Towards the Revolution

Members of the Socialist Party are not motivated by greed for money or envy of power but by the yearning for a full and free life. As socialists we are out to destroy the present intolerable capitalist system, and to substitute a better. A socialist revolution, then, is the necessity of the times, and it is essential to get prepared now. The Socialist Party has always stated that the future belongs to socialism despite its present dim prospects when the very idea of socialism has almost disappeared from working people’s political agenda. For many of our fellow-workers socialism has sadly become synonymous with state tyranny. What an unfortunate fate for an ideal linked always with freedom and liberty. However, there are promising signs of a re-awakening of interest in socialism. Many working people deep down realise that there is something very rotten with this system and are beginning to look elsewhere for an alternative that makes better sense. The political parties of the status quo are being rejected. The Socialist Party’s purpose is to show our fellow-workers hope and that it is possible to build another sort of society. It is ironic that nowadays many people no longer deny the likelihood of a global catastrophe, but are yet dubious about the prospect of a better society coming about. Maybe this is measure of our failure to explain our ideas adequately. Maybe we spend too much of our time calling for the end of what is, and not enough time explaining what might be. Working men and women seek assurance that instead of an imminent, apocalyptic collapse of civilisation there will be a speedy creation of the new socialist society. 

This is our time.

Capitalism has brought us disaster. Yet right-wing, populists and nationalists never stop telling us that they have make “us”“ great again, feeding on fears and anxieties, spreading racism and xenophobia. World socialism will protect and nurture our natural resources for future generations. To achieve our goal of creating socialism we need to resist all power. We cannot defeat global warming and a global pandemic with a divided world. If our planet is not to succumb to catastrophes, humanity must engage in revolutionary change.  

Many find aspects of capitalism morally repugnant: the degradation, misery and exploitation that continually flow from a class society throw-up impassioned voices of protest. People have two choices. They can go beyond the promises of politicians and the hollowness of reformism and organise politically to abolish capitalism. Or they can resign themselves to a lifetime of wasted effort working in charities, signing petitions, attending marches or writing harrowing books exposing this or that acute social problem. To do so will condemn us to stumble from one crisis to another and brutalise, degrade and maybe even kill us in the process.

Except for perhaps war It is not profitable to prepare for future catastrophes. Warning signs for a very probable coronavirus pandemic should have been heeded years ago. Medical experts outlined various ways to tackle it but neither pharmaceutical corporations nor government departments acted on it. The coronavirus pandemic has brought the tyranny of our economic system into sharp focus. There will be an eventual recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic but can the same be said for global warming and climate change. The threat of the survival of civilisation is intensified.

Today all the contradictions in society are sharpening, here and throughout the world. The world today is a very good place to make socialist revolution. It is precisely at such a point in history that the need for working class unity is greatest. Racism has long been a bulwark of all political reaction. It is a weapon systematically used by the capitalists to try to divide the workers of different races and nationalities and thereby to weaken the workers' movement and keep down the entire working class. The history of capitalist rule is a history of the most savage racial oppression. The capitalist rulers and their state are racist to the core. Their much-vaunted 'freedom' and 'democracy' stand exposed as nothing more than hollow and hypocritical lies. Brutal racism has been the way of life in capitalist America. However, the people have never taken their subjugation lying down.  U.S. history is filled with examples of the valiant struggles of the long-suffering masses. The reformist policy of tokenism has long been encouraged by the capitalist rulers of the U.S.A. It was promoted through a variety of programs, such as the promotion of 'black capitalism'. But while some African Americans are relatively well-off, at most, the black bourgeois have grown to become millionaires, but are not included in the list of billionaires.  In brief, the well-to-do African Americans have been given some crumbs.

 The aims of the capitalist drive against foreign-born workers are plain. First, the exploiters want to lower the standard of living and the conditions of employment of millions of our workers who happen to be foreign-born. Then they will blame and attack these worse oppressed and more ruthlessly exploited foreign-born working people to the native workers for the degrading conditions they themselves have forced upon these laborers. The capitalists are thus hoping to sow dissension in and divide the ranks of the working masses in order to crush more easily all the workers — native and foreign-born alike. The workers are divided amongst themselves into foreign-born and native. We must pit the unity of the labouring masses against the unity of the exploiters and oppressors. We must match the solidarity of the working class whose ideal is freedom, with the solidarity of the employing class whose aim is exploitation and tyranny.

