Feasible Socialism (4)

Capitalism is in fact not just an exchange economy but an exchange economy where the aim of production is to make a profit. Profit is the monetary expression of the difference between the exchange value of a product and the exchange value of the materials, energy and labour-power used to produce it, or what Marx called “surplus value”. Defenders of capitalism never seem to ask themselves the practical question about what the critical factor determining a production initiative in a market system. The answer is obvious from everyday experience. The factor that critically decides the production of commodities is the judgment that enterprises make about whether they can be sold in the market. Obviously, consumers buy in the market that they perceive as being for their needs. But whether or not the transaction takes place is not decided by needs but by ability to pay. So the realisation of profit in the market determines both the production of goods and also the distribution of goods by various enterprises. In the market system the motive of production, the organisation of production, and the distribution of goods are inseparable parts of the same economic process: the realisation of profit and the accumulation of capital. The economic pressure on capital is that of accumulation, the alternative is bankruptcy. The production and distribution of goods is entirely subordinate to the pressure on capital to accumulate. The economic signals of the market are not signals to produce useful things. They signal the prospects of profit and capital accumulation, If there is a profit to be made then production will take place; if there is no prospect of profit, then production will not take place. Profit not need is the deciding factor. Under capitalism what appear to be production decisions are in fact decisions to go for profit in the market. With the capitalist system, information is a contra-flow of information. It flows from producers, through distributors, to the consumer. This information is the prices of goods determined by the accumulating costs of production and distribution plus profit. Prices are increased in each part of production, from mining through industrial processing, manufacture and assembly, then accumulating further through distribution until the final price is passed on to the consumer.

The function of cost/pricing is to enable a business enterprise to calculate its costs, to fix its profit expectations within a structure of prices, to regulate income against expenditure and, ultimately, to regulate the exploitation of its workers. Unfortunately, prices can only reflect the wants of those who can afford to actually buy what economists call “effective demand” - and not real demand for something from those without the wherewithal - the purchasing power - to buy the product (or even to express a preference for one product over another. I may want a sirloin steak but I can only afford a hamburger).

Socialist determination of needs begins with consumer needs and then flows throughout distribution and on to each required part of the structure of production. Socialism will make economically-unencumbered production decisions as a direct response to needs. With production for use, the starting point will be needs. By the replacement of exchange economy by common ownership basically what would happen is that wealth would cease to take the form of exchange value, so that all the expressions of this social relationship peculiar to an exchange economy, such as money and prices, would automatically disappear. In other words, goods would cease to have an economic value and would become simply physical objects which human beings could use to satisfy some want or other. The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of economic calculation in the sense of calculation in units of value whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour-time. It would mean that there was no longer any common unit of calculation for making decisions regarding the production of goods. 

Socialism is a money-less society in which use values would be produced from other use values, there would be no need to have a universal unit of account but could calculate exclusively in kind. The only calculations that would be necessary in socialism would be calculations in kind. 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. 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 (after it has been realised on the market) 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, once again, be quite meaningless. Calculation in kind entails the counting or measurement of physical quantities of different kinds of factors of production. 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. But where capitalism relies on monetary accounting as well as calculation in kind, socialism relies solely on the latter. That is one reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over capitalism by eliminating the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting.

Socialism is a decentralised or polycentric society organized from below and not from the top . It is not a command economy but a responsive one. Planning in socialism is essentially a question of industrial organisation, of organising productive units into a productive system functioning smoothly to supply the useful things which people had indicated they needed, both for their individual and for their collective consumption. What socialism would establish would be a rationalised network of planned links between users and suppliers; between final users and their immediate suppliers, between these latter and their suppliers, and so on down the line to those who extract the raw materials from nature. The responsibility of these industries would be to ensure the supply of a particular kind of product either, in the case of consumer goods, to distribution centres or, in the case of goods used to produce other goods, to productive units or other industries. Planning is indeed central to the idea of socialism, but socialism is the planned (consciously coordinated and not to be confused with the central planning concept ) production of useful things to satisfy human needs precisely instead of the production, planned or otherwise, of wealth as exchange value, commodities and capital. In socialism wealth would have simply a specific use value (which would be different under different conditions and for different individuals and groups of individuals) but it would not have any exchange, or economic, value.

Since the needs of consumers are always needs for a specific product at a specific time in a specific locality, we will assume that socialist society would leave the initial assessment of likely needs to a delegate body under the control of the local community. In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period, would enable the local distribution committee to estimate what the need for food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period. Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants, builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the bodies charged with coordinating supplies to local communities. The individual would have free access to the goods on the shelves of the local distribution centres; the local distribution centres free access to the goods they required to be always adequately stocked with what people needed; their suppliers free access to the goods they required from the factories which supplied them; industries and factories free access to the materials, equipment and energy they needed to produce their products; and so on. Production and distribution in socialism would thus be a question of organising a coordinated and more or less self-regulating system of linkages between users and suppliers, enabling resources and materials to flow smoothly from one productive unit to another, and ultimately to the final user, in response to information flowing in the opposite direction originating from final users. The productive system would thus be set in motion from the consumer end, as individuals and communities took steps to satisfy their self-defined needs. Socialist production is self-regulating production for use. This would achieve a rhythm of daily production in line with daily needs with no significant growth. 

We are seeking a 'steady-state economy' which corresponds to what Marx called 'simple reproduction' - a situation where human needs were in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating this continuously from production period to production period. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilized at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods, a zero growth society operating in a stable and ecologically benign way.

Capitalism And Its Quarrels

 In an article in the business section of The Toronto Star (July 11) the author points out that Greece can never pay back its colossal debt of $461 billion so maybe a large chunk should be forgiven. Greece is only the world's 44th. largest economy and ranks somewhere in the sixties for efficiency. What is this, a league of economic output? Can a nation with so few people and resources climb into the premier division? Why do Greek pensioners have to give up some of their income? Are they responsible for the debt? The author also points out that the toughest creditor, probably because it owns a larger chunk of the debt than anyone else, is Germany, and maybe they are forgetting that in 1953 fifty per cent of West Germany's external debt was forgiven by its creditors. If all this sounds like a schoolyard quarrel, you would be right, and like all such altercations, in the end, it doesn't matter a damn except to capitalists. John Ayers.

Farm-Workers Stand Together

NFU Scotland is calling for abolition of the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board (SAWB) and for agricultural workers' pay and conditions to be determined under general employment law. Much of the media is reporting the position of the National Farmers Union (an employers’ association and not to be confused with a genuine employees union). UNITE is the union representing the interests of agricultural workers. It has told the Scottish government that compromising the powers of the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board (SAWB) would start a race to the bottom on workers’ wages, rights and safety across the rural economy.

