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“Since Bismarck went in for state-ownership of industrial
establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and
again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state
ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the
taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon
and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism.”
Socialism means more than state ownership or state
intervention in a mixed economy. Previous show-cases for what should be called
state-capitalism have been exposed. Russia’s
command economy collapsed. China has a system of market exploitation. Europe’s
social democrats have long ago transformed themselves from defenders of the
welfare state to advocates of privatisation and deregulation. It is becoming
obvious to millions around the world that we cannot solve our economic and
environmental crises without replacing capitalism. Yet the left have little to
offer because they no longer know what socialism means. It is true socialism has been a contested
term ever since it was first coined in the early nineteenth century. Engels
noted that in the 1840s “socialism” was associated with “the most multifarious
social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without
any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances,” and who had
no connection with the workers’ movement. Little then seems to have changed
with today. Reformers still argue that now is not the time to advance a case
for full socialism and offer up instead a fare of half-measures and a list of
palliatives. Socialists certainly need to be realistic, and nobody will object
to fighting for social justice, but the problem with the gradualist approach
emerge as soon as we looks at the concrete proposals they offer up. The bottom
line is that many proposed reforms are so cautious that they fail to make any
serious challenge to the status quo. Instead, they are little more than a
recipe for propping up capitalism. They are “realistic” only if our goal is to
preserve the existing system for as long as possible, not if we hope to create
a movement to replace it and the real fantasy is the idea of a market-based
solution to the environmental crisis. Political action inspired by the goal of
ending all forms of oppression, exploitation and degradation is similarly
necessary but insufficient. An understanding of the economic causes of these
phenomena and how they impact on people globally is vital. Economic categories
of explanation with universal instantiation such as labour, commodity, value,
and capital are required for a global perspective on the task of liberation. Explanations
of that have a partial understanding of its nature will produce partial
programmes for liberation. Partial forms of anti-capitalism will be utopian. An
exclusive focus on reforms makes the goal of social revolution unrealisable. As
long as the commodity form dominates the labour process in the spheres of
production and consumption then market forces would destroy such experiments as
cooperatives. The only practicable way of abolishing money, wage slavery and
the law of value, Marx argued, would be to remove all aspects of the mode of
production from its global form as commodity and value, including labour power
itself. The only means to achieving this end could be the global movement of
workers towards the collective appropriation of the means of production
including machinery, raw materials and labour. Workers, as a class, liberate
their labour power at the same time as liberating the products of labour from
their value form as money, wages and capital. Thus today, Marxists tend to
argue that movements for women, black, gay or national liberation are de facto
utopian if they promote partial solutions to their oppression and ignore the
connection with the global struggle for freedom from economic oppression and
for a classless society.
Unlike the utopian socialists, who drew up intricate
blueprints of post-capitalist society (which they sometimes attempted to put
into practice on a small scale), Marx and Engels never publically speculated on
the detailed organisation of a future socialist society. The key task for them
was building a movement to overthrow capitalism. If and when that movement won
power, it would be up to the members of the new society to decide democratically
how it was to be organised, in the concrete historical circumstances in which
they found themselves. Marx and Engels were the first to bring socialism down
from the clouds and put it on a real-world, scientific basis. Their starting
point was not ideals, but reality:
“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones,
not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the
imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material
conditions under which they live, but those which they find existing and those
produced by their activity.”
Utopians before Marx dreamed of an egalitarian society, and
drew up elaborate plans for them--rigorously detailed blueprints for industry,
education and social life. The utopians hoped that if these plans were
presented to rich and powerful people, they would be convinced by the
rationality of socialism and that change would be the product of enlightened,
courageous minorities working on behalf of the grateful masses. Marx and Engels
were the first to see socialism as the logical end result of the class struggle
that was already in progress. "All previous historical movements," they
wrote in the Communist Manifesto "were movements of minorities, or in the
interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority." This movement of the "immense majority" is not a
utopian dream. It is a part of the real world, a struggle already in progress.
As Marx wrote in a letter:
“We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a
new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new
principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We do not say to
the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true
slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for...
explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.”
We don't have to draw up elaborately detailed plans for a
socialist future, but we can imagine the broad outlines of would be possible if
we, the working people, ran society: We could house everyone with free housing?
We could feed everyone with free food. We could give people real leisure time,
to spend with their friends and families, travel, pursue other interests by
reducing the time spent at work. There has been a tradition within socialism
that blueprints, or anything that could even resemble them must be shunned. Not
all would agree: a detailed sketch of the future society is desirable, if not essential.
We are required to draw up our vision of future society. Critics of capitalism
have got to think through and explain to others how we propose to do things
differently, and why outcomes will be significantly better. Even though people are
receptive to our criticisms about capitalism, we have little credibility when
it comes to replacing capitalism with a wholly different economic system. In the
light of the unfortunate history of socialism and its frequent
misrepresentation, people have every reason to be sceptical that the Socialist
Party knows how to create a superior economic system. We have to give concrete
answers to serious questions. The first
question is, “What do we want?” What, in general, and even not so general
terms, is the form of the socialist society that we seek? The second question
is, “Why do we want it?” What exactly is wrong with capitalism, and why is socialism
a improvement? And the third question is, “How can we achieve it?”
We clearly need to speculate on the nature of a non-market
classless society and the possibility of realising this in the present.
Speculation involves the exercise of the imagination. Speculation is involved
in the creation of theory. It is an activity that generates ideas of where
current tendencies and trends might lead. Setting imaginative goals and
creating blueprints to guide action are not only a necessary feature of
democratic planning but an essential aspect of understanding history. Marx and
Engels used their speculative imaginations to describe the non-market society
of the future. They had clear conceptions of the socialist project both as
viable goal and means. For Marx, the goal of the socialist project is the
emergence of free individuality and the recovery of human sociality from the
effects of exploitation and oppression. Marx argued that the socialist project
needs certain objective conditions, one being the formation of a global
non-market classless society.
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