Socialist Principles

The reason very few of us can imagine a system that’s sustainable and fair is due to our education, which has been tuned to perpetuate the dominant economy of permanent growth. It’s ridiculous to think that we can’t create a sustainable ecological sound system. However, it’s also about how we can go from the present destructive profit system to one that is just.

 Even though we all live in a capitalist economy, few people seem to understand what this means. The situation is even worse for socialism which seems to be a label thrown onto random policies without any understanding whatsoever.

The easiest way to understand this is to imagine a factory and ask yourself “who owns it?” In capitalism, it is owned by its shareholders. Shareholders are a group of individuals (or just one person) who provide money to set up a business and receive a share of the profits in return (they hold a share of the business, hence their name). So the car factory is owned by the people who provide money (also known as capital). It should be obvious from this that pretty much every country on Earth is capitalist. Capitalism is an economic system in which the person or body owning capital—productive resources like raw material and labour—has the power to make decisions as to the use of these resources and who benefits from them. The capitalist is in control, not the workers, not the community members, not the government. It is a system in which capitalists seek to gain for themselves the highest possible return on their investment.  What most people think of as socialism is really state capitalism (where the state owns everything). This confusion came from the fact that places like the Soviet Union called themselves socialist when they really weren’t (if this sounds strange remember that they also called themselves “democratic” when they definitely were not). A key difference between the two systems is that capitalism is individualistic while socialism is collectivist. That is to say, capitalism views the world on an individual level and aims to get the best outcome for an individual. Socialism on the other hand views the world on a group level and aims to get the best outcome for society as a whole. It is paradoxical, then, that we see capitalism and democracy as best buddies when in reality they are driven by opposing principles: Democracy is about the wide dispersion of power so that everyone has a voice. But capitalism, merely left to its own devices, inevitably concentrates wealth and therefore power, so “capital’s” voice carries vastly more weight than citizens’. What if, from now on, every time we read or hear someone use the terms capitalism or socialism, we simply ask: How do you define it? At least, we’d be igniting conversation that takes us beyond slogans.

 Most socialist parties aren’t actually socialist. For example the French Socialist Party has no intention of removing ownership from shareholders to workers. Every major political party in the world is capitalist. It should also be clear how ridiculous the claim that Obama is a socialist or how little sense Margaret Thatcher’s much repeated quote “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” is. No matter how high you raise taxes or how many regulations you impose, as long as businesses are still owned by private individuals, it is not socialism. Socialism is not Robin Hood economics (taking from the rich to give to the poor) rather it is only way the workers own the business. 99% of the times someone is called a socialist they probably aren’t and a large number of “anti-capitalist” protesters are no such thing.

Is it possible, today or in some future time, to maintain a system of nation-states, which could manage a market economy in such a way as to either suppress the accumulation of capital or, given continued capital accumulation, resist domination by big capital or a return to capitalism, as so-called "market socialists" maintain? And is such a project possible without thoroughgoing political repression? And is there any reason to suppose that life under such a regime would be better than what we have now?  The answer is negative. 

Is it possible to envisage a world in which production is planned and regulated on a world scale by a state which outlaws the accumulation of capital, financial markets and so on.  In what way would such a situation differ from that which pertained in the Eastern Europe and China and so on? Is such a situation possible? Would it not be the height of utopianism to suppose that astate-ownership system could succeed today where it failed last century?

The average person are unable to see any alternative to the profit system. The view of the capitalist as the individual owner of an enterprise has long been out of date. Many thousands of individual owners of capitalist enterprises remain, but this is not the general way in which the enterprises are now owned. Marx had this to say about the capitalist: "As a capitalist he is only capital personified. His is the soul of capital." (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 233); "...capitalist - who are actually but the personification of capital." (Vol. 3, p. 261); "Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power whose agent is the capitalist." (Vol. 3, p. 259); and "These (capitalists) are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they all pocket the proceeds of the trusteeship." (Vol. 3, p. 261). It is capital which is the fundamental thing. Capital is, as Marx continually stressed, a social relationship; on the basis of this social relationship the capitalist can put on a wide variety of disguises. The management of each enterprise is becoming increasingly the effective controller of its own production. Private ownership includes joint stock companies (corporations) and syndicalistic workers councils and co-operatives as well as the government bureaucracies. Nor can the workers own the means of production when the state owns them.

Marx showed that the fundamental condition for wage labour is that a section of the population is entirely cut off from ownership of the means of production and will starve unless it agrees to sell its labour power to the owners of the means of production. The threat of hunger and privation is a very powerful material incentive to toil for others. It is well known, Marx provided no explicit model for an alternative to capitalism, no "recipes for cook-shops of the future," is his phrase. He was a "scientific" socialist. Although there were sufficient data available to him to ground his critique of capitalism, there was little upon which to draw regarding alternative economic institutions.

With socialism, there will be no wages at all and there will be no prices. Goods will be produced for the use of men and NOT for the profits which they bring in to bosses. Labour power will no longer be regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It will not be purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. Men and women in socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs and for their mutual development. Men and women no longer fettered by the necessity of working not only for their own material maintenance, but for the bosses’ even more material profits, will be freed to live more fully. The time that each must work will be small, yet the goods produced for all to enjoy will be plentiful. That is why, instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” workers must inscribe on their banner the REVOLUTIONARY watchword: “Abolition of the wage system!” Socialism is the ONLY answer! Marx wrote:

“Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism” He was talking about socialist/communist revolution happening simultaneously in the advanced capitalist countries. Today, we would have to talk about this happening globally since capitalism is now a global system of production.

Socialism is about radical democracy. To stress "democratic" is fundamental to our principles for no system would deserve the name socialism at all if it isn't democratic. When that democratic system is achieved, the people will determine how it will be run. What structure they will then choose will not be the condition for democracy, but what they will be using the democracy for. The democracy is in the processing of choosing itself, not in the specific choices. It would give people democratic control over political as well as economic matters, rather than the system we have now that concentrates the control of these areas into the hands of a small group of people at the top of the socio-economic ladder. It means giving you control over your workplace rather than in the hands of some board of trustees, the stock holders, or the bosses who are only interested in profit and not your livelihood. Socialism means collective ownership, and democratic control by the people, of the factories, farms, mines, mills, and all other industries and services, a classless, moneyless, wageless, stateless commonwealth based on common ownership and democratic of the means of wealth production. Socialism is, simply, power to the people. People will manage a certain amount directly, but find it necessary to manage the rest indirectly, that is, to delegate responsibilities to various local and regional elected committees. By default, the workers should manage all workplace matters until such time that the general public overrides a workers' decision. If the general public takes an affirmative step to declare that something other than the workers' choice is more convenient, more healthy, more ethical or more aesthetic, that decision should be a higher power than workers' self-management.

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what socialism is or is not about. So a little explanation is always helpful. Words have histories. Socialism before the twenties in the United States represented the ruling philosophy of Eugene V. Debs. It had a fair amount of popularity among workers. Then came the Bolshevik Revolution and socialism became conflated with Russian “communism”--and the media made sure that socialism was marginalised. Capitalism, on the other hand, was rarely used, "free enterprise" being the preferred term. Any word ending in "ism" was considered a term used primarily by intellectuals and therefore suspect. The term "free enterprise" contains two words both with positive connotations, "free" and "enterprise." No suggestion in here that making profits is the sole criterion for success. Maybe we need a replacement term for socialism-- how about "community" or something like that? Socialism after is just an inclusive economy that wants well-being for the entire community.