Scottish agricultural workers are not directly comparable to other workers in Scottish industry. Whilst other sizable groups can enter into collective bargaining agreements on a workplace or individual company basis, farm workers cannot, in the vast majority of cases, meet the threshold for statutory trade union recognition rights. Previous statics have illustrated that of the 6,632 holdings in Scotland employing full-time employees, only 176 employ seven or more workers.

The success of the SAWB can be seen in relation to an employer who forced mainly migrant workers to work 39 hours over 4 days under one contract of employment and a further 39 hours over 3 days on another. Using different employer names for each contract, this employer was not only breaching the wages order but also the Working Time Regulations. These workers were not paid for the overtime they had clearly worked; they only ever received plain time, and not at the minimum amount set by the board, nor even the national minimum wage. The workers had to pay for compulsory transport to work when the company moved them to another site in an attempt to avoid paying the “over 26 weeks” SAWB rate. They were also forced to continue working into late evening as the compulsory use of company transport meant having to wait until that transport was available. The SAWB and its inspectorate put an end to this blatant exploitation – but without a strong SAWB, such examples could arise again.

The Scottish Government has itself previously stated the following: “we are not aware of any other body in Scotland that would monitor the employment of foreign labour through agencies.' In 2012 Scotland accounted for the third highest proportion of workers in the UK on the seasonal agricultural workers scheme. There is also evidence that much of the seasonal labour supply into horticulture is informal or irregular. A report by the Scottish Government (2009) entitled The Experience of Rural Poverty stated that the nature of employment in rural areas (seasonal, agricultural) means that 'many migrant workers' face unemployment and, in some cases, homelessness at certain times of the year. The obstacles that exist for rural workers in general are aggravated for migrant workers due to language difficulties, lack of information on and awareness of employment rights, indebtedness to agencies or traffickers, and physical and social isolation.

In October 2013, as part of the deregulatory and austerity agenda pursued by the Conservative-led UK Government, the Agricultural Wages Board, after more than 60 years of pay protection for 140,000 agricultural workers, was abolished in England. The UK Government’s own figures estimate that farm workers will lose more than £258 million over 10 years in lost pay, sick pay and holiday entitlement. As a consequence, millions of pounds will be taken away from rural families, communities, shops, businesses, and services. There is also concern that supermarkets – when they know farm businesses are paying less in wages - will drop the prices that they are prepared to pay for agricultural produce, detrimentally affecting employers as well as employees.

A key problem now occurring, as predicted by the current Cabinet Secretary, is that individual workers are having to negotiate face to face with their employer on pay. In a survey by Unite, the vast majority of farming employers in England and Wales - some 75% – did not want to be charged with undertaking wage bargaining. They are heavily dependent on their employees and do not want the tension that comes with imposing wage deals. Many farmers valued the AWB mechanism for setting clear and straightforward rates of pay and conditions and are now very concerned about the prospect of having to negotiate with the workers they depend on.

United We Bargain - Divided We Beg

Feasible Socialism (3)

When describing the new society we are working for, socialists frequently encounter the question of "how will it work?"

The question of how far it will be possible to localise production and decision-making will remain a matter for debate both before and after the socialist revolution. When we propose different scales of social co-operation such as local, regional and world scales, this is not a question of there being a hierarchy with power located at any central point. What we anticipate is both an integrated and flexible system of democratic organisation which could be adapted for action to solve any problem in any of these scales. This simply takes into account that some problems and the action to solve them arise from local issues and this also extends to the regional and world spheres.

When we come to the question of how production solely for use will operate in socialism we begin with the fact that a world-wide structure of useful production already exists and therefore we already have a working model in front of us. The task is to identify the useful mechanisms which co-ordinate production and distribution now as distinct from the value factors of buying and selling in the markets, which under capitalism constrain useful production. In socialism, these useful mechanisms will operate on their own, freely and directly for need. In addition, our proposals for practical socialism should include the ways in which useful institutions and decision-making bodies could also be adapted from “the existing state of things”.

During the early days of socialism it is likely that the organisation of world co-operation would need to take place through a world council. Because the things we need now are produced and distributed through a world structure of production, and because its present capitalist nature has brought about immense problems, action to solve them would be required on a world scale, For example, it would be a priority to set up an ecologically benign world energy system as soon as possible. Similarly, the countless millions of people suffering from hunger and desperate poverty would need a considerable increase in food production. For this work the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN would at last be able to use its expertise and knowledge of world conditions to help with solving the problems of malnutrition. Again, to begin with, people in socialism would face a huge task in providing every person with secure and comfortable housing. This would call upon the efforts of communities throughout the world, especially in those regions where means of production were well developed. Such world projects could be co-ordinated through appropriate departments of a world council.

Although centralised world-wide planning of production and distribution has become more and more possible with the evolution of communication systems and the information-handling capabilities of computers, it has, at the same time, become less and less necessary or desirable. There are bound to be democratic decisions taken about certain aspects of production and distribution from time to time, at local, regional, continental and even global level. But, for the great mass of adjustments and controls, ordinary channels of supply arid demand (real demand) will provide the most flexible and responsive basic system for regulating socialist society's production and distribution. The almost infinitely complex network of manufacturers, growers, distributors and suppliers will, however, need well-organised communication and co-operation among themselves, as well as ready access to a richness of information about research, designs, methods, output, capacity, local preferences, etc. etc., which is simply impossible in capitalism. The computerised stock control systems now in use in many major stores that are linked to the computerised warehousing already permit the constant monitoring of consumption of goods to be carried on, future demand to be predicted within quite fine limits and automatic, and almost instantaneous, re-ordering to be carried out. In the post-capitalist world it is this greatly enhanced information and logistics network which will replace and supersede the market and the price mechanism. The immense volume of information about the daily facts and figures of all production, distribution and services which is in the possession of the working class and which is today barely used will be accorded its true value in socialist society as the data for conscious communal control of the means of life by every member of society. "Democratic control" will be far more than a matter of voting. It will be the continual exercise of informed individual power in the co-operative processes of sustaining and enhancing social life.

Looking at local forms of organisation, individual units of production in capitalism (factories, workshops, offices etc.) already have IT systems for calculating the resources that are required in production, as well as stock control systems for managing the supplies of resources. Aside from the parts of that are concerned with monetary accounting, these systems could be of use to the socialist society inheriting them. In any case, monetary accounting does not help with the input-output calculations that are really needed in the planning of production. These calculations can be made in terms of quantities whether it be kilograms, litres, watts or other units of measurement. They often are, even within capitalism. Indeed, in 1973 an economist Wassily Leontief was awarded a Nobel prize for formulating a methodology for input-output analysis that could use such quantitative measurements.

Crucial to the question of democracy is not just the ability to make decisions about what to do but also the powers of action to carry out those decisions. But with the abolition of the market system, communities in socialism will not only be able to make free and democratic decisions about what needs to be done they will also be free to use their resources to achieve those aims. Problems are not solved with money resources. They are solved by people using their labour, skills and the necessary materials and there is in fact an abundance of these material resources. But it will take the relations of common ownership to release them for the needs of communities and this will also mean that communities will be free to decide democratically how best to use those resources.

