Planet of Plenty (3/3)

It is asserted by pro-capitalists that socialism is an end to freedom, not the beginning of liberty. Those who make that assertion very often are the same people to whom freedom means only the right to grab all you can and keep all you have grabbed. This is not true freedom at all. The freedom we seek is the freedom which guarantees to the individual justice even from those who do not wish to be just to him or her; which assures the right "to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience" -- in short, free speech, free press, free assemblage, free association, for which mankind has so long struggled. The Socialist, Party believe in freedom, peace, and plenty and know that they cannot be realised unless they are realised promptly in a cooperative commonwealth or rather in a World Federation of Cooperative Commonwealths which will embrace the world. There is no hope in capitalism with its practical certainty of new cycles of wars and tyranny. Is this great goal of socialism practicable? Let us emphasise that the goal of abundance in a society of free men and women who seek life rather than death and possess the machinery which can produce abundance is so desirable that it ought to compel people to move heaven and earth to make it practicable. There has been encouraging progress made in the cooperation of workers in the management of their own affairs. I ask you to consider the history of trade unionism. It is a magnificent record of the onward march of exploited workers. I ask you to consider what many cooperatives have accomplished. They have shown the capacity of plain men and women to manage in voluntary association the production and distribution of goods on another principle other than the principle of private profit. We can have industrial democracy.

Freed from the restrictions of profit-making, modern productive techniques could provide the abundance that would allow a socialist world community to introduce free access, according to need so that no man, woman or child anywhere on the planet need go without adequate food, clothing, shelter, healthcare or education. The characteristic mark of our system is that it leaves in the hands of private owners the land, the natural resources, the great machinery, the power necessary for our common life. And these private owners or the managers who act for them, use or fail to use what they own, solely in accordance with what they think will make for their own profit. Their profit depends upon relative scarcity. The case for Socialism arises logically and reasonably out of our examination of the development of capitalism and its present failure to use the machinery of abundance for the conquest of poverty. Socialism says: "Let us go about the business of making machinery provide abundance directly. Let us begin by asking, not what price will bring profit to private owners, but how much food, clothing and shelter do we need for the good life for men. Then let us produce for the use of men, women, and children, in order to supply them with abundance." Clearly this requires social ownership of the principal means of production and distribution. This not in order to abolish all private property but to give to the exploited workers, for the first time in the long history of mankind, the good things of life which labor of hand and brain, applied to the power-driven machine, can produce. Abundance is possible when we can set our engineers and technicians to planning for society, instead of planning, in so far as they can plan at all, for the profits of an owning class.

The socialist proposal is wholly reasonable but it is not, of course, self-executing. Socialism will be the result of struggle, and the successful application of Socialism requires intelligence and the capacity for co-operative effort. The collapse of capitalism is inevitable. But there is no inevitability about Socialism or shared abundance. We may have a long stretch of chaos, wars, dictatorships, and regimented poverty. This can be prevented only by men who will not accept poverty in the midst of potential abundance. Not man but technology must be the slave of tomorrow's world.

It is not merely plenty that we want, but peace. Mankind is divided not only into economic classes but into nations. And nations as well as men are divided into Haves and Have-nots. We live in an interdependent world where not even the capitalist nations with the most resources, the United States, the EU, China or Russia, are fully self-sufficient. Yet each nation claims absolute sovereignty, absolute sway over its citizens, and blindly sees its economic prosperity, not in cooperation, but in competing with its neighbours for control and capture of markets, to obtain sources of raw materials outside its borders, and a place for its capitalists to invest more profitably than at home the surplus wealth they have acquired by the successful exploitation of the workers who are their own fellow countrymen. Modern wars arise out of the clash of nations for power and profit. Patriotism and nationalism makes people blind so that they cannot see that out of this struggle for power and profit there can be neither true prosperity nor true peace. We cannot make peace secure or glorious under the loyalties of the institutions of capitalist nationalism. The hardest task for socialism is to bring about a real unity of workers with hand and brain across the dividing lines of nation, race and creed. Yet it is only in the federation of cooperative commonwealths to which there is hope of lasting peace. Socialists want a world of freedom. This we do not have and cannot have under the shadow of war and the bondage of capitalist exploitation.

There is no man, woman or child in the world who would not be better off with the menace of war and poverty and insecurity banished. There are few in the world who would not, as individuals, be better off economically under the abundance of planned production for use. We shall never have a true cooperative socialist commonwealth until we think of our reward as workers who create all wealth and not any longer of their reward as owners of property which enables them to exploit other's labour. That is one of the reasons why our appeal must be always to the workers with hand and brain, in city and country. It is they who have so long been exploited. It is they who can and must be free. Ours the responsibility to apply the technological power we now possess to conquer poverty and release humanity from immemorial bondage. Let us harness that power for life, not death.