The world is ours

 

It is the contention of the Socialist Party that socialism,  production for use and not for profit, will make capitalism of today seem primitive by comparison. Capitalism means neither democracy nor individualism. It dehumanises a person on the job and turns him or her into a cog in a machine. Ours is a class society, based on capitalist exploitation. The working class is kept in a condition of wage slavery.  Poverty in the midst of plenty, that distinguishing mark of the capitalist system of production.

If any one thing stands out above all else, it is the fundamental anarchy of the capitalist system. It is just impossible to make the profit system fulfil the election promises made by the politicians. The purpose of production remains the same – how much is there in it for the owners of industry. The profit system has one unshakable purpose: PRIVATE GAIN. The sole end and aim of business is PROFITS. No matter how much the bosses may talk, in public, for newspaper advertising, you know that they consider everything connected with the shop, the business, the mine or the mill from the standpoint of whether it will bring MORE PROFITS to them.

Today our poverty cries out for the need of a new social order. All that stands between us and the things WE have PRODUCED, the houses we have built and do not occupy, the food we have produced, which we may not eat – all that separates us from these things, that belong to us, is our habit of thinking what the employing class wants and teaches. You will find almost everything and  every social institution directly related, in one way or another, to PROFITS, if you stop to think about it. As long as profit for the few is the basis of the economic system, that system–capitalism–will continue to go from crisis to deeper crisis, with more misery for the masses of people.

Working men or women know that something is wrong with things as they are today. No matter how hard we may work and save, we  know that we are always up against it to make ends meet. Profits are the cause of poverty and squalor. And socialism proposes to end deprivation. This is why every working man and woman ought to be a socialist.  We in the Socialist Party intend to make the factories, farms, mines and shops the collective property of society; to do away with bosses and to abolish the PROFIT system.

Under capitalism, workers have no control over what is produced and how. All that is decided by how much profit some capitalist will gain. But socialism enables the working class to decide how to organise itself and the resources of society to meet the needs of the people. So long as private property and profits remain the backbone – the unbroken backbone – of the economic system, a planned economy remains like a watery mirage in the desert, something thirsted after but far-distant and unattainable. 

Bosses make their profit out of the labour and sweat of their workers. They can’t have their cake and let the workers eat it too. The fact is that CLASSES EXIST. They exist because some men live by owning the factories and mines and machines, and have to go to work on these machines which they don’t own. The boss tries to squeeze as much profit out of the worker as he can. The worker tries to wring as close to a living wage out of the boss as he or she can.

And if the workers stopped struggling, they’d just be squeezed more, that’s all. That’s why there’s a class struggle. There are kind bosses and tough bosses. There WERE kind slave-masters and cruel ones. The working class wants NO slave-masters and NO bosses. 

To be sure, the Socialist Party demands the abolition of the profit system altogether. 

 

Scottish Republicans?

 In Edinburgh, a woman holding a sign saying, “Fuck imperialism, abolish monarchy” was arrested moments before the reading of the proclamation. The incident took place outside St Giles’ Cathedral, where the Queen’s coffin is due to lie on Monday.

A police spokesperson said a 22-year-old woman had been arrested in connection with a breach of the peace. 

Some people were heard booing at the proclamation of the King during the Edinburgh event.

Socialism is the ONLY answer

 

The working class must make its stand against its own capitalists– 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 for the peoples of developing and undeveloped nations.

In socialism, there will be no wages at all. There will be no prices or market. In socialism, goods are produced for the use of people and NOT for the profits that they bring in to bosses. Labour power is no longer regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is not purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. People, in socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs. People who have been freed from the capitalist system will also have been freed from wage labour, price and profit. That is why, instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” workers must inscribe on their banner the REVOLUTIONARY watchword: “Abolition of the wage system!”

It is the very essence of capitalism to keep the price of labour at a minimum point, just sufficiently above the subsistence level so that working people can continue to produce – never enough above this level so that the worker could save for a period of not working. The boss has no other interest in the worker. Capitalism, no matter how it plans and prays, is never actually able to do more than keep the worker at the level of subsistence – although there is plenty to provide luxury for all.

The way to cure a disease is not to put a palliative balm upon the symptoms, but to remove the cause. The profit system is the cause of nearly all the suffering poverty, sickness, crime, as well as war. It is the One Great Enemy of the working class. Amidst the horrors of famine, poverty, crime and war there is one way out for the working class of every country. There is one way that means victory for the useful workers of that country. That way means socialism (or industrial democracy as others prefer to describe it.) All the power lies in the hands of the workers. We can make the whole world our world. But it must be an educated, organised class.

Capital is simply money and commodities assigned to create a profit and be reinvested. Profit is made by the "magical" addition of surplus value to the value inherent in the product. The "added value," the profit, is produced by workers. And this capital is born to expand or die. To be useful, the investment must result not only in a profit but in a growing rate of profit.

