Arguing Socialism

Popular working class politics is in a state of great confusion. There is uncertainty, disillusion, a prevailing sense of failure and, above all, a lack of clear direction. You've only got to listen to the news on any day and hear the talk about the trade deficit . . . interest rates . . . productivity . . . wage settlements in relation to increased prices  . . . the strength of the currency . . . the level of government spending. Most people don't understand any of it but the professional politicians who run the system are permanently trapped in this economic gibberish which is totally irrelevant to what has to be done in terms of solving the social problems we face. One of the reasons for this political irrationality is because politics has become dissociated from experience. Most people have a deep, but unconscious sense of what it is that holds them back, making life hard, treating them unfairly, oppressing their spirits, threatening their futures and creating real pain - in short, what denies them freedom in so many of the realms of life. They may be very different from each other and there may be dozens of them, but they have to all be named as denials of freedom, because they are. Naming and framing are different. Framing is conceptual, it is about ideas that allow you to understand what you are experiencing. Naming is giving language to those ideas - often ideas you already have, possibly as part of your unconscious brain mechanisms. Naming can make the unconscious conscious. it is a matter of naming a single truth: Corporations govern your life in many, many ways for their benefit, not yours. Name what people already experience and resent for good reason. How do corporations govern your life for their benefit, not yours? Start with all the times you call for customer service, get a robot voice, have to press a bunch of buttons, and then wait on the phone. You are working for the corporation - when you spend your time, the company saves money by not hiring human beings and thus makes more profit. You are contributing to their profit with your precious time holding on, which is part of your life, and hardly a pleasant part. Oil companies are destroying the planet for their short-term profit. Corporations govern your life by putting hidden carcinogens and other poisons in your food, cosmetics, furniture, etc. for their profit, not your health. These are facts. In isolation, one-by-one, they are just a laundry list. Isolated facts don’t help. Together they tell a truth: Corporations govern your life for their profit not yours, in all those ways. Name it. Repeat it. We need revolution at the deepest level.

It is necessary to ground a nurturing politics for the common good and core values in language that appeals - rhetorically and emotionally - to the better selves of voters. Cognitive scientists study how people really think - how brains work, how we get ideas out of neurons, how framing and metaphorical thought work, the link between language and thought, and so on. But political activists have not been using these results. The marketing profession uses knowledge about the mind, the brain, language, imagery, emotions, the framing of experiences and products, personal and social identity, and normal modes of thought that lead to action and that change brains over time. Marketing professors in business schools study results in these areas and teach courses on how to market most effectively. Again, they study normal modes of thought - the way people really reason. It would be strange to call such modes of thought "irrational" since they are the forms of reason that we have evolved to get us through life. In short, marketers take results from cognitive science, the field that does scientific research on real reason, on how people really think. Marketers know very well that most thought is unconscious - the usual estimate is about 98 percent. They use their knowledge of how unconscious thought works. And they know that consumers are not aware of how knowledge of the science of mind is being used to sell them products that often they don’t need or may actually harm them.

What we socialists call "rational arguments" are not normal modes of real reason. We overlook the fact that our brains are structured by hundreds of conceptual metaphors and frames early in life, that we can only understand what our brains allow. Even understanding the meaning of concepts and words may be different. To deal with illegitimate fears about socialism, you don’t wait till you have to respond. You need (1) to build an effective communication system, (2) to communicate the general progressive value system, (3) repeat the truths that reveal what is right about those values, (4) act with courage to promote the sense of courage, confidence and hope that allows the truth to be meaningful and powerful. Within such a context, one can honestly and openly discuss the facts that undermine such fears, so that the illegitimate fears don’t get established in the first place. We require constant repetition of the real situation and genuine conditions. This has to be said by many, many people in all kinds of situations, never defensively. They have to be met by real understanding as they begin to arise, the courage to name them and study them, effective communication and real action. Negating a frame reinforces the frame, makes it stronger. There are implicit negatives, like "I’m the honest candidate in this campaign." When you affirm your own positions and speak positively, you undermine the opposition implicitly. When you go on the offensive, you put them on the defensive. If they have to negate your positions, they will be helping to reinforce yours. We must discuss political differences, but when we do we have to remain just be positive, starting with our values and with how we understand freedom and how it arises from people working together to provide public resources for everyone. Use our language, not theirs. And stay respectful. The rational way to begin an understanding of our problems should be to examine what did happen in the past and to ask important questions about it: What were we hoping to achieve in the past? What action did we think would be effective? What happened as a result of that action? What were the reasons why we failed? What lessons should be learned from that failure?

There are deep truths that are known about how brains work, how our unconscious minds work, and the effect of language on the mind and brain. Those are vital truths, because only by mastering and using them can you avoid the traps of laundry list of truths that don’t add up to the communication of general progressive values. Lists of truths that are not made meaningful by values are destined to be ignored. Make truths matter. Wed truths to values. For workers, the problem is capitalism. We produce all the wealth—in fact we run the useful parts of society from top to bottom—but we don't get all the benefits of our production of goods and our running of services and we don't have direct control of the society we run. Our economic function under capitalism is to produce wealth for an exploiting and parasitical class, the capitalist class. Since the 19^th Century, these basic facts haven't changed. We had capitalism then and we've got capitalism now. Workers were exploited them we're exploited now. The rich had luxury then and they've got it now. Workers had the problems of housing, making ends meet, and economic insecurity then and we've got the same problems now. This is in spite of the fact that we produce every bit of useful wealth that becomes available and run all the useful services that people need.

Capitalism produced for profit then and it produces for profit now. When there was no prospect of profit then, workers became unemployed. It is exactly the same now. At the turn of the century the privileges of the rich were based on their ownership of the means of production and all natural resources and on their control over workers through the state machine. It is exactly the same now.

We live in a world where solidarity and mutual support has been reduced to charity and volunteering and with a victim’s mentality, blaming one another and deferentially pleading with governments and our employers rather than reacting our exploitation and oppressions with strikes and revolutionary demands. We have lost any sense of our real class power. Environmental destruction and climate change has made continuing with capitalism to be a lemming-like act of species suicide. Reformist solutions remain market-oriented where we cannot imagine the world in terms other than of exchange values bound by monetary language and practices. As non-market socialists, the Socialist Party are advocates for a money-free, price-free, wage-free, class-free and state-free society where everyone’s basic needs are met — and power, responsibility and uses of the Earth are shared in just and sustainable ways. We seek a life for all where can do, or do not do, things that is not based according to how much money we do, or do not, have. Fair trade, ethical investments and carbon markets do not lead to equality between countries and environmental sustainability; trade is a see-saw of winners and losers, snakes and ladders. While rejecting monetary values is a necessary condition to break current realities, rituals and the power of private property, it is only a necessary — not a sufficient — condition to establish a world without economic inequality. Clearly, we need to initiate, maintain and support practices that ensure collective sufficiency and environmental sustainability. We must establish a world where people collectively plan and produce, share and care for one another.  It isn't enough just to have a clear understanding of what causes the problems of the working class; we must also have a very clear understanding of how they could be solved. That solution is socialism. This will be a practical and straightforward system of useful work producing useful goods free from the economic constraints of production for profit, without any exchange of any kind and without therefore the use of money.

Production will be humanised in the sense that human beings won't have a price put on either their ability to work or the product of their work. Jobs won't have a price on them, nor will goods, nor will needs. Instead of working for wages people will cooperate, and this will bring work under the control of those who carry it out. It will be the self-determined activity of individuals responding to the needs of the community of which they form a part and who have the responsibility and the real power of decision-making and action. That is the sane system we must establish and it is the only sensible definition of socialism.

Adapted from here