Newport Rising?
Last month’s Socialist Standard contained a listing for an event taking place as part of the Newport Rising festival. It’s held every year to commemorate the Chartist uprising of 1839, a large-scale rebellion by workers against their exclusion from the political process and a demand for the right to vote and to have their voices heard. This event was the Newport Radical Bookfair at the Riverfront Theatre and Arts Centre, where the Socialist Party had booked a stall. Unfortunately, just a matter of days before it took place, we were informed by the organiser that our booking had been revoked owing to a ban imposed on stalls for political organisations. We were told that this was due to the event being held in a publicly managed establishment. However, when we enquired further, we were given a different reason, which was that Newport Rising was a registered charity and to allow political organisations to have stalls at its bookfair would compromise its charitable status. When we pointed out that we had been allowed a stall at last year’s event, we were told that ‘it shouldn’t have happened’.
Party members nevertheless attended the bookfair as individuals and, when they did, they found several stalls of a political nature: one, for example, run by the Socialist Medical Association, which is affiliated to the Labour Party; and another seemingly promoting ‘trans’ ideas but offering a selection of anarchist leaflets and pamphlets, one of which contained the following statement: ‘For far too long the masters have convinced us that violence is exclusively their domain, and we have cowered and accepted this as truth. It’s about fuckin’ time we fight back, and I’ll sing the praises of anyone who kills a cop or a military jarhead. Those who end the lives of oppressors should be held in the highest regard as liberators’. So much for the exclusion of politics. We intend to pursue this further with the Newport Rising charity and, if necessary, with the Charity Commission.
Despite this our members who were present on the day were able to hand out some of our leaflets to those entering and leaving the bookfair and to participants on the traditional Torchlit March through the city in the evening which is the culminating event of the celebration of the Chartist uprising of 186 years ago. The text of the leaflet we gave out is reproduced below.
LABOUR HAS FAILED: GIVE SOCIALISM A CHANCE
The Chartists recognised the importance of political power and universal suffrage to enact social change. They rightly saw the vote as the way to political control. Once the workers had the vote, they reasoned, they could use it to send delegates to parliament who would pass laws to improve their social and economic situation. But they soon found, as everyone has found since, that the vote alone cannot alter the capitalist system. It can’t change the way the capitalist economic system works, based as it is on minority class ownership of resources and wealth and production for profit.
The last 150 years
For over 150 years now, a majority of the electorate in Britain has been made up of workers in the sense of those who, excluded from ownership of the means to produce wealth, are forced by economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to live. From time to time, as at present, voters have elected Labour governments but, when in office, those governments have always accepted capitalism, at best trying to reform it in various ways. The theory of some who supported Labour was that a series of successive Labour governments would gradually transform capitalism into a more equal society. But this has not happened and Labour is now an avowedly capitalist party, in fact proclaiming itself a ‘party of business’.
The Corbyn/Sultana party
Understandably, many who have supported Labour up to now no longer have any faith in it and a new left-wing party is apparently being set up, with Jeremy Corbyn as figurehead. But if ever it was in government, it would face the same problem as Labour – that of needing to administer a system that exists not to satisfy human needs but to generate profit for the tiny minority. The plain fact is that capitalism just cannot be made to work in any other way than according to its own economic laws that impose themselves on those who run governments as well as on those who run businesses. It is a profit-making system that can only run in the interests of the profit-takers and never in the interests of workers whose labour is the source of profits. No government can overcome these laws and all governments have to apply them or risk provoking economic chaos.
The task now
What is needed is an understanding that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority. That understood, it follows that the only political party worth supporting is one based not on a strategy of trying to tinker with capitalism’s effects but on a commitment to abolish it altogether and replace it, in one go, by a society of the common ownership and democratic control of resources with production directly to meet people’s needs and not for profit. In a word, socialism.
Once a majority want this, they can use the vote to win political control with a view to carrying out this revolution in the basis of society. The urgent task of socialists is to convince more people that that there is a viable alternative to capitalism – socialism as described above. Hence the need to work to educate and mobilise public support for it. This is the policy we in the Socialist Party have been pursuing since our foundation in 1904.