The corporate authorities or managerial systems which now dictate how production units such as factories or services should be run will be replaced. Small units could be run by regular meetings of all the workers. In the cases of large organisations these could be run by elected committees accountable to the people working in them. In this way, democratic practice would apply not just to the important policy decisions that would steer the main direction of development, it would extend to the day-to-day activities of the work place. Organisation like the trade unions, with their research departments, are well placed to conduct discussions with socialists on how production and the work place could be democratically organised. With common ownership, control of production by boards of directors and their corporate managers would immediately cease. The exploitative operations of the multi-nationals would be brought to an end. This would leave workers with the job of carrying on with the useful parts of production and services and for this they would need to be democratically organised. At this point control of all units engaged in production and distribution, services such as schools and hospitals, and useful parts of the civil service and local administration etc., would switch to management committees or councils elected by the workers running them. Unlike boards of directors and their corporate managers, works committees would not be responding to the economic signals of the market. They will be responding directly to the needs of the community. In this way, the links connecting production units and services in socialism will be far more extensive than the buying and selling that connects capitalist units with their suppliers and market outlets. One immediate difference would be that access to information throughout the world structure of production would be unlimited. There will be no industrial secrecy, copyright or patent protection. Discussion about design, materials or technique will be universally open and the results of research will be universally available. As well as having access to world information systems, production units will operate in line with social policy decisions about priorities of action. This would indicate the ways in which particular industrial and manufacturing units would need to adapt or possibly expand their operations. This would require some units to take on more staff and this again could be administered by elected management committees .

No doubt, as we have said earlier, the most urgent task will be to stop people dying of hunger but the supply of decent housing will require a vastly greater allocation of labour than any necessary increase in food production. This means that a great surge of required materials and equipment will flow through the units producing building supplies. A structure of housing production that is generally adjusted to the market for housing under capitalism, which is what people in socialism would inherit, will in no way be able to cope with a demand for housing based on need. So, within the wider context of a democratically decided housing policy, in which questions of planning and the environment would have been taken into account, the job of implementing housing decisions would eventually pass to the committees or works councils throughout the construction industry.

What we would see in these arrangements is not just the replacement of corporate management with democratic control, we would also see the liberation of the community’s powers of organisation and production from the shackles of the profit motive.

Hurting the Young

TENS of thousands of children in Glasgow are financial losers following the Chancellor’s cuts to tax credits new figures reveal.

The cuts announced in his post election Budget will hit 26,000 families in the city with more than 46,000 children living in households whose income will fall. Before the budget the Evening Times revealed that almost 80,000 kids were at risk of cuts as the total number whose parents received tax credits.

The Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) has produced analysis which shows how many will be facing a drop in income. It shows that 60% of children in the city whose household relies on tax credits will be subjected to a drop in income accounting for more than 13% of all Scots kids impacted.

Glasgow Pollok constituency has the highest number of children who will be affected with 8300 losing out. It is one of four Glasgow areas in the top ten of Scotland’s 73 constituencies all with more than 6000 affected. Provan with 6200, Southside with 6100 and Maryhill and Springburn at 6000 are also on the list. All but one of the city’s eight constituencies has more than 5000 children impacted, according to the figures. Only Kelvin, with 2500 is lower. Anniesland has 5800, Cathcart 5500 and Shettleston 5100 children whose parents will see their tax credits cut.

Across Scotland almost 350,000 children in almost 200,000 families are affected of the more than half a million whose household income depends on tax credits.

So Called Experts.

Statistics Canada reported in June that manufacturing sales in Canada were down about four times lower than economic experts had predicted for 2015 so far. Sales dropped in eight of the twenty-one industries that account for nearly two thirds of the country's overall manufacturing output. To quote Randall Bartlett, Toronto Dominion Bank senior economist, "...it's a bit of a surprise, no question there." This just proves we live under a crazy hodge-podge system in which even the so-called experts and the vulgar economists can't predict how it will go. It's time for it to go permanently. John Ayers.

Feasible Socialism (2)

Many have looked at the Soviet Union-style command economy and from their studies conclude that socialism is not possible. The problem with a centrally-planned model of socialism was its inability to cope with change. It lacks any kind of feedback mechanism which allows for mutual adjustments between the different actors in such an economy. It is completely inflexible. We did witnessed in the USSR how it was unable to determine prices by central planning. Prices were set, re-set, fixed then re-fixed, plans were made then re-appraised, re-defined, changed and dropped. Comparisons with Soviet Union and the aspiration of a moneyless society is comparing oranges with apples. Just as the reformists tried to confuse nationalisation (or as many anarchists labelled it, state-socialism) with free access socialism. It is a complete red herring.

We would describe socialism as a self-regulating, self-adjusting inter-linked and inter-dependent system. Decisions will be made at different levels of organisation: global, regional and local with the bulk of decision-making being made at the local level. In this sense, a socialist economy would be a polycentric, not a centrally planned economy. Free access to goods and services denies to any group or individuals the political leverage with which to dominate others.

Industries and productive units could use mathematical aids to decision-making such as operational research and linear programming to find the most appropriate technical method of production to employ. As neutral techniques these can still be used where the object is something other than profit maximisation or the minimisation of monetary costs.

Another technique already in use under capitalism that could be adapted for use in socialism: so-called cost-benefit analysis and its variants. Naturally, under capitalism the balance sheet of the relevant benefits and costs advantages and disadvantages of a particular scheme or rival schemes is drawn up in money terms, but in socialism a points system for attributing relative importance to the various relevant considerations could be used instead.

Since the needs of consumers are always needs for a specific product at a specific time in a specific locality, we will assume that socialist society would leave the initial assessment of likely needs to a delegate body under the control of the local community (although, once again, other arrangements are possible if that were what the members of socialist society wanted). In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period, would enable the local distribution committee (for want of a name) to estimate what the need for food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period. Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants, builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the body (or bodies) charged with coordinating supplies to local communities.

Once such an integrated structure of circuits of production and distribution had been established at local, regional and world levels, the flow of wealth to the final consumer could take place on the basis of each unit in the structure having free access to what is needed to fulfil its role. The individual would have free access to the goods on the shelves of the local distribution centres; the local distribution centres free access to the goods they required to be always adequately stocked with what people needed; their suppliers free access to the goods they required from the factories which supplied them; industries and factories free access to the materials, equipment and energy they needed to produce their products; and so on.

Within the SPGB's concept there does exist a flexibility in determining allocation of resources and determining the requirements and wishes of communities. There does indeed remain with those of us who desire a moneyless economy a justified suspicion of those Leftists who wish for a capitalism without the capitalists and the anarcho-capitalists who desire capitalism without the state. Who just are the real utopians ?

