Poisoning the planet

 

We may be facing a stark choice: a socialist world or no world at all.

Green capitalism is just as much a pipedream as ethical capitalism or, as we have been saying for ages, capitalism reformed to benefit the workers. The only possible capitalism is the one we’ve got: a profit-maximising one. Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on the expansion of markets, higher consumption and increased production. Corporations will seek out loopholes in every law and regulation that seeks to constrain their business profits and dividends to investors.

Capitalism is the impersonal process of the accumulation of capital out of the surplus value produced by the wage working class and involves competition to transform this surplus value into money by selling the products in which it is embodied. This battle is won by those enterprises that can sell their products at the lowest price due to their employment of more productive methods. This investment in new productive methods depends on making enough profits (converting enough surplus value into money). So, capitalism is the pursuit of profits to accumulate as more capital. Such “growth” is built into it and cannot be stopped. If ever it was, the whole system would seize up and there’d be massive worldwide unemployment. All the arguments, whether or not they are expressed in terms of environmental considerations, must under capitalist conditions produce an answer in terms of profit margins. 

The Socialist Party can clearly see that the system of production for profit is the major cause of pollution. It is capitalism that has forced CEOs to orchestrate and order the use of fossil fuels and the cutting down of tropical forests because this is cheaper and more competitive than the alternatives. What is required to stabilise the rise in temperature is a worldwide political and social revolution to end capitalism and put mankind in full charge of its interaction with the rest of nature (production). Which can only be done on the basis of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity. We argue for the common ownership of the Earth’s productive resources, natural and industrial, by the whole of humanity, i.e. world socialism, for how could production be reoriented towards use instead of profit unless the means of production had first ceased to be the exclusive property of individuals, corporations or states? We don’t see why humanity has to wait till capitalism has nearly destroyed the planet to institute this. It could be implemented now, to avoid the further environmental degradation that will occur if capitalism continues. 

Climate change is not just caused by “technology”, and a return to the “simple life” is no answer (though less passionate worship of "progress” might help). The high rate of technical innovation itself provides cures for its own disease. Dangerous substances can be totally discarded and replaced with chemicals which are more specific, or that break down more quickly. Non-chemical pesticide control can be developed. Factory chimneys can be capped and carbon capture. Sanitation can be fitted with more efficient filtration and with sewage recycled for fertilizer. Single-use plastics can be made redundant plastic can be developed. Industrial processes can all be modified where necessary. No technique of production is indispensable. There is a substitute for anything, or there soon can be if research resources are channelled in the appropriate direction. Something can be done about our environment, and of course, something to a limited degree is being done but the reasons for its slowness and indecisiveness, too late and too little,  are economic, not technical.

Cigarette smoking, for example, provides profits for the tobacco firms and tax revenues for the state, yet intelligent administrators of capitalism can readily see that they lose out, because of the illness and death caused by cigarettes, which lower the productivity of the working class and thereby cut the rate of return on investments in labour-power (the Health Service, schools and universities, etc).

It is the same with pollution. Short-sighted people often talk as though the choice for capitalism was a concern for the environment or economic growth, but the truth is that in the long run, a lack of concern for the environment will cut growth by lowering the quality of human labour-power, the source of growth. Poisoned workers are not so profitable to employ. Furthermore, though government pollution-control laws raise the costs of production, firms do not necessarily mind their costs rising—so long as their competitors are in the same boat.

Not that socialists advocate an internationally mandated programme of regulation and control over capitalist businesses. What we want is for the production of the useful things that people need to live and enjoy life to be taken out of the hands of profit-seeking enterprises altogether. We want the means of production to be owned in common by the whole community as the only basis on which production can be organised to take account of the overall interest of all the members of society. In socialism there won’t be any profit-seeking capitalist enterprises to regulate; just democratically-run productive units producing, in an ecologically and socially acceptable way, what people need.

CLIFFORD SLAPPER COMMENTS ON SOCIALISM (video)

 

What Future?

 We live in a society of misconceived priorities. The profit system puts all at risk because the treatment of all issues must be made at the priority cost of profit. Capitalism is turning the land into a giant toxic waste-dump. Oceans are being polluted the air is being poisoned. The media has provided many of striking images of ecological destruction which have fuelled debate on the environment in recent years. Few people have been left unmoved by the devastating deforestation of the Amazon or the mercury-contaminated cratered moonscapes left by gold miners still searching for the legendary El Dorado.

