Billions around the world don’t have access to basic needs
like clean drinking water, housing or education. The values socialists hold
dear, such as the creation of a free and classless society and an economy that
is environmentally sustainable and democratically-controlled by workers and
communities, are those which are shared an overwhelming majority of the world’s
population. If you want to know the real extremists, look no further than the
supporters of global, corporate capitalism, those financial criminals who
helped engineer the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression
and were bailed out by the governments they had bought, and now seek further
tax cuts, more deregulation and have launched attacks on the rights of working
people. These are the minority of pie in the sky, out-of-touch political
zealots and fanatics. Socialists condemn capitalism because it has failed the vast
mass of humanity in the most decisive way. It promises freedom, democracy and
prosperity but defaults on all three. Capitalism's driving principle is the
struggle between capitalists for commercial supremacy and competitive survival
in the jungle of the misnamed "free market". Human needs are met only
in so far as they are backed up by purchasing power. Thus, for instance,
suppose you need somewhere to live: if you have money you'll get what you can
pay for, otherwise you can die on the streets or throw yourself on charity. Socialism,
expropriating the capitalist class and putting society's productive forces
under social ownership and democratic control, would put a stop to this
madness.
With society in firm control of its economic mechanism, the
satisfaction of people's needs — for meaningful work, housing, health, care of
children and the aged, education, a quality public transport system, an
attractive, livable urban environment and so on — would become the goal and the
measure of its success. World socialism could, after an appropriate period of
transition, give every single person on the planet a comfortable, decent
existence — an overall quality of life such as, for instance, the western “middle
classes” might enjoy today (but minus the consumerist trappings of conspicuous
consumption). Anything less than this will not do. The basis of the division of
society into ruling and oppressed classes — under capitalism no less than
slavery and feudalism — is material scarcity. Society's small surplus over its
elementary needs is appropriated by the ruling class. Only an abundance of
goods and services — understood, of course, in a rational sense: we are not
talking about gold toilet bowls — will provide the necessary foundation for a
classless society.
Does society have the resources to accomplish such a feat?
From the standpoint of meeting human needs, capitalism is massively wasteful.
It doesn't take any great imagination to see that a fundamental change in the
social and economic system would free vast human and material resources which could
be devoted to building a better life for all. For a start, there is militarism,
consuming hundreds of billions of dollars each year and, directly and
indirectly, engaging the energies of scores, if not hundreds, of millions of
people worldwide. The end of capitalism would mean the end of the
"military-industrial complex" and the unrelenting sacrifice of human
happiness on the altar of "defence". Moreover large sectors of the
economy have a purely capitalistic function and wouldn't exist in a rational system:
buying and selling personnel, advertising, the banking and financial sphere,
the insurance industry, real estate and property development), the gambling
businesses, are some examples. You, yourself can no doubt add to a list of
redundant. The forces of law and order to protect private property, not just
the police but the private security
industry and all the jails and prison staff.
Naturally, unemployment is yet another example of the
irrationality and waste of the capitalist system. In a society freed from
dependence on the profit motive this would not happen. Everyone could be
guaranteed meaningful work and the working week could at the same time be
drastically reduced for all. The ending of capitalism worldwide would enable
society to overhaul its entire economic apparatus. There would be massive
changes in what is produced and how it is produced. Once the profit
motive is discarded, the reorganisation of the economy along ecologically
sustainable lines could for the first time be seriously tackled. Sustainable
energy production could be implemented on a truly massive scale. Wouldn’t all this
increased production and development to qualitatively raise the standard of
living of the mass of the world's population be ecologically sustainable if
rationally planned rather than left to the chaos of the capitalist market.
Socialism is an economic system in which the means of
production are commonly owned and controlled co-operatively, based upon
production for use and the direct allocation of economic inputs to satisfy
economic demands and human needs (use value); accounting is based on physical
quantities of resources, some physical magnitude, or a direct measure of
labour-time.
