Socialism or The Market

In an article in The Guardian on April 29th entitled " Making poverty history didn’t happen. We should have been tackling the rich" by Selina Todd ,she asserts that, "We must change the terms of the debate about poverty – and that means looking at the behaviour not of the destitute, but of the super-wealthy ",she continues to make a reasonable point that, "But those of us who want to turn austerity Britain into a fair and democratic society might want to stop talking about the poor so much. Rather than wringing our hands, we could acknowledge that destitution and poverty are just extreme manifestations of the economic inequality that is, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson point out, bad for at least for 99% of us. The Rowntree research points out that the destitute, like the poor, are a fluid group who have more in common with the rest of us than we often acknowledge. Most people live in poverty or destitution for limited periods of time, with millions of us vulnerable to experiencing poverty at some point in our lives. If we are to make poverty history, then we need to change the terms of a debate that has gone on for more than a century, and ask not what makes particular people poor – thanks to researchers, we know the answer – but how to wrestle wealth and power away from the 1% who have tenaciously clung on to it".

 But as for solutions she offers none save more hand wringing.

My own contribution to  the discussion that,"She should have been tackling the naive belief that capitalism could be reformed in a way in which poverty could be eliminated. Poverty, absolute and relative are essential conditions of capitalism. It requires a working class which is relatively poorer than the owning class to induce it into waged slavery in order to create all of the worlds wealth for the owning parasite capitalist class. Poverty and war are essential concomitants of capitalism and will remain so, until it is replaced by a post-capitalist, production for use, moneyless, free access society, run by us all in conditions of real social and economic equality", elicited the following response from another contributer,"What level of oppression would you need to stop people trying to get a little more for themselves in your "post-capitalist, production for use, moneyless, free access society"?"
To which I replied,"It would not need any level of oppression to prevent such silly behaviour, as access would be free and self determined in conditions of relative superabundance, once we had production for use. Coercion is only required when goods are rationed via the wages and prices system and production is for the profit of an economic elite minority parasite class."

Which prompted a further defence of market system ,
"Err, who decides what is "production for use"? Actually, we already have a mechanism to decide that, it's called the free market and it's proved much more effective than any law making at matching producers and customers.Rationing by price also works well. The experience of providing stuff as a right is not a happy one. It's a recipe for waste and abuse".

My rebuttal,.."The Market does not satisfy human needs. The market is not the answer. There is only one way to escape for workers from the detrimental effects of capitalism and that is for the economy to be run by the immediate producers themselves. Once in control of the process of production they would have no interest in wasting effort on producing goods that no one wants, on turning out goods of low quality, or resisting innovations that would make their work easier.

The price mechanism does not let firms know what to produce in advance any more than the free associated producers are able to foresee all needs and all links in the production process. But they would be quite capable of working out what their main needs are likely to be, if only because they can calculate what is needed in the same way that capitalism does – by seeing what was needed in the past – and then adjust it according to their own democratically expressed preference. Supply can be made to correspond to demand.
Socialism is a system of planning and management in which the workers allocate resources and democratically determine priorities themselves. Such a system demands that the people themselves articulate their needs as producers, consumers and citizens, in other words, that they become the masters of their conditions of work and life, that they progressively liberate themselves from despotism and diktat of the market and its tyranny of the wallet.
Socialism will be a delegatory democracy of various diverse workers and community councils. The rule of bureaucracy or technocracy is irreconcilable with the conscious control and direction, through planned democratic association of self-managing producers.

Well if you have read this far ,what do you think?

Matt