Danny Lambert was the Socialist Party of Great Britain
Parliamentary Candidate for Vauxhall in the recent general election and he was
able to explain our party’s position on a number of issues
1. Housing
Councillor Lib Peck, Labour Leader of the ‘co-operative’
Lambeth Council wrote recently in the free Lambeth Talk magazine with no sense
of irony; ‘I look back on 2013 with a sense of pride in our achievements.’
2013 saw Lambeth Labour Council use heavies or bailiffs in
jumpsuits and helmets to kick out so-called squatters out of properties in
Rushcroft Road, Brixton who had been living there for 32 years. From April 2013
the Government reduced housing benefit for working age tenants in social
housing who have spare bedrooms (the Bedroom Tax). The Loughborough Estate
Tenants and Residents Association urged Lambeth Council not to make those
tenants leave their homes who face eviction as a result of the Bedroom Tax. Residents
are ‘terrified’ by the rent arrears they have built up since the introduction
of the Bedroom Tax. Lambeth Council is refusing to rule out the eviction of
tenants who fail to keep up with their rent.
Then there are the short-life housing co-operatives in
Lambeth which were uninhabitable 30 years ago and Lambeth residents took them
on and made them family homes only now to be told they are to be evicted. The co-operative
Labour Council in Lambeth want to sell these properties to property developers.
Family homes lovingly taken care of by people will be repossessed by the
Council and sold to the likes of
millionaire ex-cabinet minister and
former jail bird Chris Huhne who
was seen viewing two short-life properties in Lilleshall Road in Clapham that
are being sold off at auction by Lambeth Council.
Housing has everything to do with the market. Houses like
everything else under capitalism are produced to be sold with a view to profit.
They are not produced simply for people to live in. The provision of somewhere
to live is determined by money considerations and market forces. Capitalism will
never be able to provide secure and decent housing for all. If you can’t afford
the rent or mortgage then you don’t count
in capitalism.
The housing problem would not exist in a socialist society
that aimed at meeting human needs rather than making profits for the few. With
the ending of ownership, the meaning of ‘tenancy’ will mean something different
than it does in capitalism. It will mean the democratically agreed right to
occupy a home for as long as you want.
2. Local Business
The Socialist Party advocates the abolition of Capitalism
which is a system of society based on the class monopoly of the means of life,
it has the following six essential characteristics:
1. Generalised commodity production, nearly all wealth being
produced for sale on a market.
2. The investment of capital in production with a view to
obtaining a monetary profit.
3. The exploitation of wage labour, the source of profit
being the unpaid labour of the producers.
4. The regulation of production by the market via a
competitive struggle for profits.
5. The accumulation of capital out of profits, leading to
the expansion and development of the forces of production.
6. A single world economy.
3. Education
Education of the young is the first way in which they are
given a foretaste of what life will be like when they reach adulthood. Most children
are given a deceptively benign introduction to capitalist schooling. At first
no pressure is put on them to do other than play and have their natural
inquisitiveness and sense of adventure stimulated and satisfied. But this soon
gives way to the real business of education. Schooling takes the place of
kindergarten. Some children don’t even have the benefit of kindergarten—they
are thrown straight into school. Starting with first year children, a concept
called ‘career education’ has been used to permeate all academic subjects at
all levels of education: The whole curriculum, from start to finish, is
conducted within an atmosphere of competition and stress, together with a
weeding-out process which segregates those with supposedly superior talents from
those less fortunate. This is accomplished through the use of tests,
examinations and grading, all of which have a direct bearing upon ultimate
occupations and potential earnings. Such an environment prevents the
pleasurable pursuit of education as a primary end in itself. The young find
themselves involved in an intensive training programme, presented under the
guise of education, which will ultimately affect the price of their
labour-power and in many instances can prove disastrous healthwise.
Thus schools—or at least the general run of state schools
and even many of the fee-paying schools—produce minimally skilled workers for wage
or salary labour. These institutions ‘educate’ workers to an ideology of compliance.
Schools play an essential role in maintaining the status quo. ‘A capitalist
society requires certain general human traits and institutional features, and
schools function to fulfil these demands’. Education for life has long been a
goal set up and discussed by teachers and others. Capitalism is increasingly
eroding that role, transforming it into education for employment (or unemployment).
The idea is ‘that school should equip children from all social backgrounds with
a greater understanding and experience of the world of work, and in the process
equip them with social and technical skills required by employers’ The raw material of education—the acquisition
and evaluation of knowledge—is strongly influenced by its capitalist
environment. ‘Really useful knowledge has come to mean skills which help you
get on and make it, not insights that help you combine with others to build a
better world’. The privatisation of the public realm, the permeation of market values
into the most intimate reaches of personal and social life, is apparent at all
levels of education. Privatisation is particularly evident in academia itself.
Academics are increasingly obliged to act (and some no doubt willingly act) as
agents of capital within the public sector. They look for commercial funding
for projects that are tied to national policy institutions and are partnered by
prestigious firms, usually national or multinational in scope. Their own
advancement is no longer dependent primarily on publications. Instead it
depends at least partly on success in marketing activity. The scope of subject
relevance is limited tacitly to exclude challenge of the status quo.
4. Leisure
In a 1966 article the idea was posited that in the future
capitalism would develop into ‘The Leisure Society’ because of the rise of
automation. This had not come to pass, as it never would under capitalism.
Automation, productivity has increased and so have the profits of the
capitalist class, but real wages for workers have not increased in decades. It
is leisure and idleness the worker needs (leisure to enjoy and idleness to
recuperate), the worker does not pursue work because he/she loves the burden of
toil; he/she does so because, as a rule, unless he/she works he/she cannot
obtain the wherewithal to live. It is not their fault, but a misfortune – we
are born into wage slavery. The promise of ease and comfort, leisure and
luxury, to the many can only be fulfilled when the many own the product of
their energy, and that would be in a socialist society.
5. Environment
The techniques employed to transform materials must, if they
are to avoid upsetting natural cycles which are fundamental to nature, avoid
releasing into the biosphere or leaving as waste products, toxic substances or substances
that cannot be assimilated by nature. In other words, a non-polluting
technology should be applied. This is quite feasible from a technical point of
view since non-polluting transformation techniques are known in all fields of
production. However, they are not employed on any wide scale today because they
would add to production costs and so are ruled out by the economic laws of
capitalism.
If human society is to be able to organize its production in
an ecologically acceptable way, then it must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism
of capital accumulation and gear production instead to the direct satisfaction
of needs.
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