Our Socialist Vision

One of the snags of presenting a vision of socialism as a solution to our numerous crises is that it's hard to know where to begin. The gap between where we are now with capitalism and where we'd like to be with socialism appears enormous and therefore we wonder how it might be accomplished. Charles Eisenstein once said “There is a vast territory between what we’re trying to leave behind, and where we want to go – and we don’t have any maps for that territory”.

Capitalists do not direct their capital, but in fact are themselves directed by and enslaved by capital, as Marx pointed out. Capital spontaneously flows wherever the most profit can be made. There is no society-wide overall planning under capitalism, nor can a capitalist economy as a whole be a planned economy. The interests of the capitalists are individual interests. Capitalists all fight for their own immediate interests, the interests of a particular company or sector. By their very nature, that is their sole consideration. They come into antagonistic conflict with other capitalists, other sectors and other industries. So long as the prevailing ideology supports it and the State apparatus is in the hands of the owners and so long its system maintains a reasonable hold, then the owning class are in control. Their system of exploitation is safe. Socialism challenges the whole prevailing ideology and socialist aim to capture of the State machine. The very experience of workers of their exploitation educates them. They ultimately require and acquire socialist ideas.

Socialism is the free association of completely free men and women, where no separation between private and common interest exist. The predictions of socialists with regard to future society cannot be exact because the great complexity of social phenomena does not permit, in our present time, of their being completely observed in all details, but only in their main features, and for that reason the picture of the new system also can only be drawn in its main outlines; but these are the most important considerations for the people of the present day. Socialism, however, can’t be built on the ruins of the existing society by a revolt of starving beggars in rags.

A British worker, employed in a nationalised industry is a ‘wage-earner’ in the Marxian sense of the word, and still ‘exploited’, he is only a wage-slave. Yet extraordinary enough in the former Soviet Union his opposite number earns less, works longer hours, has much less variety of goods on which to spend his money, has trade unions which exist only to squeeze more and more work out of him, is tied to his particular factory, and had the prospect of being sent to a forced labour camp if he protests against his lot; yet here presented the most advanced, emancipated and free worker in the world. Somehow when the amount of unpaid labour which is ‘surplus value’ goes to the British state, the same amount of unpaid labour is not ‘surplus value’ when the Russian state is on the receiving end. Who was kidding who? As Engels pointed out in his Anti-Duhring “State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution...neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital... The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme.” The state is the owner of the conditions of production (‘the general capitalist’) and the direct producers are wage-earners, that therefore the relations between them are still the relations between capital and labour, between employer and employee. All the characteristics of the capitalistic system of exploitation are to be found in the Russian system of relationship between the state, owner of the means of production, and the direct producer, the worker. The state pays the labour it employs with wages, and ‘wages... by their very nature always imply the performance of a certain quantity of unpaid labour on the part of the labourer’ (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25/1), that is ‘surplus value’.

The Leninist platform contained nothing that was incompatible with capitalism. It allowed exploitation itself and class opposition to remain in place, and suppressed political rights, enslaved its workers to the yoke of militarism and the senseless waste of its labour power.

This is a general picture of the social process of change to socialism. While capitalism exists, it is suffice for socialism to establish the possibility of the emancipation of the working-class and to work towards that emancipation. There is no necessity to work out and settle every detail of the organization of the future socialist society. Let us not have the presumption to lay down rules for those who are to come after us, and let us be content with our present task. The whole goal of the Socialist Party consists in educating their fellow-workers, in explaining to assist them become conscious of their condition, their task and their responsibility, of organising them in readiness for the day when the political power shall fall into their hands. To win for socialism the greatest possible number of supporters, that is the task to which the Socialist Party must dedicate their efforts and energies. The Socialist Party is the only party which pursues these aims in a practical fashion. What is the use of talking of anything but socialism. We must talk of revolution and our aim should be to overthrow the capitalist system, not to modify it.

Our solution appears 'utopian' and not practical and so the aspiration is abandoned in favour of short-term remedies that prove to be no cure.  Socialism is a society without money, barter or trade, with the awareness that Humanity is One family and where technology, science and spirituality is used to its fullest to develop and manage the planet’s resources to provide abundance for everyone in the most sustainable way. That is a big leap to make because this idea of an abundant, peaceful, sustainable and cooperative world may well seem impossible yet it isn't. It is a feasible future.