A New World

 Any person with a heart will agree when he or she looks at this world of misery, that our life is not happy. It is often heard said that the idea of socialism, fine and true in itself, is unfortunately unrealisable. Exploitation has  become more refined over the ages and has become more inhuman since nowadays the more we are forced to sell ourselves willingly. We cannot escape from this traffic in men and women. It is now universal. We peddle our ability to work for others  on the labour market. Money is the mark of slavery. Those who can be paid, those who buy and sell each other, are they anything but slaves? We are separated from each other, each one of us lives and works only for himself, yet none of us can for an instant do without each other.

Although Marx did not leave us with a detailed description of a socialist society, his viewpoint was  that this new mode of social production would in essence be an “association of free and equal producers”.  The State is not conceived as being the administrator of production and distribution, but rather it is the producers and consumers themselves to whom these functions would fall. Nationalisation has nothing at all to do with Marx’s conception of socialism, neither the gradualism of the social-democrat Labour Parties or the so-called peoples’ revolutions of the Communist Parties. Sadly, in the course of years his theory was completely turned upside down and many socialists have spent their years trying to put it upright again. In their texts Marx and Engels  used the terms “socialism” and “communism” more or less interchangeably. These terms are often deliberately confused.

The desire for socialism as a just social system runs deep among workers but, nevertheless whoever wishes to see an end to capitalism and state capitalism must replace these realities of social life with other realities and other economic organisations. That can be done only by the producers themselves. And they can do this only collectively, in and through their own organisations. Collectively in the factory, collectively in industry, etc. They must organise themselves in order to administer the means of production through their federated industrial organisations, and so organise the whole of economic life on an industrial and federal basis.

The call for socialism is a strongly held and very encouraging hope among the people. But it is a hope in rather vague terms. The way to achieve it is not yet clear. Sooner or later these questions will be solved by people, in whom there can be infinite confidence. They will be impelled by social necessity to find the correct way.

The people as a whole own the means of production (factories, mines, etc.). Production is for people’s use, not for private profit. The principle is “from each according to ability, to each according to needs”. Production is of such a high level that there are abundant commodities for every member of the community and each member helps himself according to his or her needs. This is the goal of the Socialist Party, the achievement of socialism, a new social system based on the elimination of all classes and class differences. Socialism is the most revolutionary and rational system in human history, a system without exploitation or oppression. The abolition of classes makes possible the enormous development of the productive forces and the production of abundant social wealth. This high level of development and the changes in  consciousness of the people enables each individual to work voluntarily according to the principle of free access to te world’s wealth. The state machine will have withered away. The working class will control and administer production and distribution inside socialism. It will replace the anarchy of capitalist production with planned socialist production, unleashing the great productive and creative capacity of the producers.

Whereas each person needs the production of the whole accessible human world, from China to North America, in order to live and act as a human, they are limited to their own isolated force to obtain all that they need. We  often hear the objection that much work is so hard, so repulsive and even so harmful to health that nobody would undertake it unless he was forced to do so by necessity. This remark which is thought to be the greatest objection to communism is rather the most conclusive argument in its favour. Consider, the high levels that technology has attained today and ask yourself if you can think of any work which men could not perform comfortably, provided that we really wanted to and would not shrink from any cost to make it so.

But suppose that despite all the resources of mechanics there should still remain work that was difficult for men, by what right would you impose the burden of this work on some and not on others? Rather, would not our right and our duty be to mutually lighten such tasks by undertaking them together? Have we then the right to treat as pariahs those who have the misfortune to have been born poor and to assure to others the privilege of an easy life? In a society for which the common welfare will be worth more than all the treasure of the world, in a society which will spare no cost to ensure that work is carried out in such a way that men can do it without harming their lives, in a society which will prefer not to have work done which is not justified from the overall human point of view, in such a society, such inhuman work as exists in our society based on robbery with murder, slavery, unreason and injustice will no longer exist. The more you find in our society such work which man only carries out through necessity, which in other words only a slave does, the more you ought to consider socialism, without which this work will neither be changed nor abolished, to be the indispensable condition for freedom, justice and humanity.