Our Socialist Plan

 

What is socialism and how can it be established. Socialism speaks to the needs and problems of the working people in a way no other political ideology can. It ties all the many and varied problems confronting people today, from economic crises to racism, from eroding democratic rights to environmental ecocide, back to their common origin in the system of capitalism. Socialism explains the basic reason why people increasingly dissatisfied with the oppression and deteriorating quality of life have not been able to gain the freedom and security they've sought for decades. Around the world, the obvious reality is that the great majority of people have no control over their lives and no way to ensure even the basic necessities of life for themselves and their families. Everywhere, they confront the rule of a small class whose ideas and interests dominate. Socialism exposes superficial excuses for this status quo of inequality and gets to its roots. It shows that tinkering with the system as it is, or waiting for "better times," or relying on politicians, are unsuccessful remedies and keeps the majority from challenging its domination.

 The Socialist Party offers no promises nor mouths appealing slogans.  Our plan is to mobilising the working people into organisations that will enable them to resist and overturn the rule of the capitalist class, and to build a better society, more democratic, more open and freer than any that has ever existed. Anything short of such a revolutionary formula leaves control of society right where it is, in ruling-class hands. And no matter how that control may be "modified," if the ruling power of society is left where it is now, this world is headed for disaster. The tremendous productive potential of the economy will continue to be used for private gain and corporate profit. It will be used, as it is today, to exploit workers on the job, to rape the environment for profit, and to amass mountains of wealth for the few. It will keep pitting worker against worker, race against race, and sex against sex, fighting over scraps while the capitalist class reaps the harvest. A small ruling class will continue to use its monopoly on the means of life to shape the entire course of our lives.

If control of society remains where it is now, the government will remain an instrument for advancing the ends of a ruling minority against the rest. It will continue to serve capitalist interests. The repression will grow more drastic and dangerous. The system will head toward ever-worsening crises and more conflicts. To change course, the political and economic power of society must be transferred from the small ruling class to the working majority. In essence, this is what socialism is all about. Socialism does not mean control by the state, or domination by a party, or the regulation of capitalist rule, or more reforms and bureaucracy. It means the transfer of power over all social institutions and operations to the working people themselves. Revolutionary change can only come through the direct activity of the workers themselves. They must break with the illusion that they have to endure capitalism forever, or are powerless to change society. Through their conscious political and economic organisation, they can not only overturn class-ruled society but, in the same process, build a better one in its place.

Politically, the working class must build a party that stands for their own collective interests. For too long workers have relied on capitalist politicians to speak for them. They must build their own political organisation, to challenge the domination of the capitalist class and help all workers realize how socialism serves their needs, and how it can be won.

Socialism is the common ownership by all the people of the factories, communication networks, mines, transport, land and all other instruments of production. Socialism means production to satisfy human needs, not as under capitalism, for sale and profit. Socialism means direct control and management of the industries and social services by the workers through a democratic administration.  All authority will originate from the working people in the places they dwell and the places where they work,  electing whatever committees or representatives deemed necessary to carry out their decisions and facilitate their wishes. Socialism means an end to economic insecurity and exploitation. It means workers cease to be commodities bought and sold on the job market, and are forced to work as appendages to tools owned by someone else. It means a chance to develop all individual capacities and potentials within a free community of free individuals. It means a class-free society.

Socialism is not government or state ownership. It does not mean a state bureaucracy as was in the ex-U.S.S.R., with the working class oppressed by a new bureaucratic class. It does not mean "nationalisation," or state capitalism of any kind.

 It means a complete end to all capitalist social relations.

To win fellow workers over to socialist freedom requires enormous efforts of organisational and educational work. It requires building a political party of socialism to contest the power of the capitalist class on the political field, and to educate the majority of workers about the need for socialism. You are needed for a better world, to end poverty, racism, wars, environmental disasters and to avert catastrophic climate change.

Our goal always remains the same

 

Capitalism threatens the existence of civilisation and a few say, even of mankind. The pollution of our air, soil and water. Other problems that defy capitalist solutions are wide displacement of people impoverishment of the population, mounting corruption and crime,  racism and xenophobia. All these are symptomatic of a doomed system that is taking us toward social catastrophe. They are a plain warning that we cannot prosper under capitalism. In this grave situation, the Socialist  Party's views deserve the closest attention that capitalism has outlived its usefulness to the majority. And that this obsolete system breeds ever-multiplying evils.

