It requires a lot less mental effort to condemn than to think. The emancipation of the workers is an act of the workers themselves. The liberation of the working class is the task of the working class itself; it is a task to be carried out in opposition to “condescending saviors.” If people wait for a revolutionary vanguard to lead them to the classless society or the free society, they will neither be free nor classless. There is enough evidence in support of the foregoing statement. Workers that they should only expect their total emancipation and any improvements in their lot from themselves, from their own efforts and initiative, and not from the miraculous intervention of a third party, their elected representative, whoever he might be, whatever party he might belong to, and whatever principles he might hold.
Reformism regards socialism as a remote goal and nothing more and, actually, repudiates the socialist revolution. Reformism advocates not class struggle, but class collaboration. Reformism is not a moderate or too slow form of socialism, but its mortal enemy. We, socialists, refuse to join the reformists into the camp of capitalism. Reformism is trickery used to keep the working class under wage slavery. Reformists maintain that we can arrive at a certain “socialism” by winning reforms one after the other. What they don’t say is that whatever the employing class has to give up with one hand, is just taken back with the other. The myriad evils of capitalism will disappear only with the destruction of capitalism and the building of socialism. That capitalism will waste and misuse resources is not seriously in dispute.
The capitalist system is the major obstacle impeding the creation of a more equitable society. In the place of all coercive institutions, the anarchist communists seek to establish a system of collaboration between individuals and associations, and instead of accumulation and hoarding of wealth by a minority, they want the workers to be the possessors of the means of production as well as to see a division of the fruits of labor according to individual need. We are fully aware that in order to achieve this aim, we need to re-shape the structure and the goals of production by redefining them as means to ensure the well-being of all mankind, so that all members of a society could have the opportunity to pursue higher intellectual endeavours, and in that way put an end to the unjust acquisition of wealth by a minority at the expense of the labourers. Socialists claim that the innate demand for equity and freedom can only be satisfied through active participation in the production of goods and in the making of decisions which affect the whole society. Democratically-elected councils of workers in every industry and district will manage the factories and public services. Freed from the fetters of production for profit, the splendidly-equipped factories will pour out their products without interruption: the productive forces will leap forward to provide almost undreamed-of plenty. No longer will wheat be ploughed under and foodstuffs dumped to keep up prices!
Socialists argue that cooperation rather than competition is the driving force behind a flourishing society. Mutual aid and social solidarity, rather than unbridled individualism, is what helped our ancestors survive. The Aleoute people of Alaska enjoyed a long established tradition of equally dividing everything they gathered and hunted. If one member showed greediness when the division of resources took place, the other members handed their portion to the greedy man to embarrass him. For Hottentots of South Africa, it was outrageous and disgraceful to eat without having loudly shouted (three times) to see whether there was a fellow tribesman in need of food. These are only a few out of many examples of cooperation that Kropotkin writes about.
The Socialist Party does not campaign on its ability to solve problems like poverty, unemployment, crime etc but, uniquely, calls on the working class to organise for the democratic overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism where every human being on Earth would have the opportunity to co-operate in the production and distribution of wealth and, again, every human being would have free and equal access to the means to satisfy their needs whether or not they had co-operated in production. Obviously, if enough people declined to partake in the productive processes it would be impossible for everyone to avail themselves of the things they need. That is why socialism can only be built upon the conscious democratic decision of a majority of socialists and why the fullest democratic control would have to prevail in a socialist society.
All those people engaged in the wasteful functions that now exist in the world of capitalism, such as buying and selling, banking, insurance, armed forces, advertising, and marketing, together with the unemployed would be available to help in the task of producing and distributing. Problems such as slums and homelessness could be quickly corrected. Whereas today the purpose of food production is the maximisation of profits without regard to the damage caused to the land and the prospects for future generations, in socialism the primary consideration will be producing enough food for all in a manner consistent with the preservation of the land. Today, it is a relatively small number of human beings who perform the work of providing essential goods and services; the rest of the working class, as we have noted, are engaged in functions that are meaningless outside the wasteful world of capitalism. It follows that, in socialism, the task of producing all the goods and services required by humanity can be accomplished with comparatively little effort. That which we now call employment—workers working for wages—will have ended with the abolition of capitalism so, effectively, there can be no unemployment. Obviously, in a wage-free, money-free world where people are able to avail themselves of their needs and are not required to work long hours for protracted periods of their lives, there will be much time for leisure. Speculating on how human beings might use that leisure, in a frontier-free world where transport and accommodation, like everything else, is free, might well be a further question worth discussing.
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