The deforestation in the Amazon is caused primarily not by subsistence cultivators but by commercial interests clearing land for pasture. Cattle ranches occupy vast areas of cleared land and result in huge profits for the owners. The loss of animal and plant species and renewable timber resources are simply not part of the profit-and-loss calculations. Capitalism, then, is bound to come into conflict with nature. It cannot go green because it simply cannot change its economic essence.  Given the nature of capitalist production for profit, it is therefore simply idealistic for the Green movement to express the hope that the government will make a substantial and unequivocal commitment to climate change. So long as profit is the purpose of production even the most well-intentioned, ecologically-minded government will encounter serious resistance to ecologically sound but expensive production methods.

Many pessimistic environment activists retreat into defeatism, predicting an approaching Apocalypse. Equally as many keep the faith that ecological problems can be solved with a little more legislation, a few more laws and a change in regulations. The Socialist Party rejects both reformism and defeatism, recognizing that the roots of the climate crisis lie in the capitalist system and its uncontrollable production for profit, a system incapable of incorporating the rational and democratic decision-making process which will be necessary to ensure an ecologically-sustainable future.  It is the uncontrollable nature and ecological unaccountability of capitalist production which must be abolished to rid the world of environmental destruction. The Socialists Party works to replace a divided world governed by capital with a state-free and money-free commonwealth.

As could have been anticipated, the repeated reports and studies from the climate think-tanks all suggest remedies to redress the issue fall only within what socialists term reformism, amounting to the same battle cries of the well-meaning, though less well-informed, without visible results for decades. It is perhaps a forgone conclusion that their recommendations will not fair any better in the years ahead as past research and we may well wonder how long before the academics and activists conclude capitalism can’t be tinkered with in our interests. Instead of producing volumes of papers each year, which on the face of it are only of any use in the armoury of the socialist, wouldn’t it be wiser if the “experts” decided to work out how much better the world would be if we freed production from the artificial constraints of profit, and organised production in a rational and sustainable manner and to the benefit of all? Or would these same experts fear they would be labelled socialist and their research studies have taken less seriously?

 

A collapse of present-day civilisation might indeed occur and would involve far fewer people surviving and at a far lower standard of living, but it would not result at the end of humanity and certainly not of the planet on which we live. Yet how likely is it that there will be a societal collapse caused by climate change or other ecological factors? In answering this question, we need to look not mainly at technical questions such as how energy is produced and how crops are grown, important though these of course are. Rather, we need to examine the economic basis of society and see the implications of the ways in which production as a whole is organised and of how priorities are considered. Only by replacing the profit system with a truly democratic organisation can we give the environment the priority it deserves. Capitalism can do no more than tinker with the problem.  Capitalism is the worst possible social system for the kind of rational, integrated action which is needed. Socialism, in contrast, will provide the kind of framework within which global warming and other ecological problems can be tackled and solved by that marvellous resource—human ingenuity.

Remembering the UCS Work-in (video)

  The Socialist Party never condemned the UCS workers. Quite the reverse. It was heartening to see a group of workers refusing to passively accept the sack. At least they didn’t meekly accept their fate or rely solely on appeals to Labourite and trade union leaders to save them. They took positive action on their own account. 

We wished them luck in using their bargaining strength to get the best of redundancy terms they could. 

The Socialist Party has always given its general support to the industrial side of the class struggle while leaving the specific tactics to be adopted in this struggle to the workers immediately involved. If after considering the situation carefully the UCS workers democratically decided on a peaceful, disciplined “work-in” that was up to them.

The Socialist Party will continue to urge workers everywhere to resist attacks made on their living standards by their employers. This is a basic necessity so long as capitalism lasts. At the same time, we recognise such action to be purely defensive, besides never-ending, and which still leaves the factories, mines, shipyards, land, transportation systems, and the other places where wealth is produced, in the hands of the owning class. We, therefore, have organised politically to work to bring nearer the day when capitalism’s inhumanity, waste and chaos will be swept away by the democratic action of the majority of the world’s working class. 

What Socialism Really Means

 

A socialist must not only be one who understands socialism and believes in it: he must be one who wants socialism. Fellow workers, the only remedy for your precarious and poverty-stricken condition is to be found in intelligent recognition of your class position. You must recognise that you are mere cogs in the industrial machine, that you are permitted to work only so long as there is profit to be derived from your labour. You must understand what you want and how to get it; then there will be no room for labour "leaders." You would not need to be led. and you could not be misled. You must organise inside the Socialist Party, and work consciously for that revolution which will replace poverty and misery for those who do the world's work with plenty for all.

The working class, having learnt that capitalist exploitation is the source of their social evils and their enslavement, will seek to emancipate themselves and solve their social problems by the abolition of capitalism through the establishment of socialism. The essential factor is the education of the workers in the principles of socialism, for on the “rank and file” rests the responsibility of a “leader’s" shortcomings.

