The Scottish Socialist Voice site has had a long-awaited update and now has new articles posted to it regularly.

Take a look at it, subscribe to online or subscribe for physical copies.

Feminism is an often misused term by its opponents. A feminist is someone who supports equal rights for all people, whatever their gender is.

Given that to achieve this it is essential to tackle patriarchy. Patriarchy is one of the many forms our society takes. Socialisation from a young age means that many people are unaware of how subtle the forms are it can take.

The SSP has adopted a number of political positions over the years which would lead many outside and inside to describe it as a feminist organisation. We believe that to tackle the inequalities caused by the class based society we live in it is also essential to tackle gender inequality and a variety of other forms of inequality. We don’t see it as a binary choice (unlike some others…) or think that recognising gender inequality exists makes your organisation a gender obsessed discussion group

Within the SSP we have experimented with various methods of tackling gender inequality. These have included trying to ensure equal representation of men and women inside the various elected bodies of the SSP. We also try to ensure in elections we have equal representation of men and women, especially at the top of the list.

At the last council elections in Dundee we only stood 8 candidates. Not only did we have the highest percentage of female candidates (50%), at 4 we shockingly had the most female candidates. Labour had 16 candidates but only 1 woman standing!

You can read some more detailed articles about the SSP on feminism on the SSP site and on the SSY site

Read the whole A-Z of the SSP here

You can see the latest SSP policies on energy on our manifesto page.

Some of the highlights include

• Responsibility for energy to be transferred from Westminster to the Scottish Parliament and the wealth of Scottish energy resources to be brought into public ownership.
• The tightening of building regulations to compel construction companies to use sustainable sources for their construction materials and to ensure that energy efficiency is built into the design of buildings and appliances fitted.
• 100 per cent grants, available to all, for insulation and double-glazing in private homes.
• The cancellation of all airport expansion projects.
• A ban on the transportation of nuclear materials on Scotland’s roads and railways.
• The protection by law of ancient forests.
• Refunds backdated by five years to households which have been forced to pay the higher charges associated with pre-payment meters.

You can read some fuller highlights of our policy at the manifesto page.

Read the whole A-Z of the SSP here

The SSP has approached the problem of drugs in a different way from most other parties. Instead of saying Drugs are bad, make them illegal and attack users we took the approach of saying drugs are bad – how can we reduce drug addiction. Instead of just condemning the effects of drug addiction we want to tackle them.

At the core of our policies were studies like this one in Switzerland

Some of the studies findings:

• The improvements in physical health which occurred during treatment…also proved to be stable over the course of one and a half years and in some cases continued to increase
• The pregnancies and births which occurred during treatment were adequately supervised…there were no indications of developmental defects in the neonates.
• Illicit heroin and cocaine use rapidly and markedly regressed
• The participants’ housing situation rapidly improved and stabilised (in particular, there were no longer any homeless)
• Fitness for work improved considerably, those with permanent employment more than doubled
• Debts during the treatment period were constantly and substantially reduced.
• Income from illegal and semi-legal activities decreased dramatically: 10% as opposed to 59% originally.
• Both the number of offenders and the number of criminal offences decreased by about 60% during the first six months of treatment

So if you were seriously wanting to tackle the societal as well as individual effects on users of heroin addiction, would you not list all these things as positives, things you would want to happen and be delighted if they happened in addition to reducing the number of users of heroin?

Well a further study was carried out in the UK in the early 90s to similar results, massive improvements in the health of addicts, reduction of usage by addicts, huge drops in opportunistic crime (burglaries, mugging, car theft etc) in the area around the trial. The cost to society in running the trial was far outmatched by the reduction in insurance claims for theft, imprisoning drugs users for possession of small amounts of drugs and so on.

This study is discussed in depth in the book Drugs and the Party Line.

So what was this radical and effective method for tackling the problems caused by heroin addiction?

Controlled availability of heroin on prescription under the supervision of medical professionals.

The SSP looked for what solved the problem and decided that was the best way to achieve it. Essentially we recognised the effects of drug misuse as primarily a medical rather than a criminal problem.

The main SSP drug policies cover heroin (control it) and cannabis (legalise it). The SSY have written extensively on drugs most frequently about the media scare stories about mephedrone. They have written extensively to debunk the media hysteria on the issue.

The War on Drugs

In addition to this we also recognise the war on drugs as a policy which has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.

In prisons, every visitor can be searched, visits supervised. The prisoners can be searched and have their cells searched constantly. There are guards around the borders of the prison, who can search everywhere and at anytime.

There have been various reports that large numbers of people go into jail with no drug addiction and leave heroin addicts. What chance of controlling drug supply on a country scale?

Time for a sensible, proven to work approach to a serious problem!

You can watch a video of Jim Bollan discussing the devastating effects on a parent of seeing their child go through the current drug treatment system.

Read the whole A-Z of the SSP here

There are two slightly differing models of class.

