Meetings

London

at 52 Clapham High St, SW4
Sunday 6 September, 6.00pm

“The free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves”

Speaker: Danny Lambert



Wednesday 16 September,7.30pm

"Adam Smith
and the
Free Marketeers"

Speaker Adam Buick

Sunday 20 September, 6.00pm

OUR OWN WORST ENEMY? – HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIALISM

Speaker: Dick Field
West London

Tuesday 15 September, 8 pm

TWO YEARS OF CAPITALIST CRISIS

Committee Room,
Chiswick Town Hall,
Heathfield Terrace, W4
(nearest tube: Chiswick Park)


Glasgow

Wednesday 16 September, 8.30pm

THE RISE OF THE BNP

Speaker: R.Donnelly
Community Central Halls,
304 Maryhill Road


Manchester

Monday 28 September, 8.30 pm

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

Unicorn, Church Street,
City Centre


Manchester

One-day School

Saturday 12 September, 1pm - 5pm

CAPITALISM AND THE CRISIS
 THE LATEST RECESSION

Speaker - Adam Buick

CASSANDRAS, JEREMIAHS AND
CHICKEN-LICKENS

Why it’s dangerous to hope for the worst.

Speaker - Paddy Shannon
Friends’ Meeting House
Mount Street
City Centre
(next to Central Library and Manchester Town Hall)



                    The Inhumanity of War
50
Years
Ago

All modern wars are the outcome of economic clashes within Capitalism. As this month is the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the last world war, the effects of which are still with us, most of the articles in this issue of the SOCIALIST STANDARD concern the Socialist attitude to war.

 War can solve no working class problem. It cuts across the fundamental identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of this class at enmity with each other in the interests of sections of the capitalist class.

 War elevates force into the position of arbiter in place of the common human desire for mutual peace and happiness. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate upon the best methods of producing misery and of annihilating each other.

 War elevates lying, cheating, disabling and murdering opponents into virtues, confers distinctions upon those who practise these means most successfully.

 Young men and women, in their most impressionable years, have the vile methods of warfare impressed upon them so thoroughly that they lose a balanced outlook on life and are impregnated with the idea that force, with all its baseness, and not reason is the final solution in all problems.

 Socialism is completely opposed to war and to what war represents. At the same time it is the only solution to the conditions that breed war. It is a new form of society in which the people of the world will work harmoniously together for their mutual benefit, for there will be neither privilege nor property to cause enmity.

 No coercion will be needed in Socialism because each will gain from co-operating harmoniously with his fellows. But it is a new social system that demands understanding of its implications from those who seek to establish it.

 With the establishment of Socialism war will disappear and humanity will have taken the first step out of the jungle.

(Editorial, Socialist Standard, September 1959)


Object and Declaration of Principles

This declaration is the basis of our organisation and, because it is also an important historical document dating from the formation of the party in 1904, its original language has been retained.

Object

The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.


Declaration of Principles

The Socialist Party of Great Britain holds

   1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (i.e., land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.

   2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.

   3. That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.

   4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.

   5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.

   6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.

   7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of all sections of the the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.

   8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.
Contents
Features

  • Oil or democracy, what do you think?
    Our rulers tell us they are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for Democracy. Not true.


  • Japan : the road to Pearl Harbor
    No-one can even pretend that the second world war in the East was
    other than a naked clash between imperialist powers.


  • Nazism – the ultimate evil?
    Everything undertaken in the regimes called Nazi, or fascist, finds its
    parallel in the capitalism of other areas.


  • Harry Patch and the First World Slaughter
    “War is organised murder and nothing else”. “It was not worth it, it was
    not worth one let alone all the millions” (Harry Patch)


  • Imagine a world without war
    A post-conflict world.

  • Why are we waiting?
    Reflections of a man in a queue


  • As things are now
    The third part of “Then and Now – how we live and how we used to live”.
    What life might be like after socialism has been established.




    		•
    Regulars
    Editorial

    Open Letter
    The crisis: an
    open letter to
    trade unionists

    Letters

     Contact Details
    Meetings

     Cooking the Books 1

    Cooking the Books 2

    Cartoons
    The Irate Itinerant

    Free Lunch


    Pathfinders

    Material World

    Pieces Together

    Book Reviews

    50 Years Ago


    Greasy Pole


    Voice from the Back







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    Socialist Standard Online edition                               September 2009