During the English Civil War of the 1640s, radicals such as
the Diggers or “True Levellers,” tried to put communal or communist ideas into
practice, calling for every able-bodied person to work and to contribute to the
common store of goods, skills, and services. Fearing the spread of such
radicalism, the English authorities destroyed their communes and arrested their
leading spokesmen. Modern socialism originated from an 18th-century
intellectual and working class political movement that criticized the effects
of industrialization and private property on society. Utopian socialists such
as Robert Owen, tried to found self-sustaining communes by secession from a
capitalist society. Henri de Saint Simon, who coined the term socialisme, advocated technocracy and
industrial planning. Saint Simon, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx advocated the
creation of a society that allows for the widespread application of modern
technology to rationalise economic activity by eliminating the anarchy of
capitalist production that results in instability and cyclical crises. Marx and
Engels believed the consciousness of those who earn a wage or salary (the
"working class" in the broadest Marxist sense) would be molded by
their "conditions" of "wage-slavery", leading to a tendency
to seek their freedom or "emancipation" by throwing off the
capitalist ownership of society. For Marx and Engels, conditions determine
consciousness and ending the role of the capitalist class leads eventually to a
classless society in which the state would wither away. They argued that the
material productive forces brought into existence by capitalism predicated a
cooperative society since production had become a mass social, collective
activity of the working class to create commodities but with private ownership
(the relations of production or property relations). This conflict between
collective effort in large factories and private ownership would bring about a conscious
desire in the working class to establish collective ownership commensurate with
the collective efforts their daily experience. First one realizes one needs an
improvement over capitalism, then one casts about for a tool for building it.
Marxism is a tool, not an end in itself. It is, however, an essential tool. If
a tool is broken one can fix it; if it is incomplete add another; if it is
useless for its purpose, forge a new one.
Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness
resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity. Socialists claim that
although the viewpoint of working people is partisan, it is better than that of
rich people for understanding reality. This is because working people are
positioned by capitalism to see more than rich people do: they can grasp the
actions of the rich and their own. Capitalism is an evil that calls for
immediate destruction.
Simplified, capitalism as a mode of production is for Marx
characterized by: 1) Production of
value by wage labor. 2) Ownership
and control of the means of production by a non-wage owners and managers who
personify capital. 3) Distribution
of the resulting products, as commodities, by a market. Marx identifies three
elements in capitalism: labor, capital, and markets. Unless joined to labor,
capital produces no value; and labor, lacking control of the means of
production, cannot make what it needs to live. The imbalance, then, is: control
of the means of production by non-workers. Lack such control workers must sell
their labor power as a commodity to those who have such control, subjecting
themselves to the latters' will during the workday. Those controlling the means
of production, seeing that they can make more from workers' labor than it costs
them, grant workers the temporary access to the means of production they need
to reproduce their labor and themselves. A wage for time? It looks like a fair
exchange if we overlook the imbalance. Yet this imbalance is signaled by
workers' advance of their labor to capitalists before receiving compensation on
payday, rather than the reverse. Once put to work, labor power soon fully
compensates the capitalist for its cost to him; but it then keeps on adding
value to commodities, unpaid, for the remainder of the workday. Workers may have
access to the means of production to make what they need, but on condition
that, having done so, they continue working, yielding up without compensation
the greatest part of the value their labor produces. Marx's name for this
unpaid labour done after workers cover their own labor costs is "surplus
labor." Its product, "surplus value," is controlled by
capitalists. It is from surplus value that profit and capital itself derives. Workers'
own savings will never match the accumulation of capital, which they create,
but which the system awards to capitalists, along with huge social power.
Individual workers may become capitalists, but the system's imbalance keeps the
working class in subservience.
But at the heart of the so-called "free" labour
contract is a theft effected under a life-threatening extortion. Coerced into
this contract by their need, itself due to their separation from the means of
production, workers get paid a mere portion of the value they produce in order
to reproduce their labor power, hence their lives. They are paid this portion
only if they work unpaid for a larger part of the workday. Should they decline
surplus labour they will not be allowed enough access to the means of
production to do even the labor needed to live. Trade unions may negotiate
compensation only for this latter amount of labor. Surplus value is off limits.