The Socialist Party knows that reforms or measures palliative of capitalism can only be obtained while the master class rules in so far as capitalist interests are thereby served; and since capitalist interests are directly opposed to those of workers in all essential points of wealth and leisure, it is obvious that the measures passed by capitalist representatives will have for object the maintenance or extension of their system or the intensification of the robbery of the workers upon which they depend. It is then a fraud for a candidate to pretend to be able to obtain measures in the workers’ interests from the capitalist class in power. The workers can get nothing of their own until they are able to take it. No man is a socialist who throws out such fraudulent sops or promises as bait to prospective voters, for besides that it must lead workers to disappointment and apathy and aid their enemies, it is obvious that as far as sops or promises are concerned the master class can, and does when it needs to, always out-sop the would-be member. Hence it is of supreme importance that the workers rely upon themselves and concentrate all their energies on the capture of political power for socialism, for all else is an illusion.

The socialist proposition begins at the point when you recognise that capitalism must go and the earth must belong to its inhabitants. Socialism has nothing to do with regulating capitalism or equalising social relations within it, or injecting illusory feelings of cooperation into it, or moulding or reforming it in any way. Socialism is not a process of playing with the surface image of the profit system. We are uncompromising enemies of the capitalist system. While it exists, in whatever form, we fight against it. Socialists are not alone in this fight. Capitalism necessitates class struggle between capitalists and workers. The two classes have opposed interests and live in a condition of permanent tension which frequently erupts into class war in various forms. The difference between the socialist struggle and that of our fellow workers who are not yet socialists is that we know what we are fighting against and what we are fighting for. Too often workers struggle in the dark; they hate the boss, they seek justice, they place faith in reform schemes or other illusions. To become a socialist is to see through the dark and convert blind struggle into a movement for social revolution. The socialist proposition commences, then, at the point of seeing the need for fundamental social change; it proceeds to consciously prepare for revolution. That is the socialist task. The socialist revolution will not be an affair between leaders and the led. 

 Workers will not be led into socialist liberation. We shall not, as a class, be told by leaders that they have very kindly emancipated us from capitalism and now we may cheer like grateful masses for being freed. Workers will not be freed but must free ourselves. To quote Marx. "The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class themselves". The revolutionaries who make the revolution will know what we are doing. That is why the first prerequisite for the socialist revolution is the consciousness of what needs to be done.

As the working class is the majority, and as there will be no socialism without a socialist-conscious working class, it follows logically that the revolution must be the act of the majority, not the minority. In short, it must be democratic. As socialism itself will be the most democratic form of society ever experienced by humankind, it follows that it can only be established democratically. A minority could not establish socialism in the face of a non-socialist majority of workers, and it would be folly to attempt such an adventure.

Once there is a socialist majority political action must be taken. The socialist revolution cannot be non-political. Why? Because we are up against the capitalist state and if we do not take it, it will take us. The power of coercion cannot be left in the hands of the capitalist class. The government and the armed forces must be taken away from them in the same way as they are handed over to them: by mandate. At present workers vote the power to rule over them to our class enemies every time there is an election. In the ballot box workers throw away their chance to be rulers over their own lives, offering such power to those who seek to govern on behalf of the bosses. The socialist never votes for anyone to rule over him or her, and never votes for any capitalist party, even if it poses as "the lesser evil". The socialist vote is a class-conscious vote which is cast in opposition to the capitalist state in any form. This does not mean that we seek to establish a socialist state. On the contrary, the socialist revolution. in establishing workers' power over the state, will at the same time, put an end to the state. The state is an instrument of class coercion: where there are no classes there will be no state. The socialist revolution will bring about a state-free society.

The working class is not a national class but exists worldwide. Our interests internationally are not many, but identical. Workers everywhere are robbed of the fruits of our labour and only by revolution everywhere can the world become the property of all — or, more accurately, the property of no one. So, the socialist revolution knows no boundaries; it will not occur nationally, but internationally.

 That is why the Socialist Party is not concerned only with the workers of one state territory.  It is up to socialists in each area of world capitalism to struggle for revolution in whatever way is best for them. To face up to that obligation and join the Socialist Party is the most historically intelligent and dignified act that you could take. The movement for revolution demands your consideration and support.

Bill Martin (video clip)

 

The Socialist Party and Socialism

 

The Socialist Party maintains that as the enslavement of the working class follows from the ownership of the means of living by the capitalist class the interests of the working class can only be served by the establishment of socialism. A system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. For world socialists, socialism means a money-free, wageless, class-free and stateless society.  Socialism is a world society with no production for sale, money, buying and selling, prices, wages, or profit.

