All equal but not all the same

There is no future on the basis of capitalism in the world. Unless we overthrow capitalism, only environmental collapse and starvation await us. Capitalism or socialism is now a life and death issue. Revolution is now practical politics for humanity’s survival. But if we can achieve socialism the result is wealth for all and the good things of life for everybody. A comfortable abode, a dining table full of wholesome food and wardrobes of elegant clothes. There will be opportunity and means to the world. Leisure to read and play and work. No poverty anymore with its filth and sickness and vice. You say all this is a dream? No, no dream at all, but an immediate possibility. By means of the vast new technology that now exists of this modern world, we can produce wealth enough for all without any trouble whatever. There is no doubt at all about this. Modern inventions have so increased the productive capacity that mankind across the globe could have an abundance of wealth by working only 3 or 4 hours a day or even a week. Socialists propose to claim a share in this abundance for all people and not for the luxury and privilege of the 1%. Socialists proposes to take for ourselves this vast new technology and use it for satisfying the needs of all, instead of producing for the profit of the few. If we owned the factories and the machinery ourselves and all of us worked at them to produce wealth for our own use and happiness, all the troubles of poverty would disappear at once. The only thing that lies between us and the promise of prosperity is the private ownership of the means of producing wealth. Therefore, what Socialism proposes to do, in order to get wealth for all, is to take possession of the instruments of production and run them for the use of us all.

Those people who are deprived of their right to use the machinery they have made and to get the riches they make, shall come together in a political party and vote the employers out of power.

 These men and women who are denied the right to use their own machinery are the men who now work for wages, a bare living. They have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. This is the working class. Socialism appeals to them on the ground of their self-interests. Our appeal to our fellow workers is simple, not simplistic, practical not impossible.  We indulge in no dreams or offer false hopes. We say to our fellow worker: “Come with us, join our party, vote yourselves into power, use that power of the State to capture back those means of wealth production which the capitalists have stolen from you, and then you will get all that abundance which modern inventions entitle you to.” We've got the abundance - we just have to transform the way we share it out.

The mission of the Socialist Party is to muster all workers under our banner and whose real interests lie in abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, and also to shut out of the party the class whose real interests lie in the preservation of the present system. It is class war, a mighty battle of the ballots. How are we to achieve socialism? A political Party of class-conscious workers is how. Otherwise we are going to a capitalist Hell. Our countries and cities are huge dumping grounds full of poverty, homelessness, joblessness, crime, illiteracy, ill-health, racism, sexism, homophobia, domestic and random violence, addictions, ad nauseam. There is less of everything for everybody except stress and rage. Hitlerite wannabes menace the innocent and the vulnerable.

To many people, socialism is a call for violent action. The ruling class would have it so; they claim for themselves the mantle of progress, logic, truth, beauty, and knowledge. They represent the socialist as deluded, irrational, psychotic, and hateful. But just look at these high-sounding critics; the maniacs in the Pentagon; the perverted and distorted finance capitalists who would see a world plunged into barbarism before they relinquish a penny of their fabulous profits; the power-mad industrialists who calmly grind the working class to dust beneath the wheels of automation; the professors of knowledge who devote their lives to keeping knowledge away from the people. Are these people sane? Socialists are infinitely more rational than our ruling class.

There will be no need of a public coercive force to maintain the power of one class over another, to protect the property of one from the assaults of the other, to assure the continuation of oppression and exploitation. There is ample opportunity for the intellectual development of all. All perform their social duty as a matter of course. What need is there for compulsion, for a machinery of force? To prevent burglary? What will there be to steal in the midst of abundance? To prevent murder or rape? Such cases will be exceedingly rare, we may be sure, and in any case they will require medical attention or confinement for the guilty one in a secure hospital, and not a jail. To regulate traffic? But for that and similar tasks there will be needed, not policemen, as we know them now, but traffic wardens assigned to perform that task. Abundance for all? Free for all to take? A society without money?  They say it is impossible. As the necessities and comforts of life become increasingly abundant, and the differences between physical and mental labour, between town and country are eliminated – the need for tolerating even the last vestiges of inequality will disappear as a matter of course. This may seem incredible to a mind thoroughly poisoned with capitalist prejudices. But why should it be incredible? Mankind will prove that class divisions, poverty and oppression are not unavoidable necessary parts of life. In the socialist society we will show that abundance, freedom and equality are not only possible but the natural condition for the new history of humanity.