In a socialist society, there will be no money and no exchange and no barter.

Goods will be voluntarily produced, and services voluntarily supplied to meet people's needs. People will freely take the things they need. Socialism will be concerned solely with the production, distribution and consumption of useful goods and services in response to definite needs. It will integrate social needs with the material means of meeting those needs. Common ownership means that society as a whole owns the means and instruments for distributing wealth. It also implies the democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, for if everyone owns, then everyone must have equal right to control the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth.

By the replacement of exchange economy by common ownership basically what would happen is that wealth would cease to take the form of exchange value, so that all the expressions of this social relationship peculiar to an exchange economy, such as money and prices, would automatically disappear. In other words, goods would cease to have an economic value and would become simply physical objects which human beings could use to satisfy some want or other.

The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of economic calculation in the sense of calculation in units of value whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour-time. It would mean that there was no longer any common unit of calculation for making decisions regarding the production of goods.

Socialism is a money-less society in which use values would be produced from other use values, there would need no have a universal unit of account but could calculate exclusively in kind .The only calculations that would be necessary in socialism would be calculations in kind. 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. Calculation in kind entails the counting or measurement of physical quantities of different kinds of factors of production. 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. But where capitalism relies on monetary accounting as well as calculation in kind, socialism relies solely on the latter. That is one reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over capitalism by eliminating the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting.

Socialism is a decentralised or polycentric society that is self-regulating, self-adjusting and self-correcting, from below and not from the top. It is not a command economy but a responsive one.

Planning in socialism is essentially a question of industrial organisation, of organising productive units into a productive system functioning smoothly to supply the useful things which people had indicated they needed, both for their individual and for their collective consumption. What socialism would establish would be a rationalised network of planned links between users and suppliers; between final users and their immediate suppliers, between these latter and their suppliers, and so on down the line to those who extract the raw materials from nature. The responsibility of these industries would be to ensure the supply of a particular kind of product either, in the case of consumer goods, to distribution centres or, in the case of goods used to produce other goods, to productive units or other industries. Planning is indeed central to the idea of socialism, but socialism is the planned (consciously coordinated and not to be confused with the central planning concept ) production of useful things to satisfy human needs precisely instead of the production, planned or otherwise, of wealth as exchange value, commodities and capital. In socialism wealth would have simply a specific use value (which would be different under different conditions and for different individuals and groups of individuals) but it would not have any exchange, or economic, value.

Needs would arise in local communities expressed as required quantities such as kilos, tonnes, cubic litres, or whatever , of various materials and quantities of goods . These would then be communicated according to necessity .Each particular part of production would be responding to the material requirements communicated to it through the connected ideas of social production. It would be self -regulating, because each element of production would be self-adjusting to the communication of these material requirements. Each part of production would know its position. If requirements are low in relation to a build-up of stock, then this would an automatic indication to a production unit that its production should be reduced. The supply of some needs will take place within the local community and in these cases production would not extent beyond this , as for example with local food production for local consumption .Other needs could be communicated as required things to the regional organisation of production. Local food production would require glass, but not every local community could have its own glass works . The requirements for glass could be communicated to a regional glass works. The glass works has its own suppliers of materials and the amounts they require for the production of glass are known in definite quantities. The required quantities of these materials could be passed by the glass works to the regional suppliers of the materials for glass manufacture. This would be a sequence of communication of local needs to the regional organisation of production, and thus contained within a region.

Local food production would also require tractors, for instance, and here the communication of required quantities of things could extend further to the world organisation of production . Regional manufacture could produce and assemble the component parts of tractors for distribution to local communities. The regional production unit producing tractors would communicate to their own suppliers, and eventually this would extend to world production units extracting and processing the necessary materials.

Production and distribution in socialism would thus be a question of organising a coordinated and more or less self-regulating system of linkages between users and suppliers, enabling resources and materials to flow smoothly from one productive unit to another, and ultimately to the final user, in response to information flowing in the opposite direction originating from final users. The productive system would thus be set in motion from the consumer end, as individuals and communities took steps to satisfy their self-defined needs. Socialist production is self-regulating production for use.

Stocks of goods held at distribution points would be monitored, their rate of depletion providing vital information about the future demand for such goods, information which will be conveyed to the units producing these goods. The units would in turn draw upon the relevant factors of production and the depletion of these would activate yet other production units further back along the production chain. There would thus be a marked degree of automaticity in the way the system operated. The maintenance of surplus stocks would provide a buffer against unforeseen fluctuations in demand .The regional production units would in turn communicate its own manufacturing needs to their own suppliers, and this would extend to world production units extracting and processing the necessary raw materials.

We are seeking ultimately to establish a "steady-state economy" or "zero-growth" society which corresponds to what Marx called "simple reproduction" - a situation where human needs were in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating this continuously from production period to production period. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilized at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods. The point about such a situation is that there will no longer be any imperative need to develop productivity, i.e. to cut costs in the sense of using less resources; nor will there be the blind pressure to do so that is exerted under capitalism through the market.

It will also create an ecologically benign relationship with nature. In socialism we would not be bound to use the most labour efficient methods of production. We would be free to select our methods in accordance with a wide range of socially desirable criteria, in particular the vital need to protect the environment. What it means is that we should construct permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social production could even be reduced. This will be the opposite of to-day’s capitalist system's cheap, shoddy, “throw-away” goods and built-in obsolescence, which results in a massive loss and destruction of resources.

Simply put, in socialism there would be no barter economy or monetary system. It would be a economy based on need. Therefore, a consumer would have a need, and there would be a communication system set in place that relays that need to the producer. The producer create the product, and then send the product back to the consumer, and the need would be satisfied.

Who Owns the North Pole (Part 87)

Russia has renewed its efforts to get the United Nations to recognise 1.2 million sq km (463,000 sq miles) of the Arctic shelf that it lays claim to. All other countries bordering the Arctic - Norway, Denmark, Canada and the US - reject Moscow's claim.

It made a similar move for the resource-rich territory in 2001, but that was rejected by a UN commission because of insufficient evidence. Russia's foreign ministry said the fresh bid is backed by scientific data. "Ample scientific data collected in years of Arctic research are used to back the Russian claim," Russia foreign ministry said in a statement.

he new move comes a week after the Kremlin said it was strengthening its naval forces in the Arctic as part of a new military doctrine.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the plans included a new fleet of icebreakers. Earlier this year, Russia's military conducted exercises in the Arctic that involved 38,000 servicemen, more than 50 surface ships and submarines and 110 aircraft.

Shop talk (1984)

A Short Story from the June 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the town of Inverness a talking checkout machine was recently introduced in a blaze of glory by Your Caring, Sharing Co-op, which should be more accurately described as Their Profit Making Co-op. Computer technology is zooming ahead at such a fantastic pace that it is difficult to keep abreast of all the improvements. Clive Sinclair, the current whiz-kid of the computer market, has predicted that new robots will soon be on the go performing all sorts of mental acrobatics.

