The Future Will Be Socialist Because Without Socialism There Will Be No Future

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.