Men dying of thirst will fight for a drink at a desert oasis. But if they are up to their hips in water they may have a thousand differences among themselves, but they will not even dream of fighting for a drink. A dozen men in a prison cell with only one tiny window may trample over each other in the fight to get to that tiny source of fresh air. But outside, whoever thinks of fighting for air to breathe, or for more air than the next man? Announce a shortage of bread, and immediately a long line will form, with everyone racing to get there first, and a policeman on hand to “keep order.” But if everyone knew that there is an ample supply of bread today, and there will be just as large a supply tomorrow and the next day, there would be no line, no race, no conflict; nobody would try to hoard an extra loaf in order to make sure of eating the next day; and there would be no need of a policeman to back up his orders by force. If society could assure everyone of as ample and constant a supply of bread as there is of air, why would anyone need or want a greater right to buy bread than his neighbour? Bread is used here only as the simplest illustration. But the same applies to all other foods, to clothing, to shelter, to books, to means of transportation.

A planned organised society, efficiently utilising our present productive equipment and the better equipment to come, could easily assure abundance to all. In return, society could confidently expect every citizen to contribute his or her best voluntarily.

The Workers Will Pay

Gap Inc. announced on June 15 that it will close about one hundred and seventy-five stores in North America over the next few years, including one hundred and forty this fiscal year. To heighten the insecurity of their employees, Gap's director of public relations in Canada said, "Since the stores are closing over the course of the year, we will be reviewing each store on a case-by-case basis as we prepare for closure or as leases expire." About 250 jobs will be lost from the company's North American headquarters in San Francisco as well as the loss of jobs for the employees at the closed stores. The reason, according to the founder of Level 5 Strategy group based in Toronto is that, "It's a brand that appears to have stalled. They haven't continued to refresh the brand and its value proposition." This means simply that a group of capitalists simply haven't kept up with the competition. That means nothing to the workers, is in no way their fault, but they are the ones who will lose livelihoods. Make no mistake, once capital does not bring in the required return, the workers will pay. John  Ayers.

Dirt Products

South America's largest body of fresh water, Lake Titicaca is so polluted that local fishermen are having a hard time catching anything, let alone making a living. Most pollution on the Bolivian side, such as toxic heavy metals like arsenic and lead originates in El Alto, a city of one million near La Paz. Seventy per cent of El Alto's factories operate illegally and are not monitored for pollution. One might wonder how a government can sit idly by while this goes on. It's more than probable that the factories are owned by global corporations who are there because of the lax regulations and failure to monitor and, if regulated, would move to another place where they could operate as they wished to maximize profit and leave El Alto and its workers high and dry. Having despoiled Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, capital is seeking new horizons to continue dirty production wherever it can. Such is the nature of capitalism. John Ayers.

Feasible Socialism (Conclusion)

Socialism means a moneyless, wageless, stateless commonwealth. This was the general understanding of what socialism meant. Marx didn't talk about a "transitional society". He talked about the lower phase of communism. It was still communism...that is, a classless society. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”

Who decides what your ability or need is? It would take some sort of position of power to determine who is in need and who has ability. Power naturally corrupts and tends to find ways to increase and consolidate power. After time, you are left with those who have consolidated power to abuse, and those who don't. Therefore who decides? The answer, you do! This is the whole point of the communist slogan "from each according to ability to each according to need". The autonomy of the individual is maximised and as a result, we all benefit. As the Communist Manifesto put it:

"In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all"

Specifically a communist (aka socialist) society - or at least what Marx called the "higher stage" of communism - exhibits two key features:

1) Free access to goods and services - no buying and selling. No barter. You simply go to the distribution point and take what you require according to your self determined needs. This depends on there being a relatively advanced technological infrastructure to produce enough to satisfy our basic needs. Such a possibility already exists. Capitalism, however, increasingly thwarts this potential. In fact, most of the work we do today in the formal sector will be completely unnecessary in a communist society - it serves only to prop up capitalism. What possible use would there be for a banking system under communism, for example? We could effectively more than double the quantities of resources and human labour power available for socially useful production by scrapping capitalism. Communism will destroy the need for greed and conspicuous consumption

