Free Access Socialism

The Socialist Party often describes socialism as a world of free access, but what does this mean? It does not mean a system based upon a free-for-all, free-to-grab-all society without rules. But there will be no private property other than personal possessions, no buying and sell hence no prices and no money. No artificial barriers to people having what they’ve decided they want. It doesn’t matter whether they’ll be called shops, stores or warehouses, but there will be places where people will go to collect necessities and luxuries. There will be choice, and probably more real choice than exists today when you can ‘pick’ from near-identical products. Everything provided will be better quality, as production for use means there would be no point in producing shoddy or disposable goods, practices which will be completely alien in socialism. A sensible use of resources would involve making things to last and as repairable and recyclable as possible. The reason why things are made to wear out is not because of the attitudes of the people involved. The management may think it’s criminal but they are paid to optimise profits. If they produced razor blades to last for decades, the firm would go broke. It is not the attitudes which are crucial, but economic interests. The rule will be “fit for purpose”

We are not advocating the abolition of money alone which would solve no problems and undoubtedly create many difficulties. But what we do propose is, that the whole system of money and exchange, buying and selling, profit-making and wage-earning be entirely abolished and that instead the community as a whole should organise and administer the productions of goods for use only, and that there will be the free distribution of these goods to all members of the community according to each person’s needs. Wealth will not be measured in terms of money since no person could say that he or she owned a share of such-and-such value in the people’s means of production. In fact, all the world’s means of production such as land, factories, mines, machines, etc, would belong to the whole of the people of the world who would co-operate in using them. Those things which mankind needs as the means of life will belong to the whole people .The world must be regarded as one country and humanity as one people where all the people will co-operate to produce and distribute all the goods and services which are needed by mankind, each person willingly and freely, taking part in the way he or she feels they can do best. All goods and services will be produced for use only, and having been produced, will be distributed, free to the people so that each person’s needs are fully satisfied.

A very common objection to socialist free access is based on a view of human nature which asserts that people would selfishly take and take without giving. The Socialist Party considers such a pessimistic perspective as one which suggests that if given the right economic framework, then, in fact, humans cannot consciously co-operate, work and consume together. Such an outlook lacks confidence that either there are sufficient resources on the planet to provide for all, or that human beings can work voluntarily, and co-operate to organise production and distribution of wealth without chaos, and consume wealth responsibly without some form of rationing. It remains fixated to the lazy person, greedy individual critique of human nature. The Socialist Party, however, will continue to struggle to create a structured society where people have accepted socially mutual obligations and recognise the realisation of universal interdependency. We understand that decisions arising from this would profoundly affect people’s choices and attitudes, and greatly influence their behaviour, economically or otherwise. Human behaviour reflects society. Humans behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in.

Critics of free access project on to socialism the insatiable consumerism of capitalism, paying no heed to the changes in social outlook that would occur when people's needs are met and people feel secure, when the world is no longer based upon dog-eat-dog that in distrust, where the ostentatious accumulation of material goods cannot validate an individual's personal worth or their status since access is unrestricted. Goods and services made freely available for individuals to take without requiring these individuals to offer something in direct exchange creates a sense of mutual obligations and the realisation of universal interdependency arising from this would change people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour in such a society. And let us not forget that the establishment of socialism through the struggles of a mass socialist movement it is reasonable to suppose that the desire for socialism on such a large scale, and the pre-requisite conscious understanding of what it entails and involves, will influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other. So why would most people want to undermine the new society they had just helped to create?

And what of our socialist revolution? The Socialist Party does not believe in achieving socialism through coercion or through violent seizure of power by a revolutionary vanguard. That's no basis upon which to build a fair and democratic society. No, the only way that socialism, as we understand it, could be set up and run is through the consent and cooperation of an overwhelming majority of the world's population. And the only way we will know once there is such a majority is when it says so via the ballot. It is then, and only then, that we will know that the time is ripe for socialist revolution. It is then that we can start dismantling the coercive machinery of government and start taking control of the things we need to make society function in our own interests. That the socialist revolution can only be international, creating a world-wide society where production is carried out solely to meet the needs and desires of its inhabitants.

Having got rid of the worst relics of the old order, production would then be adjusted so that enough is turned out to satisfy fully the needs of everyone making due provision by storing of buffer stocks for the contingencies of natural calamities such as local droughts or earthquakes. A new social system such as we envisage socialism to be, requires that the great mass of people having already learnt what responsibilities and obligations have to be met and understand the means of the necessary action to bring it about. But it also incumbent upon us all to carry on with our usual duties for the time being , except all those whose tasks being of an unnecessary nature to the new system are rendered idle: for example, cashiers, ticket collectors and so on. These people would, in due course, be slotted into more socially productive occupations for which they considered themselves suitable.

