Socialism is Coming

“The sun of capitalism is setting; the sun of socialism is rising.” - Eugene Debs 

Many say socialism is unattainable. If more workers are to be won to the cause of socialism it is clear that we must greatly advance in our ability to explain the advantages of a socialist society and how we can achieve it. Today, with the economy suffering a protracted recession and increasing insecure employment working people are increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo.  However, this discontent is not translating into support for socialism. At the present time, the idea of a socialist alternative does not appear feasible to many. Our fellow-workers remain to be convinced that socialism can provide them with a better life – greater democracy and improved material well-being.

First of all, the word “socialism” is popularly associated with the former USSR and its satellite states. While these regimes were not socialist we never stop hearing that their economies typified what socialism stood for. Today, in the name of socialism we see common ownership changed into government control. The Socialist Party holds that the ending of private/state ownership of production and resources is the precondition for a socialist society. History has provided ample evidence that it is possible for the working class to possess less political power, to enjoy less civil liberty, to exercise less control over the circumstances of its working life, to be, in every sense of the word, more ‘exploited’, under regimes based on state ownership than under “free-enterprise” democracy. What passes for socialism today and now regarded by some as a refutation of the principles of socialism has redefined socialism into some monstrous form. From its foundation the Socialist Party, the socialist movement was far from being unaware of the dangers of a concentration of economic and political power within the hands of an all-powerful state.

William Paul, a leading member of the Socialist Labour Party, and later member of the Communist Party made this view very clear indeed in his book The State: Its Origins and Functions, published in 1917:

"The revolutionary socialist denies that state ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism.... Socialism will require no political state because there will be neither a privileged property class nor a downtrodden propertyless class: there will be no social disorder as a result, because there will be no clash of economic interests; there will be no need to create a power to make ‘order’...In the last analysis state ownership is more a means of controlling and regimenting the workers than of controlling industry... The attempt of the state to control industry is therefore the attempt of the ruling class to dominate labour."

Engels, too, in his Anti-Dühring, specifically warned against equating socialism with state ownership:

“Since Bismarck adopted state ownership a certain spurious socialism has made its appearance, here and there even degenerating into a kind of flunkeyism – which declares that all taking over by the state, even of the Bismarckian kind, is in itself socialistic. If, however, the taking over of the tobacco trade by the state was socialistic, Napoleon and Metternich would rank among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, constructed its own main railway lines; if Bismarck... took over the main railway lines in Prussia, simply in order to be better able to organise and use them for war, to train the railway officials as the government’s voting cattle, and especially to secure a new source of revenue independent of parliamentary votes – such actions were in no sense socialist measures. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal Porcelain Manufacturer, and even the regimental tailors in the army would be socialist institutions.”

One might point out that if all that was required for socialism was the ownership of property by a collective institution and the administration of that property by a self-reproducing oligarchical élite, then the Catholic Church has been a socialist institution for 2000 years.

Capitalism does not consist merely in the private ownership of the necessaries for production. If such ownership were the determining feature and quality of capitalism, then capitalism reigned in the days of serfdom. The serf owned his tools, the feudal lord owned the land ”two necessaries for production. Yet that was not capitalism. Capitalism is that social system under which the tool of production (capital) has grown to such mammoth size that the class that owns it rules like a despot, inaccessible and un-dethronable by economic competition, and steadily swelling the number of its slaves, the wage slaves, thereby itself recruiting the forces that will overthrow it, and push civilisation onward to the socialist society. That is capitalism, not anyone or set of seemingly capitalist manifestations.  It does not consist merely in the overthrow of private ownership in any or all of the necessaries of life. If such overthrow of private ownership were socialism, then the overthrow of the one-time private armies and the present state-ownership of the same would be socialism.  Socialism is that social system under which the necessaries of production are owned, controlled, and administered by the people, for the people, and class rule is at an end. That is socialism, nothing short of that.