2) Voluntary labour. Your contribution to society is completely voluntary. There is no wage labour or other forms of co-erced labour. You can do as little or as much work as you choose. And you can do as many different kinds of jobs as you want, too. The presumption is that people would freely choose to work under communism for all sorts of reasons:

- the conditions under which we work will be radically different, without an employing class dictating terms work will become fulfilling and pleasant

- we need to work, to express ourselves creatively

- with free access to goods, conspicuous consumption will be rendered meaningless as a way of gaining respect and social esteem. Which leaves only what we give to society as a way of gaining the respect of our peers. This should not be underestimated; it is one of the most important motivational drives in human beings as numerous studies in industrial psychology have confimed

- Socialism depends on people recognising our mutual interdependence. There is, in other words, a sense of moral obligation that goes with the territory

- Socialism will permit a far greater degree of technological adaptation without the constraints of the profit system. Intrinsically backbreaking or unpleasannt work can be automated. Conversely some work may be deliberately made more labour intensive and craft based.

- Even under capitalism today most work is unpaid or unremunerated - the household economy, the volunteer sector and so on. So it is not as if this is something we are unaccustomed to. Volunteers moreover tend to be the most highly motivated as studies have confirmed; they dont require so called external incentives

- We will get rid of an awful lot of crappy and pointless jobs that serve as a disincentive to work

- since we would be free to do any job we chose to what this means in effect is that for any particular job there would be a massive back-up supply of labour to cover it consisting of most people in society. In capitalism this cannot happen since labour mobility is severely restricted since if you have a job you cannot just choose to abandon it for the sake of another more urgent job from the standpoint of society

With these two core characteristics of a socialist society - free access to goods and services plus volunteer labour - there can be no political leverage that anyone or any group could exercise over anyone else. The material basis of class power would have completely dissolved. What we would be left with is simply human beings being free to express their fundamentally social and cooperative nature

Free access communism is not going to be brought to the point of collapse by the fact that we cannot all have a Porshe or Ferrari parked outside our front door. Imagine what it could be like without a boss class on our backs? Imagine what our workplaces could become without the cost cutting constraints of capitalism and having the freedom to decide on these matters ourselves. Imagine not being tied tdown to one single kind of job all the time but being given the opportunity to experiment with different jobs, to travel abroad to work in new places, to taste new experiences. Imagine a moneyeless, wageless communist world in which most of the occupations that we do today - from bankers to pay departments to arms producers to sales-people - will simply disappear at a stroke releasing vast amounts of resources and, yes, human labour power as well for socially useful production. Kropotkin was quite right. We dont need the whiplash of the wages system to compel us to work. The mere fact that we recognise our mutual interdependence in a society in which we will fully realise our social nature will suffice to impose upon us a sense of moral obligation to contribute to the common good of our own free will. Indeed we already, to some extent, do this today even under capitalism, given that fully half of all the work that we do today is completely unremunerated. How much more conducive will a communist moral economy be to the performance of unremunerated work is not hard to see.

The Left-wing tend to be nothing more than the reformist advocates of some kind of state-administered capitalism, paying lip service to authentic socialism but in practice obstructing any real movement towards socialism. The Left-wing, by and large, does not stand for socialism and persistently misrepresents what socialism is all about by identifying it with some kind of state involvement in the economy. To suggest that free access communism would be less efficient than capitalism ignores among other things that at least half the work done under capitalism serves no socially useful purpose whatsoever and contributes nothing to human wellbeing in any meaningful way - it is merely done to keep the capitalist monetary system ticking over. For instance, most of the work carried out today in the formal sector of the capitalist economy will no longer be needed in communism. What useful work does a banker or pay-roll official do today, for instance? Absolutely nothing. When production for sale on market ceases to exist and we produce simply and solely for need, a huge and growing chunk of the work we do today will no longer be required. Conservatively speaking, we can at least double the available manpower and material resources for socially useful production. If that is not a huge advance in efficiency then what is? In free access communism we will be able to do more with far less because we will producing directly for use and not for sale. The capitalist monetary system is the most extraordinary wasteful form of economic organisation but we are sure the capitalists will be gratified to learn that someon the left should spring to the defence of their system against the communist alternative.