Having produced all that is required, all that is necessary is to distribute it to the people so that each person’s needs are fully satisfied. In the case of perishable goods it would merely be a matter of transport from factory or farm direct to the local distributing centres, and in the case of other goods to large regional or city stores or warehouses. From there it is but a step to the local distributing stores which would stock the whole range of necessary goods - a kind of show-room or warehouse - and from which goods could be delivered to the homes of people or collected by them if so preferred. After all, the daily, weekly, and monthly needs of any given number of people in a district are easily worked out, so it should not be very difficult to find out what stocks the local stores would require. Goods will be “distributed” not “exchanged” , neither “exported” nor “imported”; just as if the whole world’s goods were pooled and then each region drew what is required.

Simply put, in a free access society, there would be no barter economy or monetary system. It would be an economy based on need. Therefore, a consumer would have a need, and there would be a communication system set in place that relays that need to the producer. The producer create the product, and then send the product back to the consumer, and the need would be satisfied. We use the supply chain tools and logistic systems that capitalism bequeaths us, which will be suitably modified and adapted and transformed for the new conditions. Decisions will be made at different levels of organisation: global, regional and local but with the bulk of decision-making being made at the local level. A free access economy would be a polycentric not a centrally planned economy. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilised at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods. This has been called by some economists a “steady-state economy.”

Replacing the exchange economy by common ownership and free access basically means that wealth would cease to take the form of exchange value, so that all the expressions of this social relationship peculiar to an exchange economy, such as money and prices, would automatically disappear. In other words, goods would cease to have an economic value and would become simply physical objects which human beings could use to satisfy some want or other. The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of economic calculation in the sense of calculation in units of value whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour-time. Free access socialism is a moneyless society in which use values would be produced from other use values, there would be no need to have a universal unit of account but could calculate exclusively in kind. On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products. This, of course, is done under capitalism but it is doubled by an exchange value calculation: the exchange value of the resources used up is recorded as the cost of production while the exchange value of the output (after it has been realised on the market) is recorded as sales receipts. If the latter is greater than the former, then a profit has been made; if it is less, then a loss is recorded. Such profit-and-loss accounting has no place in socialism and would, once again, be quite meaningless.

Calculation-in-kind entails the counting or measurement of physical quantities of different kinds of factors of production. There is no general unit of accounting involved in this process such as money or labour hours or energy units. In fact, every conceivable kind of economic system has to rely on calculation in kind, including capitalism. Without it, the physical organisation of production (e.g. maintaining inventories) would be literally impossible. But where capitalism relies on monetary accounting as well as calculation-in-kind, socialism relies solely on the latter. This is one reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over capitalism by eliminating the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting.

The message of the Socialist Party is for all members of the class which owns little more than its ability to work and is therefore forced to sell its labour power to an employer in order to live. Revolution is a mysterious term. Most of us understand it in relation to the capitalist revolutions of the past: barricades, bayonets and blood, rousing slogans and heroic leaders leading to a new regime, one that is not really much different from the old one. However, that is not what socialists mean by revolution. When we talk of revolution we mean a conscious change in social relationships from those based upon private or state ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution to common ownership and democratic control of the world around us. The socialist revolution will mean the instant abolition of class divisions, the wages system, private property, and the need for money. It is a big aim, but it presents the only alternative to the present world system of capitalism.

The Socialist Party states as a matter of principle that the establishment of the new social order can only be possible when a majority of the world’s workers consciously understand and want it. Once majority consciousness arises, nothing can stop the conquest of power by the working class. The tensions and contradictions of working class life under capitalism tend to lead more and more workers to question the status quo. This critical thought is essential, for once you start to formulate questions, you are half way to knowing the answers. But capitalism has an immense capacity for accommodating working class discontent and dissent and it is often able to convert challenging resistance into sterile rebelliousness. Socialist consciousness cannot be accommodated within capitalism: not until we have a system of society run in the human interest will socialists be content. Socialism will open up the new possibility: the right to be different, to assert individuality, to be eccentric and to be visionaries.

The Socialist Party will continue to do everything in our power to persuade the world’s working class that their interest is not served, and can never be served by support for a system that treats them as inferior, dispensable beings and puts a permanent barrier between themselves and the fruits of their labour. It can only be brought about when members of that vast majority of the population in the economically advanced countries of the world, the working class, decide they want to bring it about and then take conscious political action to do so. And by “conscious political action” we mean going to the ballot box and voting for candidates with a revolutionary mandate to dissolve capitalism and establish socialism. This democratically established society will itself be fully democratic and in it the means of life will be produced in abundance and used freely by everyone.