Common Ownership

Consider the basic definition of socialism/communism - common ownership of the means of production and distribution. What does it mean? Private ownership is entirely run for profit. Capitalists don't care about you, they don't care about the environment, they don't care about people, they only care about profit. Just look at the American healthcare system. Instead of their healthcare system being run to help improve people's health and to heal the sick and injured, it is run entirely for the benefit of stock-holders.

Socialism is common ownership. Instead of society being run for the benefit of a minority and production being based on profit, property is owned collectively. It is often argued that such a concept as common ownership is unrealistic and an impractical dream. This is not true. We have it now on the World Wide Web with open-source software. Wikipedia is a superb example of a commons-based institution. Throughout history, land, fisheries and forests have been owned by communities, not just by private individuals. Have we forgotten the village green to be enjoyed by all? Common ownership is a principle according to which the means of production and distribution are held indivisibly rather than in the names of the individual members under private property. It means the wealth produced by society is freely accessible to anyone and everyone.

The Socialist Party hold a vision of a better world, freed from the hardships their families suffered under the system known as "capitalism". And seek common ownership of the means of production and distribution. It is the core concept of socialists that appears to has been purged from the left. Human beings share a common humanity, they are bound together by a sense of comradeship or fraternity (literally meaning 'brotherhood', but broadened in this context to embrace all humans). This encourages socialists to prefer cooperation to competition, and to favour collectivism over individualism. In this view, cooperation enables people to harness their collective energies and strengthens the bonds of community, while competition pits individuals against each other, breeding resentment, conflict and hostility. The classic formulation of this principle is found in Marx's communist principle of distribution: 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. This reflects the belief that the satisfaction of basic needs (hunger, thirst, shelter, health, personal security and so on) is a prerequisite for a worthwhile human existence and participation in social life.

Those who call themselves “market socialists” want to keep the same game (profit motive, law of value, competition), but put workers in charge of optimizing each team's strategy. Marxists want to put workers in charge of the game itself, so that we're free to decide what winning actually is rather than just the strategies we use to "win".

For sections of the socialist movement in the past such as some in the 2^nd International the state did play a role its role was not to nationalise industry and create a vast bureaucratic “state-socialist” economy. Put simply, the workers parties were to be elected to national governments, backed by the trade unions, cooperative movement and other popular organizations, and would then expropriate the capitalists. Political power would then be decentralized to local municipal levels and direct democracy introduced. This was the famous “withering away of the state” Engels talked about. The hopes of the 2^nd International didn’t go as planned. The first problem was that the workers parties never got a majority in parliament. So they began to water-down their programme and adopt a lot of reformism until the definition of socialism began to change from one of democratic and social ownership and control to nationalization and state-ownership. Socialism is incompatible with a command economy. Democracy means "rule by the people", if there is common ownership (popular ownership) of the means of production this means that the economy, at least, is democratically run. Both social democracy and socialism contain the word “social”. Generally it is invoked in a loose and ill-defined way and in practice has generally been collapsed into state ownership.

There has been various attempts to put socialism into practice. During the English Civil War, the Diggers, or True Levellers, briefly established a communal society in England. Babeuf was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution and he developed a quite distinctive position which it is entirely legitimate to describe as 'socialist'. Of course the word 'socialist' was not yet in currency. Babeuf usually described his position as the advocacy of 'true equality' or 'common happiness'. But his aim of a society based on economic equality and common ownership of property is clearly recognisable as what later became known as socialism. Robert Owen was the first to use the world Socialist in 1827 in his Cooperative Magazine. There were also the Utopian Socialists, such as Charles Fourier, who set up small scale communal societies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Waste, inefficiency, boredom, and inequality of modern work appalled Fourier. His main interest was in making work pleasant. He found division of labour unacceptable because it broke up work into minute repetitive operations. Unlike Robert Owen, he did not believe in the efficacy of big industry. Work should be concentrated in the countryside and small shops in towns where family life can be lived in communities and where all can know each other. Proudhon was the one who explicitly referred to property as theft and also had a very polemical argument with Marx on the nature of property and poverty. Proudhon shunned the idea of class war for social change. Voluntary agreement of the working people should lead the way towards a classless society. He advocated a nationwide system of decentralised workers cooperatives, which can bargain with one another for mutual exchange of goods and services. Many of these ideas are still around us, in different garbs. The[A1]  socialist idea was greatly deepened by Marx and Engels, but it was not invented by them, and what they meant by socialism is much the same as what many earlier thinkers meant by it. Marx was both appreciative and critical of these writings on socialism. He referred to them as “Utopian” because they had no conception of revolutionary action for actual change. The scientific socialist on the otherhand understood, as Engels pointed out:

“Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.”

The Socialist Party is a Marxist organisation standing in the tradition of Marx and Engels. We believe that the poverty and misery, the oppression and exploitation that marks our society is the result of control of the world’s wealth and productive resources by a tiny class that exploits the vast majority of society. This leads to humanity crippled by the reality and ideology of capitalist society. This reality leads the majority of humanity to premature death and the majority of working people to lives of drudgery and stress in a world over which they have no control. The ideas that support this social system are those of competition and the rat race. Humanity is left both physically and mentally scarred and disfigured while the planet it lives on is ravaged and devastated. The Socialist Party constantly strives for a society in which class divisions are abolished and the state that enforces class rule withers away. A society based on common ownership and control of its resources by each and every one of its citizens, democratically determining the development of its economy and society, will eradicate the divisions of class, race or sex. A democratically planned society has the potential to progressively reduce the burden of work allowing greater and greater participation in the running of society by those that create its wealth through their labour. The world of necessity (work) will give way to the world of freedom. This will lead to humanity actually living the ideas of cooperation and solidarity and see the true development of human personality in all its potential. Such a society, communism, will not create perfection because perfection itself is not a feature of humanity. It will remove the social causes of inhumanity so that everything that is truly human will be free. This emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. Because the capitalist state is a creation of the capitalist class and functions as a weapon of its rule it cannot be taken over by the workers and used to further the abolition of classes and itself. In other words it cannot be reformed. Because society is structured around the ownership of productive resources by a tiny minority and the compulsion of the majority to work, in order to live, to create profit for that minority, society cannot be reformed to abolish exploitation or the periodic economic crises that result from it. Only common ownership and control of the economic and social resources of society can abolish exploitation.

A socialist revolution simply means the vast majority of society under working class leadership carrying out this task. It represents society’s majority becoming truly politically active for the first time. The working class must therefore become the new ruling class of society, but a ruling class that seeks its own disappearance. Socialism cannot be achieved in one country but must embrace every country of the world.