The notion that capitalism can only be defined as a system where capital is owned privately for a profit is absurd. Doesn't capital owned by the state for example count as capitalism? Doesn't the very fact that means of production take the form of capital, irrespective of who owns it, make the system capitalist? The theory of state capitalism does not require there to be a class of private owners of capital, for there to be capitalism. This is a legalistic de jure approach to capitalism whereas a historical materialist approach looks instead at the de facto relations of production. It argues that there was a capitalist class in the Soviet Union that collectively owned the means of production as a class by virtue of their complete control of the state - the nomenklatura. Ownership and control are in fact inseparable. Ultimate control IS ownership. We are not saying there were no differences between the state capitalism and the private or mixed-economy capitalism but in their essentials they were the same. In Socialism Utopian and Scientific Engels noted how capitalism was rapidly evolving away from private ownership of capital for profit by individual capitalist to joint stock companies and on to ownership by the state. Here is what he said concerning the latter

"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head." Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

This does not seem to be compatible with the notion of "private profit" or ownership by private individuals but, clearly, what Engels is saying here is that state ownership is still very much capitalism. Of course you can chose to define it in whatever way you want but in the Marxian tradition the relation between "capital" and "wage labour" is absolutely pivotal to any real understanding capitalism. Hence statements like these.

“Capital therefore presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence.” (Wage Labour and Capital)

and

“To say that the interests of capital and the interests of the workers are identical, signifies only this: that capital and wage-labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other."

So, no, it is not essentially to do with "private" ownership and profit. This is misleading. This idea that capitalism rests on de jure legal ownership of capital by private individuals is essentially an idealist notion which defines a mode of production in terms of its legal superstructure. With state ownership your have in effect collective ownership by the capitalist class via their control of the state apparatus itself. From the point of the view of the worker it makes absolutely no difference whether their employers is the state or a "private" business. From the point of view of the consumer too state property is private property and for which reason a payment is required.

"The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

Engels is saying is that by bringing the scattered means of production under state ownership this will facilitate the transformation of these means into common property. So instead of having to deal with many separate individual capitalists we would have only to deal with the "national capitalist" as it were. This is what is meant by the "technical conditions" Engels speaks of - the centralised structure of decision making that socialism would inherit from (state) capitalism

As opponents of central planning we would disagree strongly with Engels on this particular point. Neverthless, Engels is clearly NOT suggesting that state ownership of the means of production, even though it faciilitates centralised decisionmaking (which he seems to have thought would be important and useful for a socialist society) is anything other than a form of capitalist ownership.

It was Kropotkin who said:

"No hard and fast line can be drawn between the work of one and the work of another. To measure them by results leads to absurdity. To divide them into fractions and measured them by hours of labour leads to absurdity also. One course remains: not to measure them at all, but to recognise the right of all who take part in productive labour first of all to live – and then to enjoy the comforts of life" (The Wage System)

Communism is not about "setting prices at zero" as some like Paul Mason has been inferring. It is about doing away with the whole notion of price and exchange value so that the very concept of "setting prices at zero" is a meaningless one as far as communism is concerned. To talk of setting prices at any level presupposes still a capitalist framework. If the supermarkets tomorrow said 'All cans of beans are free' the shelves would be cleared in hours. But if they said the same the next day, and the next, it would become pointless to go and fill your arms with cans of beans, and easier to just go and take a reasonable stock to keep close to hand. That is, money (likewise price) is not abolished, but the need for money is rendered redundant. Just because individuals in a free access economy are not restricted by money or labour vouchers from taking what they want does not mean they will want to take everything they can possibly lay their hands on. As for labour vouchers. Similarly just because these same individuals will not be externally compelled to work by the fact that their consumption is explicitly linked to their work contribution does not mean they will not contribute to the work. The point about a communist society proper - or higher communism - is that there is no objective or external econonomic mechanism - like money or labour vouchers - mediating beween the individual and his or her needs or wants. This includes the desire to work which would become as Marx put it in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, "life´s prime want". A means by which we express ourselves, our individuality. Kautsky has the right take on that, why bother mimicking the pricing mechanism when there is already a perfectly good way of doing that?

