Unite for World Socialism

The idea of world socialism is that it is a global society without frontiers, passports and separate nation-states. Already, under capitalism, people are beginning to think in world terms. More and more people are coming to appreciate world music and many millions follow world sporting events. There is a growing awareness that all humans are part of one world, that we share a common planet.  Millions of people throughout the world are concerned about world poverty and world hunger and problems such as global warming. This is a reflection that we live in an interdependent world, albeit a capitalist one at the moment. It is this interdependence which has long meant that there are no national solutions to today's universal social problems. Capitalism is a global problem, to which the answer is global socialism.

Socialists devised the slogan "One World – One People" as a concise description of the society we are striving for. Socialism means that the whole world will operate as a single productive system where goods and services will be produced so that people can use them freely without resorting to buying and selling. It also means that the people of the world will be united on the only solid basis for achieving this end—by the resources of the world and the means of producing wealth being owned in common and democratically controlled by mankind as a whole. "One World – One People", then, represents an entirely different vision of the future to such schemes as the "United Nations" or "Internationalism" which, as their names imply, attempt to improvise a patchwork from the fragments which capitalism makes of the world.

To solve the many problems confronting humanity what is needed is a change in the basis of world society from existing class ownership to a world in which the Earth's resources have become the common heritage of all. Think globally, act locally, say some environmentalists. Anyone who follows the news cannot help but think globally. World hunger and disease, financial crises and world poverty, climate change and global warming, war and the threats of war—all these are global problems. Clearly, all these problems can only be solved by global action. We are up against a global system which can only be effectively and lastingly dealt with at that level.

We should perhaps add that we are not so naive as to imagine that the changeover from world capitalism to world socialism will occur in a matter of a few weeks. The transition can be envisaged as taking place over a relatively short period of time of, say, five years (at a wild guess for we don't know) so the situation might well occur of socialists having won control in some parts of the world but not everywhere. Naturally, they will manage as best they can in the circumstances, no doubt ending class ownership and bringing in democratic control of all aspects of social life including production. Their other main priority would be to do what they could to accelerate the winning of power by socialist majorities in the rest of the world. But this is not the same as the situation you seem to be envisaging of the people of one country deliberately aiming to establish socialism in just that country while the rest of the world remains solidly capitalist. In our view, this is neither desirable nor at all likely to happen.


When we talk about self-reliant communities we don't mean this literally in the sense that each community should actually have to provide for all its needs from its own resources for this would mean having to go back, not to the iron age or the bronze age, but to the stone age since they wouldn't even have any access to metals or metal ores. What WE envisage is self-administering communities which would try to meet as many of their everyday needs as practicable from local sources and that local communities should be the basic unit of democratic self-administration but, when it comes to production, it is as well to be aware to what extent local communities are interconnected and interdependent and that this places severe limits on what needs could be met locally. The fact is that people in small communities aren't able to produce all they need, or anything like it. The final stage of the production of a range of goods for everyday use could be done locally--food, clothes, shoes, furniture--as well as repairs but neither (most of) the raw materials nor (in most cases) any of the metals to make the tools and machines used in this final stage could be produced locally.


Many environmentalists don't like the idea of mass production but most people would consider access to such items as a cooker, a fridge and a TV as essential, but these can't be assembled individually on an artisanal basis. To meet needs, they would have to be produced en masse. This doesn't mean that they need be produced under the conditions that exist today in factories under capitalism. Far from it. Factories in a socialist society can and will be structured and run quite differently: slower pace of work, shorter hours, more automation, non-polluting technology, democratic participation in decision-making, (even located amidst lakes and gardens). Nor would they be making goods to deliver across to the other side of the planet (except, perhaps, for some factories producing very specialised equipment as for hospitals or scientific research). They would be making goods to supply all the local communities in a given area. Although energy could be supplied locally, the machinery and equipment to do this (pipes, pumps, tanks, generators, transformers, cables, wires, etc) couldn't. Even environment-friendly technology such as solar power involves highly sophisticated equipment that will be beyond the capabilities of local communities to produce on their own. So, local communities cannot be independent or self-reliant as far as meeting their material needs goes; they are interdependent. It is not a question of communities trading passing on their "surpluses" to one another (most, if left to themselves, wouldn't have any surplus) but it is a question of them being interlinked in a single network of production which in the end embraces the whole world.


This does not mean that everything has to be controlled from a single world centre. Only a few functions would have to be dealt with at world level such as, for instance, communications satellites. Most could be carried out (as in practice at present) at a level that can be called regional (in world terms). It is at this level that production of intermediate goods and machines and equipment can be envisaged as being produced, for distribution for use either in other factories or by local communities. Local communities can only be the basis for consumption and for democratic decision-making but not for production. Of course the actual degree of centralisation and decentralisation will be up to the people around at the time to decide in the light of their traditions, experiences and preferences. One thing, however, is clear: even the ultra-decentralised structure can only be achieved in a world where resources no longer belonged to private individuals, corporations and states and where production was no longer carried on for sale on a market with a view to profit. In other words, in a socialist world.