After the recent case of the supermarket check-out girl who was fired for intolerably bad temper towards the customers on Monday mornings, the logical desire for any supermarket owner is a machine which replaces workers (and therefore saves wages) while at the same time is constantly pleasant to the punters whom it is relieving of their cash. However, since even the most sophisticated machine is fallible, there is a prospect of one of these devices having a brainstorm: "Good morning madam, and what little delicacies do we have here?  . . . ah, yes, cold meat 75p . . . wholemeal bread 50p, better than that adulterated white stuff . . . smarm . . . nice little table-wine at £1.99 . . . sure to impress your husband's boss when he comes to dinner. (Not to mention the refuse collector when he clocks the fancy label) . . . please pay the girl at the till. Thank you and good day . . . Krrrrrkkkk . . . fizzle.

C'mon grandma, hurry it up, we haven't got all day. Let's get these pathetic morsels tallied so we can get onto the real spenders . . . right, two ounces of spam (Yeeugh!) 20p . . . a solitary carrot 5p . . . 1 lonely onion 5p . . . 1 small loaf 25p . . . my, we're really living high on the hog aren't we? . . . 1 tin of Crappo dog food 35p . . . wait a minute, I'll bet you don't even have a dog, you're eating the bloody stuff yourself right? . . . C'mon own up. Hey, stop that snivelling woman, pay up and get out. No, not through the plate-glass door, open it first. That's right, now step out and . . . Gotcha! Security man, grab that old bag, she's got a tin of sardines that she forgot . . . er . . . didn't pay for. Good! the arm up the back, now the quick frogmarch into the manager's office to wait for the police . . . hee . . . hee . . . heeeeeerrkkkk . . . 

And the next one please. Hmm, what have we here? cornflakes 55p . . . You know, a top nutrition expert called Michael Van Straten is on record as saying that there is almost as much nutrition in the box as there is in the cornflakes. Butter 50p . . . sausage 70p . . . have you ever seen how they make sausage? almost no limit to the fat content . . . wouldn't like to see your arteries . . . Frozen chicken £2.75 . . . wonder how much water's been injected into our ex-feathered friend to boost the weight, (and the price) . . . In fact, have you ever stopped to consider why it's necessary to have prices at all? Here we are living in a world which produces food, clothing, and shelter in such abundance that everyone could have the very best instead of all this third-rate rubbish. And the beauty of it is that the amount of time actually needed to produce this wealth could be reduced to a few hours a day with all the extra available people released from non-productive jobs such as there girls operating the tills, and the manager, rushing over to pull put . . . the plug!? . . . Don't touch the . . . . . . . "

Tone

Why Risk It?

A newspaper article commented that it was fifty years ago that the famous investor and financier, Bernard Barugh, passed away. It included a few quotes of his, the most significant being, "There are no sure things in the market. There is no investment that doesn't involve risk." If the market is such a crapshoot, why not get rid of the market economy? John  Ayers.

Feasible Socialism (1)

Orthodox economics declare that the true state of the world is scarcity denies the potential for a state of abundance can exist. Our wants are essentially “infinite” and the resources to meet them, limited, claim the economists. However in the real world, abundance is not a situation where an infinite amount of every good could be produced. Similarly, scarcity is not the situation which exists in the absence of this impossible total or sheer abundance. Abundance is a situation where productive resources are sufficient to produce enough wealth to satisfy human needs, while scarcity is a situation where productive resources are insufficient for this purpose. Admitting this would mean the end, not only of the economy as a system of allocating scarce resources but also of goods having an economic value and price; goods would simply become useful things produced for human beings to take and use, while economics as the study of the most rational way to employ scarce resources would give way to the study of how best to use abundant resources to produce free goods in the amounts required to satisfy human needs. This is the purpose of the Socialist Party, to speed the day towards free access and the end of economics.

Conventional economists employ what is called the Economic Calculation Argument (developed by Ludwig Von Mises that a pricing mechanism for the well-being of society is necessary and it is presented as a fact, an economic law. Only prices and money can be used to rationally organise society because the professors’ text-books say that is so. Socialists offer an alternative model on how the practical allocation of resources does not require the intervention of a prices and how resources can be rationally allocated in a moneyless society.

A monetary economy gives rise to the illusion that the “cost” of producing something is merely financial. Money is the universal unit of measurement, the “general equivalent” that allows everything to be compared with everything else under all circumstances—but only in terms of their labour-time cost or the total time needed on average to produce them from start to finish. 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 it is not the case that the choice of productive method will become a technical choice that can be left to engineers, as is sometimes misunderstood by critics, but that 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.

By the replacement of exchange economy by common ownership basically what would happen is that wealth would cease to take the form of exchange value, so that all the expressions of this social relationship peculiar to an exchange economy, such as money and prices, would automatically disappear. In other words, goods would cease to have an economic value and would become simply physical objects which human beings could use to satisfy some want or other. The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of economic calculation in the sense of calculation in units of value whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour-time. It would mean that there was no longer any common unit of calculation for making decisions regarding the production of goods. The contention is that without prices we cannot allocate resources. The Socialist Party, however, proposes that socialism, as a moneyless society in which use-values would be produced from other use-values, there would be no need to have a universal unit of account but could calculate exclusively in kind. The only calculations that would be necessary in socialism would be calculations in kind. 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. 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 (after it has been realised on the market) 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, once again, be quite meaningless.

Calculation in kind entails the counting or measurement of physical quantities of different kinds of factors of production. 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. But where capitalism relies on monetary accounting as well as calculation in kind, socialism relies solely on the latter. One reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over capitalism is by this elimination of the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting.

Capitalist economists tell us that without the guidance of prices socialism would sink into inefficiency. “Socialism” or “communism” has for the Socialist Party always meant a society without markets, money, wage labour or a state. All wealth would be produced on a strictly voluntary basis. Goods and services would be provided directly for self-determined need and not for sale on a market; they would be made freely available for individuals to take without requiring these individuals to offer something in direct exchange. The sense of mutual obligations and the realisation of universal interdependency arising from this would profoundly colour people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour in such a society. We may thus characterise such a society as being built around a moral economy and a system of generalised reciprocity.

Fact of the Day

According to EU figures, there were 672,000 EU asylum applications in 1992 (when there were only 15 members of the EU), compared to 626,000 last year (when the EU had grown to 28 members with a total population of 500 million). It is true, however, that numbers had dropped substantially in the interim.

How many actually apply for asylum in the UK? 

According to the latest government statistics: “There were 25,020 asylum applications in the year ending March 2015, an increase of 5% compared with the previous year (23,803). The number of applications remains low relative to the peak number of applications in 2002 (84,132).”

The 2002 figure works out at something like 0.13% of the UK’s population (or 66 refugees per town of 50,000 people).