Money is a social relationship. It links buyers and sellers in a market and therefore presupposes these things. But communism implies common ownership of the means of production. Where everybody owns the means of production it is not logically possible to have economic exchange. Exchange implies owners and non-owners. When I exchange something with you I am exchanging property title to this thing for some other thing. If you own a factory producing widgets you can sell these widgets on because you own them by virtue of owning the factory that produced them. It follows that if everyone in society owned the factory there would be no one to whom these widgets could be sold or exchanged. If there is no economic exchange then there is no reason to have a means of exchange - money. Money is a mean of exchange amongst other things and what it implies is the existence of an exchange economy which is completely incompatible with the idea of your "public" owning the means of production. Exchange denotes a transfer of ownership rights of the things being exchanged. This cannot happen where everyone owns the means of production, common ownership rules out the exchange of products and hence money. Logically then if you advocate the use of money and hence exchange, this means you advocate a system based on sectional or private ownership of the means of production - not common ownership. Money is not some kind of neutral tool of administration; it is fundamentally a social relationship between people. Of course, money existed before capitalism but, in its generalised usage, it corresponds to, and demonstrates, the existence of capitalist relations of production as a monetised economy par excellance. Since there will be no economic exchange transactions in socialism - socialism being based on common ownership of the means of production - this reason falls away along with the need for money.

This is why socialists totally reject the idea of using money not only - obviously - in a communist society but in any supposed transition to such a society. A transitional stage that continiued to use money would not be a transition at all. It would still be a capitalist society based on generalised commodity production. That is why Marx advocated labour vouchers - which we reject as too as both unnecessary and far too cumbersome - precisely because it was not money.

Many leftists have aligned themselves with the argument of the arch pro-capitalist Ludwig von Mises in asserting the need for a common universal unit of accounting. According to this argument, only by means of such a unit can we directly compare different bundles of inputs and thus supposedly select the "least cost "combination. For Mises this unit is money; for some so-called leftists labour values. The purpose of a common unit of account is to expedite economic exchange - what communism will lack - rather than the actual efficient deployment of resources as such. Having a common unit of account has nothing to do with the technical organisation of production itself and everything to do with capitalism's own priorities such as the need to determine profitability and the rate of exploitation.

Free access communism is a form of "generalised reciprocity" par excellance, a “gift economy”, which as the term itself suggests denotes the absence of any kind of quid pro quo set up.

1) The amount of work that needs to be done by comparison with today will be much less because of the elimination of all that socially uselsss labour that only serves to prop up the capitalist money economy - from bankers , pay to tax collectors and a thousand and one other occupations. Less work means a much reduced per capita workload on average which, in turn, means less resistance to working since our attitutde to work is partly conditioned by how much time we are required to do it. If you only have to do 2 hours per week on a boring job you are going to regard it differently than if you have to do it for 20 hours

2) A volunteer economy means that we are not stuck with just one job but can try a variety so there is a labour reservoir in depth for any particular job - even the most onerous or boring - and to an extent that is simply not possible under capitalist employment.

3) With free access to goods and services there is only one way in which you can acquire status and the respect and esteem of your fellows - through your contribution to society. Conspicuous consumption and the accumulation of private wealth would be rendered meaningless by the simple fact that all wealth is freely available for direct appropriation

4) The terms and conditions of work will be radically different without the institution of capitalist employment. It is often these terms and conditions - in particular the authoritarian structure of the capitalist workplace - that are the real problem rather than the work itself

5) Without the profit motive there will be far greater scope to adapt technology to suit our inclinations. Some work might be subject to greater automation; other work might be made more artisan or skilled-based

6) In a communist society our mutual interdependence will be much more transparent and the sense of moral obligation to give according to one's ability in return for taking according to one's need will correspondingly be much more sharply defined and enhanced as a motivating factor

7) A communist society cannot be introduced except when the great majority understand and want it. Having struggled to achieve it can it seriously be maintained that they would willingly allow it to be jeopardised? The reductio as absurdum argument

8) Work, loosely defined as meaningful productive activity is actually a fundamental human need, not simply an economic requirement. Try sitting around on your ass for week doing nothing and you will soon find yourself climbing up the wall out of sheer boredom. Prison riots have been known to break out on occasions when frustrated prisoners are denied work opportunities and even under the severe conditions they have to contend with.