 Capitalism is an economic system in which goods are produced to be sold at a profit. The goods are produced by the working class in industries owned by a small class of capitalist parasites. The capitalist owners of industry become the owners of the products. The workers get for their creative efforts a wage, an amount just sufficient to maintain themselves and their families. 

Only when our economic life has been entirely rebuilt on a new foundation can lasting peace and economic well-being for all be achieved. Production for private profit must be replaced by production for the common good. Instead of letting a tiny useless class appropriate the lion's share of our collective product, the workers who create it must retain its full social value. Likewise, the existing despotic capitalist control of the national economy must yield to democratic management of the industries by the workers who run them. And, of course, to permit the foregoing fundamental changes, the industries and natural resources must become the social property of all the people. We must establish a new society -- a socialist society. Don't, though, get any wrong impression. We mean genuine Marxian socialism and emphatically not the counterfeits with which was the Russian and now the Chinese versions of state-capitalism.

 Socialism is a democratic economic administration where there will be no political State, and no political parties either. The workers themselves will have a democratic mastery of their tools and products -- the indispensable condition of freedom in an industrial age. There can be no peace or economic security without socialism. We cannot solve our tragic problems until we get rid of their capitalist cause. Put your full influence behind the only movement that can transform this country into a model of peace, abundance, freedom and social sanity.

The aim of the Socialist Party is to create a society in which wars will be but evil memories, a society in which poverty will have disappeared, in which freedom and democracy will have become the prevailing order of society for all. Socialism embraces and embodies the hopes and dreams of the ages, a society of peace and abundance. We of the Socialist Party believe that socialism is attained peacefully.

In a socialist society, there will be no private ownership of the land and the industries. When we say this, we are not talking about; your house, or your clothes, or your car, or any of your personal belongings. What we are talking about are the factories, communications, the mines, transport - in short, what is used in the production and distribution of goods. We say that these means of production and distribution must belong to society as a whole. There will be no wage system r. We shall produce for use, rather than for sale with a view to profit for private capitalists. We shall produce the things we want and need rather than the things for which a market exists in which the goods we produce are sold for the profit of the private owners. In a socialist society, we shall have a complete democracy - - an economic democracy. Today ownership and control of industry rest in the hands of a numerically small class (the capitalist class) who contribute nothing to production. The rest of us (the working class) own nothing but our ability to work, whether it be physical or mental, or both.

The unnecessary evil of the system of capitalism has long since outlived its usefulness. A parasitic class, which contributes nothing to human welfare exists in luxury based on the exploitation of another class that, producing everything worthwhile, yet exists in mortal fear of want and degrading misery, and now faces new horrors of environmental destruction to be added to nuclear annihilation in a third world war. In a socialist society, on the other hand, since we shall collectively own the factories and means of production, we shall have full and free access to the means of wealth production and distribution. We shall collectively produce the things we want and need for full and happy lives. It will be to the benefit of all to find new inventions, new means of production, improved means of distribution. Society as a whole will have a vital interest in providing the opportunity to each individual to find the work for which one is best suited and in which one will be happiest. There will be the fullest freedom and opportunity.

Democracy will truly be based on the broadest lines. Democracy in which the final and only power will be the great mass of our people, the useful producers, which in a socialist society will mean everybody. No more will society be split into two contending classes. We shall all be useful producers, collectively owning the means of production and distribution, collectively concerned with producing the most with the least expenditure of human labour, and collectively jealous of the rights of the individual to a full, free life of happiness.

 It is within the power of working people to establish such a society as soon as they recognise the need for it and organise to establish it. The Socialist Party points the way. By supporting it at the ballot box you will say that you demand the end of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. This is the civilised way of revolution. This is the peaceful way to revolution.

The Workplaces to the Workers

 

Socialism will have a mutual understanding as its fundamental principle upon which the future will build. Perhaps you are shaking your head at this point and saying, "All this sounds like heaven on earth. But it can never be. We have to contend with human nature, you know." Are you opposed to helping create a "Heaven on Earth"? Do you actually prefer the hell on earth of today? Are you so different from others? Is your nature so unique that you are the only one against the insecurity of employment and the exploitation under capitalism? Are you the only one yearning for economic freedom and comfortable decent life for yourself and your family? Do you endorse the fear-instilling and intimidating measures used by some politicians to curtail freedom of thought, and encroach upon your liberties? The Socialist Party maintains that the best in men and women will only be brought out by better social and economic conditions.

