A Needs-Oriented System

 Socialism is a vision of a world shared among us all, a world of common ownership with free movement for all. We live on a planet that is capable of providing all its inhabitants with the food, housing, health care, education and the other amenities of life that they need. But this does not happen. The economic system that exists all over the world today is capitalism where productive resources are owned and controlled by a few rich individuals, corporations states and whose rules of operation are ‘no profit, no production’ and ‘can’t pay, can’t have’. It is this system of production for profits that is the root cause of the world’s problems as it imposes that making profits has to take priority over meeting people’s needs and protecting the planet. It is clear that there can be no national solutions to these problems. The only way-out is global. It’s the world’s natural and industrial resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity so that they can be used to directly meet the needs of the world’s population on the basis of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’. Free of ownership by the few and the rule of ‘no profit, no production’, this is the only framework within which problems such as global warning, growing inequality and wars can be tackled for good.

All across the world the capitalist system plunders and pollutes the Earth’s non-renewable mineral and energy sources. All across the world it poisons the sea, the air, the soil, forests, rivers and lakes. All across the world it disturbs natural balances and defies the laws of ecology. Clearly this environmental destruction and waste cannot continue indefinitely, but it need not; it should not and must not. It is quite possible to meet the basic material needs of every man, woman and child on this planet without destroying the natural systems on which we depend and of which we are a part. 

We can adopt:

· Farming methods that preserve and enhance the natural fertility of the soil;

· The systematic recycling of materials obtained from non-renewable mineral sources;

· The reduced use of non-renewable energy sources (such as coal, oil and gas) while increasing the alternative sources based on natural processes that continually renew themselves (such as solar energy, wind power and tidal);

· The employment of industrial processes which avoid the release of toxic chemicals into the biosphere;

· The manufacture of durablegoods made to last and be repairable, not to be thrown away after use or deliberately to break down after a calculated period of time.

What stands in the way? Why isn’t this done? The simple answer is that, under the present economic system, production is not geared to meeting human needs but rather to the accumulation of monetary wealth out of profits. The whole system of production, from the methods employed to the choice of what to produce, is distorted by the imperative drive to pursue economic growth for its own sake and to give priority to seeking profits to fuel this growth without consideration for the longer term factors that ecology teaches are vitally important. The result is an economic system governed by blind economic laws which oblige decision-makers, however selected and whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pillage and pollute.

Not only are basic needs far from satisfied but much of what is produced is pure waste from this point of view—for example all the resources involved in commerce and finance, the mere buying and selling of things and those poured into armaments. If needs are to be met while at the same time respecting the laws of nature, then this capitalist system must go.

If we are to meet our needs in an ecologically acceptable way we must first be able to control production, to able to consciously regulate our interaction with the rest of nature—and the only basis on which this can be done is the common ownership of the means of production.

By common ownership we don’t mean state property. We mean simply that the Earth and its natural and industrial resources should no longer belong to anyone—not to individuals, not to corporations, not to the state. No person or group should have exclusive controlling rights over their use; instead how they are used and under what conditions should be decided democratically by the community as a whole. Under these conditions the whole concept of legal property rights, whether private or state, over the means of production disappears and is replaced by democratically decided rules and procedures governing their use.

A fully democratic decision-making structure must be an essential feature of the system that is to replace private and state capitalism. The centralised, coercive political state must be dismantled and replaced by a decision-making structure in which everyone is free to participate on an equal basis. It is possible to envisage, the local community being the basic unit of this structure. In this case people would elect a local council to co-ordinate and administer those local affairs that could not be dealt with by a general meeting of the whole community. This council would in its turn send delegates to a regional council for matters concerning a wider area and so on up to a world council responsible for matters that could best be dealt with on a world scale (such as the supply of certain key minerals and fuels, the protection of the biosphere, the mining and farming of the oceans, and space research). Given the replacement of the coercive political state by such a democratic decision-making structure, the network of productive units could then be geared to meeting needs. We deliberately use the word “geared” here because what we envisage is not the organisation of the production and distribution of goods by some central planning authority but the setting up of a mechanism, a system of links between productive units, which would enable the productive network to respond in a flexible way to the demands for goods and services communicated to it.

In the needs-oriented society we are describing here the concept of “profits” would be meaningless while the imperative to “growth” would disappear. Instead, after an initial increase in production needed to provide the whole world’s population with an infrastructure of basic services (such as farms, housing, transport and water supplies) production can be expected to platform off at a level sufficient to provide for current needs and repairing and maintaining the existing stock of means of production. What is envisaged is a society able to sustain a stable relationship with nature in which the needs of its members would be in balance with the capacity of nature to renew itself after supplying them.

In a socialist society all the resources of the earth, including the factories, mines, offices, land and the means of communication and transportation, will belong to everyone, regardless of colour, sex, age, or where one happens to live. All people will have free access to the goods and services which the world is able to produce.