Lets Talk Socialism
Socialism
By: Mihlali Gqada
2006
Prefix
“Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the
recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts” Engels, F, 1877.
In a socialist society the means of production (means of production comprise everything, except labour, that is used in production, namely, factories, plant, equipment, offices, shops, raw materials, fuel and components) are owned by the workers rather than by a rich minority of capitalists or functionaries. Such a system of ownership is both collective and individual in nature.
recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts” Engels, F, 1877.
In a socialist society the means of production (means of production comprise everything, except labour, that is used in production, namely, factories, plant, equipment, offices, shops, raw materials, fuel and components) are owned by the workers rather than by a rich minority of capitalists or functionaries. Such a system of ownership is both collective and individual in nature.
It is collective because society can control production unlike the economic anarchy of capitalism and because production is for the common good rather than for individual profit.
At the same time it is individual because workers are no longer a 'collective' mob of alienated non-owners employed by a minority of owners. Work becomes a gratis (free) and self-affirming activity for each worker and they receive the full fruits of their labour. The capitalists and their servants no longer control production nor become rich from other's toil.
Everybody is a proprietor, title-holder, landlord and possessor.
Socialism is genuine free enterprise.
The personal empowering and cooperative nature of socialist ownership underpins similar changes in other aspects of life. Socialism means far healthier individuals and human relationships. It means full participation by each individual in the intellectual, cultural and political life of society.
Socialism requires a revolution with three main stages:
· Firstly the emergence of a workers' movement committed to socialist revolution;
· Secondly the achievement of political power and the expropriation of the capitalists and;
· Thirdly a period during which workers learn how to be owners and rulers and cast off the psychological and ideological dross of the past.
Socialism will not be utopia simply created in people's minds. It will be the product of economic and social development. In developed countries it is now possible for everyone to live a reasonably affluent life and be free of long hours of routine toil. This creates a better basis for cooperation and mutual regard. Historically, where equality would have meant shared poverty, it was inevitable that a minority would plunder, enslave and exploit the majority. At the same time rank and file workers are progressively acquiring through their experiences, the abilities to do without an elite. Their general level of education and training has advanced significantly over the last couple of generations. The work they do, while still totally oppressive, has an increasingly mental and conceptual content. And they now have extensive access to cultural and intellectual resources and the diverse experiences of living in a modern society. So while socialism was impossible in the past, these emerging conditions make it inevitable in the future.
The basic problem is that a minority monopolize society's economic resources and force many to work for them. This means they get to cream off a lion's share of the output we produce and to control our working lives. This is the basis for a society of oppressed and crippled individuals. It is usually called capitalism.
It is a society where you are rewarded for being a bastard and penalized for doing the right thing. It is a society where most of us are just menials performing crappy work under the command of brown noses. And when they no longer want us we are discarded like a piece of rubbish.
Because work is self-destroying or self-limiting rather than self-affirming, it poisons every aspect of our life. Our spirits are ground down, our minds cramped and our feelings desensitized to the needs of others.
In this dog-eat-dog world, salt is thrown onto every wound. Fears and uncertainties are reinforced, and weaknesses magnified. If you refuse to fit in you are made an outcast. If you are a round peg you are jammed into a square hole. And poverty is the lot of the low paid, the discards on the job scrap heap and those who just can't function any more.
The only solution is a society based on equality and cooperation. This requires a new social system in which we collectively own the means of production and take control of our own working lives. We will no longer be bossed about. We will transform work so that everyone gets to do the interesting and challenging tasks and speed up the automation of the more routine ones. We will ensure each worker the right to a diverse career path that meets their needs and we establish a culture of life-long development. We will also eliminate the unemployment scrap heap and let people reduce their working hours. Such a new society is often called socialism.
In such a society we will not only become more human, but also more productive, because work will be something we want to do and we will make more effective use of our creative powers.
