Socialism is common-sense

Commodity prices wobble and economic disaster looms. We have been here before, if we could but remember. We are not the first – or the last – to feel that market is beyond our ken and beyond our control but which shape the realities of our daily lives. We live in an impoverished age. Not only a relative and extreme material poverty but a poverty of ideas, a poverty of possibilities. We need to exert democratic control over the complex economic activity that governs our lives. Poverty is almost like a prison, where freedom of choice is heavily constrained, surveillance and monitoring is endless, social services’ red-tape directs daily life, “professionals” act with authoritarian condescension and criminal anti-social behaviour and criminal fraud being assumed. Many see people in poverty and seek to try to help. Others, though, see people suffering from poverty and seek to profit. Making money off poor people is a booming business.

Members of the Socialist Party are “commoners”, advocates for common ownership of the means of production and distribution such as factories and transport. We seek the democratic association of society, based on the self-organisation of people. Our perspective is the view of human society that is for the shared good – a commonwealth – which we shall shape together to satisfy our needs. However, at present, humanity seems to be very distant from this aspiration. The Socialist Party is a democratic organisation of people united on certain basic beliefs. The Socialist Party has always held that the widest possible discussion of conflicting views is desirable. Our case for socialism is based on the proposition that the socialist-conscious working class, once they want to change society, are capable of establishing a Socialist system and running it without any orders from above. In other words, will run society without leaders, bosses, managers or any Party claiming to speak for them or represent "their interests". Socialism means no more elitism. The view that workers can only learn the futility of reformism or the limitations of trade unionism by their own personal experience is not one we fully concur with. We point out that by far the greater part of what people knew came from being taught the experiences of others. Of course, strictly speaking this learning is also experience. The task of the Socialist Party is to see that hearing or reading the socialist case is part of workers’ experience. It is not just experience of factory life (after all many workers do not work in factories), but of generally having to live on a wage or salary and all the problems which lack of money brings in housing, education, health, transport and the rest. It is their general social experience, rather than their narrow experience at the point of production, that can bring workers to a socialist understanding.

The idea of socialism as a solution to working class problems arises out of capitalism partly because it is the solution and partly because people’s experience of capitalism teaches them that it is. The role of a socialist party, at the present time, is to put socialist ideas before the working class to ensure that hearing the socialist ease is a part of their experience. This is our participation, as a party, in the class struggle. Later a socialist party will be the instrument which the working class can use to win power for socialism and will disappear as soon as socialism has been established.

Members of the Socialist Party, as workers, are engaged in the day-to-day struggle to live under capitalism. They could not avoid this even if they wanted to. In so far as this struggle is organised our members are active mainly in the trade unions but also in unofficial workers committees, tenants associations and  environmental anti-pollution groups. We see it as having the practical aim of protecting workers’ living and working conditions under capitalism. The effectiveness of this struggle, we might add, is limited not only by the economic workings of capitalism but also by the ideas of the workers involved (which is why the spread of socialist ideas, in which we are engaged, helps the day-to-day struggle.) If we are to appreciate how the revolution in ideas (a necessary precondition of the social revolution) will occur, we must first rid ourselves of the simplistic fallacy that people change their minds only when they burn their fingers.

Under capitalism production is not just a technical question; it is also a question of exploitation. Thus, in varying proportions, a manager’s function is partly technical and partly disciplinary (“order-giving”, as some put it). In socialist society production will just be a technical question; there will be no “discipline”. Work will be voluntary and democratically-controlled — though of course we cannot now give a blueprint of the way this will be done. The division between “order-givers” and “order-takers” arises out of the capitalist exploitation of the workers through the wages system. This is why genuine democratic control of work demands the abolition of the market and working for wages. To retain these is to retain the same economic pressures on the workers even if exercised through a workers’ management committee rather than a capitalist-appointed manager.

Socialists are hardened by now to meeting the opinion that the system of production for profit is essentially sane and efficient. The opposite is true. Capitalism wastes its wealth and its abilities. The profit motive cannot work efficiently. Capitalism cannot cater for the needs of its people. It produces waste and it produces want and both are profitable only to the minority who hold positions of privilege. This is now a world of potential plenty. Yet all but a few are deprived in some way and many starve. Common sense would suggest that, to take full advantage of this world-wide productive system, it should be owned and controlled as a unit. That it should belong in common to all mankind and be controlled by them for their own benefit. But of course, this is not so. The means and instruments for producing wealth are not owned in common by us all. They are the property of a few. Nor are they used to make what we need. They are used to make things to be sold. This is what is behind the paradox of waste amidst want.