Market relations isn’t a conspiracy plotted by a group of secret schemers. Marx who pointed out the truly anarchistic nature of modern industrial capitalism - an irrational, disorganized hodge-podge operation that enormously rewards price fixers, crooks, gangsters, exploiters, con artists, gamblers, stock manipulators, and all manner of corruption. It's a crazy and ruthless economy that survives by inflicting misery on untold billions. Marx who pointed out the truly anarchistic nature of modern industrial capitalism - an irrational, disorganized hodge-podge operation that enormously rewards price fixers, crooks, gangsters, exploiters, con artists, gamblers, stock manipulators, and all manner of corruption. The market is coordinated by trade (what sells and what doesn't) "trade" doesn't determine basic prices anyway. Rather than being basically dependent upon supply and demand, prices in the marketplace actually fluctuate around the real value inherent in a commodity.

The value of a commodity comes from the labour invested in it, including the labour that manufactured the machinery and extracted the raw materials used to create the item. And the boss' profits do not come from his smarts or his capital investment or his mark-up, but from the value created by labour - specifically, surplus value.

Surplus value derives from unpaid wages. The worker is never paid for the value of the product, only for the value of her or his labour time, which is considerably less, and which meanders widely depending upon the historical, cultural and social conditions of a country.

With Labour-power you get more out of it than you put in. Workers produce a commodity which has more value than what they get in wages to keep them functioning. This differential is surplus value, which is the source of capital.

Socialists will produce for use according to a rational plan without a thought for the idea of profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain, a socialist society will produce abundance for all the global human family 

To End All Wars

 Throughout history philosophers and politicians deplore the miseries of war. They still deplore them but war remains in all its brutality. Only the victims can alter this. Every war brings a flood of declarations and statements relating to its cause and proposals for its future prevention. After World War One  the  League of Nations was thought to be the panacea, but it failed. The end of the Second World War created the United Nations and that has failed. The bitter fact is that the world is no safer for peace today. The great lesson is that the war-like nature of capitalism continues.

Our party has always stated that it is impossible to prevent wars without abolishing the capitalist system which breeds war.  It is impossible to prevent wars while this system, and its conflicts between nations, remain. The Socialist Party holds the opinion that wars are caused by international economic conflicts, and not by the goodwill or bad will of some people. fundamentally wars are caused by the efforts of all the capitalist powers to expand into other fields. The only way they can get them is by taking them away from some other power because the whole world has been divided up among a small group of competing powers. That is what leads to war, regardless of the will of the people. Our party is unalterably opposed to all wars. We write against them; we speak against them and we campaign against any participation in wars.

We say if the working class dissipate their political energies by pursuing plans and schemes calculated to solve the problem of war by adjusting the political relationships of nation-states, then they will be faced in the future with more war and all the horror and tragedy it brings. War is a product of capitalist society and its conflicts, and the solution lies in the abolition of this system and its replacement with socialism; there is no other way.

We do not believe in capitalism. We do not want any blood shed to make profits for the capitalists. The main fact is that wars are a product of the clashing economic interest of various property owners in different parts of the world who struggle for markets, trade routes, sources of supply of raw materials, and so forth. While private property with its clashing sectional interest remains war in all its barbarity will always cast a shadow over the planet, a world disfigured by its warfare by torturing, murdering, persecuting, and raping. Given the conditions that lead to war then war will always produce barbarities that have upset and disturb people. The solution is the building of a new system of society in which private ownership will have no place.

 Wars will stop when people no longer support the social system that gives rise to them and replace it with one where wars are a thing of the past. What iv n s needed was a clear analysis of why humans go to war. It is not because of our genes, our natures or our beliefs. It is because capitalists make themselves richer and more powerful by obtaining more and more markets and trade routes and exploitable populations and raw materials. And until capitalism is abolished, its ruthless, competitive drive for profits will condemn workers to die needlessly in wars.

Wars can be stopped forever by simply removing the reasons for their existence. A system where property law and violence separate people into two classes can be replaced by one in which all property, wealth, and land is held in common, and where the owning class no longer has the ability to sustain itself. This system is called socialism which does away with governments and private (as opposed to personal) property, freeing the sum of all the world's wealth to be shared equally by all humans and removing the need to fight over anything. Socialism, and the end of all war, is not a utopia or a lunatic's pipe dream, but a real solution to many problems. Are you ready to take the first steps to end war?

Socialism is Vital

 

The Socialist Party proposes the abolition of the private ownership of the means of social existence, land, machinery, etc. Socialism requires that the means of production and distribution shall cease to be privately owned and become the common property of society. This relates to the means of production and distribution and the consequence of their common ownership will be that the products will be freely accessible to the members of society.  The Socialist Party's proposal is to change the social basis from private ownership of the means necessary to satisfy the economic needs of the community to one in which these things are owned and controlled by the whole of the people.

The first and most important effect must be to abolish class distinctions. Capital is not a thing but a social relation, one that comes into being whenever the producers are separated both from the means of production and from the products of their labour; this means that they can only get a living by selling their mental and physical energies, their productive skills, for a wage. The population of the planet have to put up with lives of slavery and the never-ending struggle against poverty, yet a life of ease and freedom is within their reach if they will stretch out their hands and grasp it.  Our world has the necessities of a good life in abundance, yet misery and destitution are in super-abundance. We live in a society in which almost everything we need is owned by someone else. It is their property. We must buy it from them.