 Our aim is the class-free society of world socialism. The Socialist Party is aware of the fact that today the overwhelming majority of the working class is not yet sufficiently class-conscious or convinced of the necessity of socialism.

Homophobic Attacks Increase in Scotland

Official figures have shown that homophobic hate crimes have reached their highest level on record in Scotland.

According to annual statistics from the Crown Office, there were reportedly 1,486 crimes motivated by sexual orientation in 2019-20, up 24% from 1,194 in 2018-19.

The increase in areas such as Aberdeen and Dundee was even greater, with a 68% increase in the former and 41% increase in the latter.

The 1,194 figure is a significant increase from the 452 homophobic attacks in 2010-11, when hate crimes were included in legislation. With the exception of 2014-2015, hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community have increased year on year.

Statistics also revealed that sexual orientation aggravated crime is the second most commonly reported type of hate crime in Scotland after racially-motivated attacks.

Deejay Bullock, founder of Aberdeen-based LGBTQ+ support charity Four Pillars, told Press and Journal that he was “very alarmed” by the increase of homophobic hate crimes in Scotland.

“I don’t believe this can be attributed to increase reporting, which means there is a current increase in hate crimes on the LGBT+ community,” he said.

Almost half of the hate crimes committed on trans people were violent, with 46 per cent being offences like assault and grievous bodily harm. For homophobic hate crimes, 40 per cent were violent in 2018.

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/07/20/homophobia-hate-crime-record-scotland-dundee-aberdeen-transphobia-crown-office/

Wake Up Fellow-Workers

We have always said that socialism can only be established by a conscious, participating working class organised not only politically to capture and dismantle the State machine but also outside parliament ready to take over and run industry and society generally. The Socialist Party case is that a politically conscious working class must use political means—that is through parliament —to take over the state machine, and convert it to an agent for the establishment of socialism. Once that has been accomplished the coercive state machine will cease to exist; in the words of Engels (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific): “The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’, it dies out.”

Modern capitalist society is broadly based upon one central fact — the dominance and enslavement of the many by the few. This is the Socialist Party position. Not all of it, but its essence. The reason we have to repeat it many times, is because the bulk of the working class have never heard it, and few are moved into action. At the risk of wearying those who do understand, we have to iterate and reiterate the one central truth that matters. Our task would be easier if those who do understand, in all cases squared their actions with their belief and did the logical thing — joined the Socialist Party. Socialism is essentially a movement of action. Action, and organised intelligent action at that, is vital to its achievement and yet, there must be thousands of workers, perfectly convinced of the desirability, and of the inevitability of socialism, who have never lifted a finger to bring it nearer. None of this is to deny the value of the ballot-box. The right to vote, on the contrary, constitutes a potentially revolutionary instrument which the majority of workers, once they understand where their true interests lie, can use to take over the state, preparatory to the changeover from capitalism to socialism. 

Is it not time the workers awoke and proceeded to inaugurate a social system wherein all the physically fit adults contribute their quota of labour for the social good—where all engaged in healthy work and none were overworked?

The tactics necessary to achieve socialism is the understanding of, and acting in accordance with, the class struggle—the recognition of the fact that in present-day society two classes exist whose interests are diametrically opposed: the employing class and the employed class.

The employing class own all the wealth produced, and as there is a limit to the amount of wealth that can be consumed by wage-earners—a limit imposed by the limits of the purchasing power of their wages—so there is a limit to the amount that the markets demand. The greater the speed of production the sooner this limit will be reached. The employed class produce the wealth, and the individuals who compose this class, by the necessities of their existence, are compelled to compete with each other for jobs, and so keep wages down to a certain average level.

 Our loyalty is to the working class as a whole and not any one section of it or, rather, any organisation offering to provide a service for any one section of it. Capitalism serves capitalists first and foremost.” That’s why recovery from the COVID19 pandemic and the climate crises require changing the economic system to one that puts people and the planet above profits. If there was ever a time to build a different world, that time is now. It is time for economic democracy, an economy that serves the people, not the wealthy. The reformers must recognize how the state will try to co-opt and water down their demands. Change is coming. What it looks like is up to us.

Is Capitalism the Way to Live?

