The Solidarity Economy

RECIPROCITY

Socialism is a much abused, frequently distorted and mostly misunderstood word but expressing better than any other the purpose of political and economic progress, the aim of the Revolution. The word implies harmonious relationship. Socialism is the belief that the next important step in progress is a change in man's environment of an economic character that shall include the abolition of every power whereby the possessor of privilege and holder of wealth acquires an anti-social authority to compel tribute. Socialism must be voluntary — not coerced. Socialist seek to abolish the State, and contends that government is tyranny. Those who wish to make the State, the universal employer, the universal landlord and the universal banker are mistaken giving the State control of all the means of producing and distributing wealth and giving to each only according to his or her deeds. These sort of proposal would only set up greater evils than those it proposes to remedy. Socialism is not government control of the economy. Socialists want all property to be held in common and each to receive according to his or her needs. What socialists demand is the emancipation of the individual from all economic bondage. Our political position can be described as cooperative socialism in that we recognise that socialism by its nature can only be cooperative and voluntary.

We are not advocating cooperatives within capitalism. While worker-run enterprises might very well provide a superior form of orthodox business model, in many respects they would still face much the same problems as private capitalists: if the decision-making done in a worker-managed enterprise/cooperative is done by its workers, and there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of such cooperatives making de-centralized decision-making on production (even if this involves a democratic process involving many people in each individual enterprise), then you would have decisions on investment and production made in a decentralised manner that is essentially private. If the economy uses money and has some types of financial assets as a store of value, you have exactly the same problems that exist now. The people involved would still be making decisions under subjective expectations and fundamental uncertainty, and investment would, most probably, be subject to fluctuation. Syndicalist society could so easily evolve into a state-based system not that much different from the most radical forms of state capitalism. Blanqui took a harder line than Marx on the idea of co-ops:

“As far as production societies are concerned, I take them to be the most deadly trap that the proletariat could fall into. It is clear that only a very small number of workers possess the necessary capacity for such enterprises. It is thus the intellectual elite that will take this road. Well, on this road, both failure and success would be equally bad. Failure is ruin and discouragement. Success is worse, it's the division of workers into two classes: on the one side, the great mass, ignorant, abandoned, without support, without hope, in the underworld of wage-working; on the other side, a small intelligent minority, concerned from then on only with its private interests and separated for ever from their unfortunate brothers.”

In Capital, Marx summed up the essence of capitalist relations: “The absolute general law of capitalist accumulation makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labor, slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”

Pro-capitalists are desperate to divide and rule. In Victorian times the ruling class saw a division between the ‘deserving poor’ and ‘undeserving poor’. Today they still turn us against one another (private against public sector, the old versus the young, employed and unemployed, male and female etc.) through media attacks on benefits claimants, the unemployed, public service employees with pensions, the disabled, and ethnic minorities and migrants. A new vocabulary of denigration (“benefit scroungers”, “strivers against skivers” etc) has been invented.

The stakes in the fight for a survivable and a secure future are enormous. Socialism is the extension and preservation of democracy in all realms of human activity, especially the economic arena. It is a political, social, economic, cultural, and ethical project: a struggle to transform power relations within a society dominated by a tiny minority to benefit the overwhelming majority of working people. Socialism liberates human energy to pursue its creative potential. Socialism cannot emerge from sentiment or wish fulfillment. Socialism emerges because the working class, as it struggles around everyday living comes to recognise socialism as a necessity. History and contemporary reality do not yield a schematic blueprint for socialism. An analysis of experiences in social struggle, combined with a critique of objective circumstances, suggest some possible guiding principles for the transition to a socialist democracy. Socialism’s fundamental building blocks are already present in society. The means of production are fully developed and stagnating under the political domination of finance capital. The work-force, for the most part, is highly skilled at all levels of production and its administration and direction. There is a broadly enfranchised electorate and socialism will largely be gained by the class-conscious working class winning the battle for democracy in society at large. There exists as well kernels of socialist organisation scattered across the landscape in cooperatives, socially organised human services, and widespread mass means of communication to relay supply/demand data management. Our core communities – workplace, occupational organisations, neighbourhood, community centres, schools, cultural and sports groups – should be arenas to reach out to those looking for change. Coalitions of organisations can be established around the common objective. Socialism will be a society in harmony with the natural environment. The nature of global climate change necessitates a high level of planning. We need to redesign communities, introduce healthier foods, and rebuild sustainable agriculture—all on a global scale with high design, but on a human scale with mass participation of communities in diverse localities. We need intelligent growth in quality and wider knowledge with a lighter environmental footprint. Socialism does not simply reproduces the wasteful expansion of capitalism.