The sociological model is made up of the upper class, the middle class and the lower class. Whenever the media mentions class, however rarely, this is what they are referring to. Differentials based on income.

Socialists refer to class via the Marxist model – bourgeoisie, petite bourgeoisie and proletariat. Although there may be some cross over, we differentiate based not on income but on relationship to the the means of production (tools to do your job).

To give a quick example.
A taxi driver who leases their car might be proletariat.
A taxi driver who owns their car, leases it to others and runs it themselves might be petite bourgeoisie
Someone who owns a fleet of taxis and leases them out would be bourgeoisie.

The sociological model would ignore the persons relationship to the means of production (the taxi car) when deciding which layer to place them in.

The people who own the factories which make the taxis are also bourgeoisie. The workers in the car factory would be proletariat.

So as a handy guide, these terms are, for the most part, interchangeable:
ruling class, bourgeoisie, upper class
middle class, petite bourgeoisie
lower class, proletariat, working class

Class War

These classes have competing interests and where they differ this is referred to as class war or class conflict. To read headlines in the papers you would think that class war is started when the working class fight back, not when their conditions are initially under attack from the ruling class.

We disagree.

Class war isn’t that one day of striking every few months by a section of workers. Class war is the ongoing daily battle by the rich to redistribute wealth to them from us. Every time an employer tries to worsen the working conditions of workers that is class war. Not just when the workers eventually have had enough and protest or strike about it.

Read the whole A-Z of the SSP here

Until a few years ago the SSPs policy on banks was probably take them under workers control. With the most recent capitalist recession though, we have had to develop it a bit deeper than that.

Raphie de Santos has been central to this, several of his articles on the banking crisis have been republished here.

For something a bit more in depth read the pamphlet Sub Prime Driven Recession: Coming soon to a neighbourhood near you.

Available for free online, or £2.50 in print, it goes into depth about the causes of the collapse of the banks.

This tries to explain the roots of the banking crisis in easy to understand language

The Great UK Housing Bubble
The great 1980s UK housing bubble, which is now deflating rapidly, started with problems in the economy in 1970/80s and was inflated by:

• government policy around selling council houses
• a disastrous entry into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism
• central bankers cutting interest rates to avoid a deep recession at the turn of the millennium

The last major economic recessions in 1974/75 and 1979/80 saw a massive overproduction of goods and services with factories and warehouses stockpiled with unsold goods. Capitalist governments sought to stop a repeat of such a crisis of overproduction. One way was to find alternative avenues for investments; the other was to increase consumer demand for goods. The US and the UK in particular did this by privatising state industries. Excess capital flowed in and created a climate and appetite for credit amongst their working and middle classes.

One way this was carried out in the UK was to sell off council housing. This allowed spare capital to be invested in a growing private housing market and created a shortage of social housing meaning that ordinary people were forced to look at buying private housing rather than renting a council home.
The second way was to create a feeling of wealth through home ownership. This encouraged people to borrow money through credit – loans and credit cards. Thus, at the beginning of the 1980s, these factors started the great UK housing bubble.

Read the whole A-Z of the SSP here

It is unfortunate that the alphabet starts with a as anti becomes the obvious starter. Hopefully the rest of the 25 words picked will give you an idea of some of the things we are for, but it’s probably justifiable to use Anti-Capitalism as an example of something we oppose – capitalism.

From Wikipedia

Anti-capitalism describes a wide variety of movements, ideas, and attitudes which oppose capitalism. Anti-capitalists, in the strict sense of the word, are those who wish to completely replace capitalism with another system.

(emphasis mine)

Some people often misunderstand what Karl Marx spent decades writing about. He spent very little time writing about religion, socialism or communism. He and Engels’ biggest work was entitled Capital: Criticism of the Political Economy. It was a study of capitalism, how it works and more importantly how it doesn’t work.

Socialists argue all the time about what socialism would be like, or what we want it to be like, or for some Stalinists what it actually was like.

What we all agree on though is that the current dominating economic system is a bad thing.

Some other people are also anti-capitalist – including anarchists and some fascists.

Being just anti-capitalist isn’t enough though. Being anti anything is never just enough. Hopefully through the rest of this series you will get a sense of some of the things we are for.

What other A words would you use to describe some aspect of the SSP? Post below and we can try to expand on them once we have completed the alphabet. SSP member who has a brilliant idea of what to write for the letter J or T? Contact us and we’ll see if we can fit it in.

Read the whole A-Z of the SSP here

Some bloggers have started an April meme of posting about a letter of the alphabet every day. We thought it was a great idea for stimulating ideas for blog content. Lots of the time we post about elections or campaigns or stuff we have done. Ideas and policies can get lost in that though.

We came up with a rough list of ideas to post for each of the letters of the alphabet. These aren’t set in stone and they aren’t the only idea for that letter we came up with. We just tried to make a selection covering more breadth rather than depth. None should be massively detailed and we may add some more later on too.

• Anti-Capitalism
• Banks
• Class
• Drugs
• Environment
• Feminism