 The Socialist Party reject all forms of minority action to attempt to establish socialism, which can only be established by the working class when the immense majority have come to want and understand it. Without a socialist working class, there can be no socialism. The establishment of socialism can only be the conscious majority, and therefore democratic, the act of a socialist-minded working class. If we use terms such as “majority” this is not because we are obsessed with counting the number of individual socialists, but to show that we reject minority action to try to establish socialism – the majority as the opposite of the minority. Socialism can only be established when through the experience of capitalism, including hearing the case for socialism (itself the distilled past experience of the working class), a majority (yes, but in the democratic rather than mere mathematical sense) have come to want it. 

This vicious system that we live under has not always been, and it need not continue. But before it can be superseded by socialism, which is a system of society based upon the common ownership of the means of life, socialism must be understood and desired by the workers generally.

To agitate for the reform of a system which has such a basis as the capitalist system has, to endeavour to palliate its inevitably harsh bearing upon those who possess nothing, is a waste of energy and time. Worse than that, the struggle for reform obscures the main issue. One thing, and one thing only, will change for the better the condition of the workers generally, and that is the OVERTHROW OF CAPITALISM and its supersession by socialism.

The abolition of capitalism and the inception of socialism is a work that necessitates knowledge of the system now obtaining, of the system that can replace it, and of the necessary work that shall make socialism an accomplished fact. To gain this knowledge the workers must think for themselves. Socialism will not come until it is generally understood and desired.  Our position always has been that Socialism essentially includes democracy—the genuine thing, not the pitiful caricature some confusionist lips and pens love to portray. We have always held, as one of the primary tenets of our political faith, that a knowledge of the principles of socialism, even together with an avowal of acceptance thereof, is not of itself sufficient to make a person a socialist. Something more, we have maintained, is required.

The surest way for such a socialist majority to gain control of political power in order to establish socialism is to use the existing electoral machinery to send a majority of mandated socialist delegates to the various parliaments of the world. This is why we advocate using Parliament; not to try to reform capitalism (the only way Parliaments have been used up till now, which has inevitably failed to do anything for the working class since capitalism simply cannot be reformed to work for their benefit), but for the single revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism by converting the means of production and distribution into the common property of the whole of society.  At the same time, the working class will also have organised itself, at the various places of work, in order to keep production going, but nothing can be done here until the machinery of coercion which is the state has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist class by political action.

Socialists distinguish between society and the state. In their view, the State, as a coercive instrument, only flourished in class societies and was the instrument whereby a ruling class controlled society. In the class-free society of the future, there would be no coercive government machine, and central control would be purely administrative. Unfortunately, many people, including some who called themselves socialists, overlooked this distinction between society and the state.

Carl Sagan on Religion (video)

 

The Only Choice is Socialism

 

There is no way out for workers within the framework of capitalism. Struggle as they may to improve their conditions. Poverty is a cancerous growth that has shattered the lives of workers. It is no use looking towards  the capitalist class to solve your problems. If they could abolish poverty, they would lose their privileged position, power and prestige. The result of class ownership of the means of production is but the appropriation of the unpaid labour of the workers. And because every ruling class seeks to further its own class interests the capitalist will never distribute the profits thus made among the workers. This would mean to forego class monopoly and privilege. Humane slave masters cannot abolish slavery.

Capitalism is a system of society in which the majority, the working class, are alienated from ownership and control of the means of production and distribution; a system in which these means of production are used not for the provision of the needs of people but rather for the production of commodities for the market in order to ensure profit, in one form or another, to those owning and/or controlling the means of production. In carrying out its profit-making function capitalism operates through the medium of the money system, imposing on the working class the need to work for wages, which in turn produces their servile status and puts the seal on the permanence of their poverty.

Our class produces all wealth but because the capitalist class, either directly or through the medium of the state, have title to the ownership of the tools of production and the resources of nature, such wealth as we produce has to be left with our employers and we receive in the form of wages more or less sufficient to maintain us in a working class condition of life between pay-days. It is in the fact that the working class are obliged in order to live to sell their physical and mental skills that their exploitation arises and it is from the same condition that all profit, rent and interest, or, as we call it, surplus value, arises to maintain a parasitic class in power and privilege. But the problem doesn’t end there, for in order to maintain this condition we must accept the whole stultifying apparatus of the money system with its organised waste and inability to exploit the abundant potential of the world for the benefit of mankind.