Revolutionary Socialism - A New Day

The Socialist Party is an organisation committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society. Certainly capitalism was preferable to the earlier feudal and mercantile economic systems in which nobles and kings owned most economic resources. Socialism was being created inside capitalism by the socialisation of production that is a natural part of capitalism. The Communist Manifesto is full of praise for the bourgeoisie because capitalism had developed the means of production. However, capitalism emphasised individual acquisitiveness and greed (the profit motive), relied on rankings (the class structure), continued traditions of violence (colonial conquests and wars). Socialism is the necessary outgrowth of advanced, developed capitalism. Throughout history ruling classes have been necessary, because human beings have lived in a world of scarcity. That is the root of the class struggle. Capitalism had created, or was in the process of creating, a situation where there was no need for the struggle of classes, no longer a need for some people to rise to the top and create some sort of civilisation on the basis of exploitation. Socialism came out of capitalism.

Capitalism, by its method of production, has brought isolated workers together and constituted them as a class in society. Capitalism has made the workers a class in themselves. That is, the workers are a distinct class in society, whether they recognize this fact or not. Unfortunately, the working class still follows the capitalist parties, still pursues capitalist politics. The workers must become a class for themselves. They must acquire a clear understanding of their real position under capitalism, of the nature of capitalist society as a whole. They must act consciously for their class interests. They must become conscious of the fact that these class interests lead to a socialist society. When this takes place, the workers are a class for themselves, a class with socialist consciousness.

Our world is comprehensively corrupt. It must depend on lies because it cannot deliver its promises. The slogan, "Workers of the world, unite" is still a meaningful one in the face of a capitalism which, if anything, has grown more rapacious and which tends more and more to place all workers in the same boat. Everyone sooner or later runs up against capitalism. Socialists stress that in every direction we see dazzling material achievements, with new ones springing up by the day. In anti-capitalist struggles, we emphasise how much thwarted human possibility is contained in the labour that created them. But we are certainly not the only ones to know that we stand on the shoulders of previous generations. Or to believe fervently that our goal is "a society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

 Revolution? "That means violence, bloodshed, killing, destruction! No, anything but revolution!" The capitalist class came to power in society and destroyed feudalism in a number of modern countries by means of a revolution, and not a very peaceful one. Nor could the capitalist class exist without the violence that it exercises. Its exploitation is based on the forcible maintenance of its property by the armed state machinery. Its exploitation of millions of people is maintained by the most gruesome violence. And periodically, it plunges innocent millions all over the world into the most violent wars.

What is a social revolution? It is the replacement of one ruling class by another. History is filled with such revolutions and in almost every case they made possible the progress of society. The socialist revolution is simply the overthrow of capitalist despotism and the establishment of workers’ rule. Will this revolution be accomplished by violence or can it be achieved peaceably? Socialists say that socialism can be established by the workers gaining a majority of the votes for their candidates to public office. Once they have been elected in sufficient number they will legislate capitalism out of existence. Socialists are not bloodthirsty maniacs, as the capitalist slanderers would have workers believe. When the time comes for the people to take power, it will be done with a minimum of violence, a minimum of bloodshed of disorder and destruction. A socialist would indeed be insane to want bloodshed and destruction when his aim is an orderly society. It does not follow that socialists are indifferent to democracy under capitalism. Nothing of the sort is true.

The struggle for socialism can best be conducted under conditions that are most favorable to the working class. The most favourable conditions are those in which the working class has the widest possible democratic rights. Hence, it is to the interests of socialism and of the working class to fight for the unrestricted right to organise, the right of free speech, free press and free assembly, the right to strike and the right to vote, the right of representative government, and against every attempt to curb or abolish these rights. The social position of the workers, and their class interests, make them the most democratic class in society. Socialists are the most consistent champions of democracy. The more extensive and less restricted the democratic rights, the greater the opportunities for socialists to speak, to write, to meet, to organize. The same applies, of course, to the working class as a whole. It is the capitalist class which is, by the very nature of its position in society, anti-democratic. Its monopoly of wealth and power denies the common people real equality in the exercise of the democratic rights. It rightly fears the consequences of the workers being able to meet freely, speak and write freely, organize, vote and demonstrate freely. To keep itself safely in power, it is compelled to reveal its fundamentally dictatorial rule more openly by cutting down political democracy and resorting to naked force.

The road to freedom is marked out by the principles of socialism, and no other road exists.

Seeking Democracy

The Socialist Party holds to the doctrine of the class struggle and the idea that the workers must accomplish their own emancipation through their own organised power. We campaign for the overthrow of capitalism by workers’ revolution, preferably through the ballot, and refuse to settle for anything less. We are determined to stick to the main issue and stay on the main track, no matter how alluring some of the by-ways may appear. The Socialist Party denounces capitalism and we bring a message of hope of the good times that could come if we wished it so.  The strength of capitalism is not in itself and its own institutions; it survives only because it has bases of support in the organisations of the workers. This is the primary purpose of our party – to disillusion our fellow workers from their blind faith in the capacity of capitalism to serve their interests if only it was reformed into an ‘improved’ version. Socialism signifies and requires the revolutionary transformation of society; anything less than that are mere palliatives. A socialist party deserves the name only to the extent that it acts as the conscious agency in preparing the workers for the necessary social revolution. An organisation such as the Labour Party that includes openly pro-capitalist reformists with genuine advocates of the working class in one political organisation simply introduces a form of the class struggle into its own ranks.

Marx explained that capitalism not only greatly advances the forces of production but, in developing the forces of production and proletarianising the great mass of the population, capitalist society prepares its own gravediggers in the person of the working class. Yet for the socialist transformation of society we all have to recognize there exists one of most conservative political climates and a weak labour movement, lacking radicalism and socialist consciousness.

 Despite all the experiences of the working people which should have come to our aid and eventually inevitably will—despite all the favourable developments for socialism on a world scale, the situation of socialist radicalism today, from the point of view of consciousness, organisation and even morale is worse than it ever was.  For sure, there are objective causes for this. They are well known, the unprecedented post-war boom. This ‘prosperity’ was interpreted by all kinds of learned people as the final solution of the contradictions of capitalism. Marx was out of date. His theory of the cycle of boom-and-bust had been overcome by the genius of Keynsian capitalism. We were going to have ever-rising standards of living from now on. We believed that all future generations would be better off. A great many workers believed that and radicalism lost its previous attraction. These days with a recession that has cost us to lose faith and trust in governments and to doubt that our children would be living better lives than ourselves we wonder why there has not been a corresponding intensification of class struggle much less an increase in general socialist consciousness. We all expect new epoch of independent class political action. But it isn’t happening. The discontent has not turned into an aggressive labour movement. In a time of social crisis, when the workers of many kinds see no prospect in capitalism, they want to hear the word of a radical social transformation and a new beginning. Yet all there is are the same old failed flawed ‘solutions’. From all quarters come the refrain “Socialism is not the issue!”  Instead it is ‘democracy’, the environment, minority rights. The Left campaigns in elections on the slogan of the lesser evil. “Beat **** at all costs!” which means, of course, “Elect #### at all costs!” That’s what such a slogan always means in reverse. But those who started out that way, thinking to outwit the class enemy by supporting him or her, eventually became victims of their own deception. They begin to play the capitalist party game in earnest. They believe in it. The mask has become the face. The dupers become the duped. Rather than capture the Labour Party (or Democratic), class collaborationist politics led to the capture the labour movement and the leftists, who go to work, running errands and ringing doorbells in order to beat some capitalist political faker at all costs in order to elect some other capitalist political shyster at all costs. They have continued to support the Labour Party long after Labour had no further need of them and gave them the boot. That’s the basic cause of the defeat, demoralisation of labour militancy. From independent class politics, to class collaboration, to support of capitalist politicians.