Socialism will mark a new departure in world history. A new civilisation will dawn. Socialism knows no barriers of sex or race: each individual of both sexes, of every race, and every ethnic group, receives equal care and equal chance of development. Culture will realise its immense possibilities when the latent power of the masses is released. Contrary to commonly accepted ideas it was an intensely humane and tenderly sympathetic spirit that gave birth to socialism. The widespread impression that there is something remote, cold, and inhuman about the theories of socialism, and something regimenting and enslaving about that system of society is wholly false. The precise opposite is indeed the truth. The activities of socialists spring from the compassion aroused by the horror of capitalism and human suffering.

The class struggle is a fact, but a fact much misunderstood. In a class society, part of the community, by virtue of the ownership of the means of production, has control over the whole productive process and possesses corresponding privileges, together with the control of government. The other part of the community possesses nothing but a minimum of personal goods, the ability to work, and some hard-won political rights. Conflict of interest is inevitable. Sooner or later the dominant class will be actively opposed by the dominated class. This opposition will accord with justice, morality, efficiency and sense. When the dominated class gets strong enough it will seize the power of the state. The form of government will change: the tools that society employs will in the long run determine the nature of the state. In this way a slave society emerged from a primitive classless society; and feudal society from a slave society. The advent of industrial production and the development of trade and banking forced feudalism to yield to individualistic capitalism, which has now become monopoly capitalism on the one hand or socialism on the other. It is the resistance of the dominant class to changes demanded alike by morality and efficiency that produces the conflict. The emerging class does not seek conflict. It seeks the right to emerge. 

The class struggle, then, is a right struggle. It is right that those who create goods should share in their ownership. It is wrong that one set of men, few in number, should hold all the fruits of technology over and above a bare subsistence wage granted to those who operate it. It is  right that the workers should share to the full that extension of life and culture which the wealth-producing machine has made possible. It is wrong that a small possessing class should monopolise this life-giving wealth. The struggle is right so long as classes and class privilege remain. It can be blood-less if the people understand the law of social evolution leading to the class-free society.

Equality of race, equality of sex, equality of citizens; absence of domination and exploitation already yield results. A new sense of solidarity, a new unity of interest and comradeship, are brought to the surface. Socialism or barbarism! With the whole world hard pressed by advancing chaos to make the choice of socialism that it must make for civilization to survive, if not to flower. Capitalism is objectively over-ripe for replacement by socialism, that is only another way of saying that capitalism has become reactionary, that it is an obstacle in the path of social progress, that it stands in the way of the welfare of the people upon whom it places, and must place, increasingly heavy burdens.

 Capitalism can no longer work effectively, regardless of what is done or who “cooperates” in the doing of it. It can not longer work effectively in a double sense: it cannot work effectively for the social progress of the masses, as it once did; and it cannot even work effectively for the social progress of the capitalists. If it works at all, that is, if it is maintained at all, it can only produce a continual social deterioration and recurring crises, of which climate change and military conflicts are expressions.

 Capitalism is production for profit. Socialism is called upon to redress the balance of power, to help mankind to attain to an equilibrium of the main forces of life. Power must be strictly subordinated not only to the socialisation of the means of production, but to the socialisation of man, to the restoration of the rational order of the world.

Reset the System

Engels denied nationalisation equalled socialism, and if it was then the German dictator Otto von Bismarck was a ‘socialist.’ There was nothing socialist about such state ownership. The Socialist Party counter-pose genuine social ownership to state-capitalism. The basis of socialist society must be the common ownership of the means of production. The machinery in factories, the transportation networks, the mines, all the communications , the land and farms must all be at the disposal of society. All these means of production must be under the control of society as a whole, and not as at present under the control of individual capitalists or capitalist corporations. What do we mean by 'society as a whole'? We mean that ownership and control is not the privilege of a class but of all the persons who make up society. In these circumstances society will be transformed into a huge working organization for cooperative production. Global production will be organised. No longer will one enterprise compete with another but will operate as one vast people's workshop. The communist method of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use. With socialism, it is no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic cooperative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer have commodities, but only products. These products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought nor sold. They are simply stored in the communal warehouses, and are subsequently delivered to those who need them. The essence of socialism lies in this, that the organisation shall be a cooperative organisation of all the members of society, that puts an end to exploitation, that abolishes the division of society into classes. In such conditions, money will no longer be required.  A person will take from the communal storehouse precisely as much as he needs, no more. No one will have any interest in taking more than he wants in order to sell the surplus to others, since all these others can satisfy their needs whenever they please. Money will then have no value.  Products will simply be supplied according to the needs of the people, for there will be an abundance of everything. 

