into believing that they are not being robbed as much as previously.

The State is used to defend and strengthen the power of the capitalists and to oppress the workers. Constitutions and laws are framed with the deliberate purpose of protecting the owning class interests against the majority of the people. So-called socialists believe that they can gradually gain this political power by using the political machinery of the capitalist State to win reforms, and when they have elected a majority of the members of the legislatures, they can proceed to use the State power to legislate capitalism peacefully out and the industrial commonwealth in. Supposed socialists preach all sorts of reforms of the capitalist system, drawing to their ranks small capitalists and political adventurers of all kinds, that finally causes them to make deals and compromises with the capitalist class. 

The Socialist Party candidates elected to Parliament have as their function to campaign ceaselessly to expose the real nature of the capitalist State, to obstruct the operations of capitalist government and show their class character, to explain the futility of all capitalist reform measures, etc. At the various national assemblies, socialists can show up capitalist hypocrisy and outright brutality.

 

The Sutherland Clearances

 

Volume three of Alwyn Edgar’s work on the Scottish Highland Clearances is out now as an ebook. This volume is about the clearances in Sutherland.

Before the Rebellion of Prince Charles in 1745, each Highland clan owned its own land. No one else, including the Government in Edinburgh, had the power to deprive them of it. (Travellers saw that in the mountains every crag was a new fortress for men defending their own country.) But the Highland Jacobite rebels having been defeated at Culloden and scattered, and the Lowland Government in Edinburgh now being much stronger since the Union with England in 1707, the British authorities decided to incorporate the Highlands into Great Britain in fact, as well as in theory. The anglophone legal system was successfully imposed, and the clan chiefs were made into landlords, owning all the land which had once belonged to their clans. Scots law now gave each chief-landlord the right (for any reason or no reason) to turn his entire clan out of their homes and farms, and keep the whole clan land as his private back garden, if he wanted. So when the new landlords realized that big grazing farms, for cattle or sheep, would make a lot of money, the clearances started. Well-to-do Highlanders, Lowlanders, even a few Englishmen, rented the clan lands; the chiefs evicted their folk; and the chief/landlord found his income shooting up over the years to five times or fifteen times what it had been (and there was no income tax!). Many of the evicted Highlanders were given an acre or two of worthless, barren land, and told to make it fertile: and when by donkey-work the crofters were able to grow a few potatoes, they had to pay rent for the value they themselves had created. Others – either immediately or after years of rack-rented drudgery on the croft – went to the Lowland factories, or abandoned Scotland entirely for arduous pioneering lives in North America (those who survived the journey).

The Earls of Sutherland were chiefs of the Sutherland clan, Murrays, MacKays, Sutherlands and others. Adam Gordon married a daughter of the Earl of Sutherland about 1500, and managed to cheat the rest of the family out of their land-charters. After that the Earls of Sutherland were Gordons. The 18th earl died in 1766 leaving a year-old daughter, Elizabeth Gordon, to succeed him. She inherited nearly two-thirds of the county of Sutherland, over 1250 square miles, an estate about the size of Gloucestershire. The long wars with France between 1793 and 1815 meant there was a desperate need of soldiers, such as the Sutherland small tenants could provide: but (despite being married to one of the richest men in England, the Marquis of Stafford) she wanted the much higher rents which big sheep farms would supply. (You can never have too much money.) She was indifferent to the fate of the small tenants – “a good many of them”, would “inevitably be tossed out”, she wrote; they would be “driven from their present dwellings by the sheep farms”. She cleared her estate between 1807 and 1821, greatly increasing her rents. She and her husband became the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

The second greatest Sutherland landowner was Lord Reay, the chief of the Reay MacKay clan. Reay cleared his estate even before Elizabeth Gordon, beginning about 1800. (Thirteen smaller landlords owned the rest of the county, and rivalled the countess and Lord Reay with their own clearances.) Reay belonged to a London firm which provided finance to slave-traders, and spent most of his time in gambling dens and brothels. Having wasted vast amounts of money, he sold his estate to the Sutherlands in 1830, and bought a slave plantation in the West Indies. When the slaves were freed in 1833, like the other slave-owners he was compensated. (The slaves weren’t.)

The Sutherland Clearances. The Highland Clearances Volume Three – Theory and Practice