Our Revolution

At times we have an inability to see what is in front of our own eyes. Imagine a world run along truly democratic lines. There would be no politicians. People can show incredible acts of kindness to and sacrifice for others, even strangers. Some will even give up their own lives for strangers.  Human life is a product of the evolution of life on earth. Human life is not independent and separate from the planet but a part of it. The relationship of human species with nature and all life forms is that of interdependence. We must not embrace the despair of a bleak future that capitalism is creating. We must acknowledge acts of resistance, even if it appears futile, as small victories. Our character and dignity will be measured by our ability to resist the malignant forces that seem to hold us in a death grip. Our technology and science will not save us. The future of humanity is now in our own hands. At best, we can mitigate the misery. We cannot avoid it. We are fighting for our survival and we must build militant social movements of sustained rebellion. It is a lot to demand. But if we do not succeed, the human race will disappear. We have the technology to build alternative energy and food systems, but the capitalist industry has blocked all meaningful attempts to curb fossil fuel extraction and reduce energy consumption. And meat, dairy and egg producers, responding to consumer demand, are responsible for the emission of more greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector. Livestock generates enormous amounts of methane, which is 86 times more destructive than CO2. Livestock also produces 65 percent of nitrous oxide resulting from human activity, a gas that has 296 times the “Global Warming Potential” of carbon dioxide. The massive animal agriculture industry, like the fossil fuel industry, receives billions of dollars in subsidies. And pliant politicians do the bidding of these industries receive millions in return from lobbyists in legalized bribery. And it won’t stop until this political system is destroyed. Governments, if they were instruments of the common good, would free themselves from being held captive by corporations and end the profit system which takes precedence over human health and even human survival.

Critics of socialism are wedded to a strawman notion of socialism as some kind of cornucopian society of absolute super-abundance - all the more easy to knock it down. But this is not what is being proposed. What is being proposed is something rather more modest and reasonable - that we can today adequately meet our human needs (which are not infinite but finite) but increasingly capitalism gets in the way of this happening. The technological capacity to satisfy the basic needs of everyone on this planet for food, shelter, sanitation and so on exists today. However, it is capitalism that is increasingly thwarting this potential. Mostly, the productive possibilities at our disposal are not being realised because of the huge and ever-growing proportion of work undertaken today that is entirely socially useless but is nevertheless indispensable to the operation of the capitalist system itself. Thus, a vast and steadily growing proportion of the work carried out today does not in any meaningful sense enhance human wellbeing and welfare but merely exists to serve the functional needs of the system itself.

Free access entails - amongst other things, a self-regulating system of stock control which of its very nature is capable of responding very rapidly to shifts in demand. If people come to reduce their demand for a particular product this will manifest itself in a build-up of surpluses, prompting distribution points to cut back their orders from suppliers who, in turn, will reduce their inputs for said good from their own suppliers and so on the further back along the production chain. The opposite would happen if people increased their demand for a good. This would automatically trigger a signal for more of such a good and hence the inputs for such a good. The point is all this is perfectly possible today and more so now with the development of computerised system of stock control. A self-regulating system of stock control which responds directly and promptly to changes in the pattern of demand from both production units and consumers provides the necessary data we need relating to stocks of inputs. It then becomes a matter of economising most on what is scarcest. The "relative scarcity" of any input is a function of the demand for the end product of which it is a component and of the technical ratio of input to output (or the product itself). In this way, it is quite possible to rank the relevant inputs in terms of their relative scarcity. So selection of the least cost combination is entirely practicable in a communist society. Only the method of doing it is quite different to what happens with a common unit of accounting. It is what I call a "lateral" approach to cost accounting rather than a "vertical" approach. We select technical combinations of inputs that minimise as far as possible our reliance upon scarce inputs in favour of more abundant alternatives. This is not an exact science but it’s the orientation of decision-making that counts - the fact that we are operating within a systemic constraint that pushes us always in the direction of economising most on what is most scarce - which makes it an eminently sensible and reasonable principle to apply.

There’s no end to the maladies that ail workers these days and it is understandable that they will seek to alleviate their exploitation. Regularly on progressive websites and magazines, articles spring up promoting the empowerment of the working class by suggesting for what the authors believe to be radical new ways of organising the economy – making capitalism more people-friendly. How the authors dislike being reminded that they are regurgitating political ideas that have a proven track record of failure. The Socialist Party only hopes that our fellow-workers are not duped into believing that such proposals offer any fundamental improvements in their condition. Despite widespread anxiety and discontent the liberals and the left have been unable to respond or develop determined workers' movement in any meaningful sense so they resurrect past ideas, re-package them to sell once again.