We seek a socialist world where there will be no private ownership in the necessaries of life, i.e., the industries and the system of communication and distribution, as well as the social services, there will be no political State, no political parties, no politicians, and, accordingly, there will be no State ownership or bureaucratic control of these necessaries of life and where will be no wages system, hence, no exploitation. We shall have common ownership of the necessaries of life. We shall control and administer these. Socialism is a social system under which all the instruments of production, distribution, education, health, etc., are owned, controlled and administered by the people, for the people and at all times responsible to the people. That is socialism, and nothing short of it is socialism.

On the Left, there are "socialist" parties that have for decades have advocated a hodgepodge of reforms of municipalisation and nationalisation, while the more radical call for cooperatives. All of which would make necessary the retention of the political State and give politicians and civil servants positions of power as the ruling bureaucrats. In their effort to be "all things to all people," they also advocate private ownership of small businesses unaware that the capitalist system fosters accumulation of capital, expansion of markets and leads to centralisation and monopolies. Walmart was once a “mom and pop” neighbourhood store, Bank of America was formerly a community bank for Italian immigrants.

The Left are reformists seeking political power by making meaningless promises in the name of "socialism," while the Socialist Party is a revolutionary political party whose aim is, and always has been, the abolition of capitalism.

 The World Socialist Movement is the only organisation that stands uncompromisingly for the abolition of capitalism and denies that there is any possibility of real or lasting improvement for the vast majority, the working class, within the framework of the capitalist system. On the contrary, the Socialist Party warns that the longer capitalism lasts, the worse becomes the condition of the workers as a class, and the more difficult will become the transition from capitalism to socialism. And this is despite the persistent efforts of the progressives and liberals with their reforms, whether they pretend to be socialists or not. The Socialist Party has learned through the hard school of experience that reformism leads away from the progress of socialism. Every reform granted by capitalism can be a concealed measure of reaction. Therefore, we contend that capitalism must be abolished.

Support the Socialist Party and its socialist reconstruction of society. Do not be deceived by those who, lacking revolutionary principles, opportunistically trading on the word "socialism." 

 Are you going to keep the system of private ownership? Will you attempt to preserve a social system that has proved its incapacity to solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty? Do you favour prolonging the life of a society in which a few own all the means of wealth-production, in which labour-saving machinery, instead of lightening the workers’ toil, throws people out of jobs onto the scrap heap? Must you permit mankind to pass through still another vicious cycle of recession, crisis and conflict?

 Or shall you do the common-sense thing, make the means of production our collective property, abolish the exploitation of the many by the few, and use our species’ genius to create abundance for all?

There are certain things you must understand. The first is that we can expect no help whatsoever from the beneficiaries of capitalism. Here and there an individual capitalist may see the handwriting on the wall and join with the workers, but as a class, the capitalists, like the slave-owning and feudal classes before them, will strive to prolong their poverty-ridden, war-breeding system. The workers of hand and brain must build this new world and emancipate themselves through their own class conscious efforts. Another thing to understand is this; though the workers are in the overwhelming majority, and have tremendous potential power, they can apply their collective strength to the task at hand only through organising politically and by availing themselves fully of the peaceful method for the conquest of the capitalist political State.

(VIDEO) Alwyn Edgar - The Highland Clearances

 

Clans and Clearance. The Highland Clearances Volume One

If you go to the Scottish Highlands now, you will find many valleys almost without people. Yet we know from history and archaeology that many people lived in the Highlands for thousands of years. What happened? Between about 1740 and 1900, the Highland landlords decided to clear out the people and establish great sheep farms instead. Five volumes will tell the story, starting with volume one – “Clans and Clearance”.