Marxists call the ratio of what labor costs capitalists to what it produces for
them as surplus value, the rate of exploitation. It is often euphemistically
called the rate of productivity. Surplus labor is extracted involuntarily since
workers would not willingly hand over control of their earnings to others were
they not compelled to do so by their separation from the means of production.
This imbalance in capital's reproduction thus allows control of the lion's
share of the extorted value to be controlled by the representatives of capital.
Under cover of equal exchange, this is an exploitation of humans by other
humans that is not made more just by being pervasive and normal in the process
of capital accumulation. Chattel slavery was once normal.
It will not do to say capitalists are entitled to profit
because of their unique productive contributions. Contributions usually named
-- entrepreneurial insight, managerial skill, innovation, risk-taking, etc. --
are not unique to capitalists. Persons with these abilities may extract profit
from others' labor only if they also own or control the means of production.
Many so endowed who lack such control are excluded from profits. Ownership (or
control) not skill is the key. Under capitalism all one needs for full
entitlement to luxury is enough ownership of the means of production. Nor is
providing capital itself a contribution that merits profits. Phoning one's
broker is not a productive activity or contribution. "Providing
capital" is indeed widely accepted as a productive contribution, but this
assumes such entitlement is just, and provides no proof. Part of the illusion
that capital contributes arises from the fact that capital is not physical
things (equipment and materials) or money, but rather, as Marx said, "a
social relation." He was referring not just to our mystified attribution
of agency to an abstraction we've collectively produced, but to the gradations
of power that must permeate human communities which defer to such inhuman
agency. This hierarchy is geographically displayed in the fine class gradations
visible in residential neighborhoods of first world countries. In the end it
matters little if capital's representatives lack justification for exercising
power in its name. They control it (and it them); they give orders in its
behalf; the police and courts back them up in a power structure with capital at
the top. That is the way it is.
The Co-op solution?
Take producer cooperatives. These unite capital and labor in
a non-antagonistic manner. In a true cooperative the same group of workers both
produces value and owns the means of production. A coop's active workforce
hires managers and capital (by jointly taking out loans) instead of being hired
by them, a major reversal. A broad cooperative movement, by starting cooperatives
and buying out existing enterprises, can dismantle capitalism, one firm at a
time, in the following three ways:
First, by abolishing capitalist exploitation. Selling one's
labor power always means subjecting oneself to another's domination. This might
be acceptable were the subservient labor fully paid. Instead, it leads to
capital accumulation and profit for managers and owners. By contrast, coops
return all value to those who produce it, who then decide how much to pay
managers, reinvest, and share as profits. Since the current workforce
democratically decides on any work beyond that needed for living costs, such a
workforce cannot be said to exploit itself. Second, by abolishing the market in
labor. By joining a coop workers pool their labor with equals and do not sell
it. This has two effects: it shatters the illusion that capital is active since
workers themselves unite the factors of production and profit therefrom; and,
more crucially, it stops capital accumulation by non-workers, jamming the mechanism
that maintains capitalism's imbalance and feeds finance capital. And thirdly,
by blocking capitalism's creation of class divisions within and between
nations. This is due to the much smaller income spreads in coops than in
capitalist firms. Since class divisions outside of workplaces tend to reflect
those inside, cooperativisation will narrow capitalism's class divisions and
the resultant unjust distribution of life-chances.
Cooperativisation, then, the theory argues, could displace
capitalism. However, if the goal of socialism is a self-determining humanity,
then even a fully cooperativised global economy will not be self-determining
because of its subjection to market forces. Democratic planning is indeed
needed for socialism. Marx entertained cooperativisation as a strategy. He
admitted coops demonstrate that workers don't need capitalists in order to run
firms. But he believed cooperativisation could not bring socialism so long as
capitalists control state power, which they had exercised so brutally in 1848.
Marx envisioned a world free of domination both by capital and the state, a
world of direct self-determination by "the associated producers" in
which states will have "withered away." But to defeat and expropriate
capitalists, workers must meanwhile exercise state power in a
"dictatorship of the proletariat" (a misnomer in many ways, since
Marx envisioned an extension of democracy by democratic means). Forming parties
to take power thus became for Marx the priority of the workers' movement.
No comments:
Post a Comment