Why don’t lefties vote conservative?

[Mich the Tester]

After all, if Labour voters are so concerned with the lot of the poor, surely they should vote for the party that gives them the economic freedom to make a tulipload of money and then voluntarily hand over 60% or more to the poor. Result; middle class lefty conscience is clear, poor people get help without government interference and bureaucracy and the rest of us can get on with running the profitable businesses that provide job opportunities.

Is it actually that lefties are too damn stingy to help anyone if they’re not forced to hand over their cash? Or are they unable to get a job doing something profitable?

[Alf W]

Here's a series of articles to start you off.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/topic.php?topic_id=31

Socialism involves the great majority seizing back, under their own control, the wealth they already produce. No vision of "socialism" is worth a bean if it leaves out the working class, actively organising itself, taking control of the means of production from the capitalist class and setting out to remake society on the basis of real human need.

The road to socialism and the goal of socialism are inextricably linked. We utterly oppose all those "top-down" accounts of the way to achieve socialism that suppose that some small group of clever people-intellectuals, party leaders, MPs, guerrilla army leaders, etc-can emancipate humanity from capitalism.

Socialism cannot be achieved by acts of parliament or any kind of dictatorship or minority action.

For this reason the Socialist Workers Party has always opposed the traditions of social democracy (embodied in Britain by those who talked of the Labour Party bringing socialism through parliament) and Stalinism alike. Both involve the politics of "socialism from above".

Socialism is only possible when millions upon millions of ordinary working people - women and men, black and white, gay and straight - organise themselves democratically "from below" and set out to take all forms of decision-making power away from the minorities who rule us today, and to impose their own collective power over every aspect of social and productive life.

The founding principle of a socialist society is the most extensive democracy, going far beyond the limited principles of "parliamentary democracy" today. In order to secure and extend its rule the working class needs the active involvement of the masses of people who are currently excluded from decisions about the matters that shape their own lives.

Capitalism has a combination of two drives, both of which are direct obstacles to democratic popular control over social, economic and political life. The first is exploitation. The second is competition.

Exploitation - the extraction of surpluses from the labour of the majority by a minority - necessarily rests on hierarchy and lack of democracy. To maintain the flow of profits to a few, the social power of private and state property over us is upheld by whole armies of supervisors, foremen, managers, police, jailers and (ultimately) soldiers.

Replacing production for profit with production aimed directly at satisfying human need means breaking these hierarchies and substituting direct democratic control over society's means of production.

Capitalism, though, is not only marked by class exploitation. Its other core feature is "the market" and the necessity of competition between rival companies and states. Indeed, that competition compels the capitalist class to seek, constantly, to step up the rate of exploitation and to devise ever new methods of keeping control over labour. Competition drives capitalists to accumulate, to exploit.

Competition and the market also produce a world that nobody controls that develops through convulsive crises. Private profit dominates, and general interests take a back seat - as a result the capitalist class has no effective answer to ecological threats like global warming.

Capitalist production, driven by competitive accumulation, rips the heart out of established communities, and today threatens the very existence of life on the planet. It prevents the rational collective harbouring and development of resources.

The sole practical alternative to the anarchy and destructiveness of capitalist competition and exploitation is the development and extension of cooperative and democratic planning.

How, in the end, can human needs and wants be decided unless human beings themselves choose - democratically - what their needs and wants are and where their priorities lie?

How else can plans be sensibly evaluated and changed unless the majority can engage in debate and decide how to alter things?

Such a world only becomes possible when workers organise themselves to take that world back from their ruling exploiters and place it under their own collective power.

[Mich the Tester]

All well and good, but I have two objections. Firstly, I don’t see how millions and millions of people can act collectively without there being competition among those people in terms of ideas; logically, those who present their ideas most effectively will gain influence, and with influence, they effectively gain power. Power corrupts. Secondly, millions of people in western countries now have the skills and education to choose to opt out of the exploitative employer-employee relationship and work for themselves according to their own principles, which can include sticking to collectively agreed principles about the environment and social issues. I have done that. My business gives me an excellent living, but also contributes in financial and practical ways to social concerns; all the while I rejoice in the fact that I don't have a boss. Of course I’m not really saying socialists should vote tory, I’m just trying to understand why so many people feel that ‘social justice’ can only be achieved through a coercive state taking from the rich to give to the poor, or indeed to their cronies. Many of those people are intelligent and worldly and could of their own device do much more to care for the society around them.

[SallyAnne]

This is a bit deep for a Friday afternoon isn't it?!!

[Mich the Tester]

This is a bit deep for a Friday afternoon isn't it?!!

Oh no, we haven't started on Hegelian dialectics yet.

[threaded]

Oh no, we haven't started on Hegelian dialectics yet.

But what happens if you believe you can have quality without quantity?

[Mich the Tester]

But what happens if you believe you can have quality without quantity?

Intense disappointment when you realise you've only got one bottle of that rather refreshing Chablis.

[swamp]

Sounds like mob rule.

Rome was ruled by the mob. Look what they did!

[swamp]

Intense disappointment when you realise you've only got one bottle of that rather refreshing Chablis.

Best buy two

[Mich the Tester]

Sounds like mob rule.

Rome was ruled by the mob. Look what they did!

Made a lot of Frascati?