In Highland histories, some beliefs (though clearly at odds with the evidence) re-appear regularly, all these, and other, misapprehensions are dealt with in “Clans and Clearance” e.g -

* There was an enormous Highland population increase in the century after 1750: this never happened – the highest possible increase is 37% in the years 1750-1840 – during which time food production doubled or trebled.*. Some figures in original documents are clearly inaccurate, but have been accepted by writers who feel that documents cannot lie; they claim that Highland parishes averaged 400 square miles. This is clearly wrong, and can be disproved by anyone who has an atlas and a ruler: the average was about 100 square miles.
* The clearances were carried out by “the English”. In reality they were carried out by the clan chiefs, after the Lowlanders and the English conquered the Highlands, following the Battle of Culloden, 1746. The British state forced the private-property system onto the Highlanders; the clan chiefs were made into landowners, who suddenly realized they could make themselves rich by driving out the clans folk and letting the land to large farmers.
* Most of the Highlanders were Catholics. In fact, 96% of the Highlanders were Protestant.
* The old Highlanders were “crofters”. In fact, the Highlanders were hunter-gatherers, with a second ample food source in their vast flocks and herds. The crofters appeared only after the clearances, when some of the evicted were kindly allowed to try growing potatoes in an acre of two of barren, waste ground.
* The clan chiefs were tyrants, jailing and executing clans folk indiscriminately. No, the chiefs had no state apparatus – police, soldiers, lawyers, courts, jails, torturers, executioners etc – so had to rule with the general approval of the clans folk.
* The Highlanders’ cattle lived under the same roof as the Highlanders. No, the herds far too large; this only happened after the clearances, when Herds no longer had enough pasture for their great flocks, and therefore had very few animals left – and very little grazing, so the cow had to be housed in the same building.
* The clans folk were wildly licentious, drinking enormous quantities of whisky, while at the same time they fervently believed in a strait-laced religion. No, both these opposite convulsions appeared as extreme reactions to the social misery caused by the clearances.

Clans and Clearance. The Highland Clearances Volume One – Theory and Practice

Comments on “Scottish Highland Clearances”

Sorley MacLean, frequently called “the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century”, to whom the author had sent part of the work, wrote on 29 August 1994: “Your ‘MacKinnon clearances’ fills me with hope that I will live to see your whole history of the Clearances published in parts or as a whole. It will supersede everything written on the Clearances at all times and places.”

Andrew Simmons, Editorial Manager, Birlinn publishers: “It is an extraordinarily impressive work.”

Emma Brennan, Manchester University Press: [There is a] “clear authorial voice through which a real enthusiasm for the subject is very effectively communicated”.

Dr Lester Crook, I. B. Tauris publishers: “I appreciate that so many years of detailed and meticulous research and huge reading have gone into this project, also deep consideration of history and much reflection.”

David Paterson, Photographer, author of “Glens of Silence” (with David Craig, Birlinn, Edinburgh): “May I first congratulate you on your extraordinarily scholarly, open-minded and thorough approach to The Clearances.”

The author’s blog

742 pages. Available in hardback and eBook

Hardback: ISBN 978-0-9956609-9-1
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Ebook: ISBN 978-0-9956609-3-9
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Audio Talk

The Highland Clearances – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

The Socialist Party - The Anti-Exploitation Party

 

You have read that socialism will result in the loss of individual liberty; that all power would be surrendered to the state or the government, and a harsh bureaucracy would regulate our lives and enforce blind obedience.

The truth is that socialism rejects the state. Socialists hold with Karl Marx that "The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery."

How then, in the name of common sense, could socialists wish to glorify the state and surrender to it? Where there is socialism, there can be no state, and where there is a state, there can be no socialism. Socialist society will rest on industrial democracy. All power will reside in the hands of the people. Socialism would offer incentives to all. Instead of fearing the loss of their jobs as a result of improved methods of production, workers would know that every such improvement would mean more leisure and more of the good things of life. Thus, socialism would give an unprecedented impetus to incentive on the part of all the members of a free society.

You have been told that socialism means nationalisation or government ownership and control of industry.

The fact is that socialism rejects nationalisation or government ownership of industry. State control and intervention in the economy are long-standing features of capitalism. One of its greatest proponents was Baron Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor of Prussia. For the workers, state ownership is merely a change of masters - it brings no solution to their problems. Socialism is not a mere change of masters. Socialism means complete control of their tools and products by the workers. It guarantees this by placing the factories, the mines, transport, the land - all social wealth - under social ownership and control. Not a state, not the capitalists, not a bureaucracy, but the people collectively own, control, and democratically manage the means to produce and distribute all social wealth in socialism.

They tell us that the former USSR had socialism. That the Nordic countries have a form of socialism. A real socialist society has never been established in any country.

Capitalism keeps working people on the verge of poverty, forcing them to toil in order to eke out a bare existence. Socialism would offer equality of opportunity under which each worker would become the architect of his or her own future.

