What About TTIP ?

The Socialist Party, which stands for the dismantling of the whole edifice of capitalism and its State, is often being asked in this election our attitude towards specific issues via the web-based 38 Degrees. One such example is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being presently negotiated mostly in secret. Here is our reply:

Dear Brighton voter,

Please forgive the general address but I have several hundred of these to reply to and no staff or fancy PC sub routine to bulk reply.

Somehow we have all come to accept we live in a world where there is no alternative to these international trade deals: that there is no option but to a system based on markets of supply and demand. This means of course we all are beholden to large financial interests and see ourselves as powerless and insignificant. We meekly accept that we are pawns in this arrangement and it could not be otherwise. All the while the captains of those massive corporations and their shareholders are receiving huge bonuses. Somehow they can play by different rules to us, or rather they make them and we follow them. It is of course in their interests that everyone believes there is no other way to run things.

 TTIP is yet one more example of vested interests using their power: tackling this one issue will not really make much difference. All the other candidates on offer at this election will offer you some tinkering within the current set up: a bit more/less tax, bit more/less spend, bit more/less rhetoric.  Either way they will not tackle the fact that the system is set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many. They all believe that things must be arranged as they are; they all support a market system where a select few have more money, power and privileges. 

The Socialist Party exists to argue that there is another way; that people are intelligent enough to arrange things so that society runs to benefit us all and not just the top 1%. We believe trying to reform capitalism is a bit like trying to reform the norovirus: a hiding to nothing. The whole thing has to be restructured so that we [emphasis on plural] are in control. A vote for ourselves  is signalling that you too want the entire system to change: you have had enough of this exploitation and degradation. Things will only move forward when people start to assert their dissatisfaction with what is happening.  

Vote socialist and start to bring about the change that you know is necessary.