Answering our critics

A conservative think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs gave the Socialist Party a mention.

https://iea.org.uk/has-real-socialism-never-been-tried/

“Every socialist experiment has, at some point, been waxed lyrical about by Western intellectuals, including Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao’s China. It was only when their horrors could no longer be denied even with the best will in the world that the blue tick was withdrawn retroactively.
And yet, there are exceptions to this, such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). They are not, and as far as I know, never were, apologists of Soviet-style socialism, which they describe as ‘state capitalism’. They are among the few socialists who have at least some idea of what they mean by ‘real’ socialism. They use that term to describe a hypothetical system in which working-class people own and control the economy’s productive resources directly, not via the state; a system in which public ownership is not mediated through a government bureaucracy. I have no idea how this should work in practice, but I suppose we could imagine some combination of public ownership with Swiss-style multi-level direct democracy.”

Socialism obviously isn't going to be an endless series of referenda about how many tins of baked beans we produce.

The long shadow cast by the centrally planned model of socialism has done incomparable damage to the socialist  cause and - lets face it - this is what lies behind this grotesque caricature of the "economic planning process" in socialism - that all decisions affecting the production of goods will be made democratically by the population as a whole on a society-wide basis and hence in a centrally planned manner

This has become a stick with which to beat the socialist cause - to demonstrate its alleged impracticality - and the Leninists and their ilk have conspired to give credibility to this ridiculous accusation with their loose talk of a "planned economy".  As if the totality of production can ever be planned  in advance. there is much mileage to be made for socialists to emphasise instead that real socialism must of necessity be a self regulating system of production in the same sense that a capitalist market economy is self regulating - except of course that a socialist system will be completely devoid of any kind of market transaction. 

Sure, there will be a role for democratic decision-making within the vision of socialism and no doubt it will be much enlarged by comparison with today but we should not make the mistake of confusing the part with the whole

 Socialism as understood by the Socialist Party is namely, a non-market, non-statist system of society based on the common ownership of the means of wealth production in which goods are freely distributed and labour is performed on a purely voluntary, self-determined basis. Socialism would necessarily be a decentralised system of production in which the great bulk of decisions would be effectively communicated via a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind. In fact, this kind of production model already to an extent exists today under our very noses. A supermarket for example makes use of two systems of accounting – calculation in kind and monetary based accounting. In socialism we will completely dispense with the latter but continue to use the former. Democratic decision-making will of course play a role in socialism and a much enlarged one by comparison with what is the case today