When we speak of socialism we do not mean state capitalism. What, then, do we mean? We mean by socialism a world-wide system of society in which there would be neither an owning class nor a working class. All the means for producing and distributing wealth would be owned in common by all members of society and would be used solely for the purpose of providing the needs of everyone in society. As it is now, wealth would be produced by social labour, except that social labour would no longer be provided by a subject class of producers but by the whole of society and the division of labour peculiar to capitalism, with its market economy, its buying and selling, money and wages structure, would no longer obtain.

All of our class who are presently engaged in occupations made necessary only by capitalism and its money system would be freed from such activities and would be available to apply their skills and energies to the task of producing an abundance of all the things we need to form the material basis of a full and happy life. It is worth considering just how many wasteful and useless functions capitalism and its market economy imposes on us. Sales people in shops and stores, sales representatives — their number can be judged by the fact that they are responsible for burning up almost half the petrol used by private transport — bank clerks, insurance operators, advertising and marketing men, tick men, ticket collectors — if you had the time and plenty of ink in your pen you could continue the list indefinitely.

You could add armies, navies, air and “security” forces, just as you could deduct from humanity’s bill of needs the tremendous wealth in the form of armaments that these grotesque organisations of class society need to maintain them even when they are not engaged in the destructive activities for which they exist.

Obviously, then, in socialism, there will be no shortage of hands with which to perform the work of producing an abundance for all. This is what socialists mean when they say that in socialism “each will contribute in accordance with his or her mental or physical ability.”

We also say that, in socialism, “Each will take in accordance with their needs.” What we mean is just that! Every member of society will have the right to freely avail himself of such things as he may need. Just as each member of society has contributed to the task of producing the things we require so now, without money, checking, or any of capitalism measurements of poverty, each will take what he needs.

This, then, is what we mean by socialism; not the attempt to facilitate the further development and smooth functioning of capitalism by state controls, not the notion that some of the worst features of the system can be curbed by the state and certainly not the patently absurd idea that workers in one country can elect to power a political party — any political party — that can legislate in such a way as to protect workers in that country. Capitalism is a world system and workers in one country cannot create a national oasis of economic sanity in such a world. Indeed, in this latter idea, the nonsense of a “workers’ republic”, there are dangerous pit-falls. Experience has shown that, where the attempt has been made, the state controls made necessary to impose disciplines on workers, frustrated by the limitations of capitalism’s wages system and the continuance within the so-called “workers’ republic” of all the old failed features of capitalism, has only resulted in the further mortgaging of that very freedom of political action that represents the one avenue to socialism and freedom.

Tragically for the working class, most of its alleged friends on the so-called “left” make the struggle for even their limited vision of socialism seem insurmountably difficult. They will point to the tremendous power of the capitalist state with its standing army and sophisticated devices for delivering death. “How can you beat that peacefully?” they cry, and they proceed to tell us that socialism can only be introduced by violence! These ignorant vapourings may sound much more romantic than the hard-plugging and slogging needed to make workers socialists but they are dangerous beyond measure. The absurdity of the proposition stands clear: the state machine has at its disposal these tremendous means of destruction of those who oppose it, so the workers should collect some old weapons, stones, petrol bombs, rifles and machine guns and declare war on the state!

This is further exposed when its exponents develop their case in the light of our rebuttal. Then, it transpires, we will win a majority in arms. The question we must ask is “Win a majority for what”. To introduce socialism or to prosecute a “glorious” struggle. Obviously, if it is to introduce socialism as we understand it, it follows, and logically follows, that that majority will have to be conscious socialists; that is to say, they will have to be people who understand what socialism is and what will be expected of them in the way of effort — and, no doubt in the early stages, self-discipline — in a socialist society.

What then becomes obvious is the fact that the power of the state, with all its means of violence and intimidation, emanates from the overwhelming support of the majority of the working class today. It is the working class who, by voting for political parties whose policies are based on the maintenance of capitalism and its necessarily coercive state apparatus, that keeps the state in being.

If the working class, armed with socialist knowledge, wanted — as of course they would — to elect representatives to the state legislature for the purpose of making the productive resources the common property of all and dismantling all the restrictive and destructive machinery of capitalism’s wages and money system, what power is there to stop them? Certainly violence waged directly by the tiny minority that would have an economic interest in prolonging capitalism is unlikely indeed. But if the question of violence is to be posed hypothetically then we would say that this is the only context in which we could accept it: when the majority of the working class have consciously opted for socialism and an undemocratic minority of capitalists and their hangers-on (and we would have to allow that they had suicidal tendencies) took to arms to frustrate the will of the majority.