An Alternative Vision

Socialism can protect the planet and its peoples. The struggle for a livable and sustainable world is a life and death issue. Socialism is the idea that working people makes all of society run so why shouldn’t they run all of society? There is throughout the world a widespread popular perception that socialism is a coercive system, and the experiences of the former Soviet Union and its satellites states have justified that perception. Generally speaking, while the world's peoples dislike capitalism, they fear socialism. This issue is often at the heart of socialist's problems in persuasion. In the face of the crisis in socialism the Left has to present an alternative programme. We must bring socialist ideas anew.

The Socialist Party rejects any notion of class dictatorship and any dictatorial form of government and ever-expanding state apparatus. Socialism is not state repression. We identify socialism first and foremost with common ownership of the means of production, and with the mass participation in and control over economic, political, and social institutions and structures. Socialism has been the goal of the working class political movement. The Left's unity is based on support for capitalism and refusal to fight capitalism.

Our vision is where society becomes a "self-administered" economy involving democratic bodies (elected by the entire adult population and subject to recall ) at the global, regional and local levels where decisions are made by the people actually affected by them. Working people must be able to express their needs and desires in the process of decision-making, in the formulation and the implementation of the allocation of resources. There is the assertion that the problem of the sheer complexity of the economy makes such an aspiration an illusory one, that it is not feasible, not workable in practice. They claim industrial democracy of that scale is utopian. They insist that the present price mechanism and the market system are indispensable to directing resources in the most efficient way. Even some who claim to Marxists suggest that some form of market will remain even in money is replaced by labour-value vouchers of some sort. The Socialist Party contests this argument and in fact posits that assessing needs and directing resources to satisfying them will actually be far simpler than employing use of money in those calculations.

There already exists a self-regulating system of stock control. How does it work? You go to a supermarket and take something off the shelf. Others do the same. What happens? The shelf empties and this triggers an order for fresh stock from the suppliers. The suppliers too might find they are running low of particular input to manufacture the good in question. So this too triggers orders for more stock of the input in question. And so on and so forth, all along the supply chain. The economy knows exactly what the real preferences of people are! These preferences are indicated by the rate of take up or depletion of stock. Stocks which are are not depleting very rapidly suggest that people don't have a particularly strong preference for them while stock which are depleting rapidly suggest a strong preference is being expressed. All this information is instantly picked up and acted upon in a completely self-regulating manner. The problem of the critics of socialism is that are not looking at production and distribution in terms of a feedback mechanism but are fixated on the idea of a priori central planning – the command economy - deciding what to produce first and then setting about to organise production according.

Capitalism is built upon monetary accounting while socialism relies on calculation-in-kind. There is no general unit of accounting involved in this process such as money or labour hours or energy units. In fact, every conceivable kind of economic system has to rely on calculation in kind, including capitalism. Without it, the physical organisation of production (e.g. maintaining inventories) would be literally impossible. This is one reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over capitalism because of the elimination for the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting. In socialism calculations will be done directly in physical quantities of real things, in use-values, without any general unit of calculation. 

Needs will be communicated to productive units as requests for specific useful things, while productive units will communicate their requirements to their suppliers as requests for other useful things. Such non-monetary calculation of course already happens , on the technical level, under capitalism. Once the choice of productive method has been made, according to expected profitability as revealed by monetary calculation, then the real calculations in kind of what is needed to produce a specific good commence so much raw materials, so much energy, so much labour. In socialism this choice too will be made in real terms, in terms of the real advantages and disadvantages of alternative methods and in terms of, on the one hand, the utility of some good or some project in a particular circumstance at a particular time and, on the other hand, of the real “costs” in the same circumstances and at the same time of the required materials, energy and productive effort. On the one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy, equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the amount of the good produced, together with any by-products. As already stated this, of course, is done under capitalism but it is doubled by an exchange value calculation: the exchange value of the resources used up is recorded as the cost of production while the exchange value of the output is recorded as sales receipts. If the latter is greater than the former, then a profit has been made; if it is less, then a loss is recorded. 

Such profit-and-loss accounting has no place in socialism and would be quite meaningless.