The Socialist Case

 

 

Many on the Left continue to see the immediate struggle for civil and human rights and against fascism and racism as having top priority. Other activists continue to argue that we have to lead with an all-consuming effort to eliminate fossil fuels and environmental destruction. The threat was, is and always has been capitalism. A well-functioning capitalist economy depends on maintaining large, competing pools of vulnerable docile and compliant labour force and on the continuously increasing exploitation of energy and natural resources. It has been obvious for decades that we can have either capitalism or a liveable planet but not both. We know that we can have either capitalism or economic democracy but not both. For most of us, there’s no dilemma there; only for capitalists themselves does the need to preserve capitalism warrant ruining the Earth for human habitation or having the majority of our fellow human beings live in misery. But in coming years we will have to face this question - are we prepared to make changes to the way the world is run. If folk continue to elect supporters of capitalism, the consequences will be terrible. Within a couple of decades, millions of people around the world will have lost their homes to flooding, and others will be going hungry because of crop failures. Socialism will ensure that you have access to sufficient food, basic goods, in a cleaner, healthier world.

Where do you go from here as regards politics. The Socialist Party's answer is unequivocal: the full programme of socialism. A money-free, state-free, and classfree society based upon the production of use-values rather than exchange-value, and from each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her needs. And moreover this programme is to be carried out at a planetary level.  Our first task is to seek a better understanding of the world,  in order to change it. The world we live in is a world of contradictions. The environment is in a state of decline, yet industry continues to pump pollutants into the atmosphere whilst non-polluting technologies are neglected. Thousands starve, while food stocks remain unused. We can communicate with strangers from all around the globe, yet no-one knows their neighbour. Automation could free us from labour, yet we are chained to the machine. We live amongst vast material possibilities, yet poverty is the universal experience - not just in the narrow economic sense but also in terms of the quality of lived experience.    Never in history has there been such a glaring contrast between what could be and what actually exists.

Central to all these contradictions and reshaping all previous antagonisms is the global commodity-capitalist system. A system characterised by the production of  commodities,  wage labour  and the  market economy. A commodity is what is produced by the worker under capitalist conditions, its purpose to reproduce and enlarge capital (stored-up labour). The pursuit of ever increasing profits is the driving force behind the whole process – the fulfilment of peoples needs is a secondary and not always occurring result.

Commodities are only available in exchange for other commodities, money being the universal commodity and measure of all others. Since all goods have been turned into commodities and access to non-commodified materials restricted , those without the means of producing anything to exchange must sell the only thing they have, their physical or mental labour-power. The logic of the market economy treats this labour like any other commodity; to be bought, sold and discarded as the market dictates. In effect the worker becomes a commodity. This transformation of living activity into an object creates an  alienated  or estranged world in which humankind does not recognize or fulfil itself, but is overpowered by the dead things and social relations of its own making.

Capitalist society is therefore split into two camps, the bourgeois or capitalist class (those who own and control the means of production – the land, equipment, machinery, buildings and raw materials necessary to create the things we need and use every day) and the proletariat (those with “nothing to lose but their chains”). However, both classes are subject to the laws of the market economy - our concern is with the social relation  capital  not the individual  capitalist  - the functionaries of capitalism are more and more disposable as individuals. While the rag wearing classical proletariat of Marx’s time has all but disappeared, at least in the developed countries, the fundamental division remains; power and wealth are becoming more rather than less concentrated under the control of a small minority. The modern proletariat is  almost  everyone; it is the working class which must destroy both alienated work and class.

The “official” history of the working class’s struggle against capitalism is an inversion, what is presented as its greatest triumphs are in reality its most bitter defeats; Leninist “Communism” in the east and reformist “Socialism” in the west where both expressions of a general movement towards  state-capitalism.  The greatest tragedy of these times is that in the minds of the vast majority of workers the project for the dissolution of the commodity economy became associated with its exact opposite.

Though the call for a new society was never thoroughly extinguished; small and often profoundly isolated groups and individuals argued the case for a social reorganisation to bring free access and control of the means of production into the hands of the whole of humanity. “From each according to ability, to each according too need!”

The creation of such a society has two preconditions; firstly that technological production techniques have been sufficiently developed to be able to fulfill the material needs of the whole of society and secondly, that the majority of the population have an understanding of what needs to be done and want to carry it through. Revolutionaries are painfully aware that the first requirement has long since been reached but that the second is still far from being realised.

If we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past it will be necessary to develop a theory of revolutionary practice, a theory which seeks to “get to the root of all things” and improve them. It is not a matter of choosing from one of the pre-existing ideologies of the old workers movement and basing our world view around it, but a matter of finding the “moment of truth” in all the theories of the past and synthesising this with our experience of the present.