If we’re going to make a new start and prepare for the next wave of radicalism, there’s only one way to begin. We have to return to fundamentals. Outside the Socialist Party are those who remain faithful to the fundamental ideas of socialism even though it is a confused attachment to a vague ideal. They’re numerous and we see and hear these people more frequently, who have fallen out of the Labour Party and its left-wing camp-followers by the tens of thousands, who still want to consider themselves in their own way as socialists. They seek to have a discussion—providing you don’t bring up any fundamental questions. They can’t remember where they came from but have a nostalgia for mass action, but they’ve forgotten that that mass movement was produced by policies of the class struggle. The unions as organizations have survived. We see them in action every once in a while. And they remain a great potential power. Every now and then there is a sort of political uprising, a portent of things to come, that upset all the calculations of the capitalist politicians. What we are hearing from workers that if you speak the true and honest word of class struggle against class collaboration there is a resonance and a receptive understanding. There’s an immense reservoir for genuine militancy, especially within the trade unions. But without the ideas you can’t hope to build a consistent revolutionary movement. Class conscious workers will release a great power. That is the touchstone. That is ground for confidence. The living movement always appeals to the activists, and the mark of a living movement is its ability to attract fresh militants.

The working class cannot be written off until it has been definitively defeated on a worldwide scale. That hasn’t happened yet. It is impossible to stumble into socialism. It will have to be organised and directed by people and a party that have at their command all the theory, knowledge, resources, and lessons accumulated by the world working class. Its know-how and organisation in politics and action must match and surpass that of its enemies. The very physical existence of our species depends upon the realisation of our socialist goal.

The authors of the Communist Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority” cannot be anything else but democratic, if we understand by “democracy” the rule of the people, the majority. “The first step”, said the Manifesto, “in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” It is reiterated by statement of Marx and Engels that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves”. That is the language of Marx and Engels—“the task of the workers themselves”. That was just another way of saying—as they said explicitly many times—that the socialist reorganisation of society requires a workers’ revolution. Such a revolution is unthinkable without the active participation of the majority of the working class, which is itself the big majority of the population. Nothing could be more democratic than that. They never taught that the simple nationalisation of the forces of production signified the establishment of socialism. That’s not stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. Still less could they have sanctioned, even if they had been able to imagine, the monstrous idea that socialism could be realised without freedom and without equality; that state-owned command economy, controlled by a ruthless police dictatorship, complete with prisons, torture chambers and forced-labour camps, could be designated as a “socialist” society. Marxists defined socialism as a classless society—with abundance, freedom and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic workers’ state, to say nothing of a state in the monstrous form of a bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority. We will not put the socialist movement on the right track and restore its rightful appeal to the best sentiments of the working class and above all to the young, until we begin to call socialism by its right name as the great teachers did and restate the thoughts and formulations of those authentic Marxist teachers. Capitalism, under any kind of government is a system of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are the small minority of exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slave-owners of ancient times were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of Greek democracy.

Work for Revolution

For capitalists, workers are a necessary inconvenience. To make a profit in the productive sector, they must purchase our labour power. (They’d prefer to go robotic or concentrate upon the financial—moving money around rather than selling goods or services—and not have to deal with pesky workers. Sadly for them, robots aren’t everywhere yet. They still need us—without exploiting us, their whole economy falls apart.) For them, the employment rate is not determined by what society needs; it’s determined by how much money they can accumulate. If it’s not profitable to employ us, they throw us in the street. This is the framework within which capitalists conceive of the “employment rate.” They evaluate the numbers with certain questions on their minds, namely: “Should we employ more workers or can we get a higher rate of profit playing the market?” and “Is the masses’ discontent threatening social disorder, making it necessary to ease their pain a little bit?”

We working people, on the other hand, consider being employed as “making a living.” In our framework, everyone has the right to do so. We, who have to hawk our labor power and services on the open market, value our labor power differently than capitalists do. For us, its value is equal to whatever it takes to live. “Live” and “survive” are two different things—we’re not talking about the bare minimum that will keep us just alive enough to return to work tomorrow. At a bare minimum, “employment” should provide us and our families with certain basics: a comfortable home, a broad and stimulating education, quality clothing, restful vacations, high-quality food and medical care, convenient and cheap transportation. These are the basic human rights of everyone who lives in a functioning society, yet we’ve been so conditioned to deprivation that these simple necessities have become wild fantasies. We yearn for them when buying lottery tickets, dreaming of beating ridiculous odds in the hope of easing the intolerable stress of constant hassles and personal financial disasters. But in these days of austerity, part-time jobs and zero-hour contracts that capitalists count as “jobs”—part-time gigs that don’t even let us feed ourselves properly—are not worthy of that name. The same goes for day labor, temp work, being subcontracted out, coming out of retirement, freelancing, internships, and other forms of slave labor. We are working too hard, too much, and not enough. Well, we need better. We produce all the value in this damn economy—we deserve better.

Every day we’re being dragged deeper into the capitalist nightmare. The reformists decry capitalism’s “excesses” by defining the problem not a capitalism itself, but as errors within an otherwise acceptable economic system. They add qualifiers: crony capitalism, disaster capitalism, corporate capitalism and then they offer they offer reassuring-sounding it-won’t-be-that-bad schemes like “ethical capitalism,” “conscious capitalism,” “social entrepreneurship,” and “green capitalism.” These reformists build careers as intellectuals by offering the comforting thought that if we could simply eliminate its worst elements, the system might yet be saved. But the worst aspects of capitalism aren’t a mistake. They’re inherent to it. Fortunately, faced with looming demise as global warming makes itself felt, increasing number of progressive thinkers  are acknowledging that capitalism itself is the problem. But are they pointing out the solution to the madness? Let’s see what remedies many of them point to: “collaborative commons,” “workplace democracy,” “workers’ co-ops,” “mutual aid,” the “sharing economy.” These sound good, and indeed some of them may be positive and necessary steps toward a non-capitalist mode of production. But they are just that—steps—and it’s a mistake to confuse them with the path as a whole. Unless the framework of capitalism is broken entirely, they circle back to the beginning every time. Capitalism is not damaged simply because we engage in activity that is cooperative, non-hierarchical, collaborative or “socialistic.” It can and often does assimilate this activity, monetize it to generate new revenue streams. At the same time it helps manage and manipulate our discontent. This is not post-capitalism. Exploitation in the process of production is still at the heart of the global economy. And as long as the value produced by workers is being appropriated and accumulated by capitalists, then we are still in capitalism.