 Capitalism is all about a small group of capitalists who controls everything; production has been organised, so that capitalists extract surplus value from the workers, who have been practically reduced to slavery. Here we have the exploitation of one class by another. Here there is a joint ownership of the means of production, but it is joint ownership by one class, an exploiting class. This is something very different from socialism, although it is characterized by the social nature of the organisation of production. Such an organisation of society would reduce one of the fundamental contradictions, the anarchy of production. But it would have strengthened the other fundamental contradication of capitalism, the division of society into two warring halves; the class war would be intensified. Such a society would be organised along one line only; on another line, that of class structure, it would still be rent asunder. Socialist society does not merely organize production; in addition, it frees people from oppression by others by creating the cooperative character of socialist production in every detail of organisation. With socialism, for example, there will not be elected delegates to manage factories, nor will there be persons who do one and the same kind of work throughout their lives. Under capitalism, if a man is a bootmaker, he spends his whole life in making boots; if she is a pastry-cook, she spends all her life baking cakes. Nothing of this sort happens in communist society. In socialism people receive a many-sided culture, and find themselves at home in various branches of production.

If in a socialist society there will be no classes this implies there will likewise be no State. The State is a class organization of the rulers. The State is always directed by one class against the other. A capitalist State is directed against the proletariat, whereas a workers State is directed against the bourgeoisie. In socialism there are neither landlords, nor capitalists, nor wage workers; there are simply people - comrades. If there are no classes, then there is no class war, and there are no class organisations. Consequently the State has ceased to exist. Since there is no class war, the State has become superfluous. There is no one to be held in restraint, and there is no one to impose restraint.

Who is going to work out the plans for social production? Who will distribute labour power?  How, they ask, can socialism be run without any direction? It is not difficult to answer these questions. It will be entrusted to various kinds of administrative bodies and we can suggest such United Nations departments such as FAO, ILO, and WHO. The State, therefore, has ceased to exist. There are no groups and there is no class standing above all other classes. The State will die out.

With socialism there will be the liberation of the vast quantity of human energy which is now absorbed in the class struggle. Just think how great is the waste of nervous energy, strength, and labour - upon the political struggle, upon strikes, revolts and their suppression, trials in the law-courts, police activities, the State authority, upon the daily effort of the two hostile classes. The class war now swallows up vast quantities of energy and material means. In the new system this energy will be liberated; people will no longer struggle one with another. The liberated energy will be devoted to the work of production.

Secondly, the energy and the material means which now are destroyed or wasted in competition, crises, and wars, will all be saved. If we consider how much is squandered upon wars alone, we shall realise that this amounts to an enormous quantity. How much, again, is lost to society through the struggle of sellers one with another, of buyers one with another, and of sellers with buyers. How much futile destruction results from commercial crises. How much needless outlay results from the disorganization and confusion that prevail in production. All these energies, which now run to waste, will be saved in socialist society.

The organisation of industry on a purposeful plan will not merely save us from needless waste, in so far as large scale production is always more economical. In addition, it will be possible to improve production from the technical side, for work will be conducted in very large factories and with the aid of perfected machinery. Under capitalism, there are definite limits to the introduction of new machinery. The capitalist only introduces new machinery when he cannot procure a sufficiency of cheap labour. If he can hire an abundance of cheap labour, the capitalist will never install new machinery, since he can secure ample profit without this trouble. The capitalist finds machinery requisite only when it reduces his expenses for highly paid labour. Under capitalism, however, labour is usually cheap. The bad conditions that prevail among the working class become a hindrance to the improvement of manufacturing technique. This causal sequence is peculiarly obvious in agriculture. Here labour power has always been cheap, and for that reason, the introduction of machinery in agricultural work has been extremely slow. In communist society, our concern will not be for profit but for the workers. There every technical advance will be immediately adopted. The chains which capitalism imposed will no longer exist. Technical advances will continue to take place inside socialism, for all will now enjoy a good education, and those who under capitalism perished from want - mentally gifted workers, for instance - will be able to turn their capacities to full account. There will be no place for the parasites who do nothing and who live at others' cost. 