9) Even under capitalism just over half of the work that we do is completely unpaid and outside of the money economy. This is by no means just confined to the household sector - think for example of international volunteers such as the VSO - and it gives the lie to the capitalist argument that the only way you can induce people to work is paying them to do it

Since you don’t have a quid pro quo set up with free access communism, individuals are free to do whatever work they chose. What work needs to be done as explained can be readily communicated through the appropriate channels such as job centres, online facilities and so on. You don’t have the same kind of dichotomous view induced by a quid pro quo set up which pits your self-interest against the interests of others. So social opinion become becomes a much more powerful force in society. Work that needs to be done most urgently and is not perhaps being done to the extent required - e.g. garbage collection - gains in status to the extent that it remains undone. People work for all sorts of reasons not just because they "like it". This is why we find the usual objections to free access communism being trotted out to be simplistic and reductionist. Labour at this higher stage is no longer coerced labour in the sense that an individual's access to goods (via their "income") is made dependent upon his or her contribution. On the contrary, the labour of freely associated individuals becomes life's "prime want". It becomes entirely voluntary labour, freely offered. The compulsion to produce without which human life could not continue will then operate exclusively on the social plane and not directly upon individuals who, neverthless, will have realised their fully social nature in a communist society and respond accordingly to the requirements of society to produce and reproduce its own means of existence. This is what constitutes the essence of communism - the realisation of our true social nature and of the need to contribute to society's maintenance and wellbeing - and it is why I have long argued that communism needs to be conceived as what is technically called a "moral economy"

The problem for the notion of apportioning labour time according some single vast society wide plan. Because production is a socialised process, because everything is interconnected - you need to ensure a certain amount of input X is produced in order to ensure that a certain amount of consumer good Y is produced - the ratios of millions upon millions of inputs and outputs have to be worked out in advance and the relative proportions or amounts have to be produced precisely in accordance with the Plan because the knock on consequences of any shortfall, say, will ramify through the whole economy and upset the carefully worked out calculations of the central planners. So finally on to the question of labour time allocation within the context of a definite social plan. It seems to me that if you are going to allocate labour in this predetermined a priori fashion then, in order for the definite social plan to be effectively implemented to the letter, you would need some way of ensuring that labour in its multiple forms is supplied in precisely the quantities needed in order to ensure that the technical ratios of inputs and outputs embodied in the plan are complied with. How can this can this be done without the most resolute and coerceive central direction of labour and the conception cannot possibly accommodated to the principle "from each according to ability to each according to need". It cannot be done and the fact that it cannot be done points to the need for a radically different perspective on the nature of a communist society to the one he is proposing. Actually even Marx's speculations on the nature of work and the abolition of the division of labour in communism directly contradict this notion in the famous quote from the German Ideology:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.”

Asbestos Again

Families of workers affected by asbestos related cancers have called for better screening for the condition. Illnesses associated with working in the construction industry are thought to kill more than 4,000 people across the UK every year.

Clydeside Action on Asbestos - the biggest asbestos charity in Scotland - called for more investment in screening, either through routine X-rays or a simple blood test that would detect illnesses. 

The charity's chairwoman, said catching the disease at the earlier possible opportunity would allow patients to "start making plans for their life and their families and so forth, but also to receive any form of treatment that may be available." 

Feasible Socialism (6)

The goal of social ownership and democratic control of production and distribution has to be articulated directly. To seek political improvements to the capitalist system is a distraction from what needs to be done. When we insist that the working class has to be educated before it can make progress, some people on the left who have good intentions say that they "don't want to wait that long." But this isn't an option. A "revolution" carried out by people who are angry at the injustices of the old social system, but unclear about what to replace it with, or not sufficiently dedicated to the democratic structure of the new system, is the road to a new dictatorship. The working class who will create a socialist society must also know how to operate it. They need to understand what the basic rules of the game are, so to speak. There needs to be a widespread consensus about what to expect of people if a socialist society is to properly function. "Anti-capitalism" in itself can never succeed in overthrowing capitalism. To bring capitalism to an an end we need to have a viable alternative to put in its place. And this is an alternative that we need to be conscious and desirous of before it can ever be put in place. A class imbued with socialist consciousness will be far more militant and empowered than any amount of mere "anti-capitalism". Socialist consciousness is class consciousness in its most developed sense. The idea that such an alternative could somehow materialise out of thin air without a majority of workers actually wanting it or knowing about it is simply not realistic. Such an alternative can function if people know what it entails. In itself, engaging a workplace struggles within capitalism - important though this is – doesn’t take us much forward since capitalism can only ever be run in the interest of capital. The capitalist system isn't a failure due to bad leaders or bad policies, but because of the kind of system that it is.