Of course the elite tells us that this is impossible. They tell us that socialism is against human nature and that countries like the Soviet Union and China prove that it won't work. Socialism means police states and clapped out economies. Is it really against human nature to cooperate for mutual benefit? As for the failure of socialism in places like the Soviet Union and China, if it could thrive in such backward and feudal countries, it wouldn't be worth having. Even capitalism has had a lot of trouble developing in places like these, going by the experience of most other Third World countries.
While the struggle for radical change in developed countries such as ours (South Africa) will never be a tea party, the conditions are there for it to happen. To begin with, socialism in a developed economy would mean shared prosperity rather than futile attempts to share poverty. And over time we are becoming increasingly better equipped to successfully run things without masters. We are becoming better educated. We have the experience of modern life. And even our crappy jobs require most of us to use our brains more than workers of past generations.
Socialism is not in our agenda yet, but it is time for some of us to start talking about it.
Prospects for socialism
There is no disputing the reality that there is virtually affirmative support for socialism at the moment. We don't even have the remnants or miscellany of a socialist movement and the ideas that would be needed by such a movement are either long forgotten or heavily corrupted. This 'forgetting' and corrupting is the handy work of what is merrily called the 'Left'. A better term is 'fake left'.
These people really are quite reactionary. Their worst feature is the defence of economic nationalism and Third World backwardness and barbarism, all in the name of 'anti-imperialism'. Most of them also share many views with the greens whose opposition to capitalism is feudal rather than socialist. Unlike socialists who want to build on the basis of the possibilities created by modern capitalist society, greens want us to go backwards. They are hostile to modern science, overstate environmental risks and deny the possibility of global prosperity based on scientific and technological progress. In other words they deny the very conditions for world socialism.
The fake left also discredits socialism by its bigoted defence of statism against neo-liberalism. Apparently state capitalism, corporatism and government patronage are embryonic forms of socialism! Virtually the only time socialism gets a mention is when they are capitulating to its detractors. This capitulation is called 'market socialism', an oxymoron if there ever was one. It makes about as much sense as 'capitalist socialism'.
For most fake leftists even 'market socialism' would be a bit radical. For them, being 'socialist' simply means breast beating about the ills of capitalism. And even this isn't done right, because the "ills" are seen from a semi-feudal or petty bourgeois perspective. "Oh, those nasty multinationals! Give me back my corner store! Oh, for the good old days!"
A foot in the right direction
Although the journey is bound to be protracted and tortuous, in the long run it is ultimately all good news because we have history on our side. In other words there are developments within capitalism that make that system less viable and socialism more so. Economic and social development has creating the conditions that socialism needs. While these conditions are far from developed in Third World countries, they are increasingly present in the advanced capitalist countries of North America, Western Europe, East Asia and Australasia.
Firstly, equality no longer means shared poverty, ignorance and toil. The economy has developed to such a stage where everybody can have a high material and cultural standard of living, be free from toil and have plenty of free time. You don't need more than an average share of these things to be able to partake in most of what life has to offer. This is very important because if a significant number of people aspire to being members of a privileged elite, socialist revolution is made more difficult. This includes difficulty in initially establishing a socialist government and in the subsequence process of change.
Firstly, equality no longer means shared poverty, ignorance and toil. The economy has developed to such a stage where everybody can have a high material and cultural standard of living, be free from toil and have plenty of free time. You don't need more than an average share of these things to be able to partake in most of what life has to offer. This is very important because if a significant number of people aspire to being members of a privileged elite, socialist revolution is made more difficult. This includes difficulty in initially establishing a socialist government and in the subsequence process of change.
Of course, there will always still be some benefits from having more than the average of these things, but these benefits are diminishing as the average improves. Anything extra tends to be more in the realm of prestige goods and extravagance rather than in meeting real needs. Also the benefits of having more than your share have to be weighed against the benefits of living in a socialist society.
