Peering into the Future

What does the socialist society of tomorrow look like?

Many who advocate a socialist system are hesitant to talk about what such a society might look like, however, the discussion on how socialism will work is as old as the workers’ movement. Marx once said it was not for socialists to describe “the recipes of the cookshops of the future”, that a future society must emerge from those who are actually creating socialism and not from a wishful imagination. In general this aversion to drawing up blueprints has been healthy, in the respect that we cannot predict the specifics of the revolutionary situation and it is not the business of socialists at this moment in time to tell those who will be engaged in the socialist revolution how they should construct their post-revolutionary economy. We're not going to get a blueprint of socialism from Marx who knew that something would come after capitalism...

… Yet he did make some predictions about what it could be like, and those are the very famous pieces of his speculations about future society that he divided into two phases where the first involved labour tokens and an accounting system to determine how much workers would get paid. But they're very small compared to the majority of his work, which is just about understanding capitalism. What socialists should decline to do is to lay down detailed instructions for every minutia of daily life in socialism. It may be difficult to draw up our vision of future society and a degree of confrontation with differences of opinion. But if we're serious about revolution, we have to be serious about what we want and how we propose to get there. The important thing is that a practical alternative is shown. We can easily alter it on the way taking into account new experiences and the new lessons to be learned from them.

A socialist economy would for the first time give people, as producers and users, the chance to control every step of production, take initiatives and experiment without being strangled by profit-driven competition. Each productive enterprise is managed by those who work there. Workers are responsible for the operation of the facility and organisation of the workplace. Though workers manage the workplace, they do not own the means of production. These are the collective property of the society. But it is invariably asked, "Will a self-managed firm do so as well as a capitalist firm? Are workers sufficiently competent to make complicated technical and financial decisions? Are they competent even to elect representatives who will appoint effective managers?" it is strange that these questions are raised in a world where that prides itself on its democratic commitment. And which already deems ordinary people sufficiently competent to select local councils and national governments. We regard ordinary people capable of selecting representatives who will decide their taxes, who will make laws which, if violated, consign them to prison, who might even send them off to kill and die in wars. Should we really ask if ordinary people are competent to elect their bosses? Nevertheless we can answer the question directly from actual study. Research from 1973, which concluded: "In no instance of which we have evidence has a major effort to increase employee participation resulted in a long-term decline in productivity" (United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare) A later by Jones and Svejnar (1982) report: "There is apparently consistent support for the view that worker participation inmanagement causes higher productivity.” In 1990 Princeton economist Alan Blinder reaches the same conclusion. Levine and Tyson (1990), in their analysis of some 43 separate studies, found: “Our overall assessment of the empirical literature from economics, industrial relations, organizational behavior and other social sciences is that participation usually leads to small, short-run improvements in performance, and sometimes leads to significant longlasting improvements…There is almost never a negative effect…”

Lastly, of course, there is also the empirical evidence of the continued existence of tens of thousands of viable co-operatives around the world that demonstrate that worker self-management is any less competent than their conventional counterparts. Not even the most pro-capitalist critics of cooperatives argues that worker incompetence in selecting managers is the problem. It is not so surprising that worker self-managed enterprises should be efficient since workers' well-being is tied directly to the financial health of the enterprise, all have an interest in selecting good managers. Bad supervision is not hard to detect by those near at hand (who observe at close range the nature of the overseeing and feel its effects quickly), incompetence will not likely long be tolerated. Moreover, each individual has an interest in seeing to it that co-workers work effectively (and not appearing themselves to be slackers), so less supervision is necessary. The conclusions of Henry Levin (1984) after several years of field study “There exist both personal and collective incentives in cooperatives that are likely to lead to higher productivity. The specific consequences of these incentives are that the workers in cooperatives will tend to work harder and in a more flexible manner than those in capitalist firms; they will have a lower turnover rate and absenteeism; and they will take better care of plant and equipment. In addition, producer cooperatives function with relatively few unskilled workers and middle managers, experience fewer bottlenecks in production and have more efficient training programs than do capitalist firms.” [http://www.luc.edu/faculty/dschwei/economicdemocracy.pdf]

 “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war,” Naomi Klein writes in her book ‘This Changes Everything’, that changing our relationship to nature is inseparable from changing our relationship to each other by transforming our economic system. The immediate threat to the earth “changes everything” in the sense that just adding “the environment” to our list of concerns is not good enough. The sheer scale of the problem necessitates a politics that can take on capitalism. We must do away with any notions, Klein asserts, that the environmental crisis can be contained and eventually rolled back through policy tinkering; geo-engineering technical fixes or through  market-based solutions Klein is critical of the existing environmental and social movements. People hunker down into a "survival bubble" in the attempt to ride out economic hardships they face and this weakens social bonds that are essential to political engagement. Significant numbers abandon reason and are more susceptible to simplistic populist slogans and political messages based on falsehoods. Creating a vacuous political environment, and framing issues in the simplest manner possible, avoiding complexity  becomes the  political strategy driving mainstream election  campaigns. Democracy is not defined as "we" but "me", denying the common welfare and the public good in preference for the personal advantage and individualism.  The Socialists endeavour to seek frameworks that reinvigorate democracy for all.   There is the tendency of many in the movement to mistakenly identify structures themselves as part of the problem. There is no going forward, however, without the most serious development of institutions that can deal on a mass scale with resources, coordination, generational continuity, leadership development, outreach, popular education, and, especially, the accountability structures to make complex and difficult collective choices and to keep wayward leaders in check. As Klein writes, “The fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformational movements can afford… Despite endless griping, tweeting, flash mobbing, and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained the transformative movements of the past.” Klein also insists that the struggle against climate change cannot be won by fear alone. “Fear is a survival response. It makes us run, it makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the fear is only paralyzing.” Calling for a more austere lifestyle only reinforces the austerity pushed by capitalist states. The issue is not just living with “less” but living differently — which can also mean better. It is about an alternative society. The tactic is to point to a long series of issues directly linked to the environment — housing, transportation, infrastructure, meaningful jobs, collective services, public spaces, greater equality, and a more substantive democracy — and work to convince people that “climate action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more exciting than anything else currently on offer.”

 But more importantly to take on capitalism we must be clear about what this means, to ensure what “anti-capitalism” really means. For many it is not the capitalist system that is at issue but particular sub-categories of villains: big business, banks, multi-nationals corporations. There is no “neoliberal” capitalism, “deregulated” capitalism, “unfettered” capitalism, “predatory” capitalism, “extractive” capitalism – only one capitalist system. It is capitalism — not a qualified capitalism that is the enemy and the concept of a “green” capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism does of course vary across time and place, and some of those are far from trivial. But in terms of substantial fundamental differences we still have capitalism that is inseparable from the compulsion to indiscriminate growth, commodification of labour power and nature and consumerism. A social system based on private ownership of production can’t support the kind of planning that could avert environmental catastrophe. The owners of capital are fragmented and compelled by competition to look after their own interests first, and any serious planning would have to override property rights — an action that would be aggressively resisted. Arundhati Roy is quoted as saying: “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”