Feasible socialism

There is no effective world socialist movement in the foreseeable future despite our own aspirations in the World Socialist Movement and therefore there is little hope of salvation for humanity. We advocate a decision-making process that must be resolutely democratised by interlocking networks of the councils and communes on a local, regional and world scale. We understand the utopian and unrealisable character of the idea of building of socialism in one country and understand the integrated worldwide character of economics, politics, and social contradictions in our epoch. We maintain that the class struggle is the motor of human history. The aim of socialism is to achieve total control over social forces which humanity itself has generated. Socialism, according to Marx, involves the creation of a society in which “socialised humanity, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power”. Private and state property has to be transformed into social property by reorganising social life as a whole so that the producers have a real say not only in the production of social wealth but also its disposal. Humanity can never attain real freedom until a society has been built where no person has the freedom to exploit another person. The all-round development of the individual and the creation of opportunities for every person to express his or her talents to the full can only find ultimate expression in a society which dedicates itself to people rather than profit. Mankind’s resources will never be used for the good of humanity until they are in common ownership and under democratic control.

Let us describe workers, self-management and what possibly its main mechanisms and institutions could function. Let us assume for the sake of simplicity a global workers’ councils would determine the needs and how it should be divided starting from possibilities previously debated by all in the process of electing delegates for that congress. The choices and the main foreseeable consequences of each option –would be clearly spelt out: average workload (length of the working week); priority needs to be satisfied for all through guaranteed allocation of resources (‘free’ distribution); volume of resources devoted to future ‘growth’ (reserve stocks) The global framework of the economic plan would thereby be established on the basis of conscious choices by a majority of those affected by it. Starting from these choices, a coherent general plan would then be drawn up, utilising input-output tables and material balances, indicating the resources available for each separate branch of production (industrial sectors, transportation, agriculture and distribution) and social life (education, health, communications, etc). The congress would not go beyond these general instructions and would not lay out specifications for each branch or production unit or region. Self-managing bodies – for example, congresses of workers’ councils in the shoe, food, electronic equipment, steel or energy industries – would then divide up the work-load flowing from the general plan among the existing producer units and/or project the creation of additional producing units for the next period, if the implementation of output goals made that necessary under the given work-load. They would work out the technological average (gradually leading up to the technical optimum on the basis of existing knowledge) – that is, the average productivity of labour, or average ‘production costs’ – of the goods to be produced, but without suppressing the least productive units as long as total output elsewhere does not cover total needs, and as long as new jobs for the producers concerned are not guaranteed in conditions considered satisfactory by them.

In production units making equipment, the technical coefficients flowing from the previous steps would largely determine the product mix. In factories manufacturing consumer goods, the product mix would flow from a previous consultation between the workers’ councils and consumers’ conferences democratically elected by the mass of the citizens. Various models – for example, different fashions in shoes – would be submitted to them, which the consumers could test and criticise and replace by others. Showrooms and publicity sheets would be the main instruments of that testing. The latter could play the role of a ‘referendum’ – consumer research, having the right to receive six pairs of footwear a year, would cross six samples in a sheet containing a hundred or two hundred options. The model mix would then be determined by the outcome of such a referendum, with post-production corrective mechanisms reflecting subsequent consumer criticisms. Compared with the market mechanism, the great advantage of such a system would be the far greater consumer influence on the product mix and the suppression of over-production – the balancing out of consumer preference and actual production essentially occurring before production and not after sales, with a buffer stock of social reserves additionally produced – empirically (statistically) optimized after a few years. Factory workers’ councils would then be free to translate these branch decisions at the level of the producing unit as they liked – organising the production and labour process to realise all the economy of labour-times they could achieve. If they could reach the output target by working twenty instead of thirty hours a week after submitting their goods to a quality test, they would enjoy a reduction in work-load without any reduction of social consumption. It should be stressed at the outset that democratic self-management does not mean that everybody decides about everything. If one was to assume that, the conclusion would be obvious: socialism is not possible. Four billion human beings could not find the life-span to settle even the tiniest fraction of each other’s affairs, in that sense. But it is not necessary. Certain decisions can be best taken at work-shop level, others at the factory level, others again at neighbourhood, local, regional, national, continental and finally at world level. Decisions could – and should – be taken on a world scale.  Three spheres immediately present themselves. The first would be all those decisions necessitating a global redistribution of human and material resources to ensure the rapid disappearance of the social and cultural ills of underdevelopment – hunger, infant mortality, disease and illiteracy in the developing world. The second would cover priority allocation of genuinely scarce natural resources – those which could be depleted absolutely, and of which no minority of the human race has the right to dispossess the next generations; only the living population of the world in its totality has the right to decide here. The third would include everything affecting the natural environment and climate of the planet as a whole; all those processes which can pollute or disrupt oceans, poles or atmosphere, or destroy such world-wide bases of ecological balance as the Amazon Forest.

From these global determinations would flow constraints on regional or local resources available for planning and need-satisfaction, which would themselves be decided in each region or district. Thus, for example, once the total tonnage of steel that could be used in North America, Europe or Asia was set, the producers and consumers of these areas would be free to allocate it as they decided. If in spite of every environmental argument, they wanted to maintain the dominance of the private motor car and to continue polluting their cities, that would be their right. Changes in long-standing consumer orientations are generally slow – there can be few who believe that workers in the United States would abandon their attachment to the automobile the day after a socialist revolution. The notion of forcing people to change their consumption habits is far worse than that of another few decades of smog in Los Angeles. The emancipation of the working class – today, contrary to every received notion, for the first time in history the absolute majority of the earth’s population – can only be achieved by the workers themselves, as they are: not people out of another world, but human beings with their weaknesses like all of us.

Such an allocation of resources, of democratic planning and self-management, would be much more efficient than either a capitalist market economy or a state- capitalist command economy. For it would have a powerful built-in self-correcting mechanism, which both of the existing alternatives lack. We do not believe that the ‘majority is always right’, any more than we believe that the Pope is infallible. Everybody does make mistakes. This will certainly also be true of the majority of the citizens, of the majority of the producers, and of the majority of the consumers alike. But there will be one basic difference between them and their predecessors. In any system of unequal power – be it economic inequality, political monopoly or a combination of the two – those who make the wrong decisions about the allocation of resources are rarely those who pay the price for the consequences of their mistakes, and never those who pay the heaviest price. We witnessed that with the Great Recession of 2007 when the CEOs of the corporations were reduced to the unemployment lines. It was the workers who they laid off, and their communities, which suffered although they are completely innocent of the cause of the financial crisis. Likewise, members of Congress did not pay the price for their error in repealing banking regulations.

Provided there exist real democracy, real choice and information, it is hard to believe that the majority of people  would then prefer to see their forests die, their housing stock dwindling, or their hospitals understaffed, rather than rapidly to correct their mistaken allocation. Nor will there be uniformity. People will receive the equipment and tools to produce whatever they wanted for their own satisfaction or that of their families, friends or neighbours, in their leisure-time to put their imagination to work. The scope for practical do-it-yourself initiatives will be enormously enlarged.

Shall we remain chained to “market laws” or do we seize the potential to shape its own destiny. Do we break our shackles or do we allow self-emancipation for all to be forever an unfulfilled dream?