Secondly, the rank and file are acquiring the abilities they need to do without an elite. This is due to a number of factors:
1. Better general levels of education and training. Fifty years ago only a small minority finished high school while a tiny handful went to university. Now it is the norm to finish high school and complete an institution of higher learning qualification.
2. People are engaging in labour that has greater mental and conceptual content. About half of jobs are now of the less routine type, usually requiring some level of post school training. This includes teachers, paramedical professions, computer workers, accountants and so on. Even the crappy jobs are a bit more demanding than the old fetch and carry jobs. Literacy and numeracy is more important and the jobs tend to require more human interaction whereas in the past it was not uncommon for talk to be forbidden during working hours.
3. Virtually everybody now has extensive access to cultural and intellectual resources and the diverse experiences of living in a modern society.
As workers acquire greater abilities and take on jobs that require them to think and to take on responsibilities, they are going to find the constraints of capitalist oppression increasing intolerable. Another important factor that is bound to ultimately undermine people's acceptance of capitalism is the fact that this system is an increasing obstacle to economic progress.
In summary, the net benefits of being privileged are declining while the ability of the exploited to run things without exploiters is increasing and their tolerance of oppression diminishing. Of course, these conditions don’t make revolution happen by itself. There is nothing automatic about it. People have to decide to make the change. Although in a sense there is still something close to inevitable about the process. People cannot stare blindly at the increasingly obvious forever and a socialist transformation of society only has to fully succeed once irrespective of previous periods of dormancy or utter defeat. Capitalism on the other hand can have many periods of success but only needs to be resoundingly defeated once for it to be swept from the field permanently. Another thing in our favour is that a future socialist movement should have less trouble with reformism than the old movements had. In times of political crisis, it is the enemy within that diverts people from revolution.
Reformism has already undergone a considerable decline and hopefully this will continue. This weakness stems from the fact that it is hard to get excited about marginal changes to welfare programs or to how the government goes about its business. In the past this was very different. There were many reforms to get exited about - universal suffrage, the introduction of old age pensions, workers compensation, union rights, fighting to raise wages above starvation levels, the basic welfare safety net, ending racial and gender discrimination, and so on. It was also possible to paint socialism as a reform that could develop under capitalism - state ownership, economic progress and more equal distribution - rather than as a fundamental rupture with the existing order. The line between revolution and reform became very blurred, and reform offered an immediately more promising basis to build a movement than radical rhetoric.
That statist vision has lost so much of its shine that even the militant opponents of economic liberalism don't have the gumption to call for wholesale nationalisation, they just whine about attacks on existing statist arrangements. Their vision splendid is a return to the 1950s. This fake left also resents the way that the major labour and social democratic parties 'betray' reformism and think they are being very radical in militantly upholding it.
The fake left and the greens should pose little problem for a new movement once it has found its feet. While the fake left is a lingering sickness that discredits socialism and revolution, it is tiny, shrinking and ineffectual. And the greens have seen their best days. While they have successfully spread their pall of doom and made it part of the popular consciousness, they have no credible alternative and are mainly sustained by electoral niche politics and the lifestyle needs of a section of the middle class.
So what about the chances of a modest socialist movement emerging from the dust? A big problem is achieving critical mass and this is where the Net can be important. If you only have a handful of people expressing certain interesting ideas it does not get very far. However, if the handful is just a tad bigger, it triggers an explosion. The key thing, of course, is having the interesting ideas that strike a chord. You may not take the world by storm but you should attract a small minority who, for various reasons, are amenable to such ideas.
A slight resurgence could also be helped by the business cycle going nasty. At the moment, the good times keep rolling on. A dramatic change in that department would provide more fertile soil.
The Utopians' mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist Ideas, but the time has come to think of Socialism not as a Utopian system of governance but a practical one, to ensure righteousness in the hearts and homes of our people. Until very recently, all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer the entire world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one's special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook. To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis. Engels, F. 1877
This paper was inspired by: Engels, Frederick. 1877. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. London 1892
posted by Woman of Sparta (Spartans) @ 6:55 AM
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