Many on the left lack a vision of a
fundamentally different society. Utopia is a whole narrative of profound change
in the lives we lead involving our work, leisure, bodies and relationship to
nature. Where are the utopian responses to everyday alienation - the lives we
would lead if we were free from alienated exploitative labour. Where is the
socialist imagination we so desperately require.
Marx's acknowledged at the 1872 Hague Congress that
socialism could be voted in, precluding a revolutionary cataclysm. But workers
of the world didn't unite but became more divided by nationalism when workers
wrapped themselves around their various flags and capitalism developed
reformist coping mechanisms such as the welfare state, as a temporary respite.
People though are now again more open to socialist ideas.
Socialism is an economic system in which the means of
production are commonly owned and controlled co-operatively. As a form of
social organisation, socialism is based on co-operative social relations and
self-management. Socialist economies are based upon production for use and the
direct allocation of economic inputs to satisfy economic demands and human
needs (use value); accounting is based on physical quantities of resources,
some physical magnitude, or a direct measure of labour-time.
Marx and Engels believed the consciousness of those who earn
a wage or salary (the "working class" in the Marxist sense) would be
molded by their "conditions" of "wage-slavery", leading to
a tendency to seek their freedom or "emancipation" by throwing off
the capitalist ownership of society. For Marx and Engels, conditions determine
consciousness and ending the role of the capitalist class leads eventually to a
classless society in which the state would wither away.
Marx argued that the material productive forces brought into
existence by capitalism predicated a cooperative society since production had
become a mass social, collective activity of the working class to create
commodities but with private ownership (the relations of production or property
relations). This conflict between collective effort in large factories and
private ownership would bring about a conscious desire in the working class to
establish collective ownership commensurate with the collective efforts their
daily experience. Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness
resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual
level and on a world scale, with regard to all peoples suffering from
oppression. People would not develop by magic, they would develop because they
struggle, they transform (in transforming circumstances, people transforms
themselves).
Marx said that any truly fair distribution had to take into
account people’s differentiated needs. Hence his maxim: “From each according to
his ability, to each according to his needs.” distorted by the rich say who
claim socialists will expropriate everything, your fridge, your car, your home,
the clothes off your back, etc. Neither Marx nor any socialist has ever thought
of collectivising people’s personal belongings. When we speak of abolishing
capitalism, we mean abolishing the private ownership of the basic means of
production and the profit-making system it engenders, which permits a few, the
capitalistic class, to exploit the many. We mean that the natural resources,
and the mines, mills, factories, transport, means of communication, shall be
owned in common by all the people. We don’t mean that personal or private
property is abolished in those things which are for personal use. What will be
abolished is the use of private property to exploit the labor of another.
What Marx proposed was the idea of giving society back what
originally belonged to them, that is, the means of production, but which was
unjustly appropriated by an elite. What the capitalist does not understand, or
does not want to understand, is that there are only two sources of wealth:
nature and human labour, and without human labour, the potential wealth contained
in nature can never be transformed into real wealth. Marx pointed out that
there is not only real human labour but also past labor, that is, labour
incorporated into instruments of labour. The tools, machines, improvements made
to land, and, of course, intellectual and scientific discoveries that
substantially increased social productivity are a legacy passed down from
generation to generation; they are a social heritage — a wealth of the people.
The ruling class has convinced us that the capitalists are the owners of this
wealth due to their efforts, their creativity, their entrepreneurial capacity,
and that because they are the owners of the companies they have the right to
appropriate what is produced. Only a socialist society recognises this
inheritance as being social, which is why it must be given back to society and
used for society, in the interest of society as a whole, and not to serve
private interests. These goods, in which the labor of previous generations is
incorporated, cannot belong to a specific person, or a special group, but must
instead belong to humanity as a whole.
But simply handing over means of production to the state
represents a mere juridical change in ownership, because the change to
state-ownership is limited and the subordination of workers continues. A new
management, which may call itself “socialist”, might replace the capitalist
management but the alienated status of the workers in the production process
remains unchanged. While formally public property, because the state represents
society, real appropriation is still not collective. That is why Engels argued,
“state ownership of the productive forces is not the solution to the conflict.”
Furthermore, Marx argued that it was necessary to end the separation between
intellectual and manual labour that transforms workers into one more clog in
the machine. Enterprises need to be managed by their workers. But, then we have
the argument of the managerial bureaucracy that says: How can we hand over
management to the workers! They are not educated in the management of
enterprises! Concentrating knowledge in the hands of management is one of the
mechanisms that enable capital to exploit workers.
Unless capitalist control of the state is broken, they will
use the military and the police to maintain their power. Attempts at building
alternative forms of society without challenging the capitalist state are
doomed to failure. There would be no wages and no physically coercive state in
socialism. Marx nowhere in any of his writings distinguishes between a
socialist and a communist stage of history. Marx used the word socialism and
communism completely interchangeably in his work. In his later work, Critique
of the Gotha Program written at the very end of his life, for instance, Marx
speaks of a lower and a higher phase of communism, the first, the lower phase,
still bearing the birthmarks of the older society, where the higher phase does
not bear those birthmarks. But the notion that socialism and communism are
distinct stages in history, was alien to Marxist thought because he was really
saying a lower and higher phase of socialism.
Marx never identified
the dictatorship of the proletariat, a stage in which the working class assumes
political control over society with socialism, he just never did. He wrote in
Critique of the Gotha Program “between capitalist and communist [or socialist]
society there lies the period the revolutionary transformation from one into
the other. Corresponding to this is the political transition period in which the
state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship or the proletariat. Now
Marx clearly refers to this dictatorship which meant to him NOT the
dictatorship of the party on behalf of the workers, but rather the rule over
society by the working class as a whole democratically. He explicitly says
“this lies between capitalism and socialist or communist society.” The failure
to distinguish between the political form of transition, between capitalism and
socialism, from socialism itself, is extremely widespread in a lot of
discussions on Marx and on contemporary issues, but it has no basis in Marx’s
writings.
The Socialist Party strives for a peaceful road to socialism.
We will do everything in our power to prevent the use of force and violence in establishing
socialism, which we know full well cannot be undertaken here or elsewhere
unless it has the support of the majority of the people. But we cannot, of course, guarantee that the
enemies of the people will accept the decision of the people to move to socialism.
Socialism, however, is not yet on the order of the day and we campaign to make
it so.
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