When capitalists cannot profitably dispose of the wealth of which they factories will close and unemployment climb. In order to avoid recessions at home, capitalists seek foreign markets. The competition for such markets leads inevitably to trade wars and eventually a cold war will become a hot one with open hostilities.

Socialism would function smoothly because socialist production would be carried on for use, and not for sale and private profit. The chaos of capitalist production would be replaced by socialist cooperation, based on the principle that each person should receive according to needs.

Are you one who entertain false and distorted concepts about socialism? If you are, then surely, if only in fairness to yourself, not to mention the momentous issues at stake, to learn more. Do this by studying the literature of the Socialist Party and learn what socialism really means. Socialism cannot come a little at a time, or in one small locality at a time by government decree or otherwise. Socialism does not mean a lowering of anyone's standard of living to one common level, as you have been told by countless politicians who want to do your thinking for you.

The Socialist Party is the only organisation to have warned of the dangers of dependence on "leaders." You may never before have heard socialism described as economic democracy. Socialism is one of the most lied-about and misrepresented words in common usage today. Socialism cannot be handed to you by "leaders", no matter how personally sincere. Socialism is strictly a "Do It Yourselves" project.

Socialism means the common ownership and democratic management of all the machinery of production and distribution, as well as the natural resources and land. The working class today creates all wealth for the private owners of industry in return for a fraction of that wealth, called wages. In Socialism, the same producers will create wealth for all of society to enjoy. With those now un - or under-employed, or senselessly occupied in socially unnecessary jobs, put to useful endeavour, and with all the ingenious time and labour-saving innovations put to use, the hours of the working day will be shortened tremendously.

Automation in industry will cease to be a threat to job security, it will bring the blessing of greater abundance and more leisure time to enjoy that abundance. Instead of workers being divided into hostile groups competing for jobs that will pay enough to keep a family until next pay-day, we will work in harmony, cooperating to produce most efficiently the best possible products, since we will all directly benefit from each improvement in quality and quantity of the goods and services we have made available.

 Socialism is not a paternalistic society in which the good things are handed down to you. It is a society of economic equality, which is to say, equality of economic opportunity. You will have a full voice and vote in the industrial democracy of a socialist cooperative commonwealth. After all, you know as well as anyone the details concerning your job. You are capable of choosing management committees that will best harmonise production in your industry. These will discuss new methods of gaining efficiency, and formulate information on the total production of that industry to serve the needs and desires of society as a whole, so that abundance will be assured to everyone. Your representatives can be removed as easily as they are elected, because of your on-the-job voice in running your industry. Economic, as well as governmental freedom, will, at last, be yours. The worries of unemployment, the insecurity and strain that now accompany the sale of your labour-power to the private owners of industry -- all will be banished along with capitalism and its governmental voice, the political State.

Increased leisure and general well-being will, of course, make it possible for all of us to lead wholesome and decent lives. All will enjoy better health. The modern scourge of mental illness will be practically eliminated in a society freed from the causes of anxieties and tensions that now plague mankind.

From History, We Learn

  In Celtic cultures, harsh material conditions made cooperation a necessity rather than a choice, in order to survive. Fishing and subsistence farming was the mainstay of communities. The land was held in common. Each family was allocated a field – the size and needs of the family determined the size of the field. Field ownership was not permanent but changed over time according to need. Peat was also held in common and allocated on the same basis. Fishing was organised on a communal basis. There were very little monetary relations between members of the Celtic communities. People were bound to each other by close ties of clanship and interdependence. Co-operation was at the core of all activity. Collective decisions were made at people’s assemblies where the issues concerning the community were discussed. Votes were not taken but issues were discussed until a consensus was reached.

 Socialists have used the term primitive communism to describe these pre-class societies. There was no division of goods based on a top-down hierarchy. Rather, it was a society of mutual aid supporting and sustaining real humanity.

In the modern age, clans are associated with poverty and backwardness. The Georgian and Victorian generations appropriated a romantic sanitised version of the clan traditions of bagpipes, tartan and kilts. 

The time came when people saw in the newspapers things they were unable to make themselves and had to buy. To obtain them, money was needed, and all they had to sell was their labour-power. Their communal way of life was gone. 

Yet the past gives us an insight into the future – how people freed from the oppression of class society might live their lives – but this time in an age of plenty.