 

When all those things necessary for the community's well-being cease to belong to individuals but are owned as a single undivided instrument of production and distribution by the whole people as an organic unit, none are possessors and none have any advantage over others. Since all are in the same situation, all have the same interest, namely, to make the means of gaining the common livelihood serve with the utmost efficiency the common purpose. Society, therefore, so long rent by class divisions. founded upon unequal property conditions, at once loses its class nature with the abolition of private property, and being classless, there can be no class interests. The putting of all men and women on the same economic plane reconciles their interests, and just as those with the same interests under the class system combined to strive for the class interest, so the whole of society, having been made one by their unified interests, will combine to further the common interest. The old and bitter struggles between sections of the community, which socialists know as class struggles, will no longer be known.

The capitalist class, by means of their control of the media, are able to focus the attention of the working class on things that are often of little concern or consequence, permitting the exploiter to devote his energies more closely to his profits.  The exploiter could not long continue in his privileged position if he failed to keep going through the wheels of deception; the capitalist not only lives at the expense of his victims but he succeeds in preventing them from finding out how it is done. It is obvious that the process will continue until the worker decides to end it, and the idea of ending it will never enter his head until he realises that only by doing so can he hope to enjoy a life worth living.  

By studying capitalism we learn that human society is not the result of some eternal logic or divine laws but is created through our own actions.

All Hail the Socialist Commonwealth of the World

 The more a person considers the present social system, and the facts of working-class existence under capitalism, the more its realities show that the root-cause of the many’ evils of to-day is nothing else but the class-ownership and control of the means of living. There are sufficient resources in the world to provide adequately for every human being on earth. But out of that class-ownership spring the wage-slavery of the overwhelming majority of mankind, their exploitation, misery and poverty, and the innumerable evils that arise from this system of production for profit.

The workers are a dispossessed class; and though our labours of brain and brawn produce the colossal wealth of the world, we do not own or control the means and instruments of production, nor the products of our toil. As wage-slaves we can only purchase to the degree represented by the buying-power of our wages or salaries. Our chief function in life is to work and to produce a surplus-value for an idle and parasitic class of exploiters. We own but one thing—our ability and power to produce wealth by the use of our physical and mental energies. And those we have to sell for wages. We work to live. We live to work.

Capitalism  is  a “buying and selling system.” with production of commodities for sale in the market, in order to realise a profit,. And the workers’ one commodity—their labour-power—is bought in just the same matter-of-fact way as as any other product on the supermarket shelves. They sell their labour-power because they needs must, in order to live. They are “employed” to function as human wealth-producers—as producers of surplus-value.

The parasitic class that lives on our labours look on us as the human source of their wealth. Their machinery and “labour-saving” devices are operated by our class for that purpose. Without our efforts their machinery would not function, the commodities would not be created nor distributed to the markets of the world. 

Surplus-value is produced by the workers in the factories and fields. But it is only realised on the sale of the commodities in the markets themselves. And markets must be found. The most frantic efforts are made to find or create them.

 

Our masters, owning the means of living, own and control our lives.  We are employed as creators of surplus-value: a value over and above what is given us as wages. Out of it, “Rent,” “Interest” and “Profit” go to the respective recipients. It means that a gigantic system of plunder has been in operation, and robbed the workers, who not only have produced the value represented by their wages, but a huge surplus-value also. The wages-system is nothing else but an organised system of legalised robbery.

Look at the widespread poverty of our class—in a great degree chronic; the slums with their misery and disease; the social curse of employment or unemployment, and the terrible results of malnutrition, diseases, etc. Consider the colossal waste of human life in capitalism’s frequent wars, with their untold suffering and miseries for the working class. Capitalism, as a social system, creates incalculable waste in many spheres.

Can we content ourselves with the continuance of such a pernicious system, when we:, its wage-slaves, suffer so from its effects ? Is there any reason why we should tolerate its patching-up by petty reforms when we could, in truth, rid ourselves of the root-cause of its evils? It has blighted the world, and been the cause of infinite death and destruction.

Capitalism is indeed the enemy of the workers. It robs us of freedom, happiness, and life in the fullest sense. Wage-slavery, and the resulting poverty of the workers, must be abolished, and, to achieve these things, capitalism must go!

Our masters, having control of political power, are, through it, able to dominate our very lives. Only by our capture and control of that power can we, as a class, overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. To do that the majority of the working class must first understand their slave-condition ; must earnestly desire the overthrow of capitalism, and the triumph of the Socialist Commonwealth.

Nothing could withstand the organised might of a working class the majority of whom were fully bent on establishing socialism .

Full of socialist knowledge, and intensely conscious of their class-interest and aims, they could and would by their immense unity of purpose capture the key of the position: Political Power.

 

Thus would they smash the pernicious system that is indeed their enemy, and proceed to usher in the Socialist system of society which will liberate all mankind and bring to every nation Freedom, Happiness and Peace.