Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.05.2017, Blaðsíða 13

Ground up;
not top
down
We e m p h a s i s e
that the follow-
ing points are still
in the formative
stages. But SPI’s
platform makes
it very plain how
they see the lay of
the land:
T h e S o c i a l i s t
Party of Iceland is
the party of wage
e a r n er s a n d a l l
those who suffer
from want, invis-
ibility and abjec-
tion. The opponents
of the Socialist Party of Iceland are the
capitalist class and its functionaries. The
terrain of the Socialist Party of Iceland is
a broad class struggle that rejects compro-
mise and false dialogue.
As one could guess, this invariably
means that SPI calls for the people to
seize power in all spheres of society,
rather than just win votes in Parlia-
ment: “Workplace, union, school, neigh-
borhood, municipality, village,” as they
put it, “all these domains should be un-
der egalitarian control where the popu-
lar interest is prioritized.”
This point is crucial: in a socialist so-
ciety, the people do indeed control these
spheres. Rather than the standard re-
formist approach—that is, hoping that
if a socialist party wins enough seats
in parliament, they will radically trans-
form all of society from the top down—
SPI’s aim seems to be more from the
ground up, and with a broader base than
simply the legislative.
So what’s the plan?
The SPI would seem to be on the right
track in terms of how they see the ter-
rain of class struggle. Which brings us
to SPI’s “initial campaign causes”:
1. Decent living conditions for all citi-
zens, whether they are wage earners,
unemployed, pensioners, students, or
homemakers.
2. Access to secure and affordable housing.
3. Access to free healthcare, to free edu-
cation on all levels, and to a free wel-
fare system that meets everyone’s dif-
ferent needs.
4. The shortening of the work week,
to improve quality of life for the
people and to facilitate their ac-
tive participation in shaping
society.
OK, so far so good. These are
not utopian ideas; they are ex-
pressly socialist, in that all citi-
zens are publicly provided with
all of life’s essentials, at no cost to
themselves. Socialism does this by
the workers directly controlling the
means of production. They own the
workplaces, they own the services they
provide, they own the public institu-
tions that they run. Which is why it is
jarring to then read:
5. Reconstruction of the tax system,
with an eye to making the wealthy
pay an adequate share in common ex-
penditures but alleviating the burden
of others.
So are we then to assume that there will
still be wealthy people to tax? You can’t
have wealthy people without capitalism,
and you can’t have capitalism in a so-
cialist country. Shifting the tax burden
from the poor and onto the rich is laud-
able, but it isn’t socialist—it’s social-
democratic. The social democrat counts
on capitalism to function well because
the social democrat needs wealthy peo-
ple to tax to pay for the bulk of the social
welfare system. The more successful
they are, the more revenue they make
for the state. A socialist, by contrast,
would abolish capitalism altogether,
seizing the means of production from
the hands of the wealthy and expropri-
ating their wealth for the common good.

Gunnar Smári expanded on this part
of the platform by saying, “We have, as
a society, fallen into a hole in the ice; a
hole we could call neoliberalism.” Get-
ting out of this hole requires finding
the funds to develop the social welfare
system to the degree by which it can ful-
fill these platform points. “When we’ve
taken that step, we can then consider
what our next steps should be, how we
can increase power to the people over
their communities, and in what form
we manage offices, companies and in-
stitutions. It’s not good to decide this
while we’re still in the hole; first, we
need to get on dry land.”
Tossing out the “damned
beast”
To do so requires a very broad base of
action, as Gunnar Smári repeats the
party’s aim: “We do that by empower-
ing class struggle, increasing political
participation in all areas, we have to re-
store the labour movement as a tool for
fighting on behalf of the public interest,
we have to gain power in Parliament, in
municipalities, in all foundation insti-
tutions of society. We need to clean
out the entire system.”
When all is said and done,
after socialists have managed
their way into majority posi-
tions on every level of Icelandic
government, then the ruling
class can be overthrown.
"The ruling class contends
that families cannot function
unless they sit at the end of the
table and control everything,”
Gunnar Smári says. “So the family
stands up, tosses the damned beast
out, and everyone has a much better life
after that."
As a grassroots movement with
grassroots praxis, the Socialist Party
of Iceland has its work cut out for it,
but this is the paradox of all grass-
roots movements: complete revolution
means revolution in all spheres of soci-
ety, which takes an extraordinary long
time. Vanguard revolutions take much
shorter, but can lead to reactionary im-
pulses and oppression. Time will tell
whether the Socialist Party of Iceland
can remain cohesive throughout the
struggle—a challenge every revolution-
ary movement must eventually face.
“We have spent the
past 30 to 35 years
under the reign
of neoliberalism,
as horrible an
ideology as there
is. It claims to be
based on science,
but is more or
less some kind
of ridiculous
religion.”
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