So deep down, they are reformists even if they sound radical and don’t really want to eliminate capitalism completely, but rather to mitigate its worst effects. Because their hearts aren’t fully committed, they want an easy way out. They seek administrative measures and decrees like establishing “democracy in the workplace” and “guaranteed income.” They hope they can wait for the economy to evolve to some improved state through co-operatives or Worker Self-Directed Enterprises, even the return of sewer socialism in the form of municipalisation of local utilities. That these academic hucksters of stupid ideas are able to get a wide hearing is amazing.

To get beyond capitalism, we cannot wait or hope or engineer an upgrade. There is no easy way out. We need to emancipate ourselves from it through struggle; we need to destroy it. The good news is that it is possible to destroy it. It is the producers of material value—the working class—who are in a position to lead all of us out of capitalism. Their hands are on the means of production—factories and land and infrastructure. By taking it out of the hands of capitalists, they free it so it can be used by all to meet the needs of all, for a real common good. The proliferation of these fake anti-capitalist schemes should serve as a wake-up call—a loud and clear sign that we need to organize and build a real mass movement led by the working class against capitalism. We need to become a strong social force, so we can fight our exploiters and win. We gain nothing unless we fight for it. If we’re going to be strong enough to win our rights, then we need to organize. If unions hold us back or sell us out then we need to organize on our own, into a new labor movement that workers control. Let’s band together.  

For capitalists, workers are a necessary inconvenience. To make a profit in the productive sector, they must purchase our labor power. (They’d prefer go robotic or full-financial—moving money around rather than selling goods or services—and not have to deal with pesky workers. Sadly for them, robots aren’t everywhere yet. They still need us—without exploiting us, their whole economy falls apart.) For them, the employment rate is not determined by what society needs; it’s determined by how much money they can accumulate. If it’s not profitable to employ us, they throw us in the street. This is the framework within which capitalists conceive of the “employment rate.” They evaluate the numbers with certain questions on their minds, namely: “Should we employ more workers or can we get a higher rate of profit playing the market?” and “Is the masses’ discontent threatening social disorder, making it necessary to ease their paina little bit?”

We working people, on the other hand, consider being employed as “making a living.” In our framework, everyone has the right to do so. We, who have to hawk our labor power and services on the open market, value our labor power differently than capitalists do. For us, its value is equal to whatever it takes to live. “Live” and “survive” are two different things—we’re not talking about the bare minimum that will keep us just alive enough to return to work tomorrow. At a bare minimum, “employment” should provide us and our families with certain basics: a comfortable home, a broad and stimulating education, quality clothing, restful vacations, high-quality food and medical care, convenient and cheap transportation. These are the basic human rights of everyone who lives in a functioning society, yet we’ve been so conditioned to deprivation that these simple necessities have become wild fantasies. We yearn for them when buying lottery tickets, dreaming of beating ridiculous odds in the hope of easing the intolerable stress of constant hassles and personal financial disasters. But in these days of austerity, part-time jobs and zero-hour contracts that capitalists count as “jobs”—part-time gigs that don’t even let us feed ourselves properly—are not worthy of that name. The same goes for day labor, temp work, being subcontracted out, coming out of retirement, freelancing, internships, and other forms of slave labor. We are working too hard, too much, and not enough. Well, we need better. We produce all the value in this damn economy—we deserve better.

Every day we’re being dragged deeper into the capitalist nightmare. The reformists decry capitalism’s “excesses” by defining the problem not a capitalism itself, but as errors within an otherwise acceptable economic system. They add qualifiers: crony capitalism, disaster capitalism, corporate capitalism and then they offer they offer reassuring-sounding it-won’t-be-that-bad schemes like “ethical capitalism,” “conscious capitalism,” “social entrepreneurship,” and “green capitalism.” These reformists build careers as intellectuals by offering the comforting thought that if we could simply eliminate its worst elements, the system might yet be saved. But the worst aspects of capitalism aren’t a mistake. They’re inherent to it. Fortunately, faced with looming demise as global warming makes itself felt, increasing number of progressive thinkers  are acknowledging that capitalism itself is the problem. But are they pointing out the solution to the madness? Let’s see what remedies many of them point to: “collaborative commons,” “workplace democracy,” “workers’ co-ops,” “mutual aid,” the “sharing economy.” These sound good, and indeed some of them may be positive and necessary steps toward a non-capitalist mode of production. But they are just that—steps—and it’s a mistake to confuse them with the path as a whole. Unless the framework of capitalism is broken entirely, they circle back to the beginning every time. Capitalism is not damaged simply because we engage in activity that is cooperative, non-hierarchical, collaborative or “socialistic.” It can and often does assimilate this activity, monetize it to generate new revenue streams. At the same time it helps manage and manipulate our discontent. This is not post-capitalism. Exploitation in the process of production is still at the heart of the global economy. And as long as the value produced by workers is being appropriated and accumulated by capitalists, then we are still in capitalism.

So deep down, they are reformists even if they sound radical and don’t really want to eliminate capitalism completely, but rather to mitigate its worst effects. Because their hearts aren’t fully committed, they want an easy way out. They seek administrative measures and decrees like establishing “democracy in the workplace” and “guaranteed income.” They hope they can wait for the economy to evolve to some improved state through co-operatives or Worker Self-Directed Enterprises, even the return of sewer socialism in the form of municipalisation of local utilities. That these academic hucksters of stupid ideas are able to get a wide hearing is amazing.

To get beyond capitalism, we cannot wait or hope or engineer an upgrade. There is no easy way out. We need to emancipate ourselves from it through struggle; we need to destroy it. The good news is that it is possible to destroy it. It is the producers of material value—the working class—who are in a position to lead all of us out of capitalism. Their hands are on the means of production—factories and land and infrastructure. By taking it out of the hands of capitalists, they free it so it can be used by all to meet the needs of all, for a real common good. The proliferation of these fake anti-capitalist schemes should serve as a wake-up call—a loud and clear sign that we need to organize and build a real mass movement led by the working class against capitalism. We need to become a strong social force, so we can fight our exploiters and win. We gain nothing unless we fight for it. If we’re going to be strong enough to win our rights, then we need to organize. If unions hold us back or sell us out then we need to organize on our own, into a new labor movement that workers control. Let’s band together.