Socialism will signify an enormous development of productive forces. As a result, no worker in socialism will have to do as much work as of old. The working day will grow continually shorter, and people will be to an increasing extent freed from the chains imposed on them by nature. As soon as man is enabled to spend less time upon feeding and clothing himself, he will be able to devote more time to the work of mental development. Human culture will climb to heights never attained before. It will no longer be a class culture, but will become a genuinely human culture. Concurrently with the disappearance of man's tyranny over man, the tyranny of nature over man will likewise vanish. Men and women will for the first time be able to lead a life worthy of thinking beings instead of a life worthy of brute beasts.

The critics of the socialist idea have always described it as a process of sharing things out equally. They declared that the communists wanted to confiscate everything and to divide everything up; to parcel out the land, to divide up the other means of production, and to share out also all the articles of consumption. Nothing could be more absurd than this notion. Above all, such a general division is impossible. We could share out land and money, but could not share out transport systems, machinery and various other things of the sort. Furthermore, such a division, as far as practicable, would not merely do no good to anyone, but would be a backward step for mankind. It would create a vast number of petty proprietors. But we have already seen that out of petty proprietorship and the competition among petty proprietors there issues large-scale proprietorship. Thus even if it were possible to realize such an equal division, the same old cycle would be reproduced. It is why socialists are not swayed by the proponents of co-ops. Socialism is a huge cooperative commonwealth.

The idea of the co-operative commonwealth

One condition of success for socialism is that its adherents should explain its aim and its essential characteristics clearly, so that they can be understood by every one. We must do away with many misunderstandings created by our adversaries and some created by ourselves. The main idea of socialism is simple. Socialists believe that society is divided into two classes by the present form of property-holding, and that one of these classes, the wage-earning, the proletariat, is obliged to toil for the other, the capitalist, to be able to live. All this misery, all this injustice and disorder, results from the fact that one class monopolises the means of production and of life, and imposes its laws on another class and on society as a whole. All differences of class must be abolished by transferring the ownership of the means of production and of life, which is to-day a power of exploitation and oppression in the hands of a single class, from that class to the organised community. The abusive rule of the minority must be substituted by the universal co-operation of people associated in the shared and joint ownership. And that is why the essential aim of socialism is to transform capitalist property into social property.

 With socialism private ownership and production for profit will be supplanted by common ownership and production for use. Working people will work together in harmony instead of being arrayed against each other in competitive warfare. They will collectively own the means of production, and there will be work for all.

The Socialist Party aims to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition. The present system is marked by glaring inequalities of wealth and opportunity, by chaotic waste and instability; and in an age of plenty it condemns the great mass of the people to poverty and insecurity. Power has become more and more concentrated into the hands of a small irresponsible minority of financiers and industrialists and to their predatory interests the majority are habitually sacrificed. When private profit is the main motivation to economic effort, capitalist society swings between periods of feverish prosperity in which the main benefits go to speculators and profiteers, and of catastrophic recession, in which the common people’s normal state of insecurity and hardship is worsened. We believe that these evils can be removed only in a planned and socialised economy in which our natural resources and principal means of production and distribution are owned, controlled and operated by the people.

 Socialism is not a system of society in which individuality will be crushed out by regimentation. What we seek is a proper democratic collective organisation of our economic resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen. This social and economic transformation can only be brought about by political action. Political action is not to be despised, nor is any other that will help to break down the domination of the master class and hasten the emancipation of the proletariat. It will be time enough to forswear political action when the master class no longer strive to retain their mastery of the political machine. We do not believe in change by violence. The old parties are the instruments of capitalist interests and cannot serve as agents of social reconstruction, and that whatever the superficial differences between them, they are bound to carry out policies in accordance with the dictates of Big Business interests who fund them. The Socialist Party aims at political power in order to put an end to this capitalist domination of our political life and the establishment of a planned, socialised economic order, in order to make possible the most efficient development of the national resources and the most equitable distribution of the world’s wealth.

The principles of the Socialist Party are fixed and immutable. Our object aimed at, the end to be attained, remains ever the same, that object being social and economic freedom and equality for all, and the realisation of the highest individual development and liberty conceivable for all, through the social ownership and control of all the material means of production and existence. 

The Socialist Party will not rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and the establishment of the cooperative commonwealth. Our primary function is to organise a political party, independent and class-conscious. The purpose of a Socialist Party is the realisation of socialism. We refuse to subordinate that goal to any other.