For socialism to be established, there are two fundamental preconditions that must be met.Firstly, the productive potential of society must have been developed to the point where, generally speaking, we can produce enough for all. This is not now a problem as we have long since reached this point. However, this does require that we appreciate what is meant by "enough" and that we do not project on to socialism the insatiable consumerism of capitalism. Secondly, the establishment of socialism presupposes the existence of a mass socialist movement and a profound change in social outlook. It is simply not reasonable to suppose that the desire for socialism on such a large scale, and the conscious understanding of what it entails on the part of all concerned, would not influence the way people behaved in socialism and towards each other. Would they want to jeopardise the new society they had helped create? Of course not.

Humans behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in. Human behaviour reflects society. In a society such as capitalism, people's needs are not met and reasonable people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard goods because possession provides some security. People have a tendency to distrust others because the world is organized in such a dog-eat-dog manner. If people didn't work society would obviously fall apart. To establish socialism the vast majority must consciously decide that they want socialism and that they are prepared to work in socialist society. If people want too much? In a socialist society "too much" can only mean "more than is sustainably produced."

If people decide that they (individually and as a society) need to over-consume then socialism cannot possibly work. Under capitalism, there is a very large industry devoted to creating needs. Capitalism requires consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and drives us to consume up to, and past, our ability to pay for that consumption. In a system of capitalist competition, there is a built-in tendency to stimulate demand to a maximum extent. Firms, for example, need to persuade customers to buy their products or they go out of business. They would not otherwise spend the vast amounts they do spend on advertising. There is also in capitalist society a tendency for individuals to seek to validate their sense of worth through the accumulation of possessions. As Marx contended, the prevailing ideas of society are those of its ruling class then we can understand why, when the wealth of that class so preoccupies the minds of its members, such a notion of status should be so deep-rooted. It is this which helps to underpin the myth of infinite demand. It does not matter how modest one's real needs may be or how easily they may be met; capitalism's "consumer culture" leads one to want more than one may materially need since what the individual desires is to enhance his or her status within this hierarchal culture of consumerism and this is dependent upon acquiring more than others have got. But since others desire the same thing, the economic inequality inherent in a system of competitive capitalism must inevitably generate a pervasive sense of relative deprivation. What this amounts to is a kind of institutionalised envy and that will be unsustainable as more peoples are drawn into alienated capitalism.

In socialism, status based upon the material wealth at one's command, would be a meaningless concept. The notion of status based upon the conspicuous consumption of wealth would be devoid of meaning because individuals would stand in equal relation to the means of production and have free access to the resultant goods and services. Why take more than you need when you can freely take what you need? In socialism the only way in which individuals can command the esteem of others is through their contribution to society, and the stronger the movement for socialism grows the more will it subvert the prevailing capitalist ethos, in general, and its anachronistic notion of status, in particular.

The main features of Socialism are really quite simple:

Firstly, the new social system must be world-wide. The world must be regarded as one country and humanity as one people.

Secondly, all the people will co-operate to produce and distribute all the goods and services which are needed by mankind, each person willingly and freely, taking part in the way he feels he can do best.

Thirdly, all goods and services will be produced for use only, and having been produced , will be distributed , free , directly to the people so that each person’s needs are fully satisfied .

Fourthly, the land, factories, machines, mines, roads, railways, ships, and all those things which mankind needs to carry on producing the means of life, will belong to the whole people .

 Socialism would inherit from capitalism a complex worldwide productive network linking all the millions of individual productive units in the world (farms, mines, factories and so on ) into a single system. The links we are talking about are physical in the sense that one unit is linked to another either as the physical user of the others product or as the physical supplier of its materials, energy or equipment. Under capitalism such links are established in two ways: organisationally (as between different productive units forming part of the same private or state enterprise) and, above all, commercially (as when one enterprise contracts to buy something from, or to sell something to, another enterprise). In socialism the links would be exclusively organisational. We should be very wary of rejecting the structures or lines of communication left by capitalism. Sure, the internal structures of many organisations reflect their origin, but the decision-making processes inherited should surely be our first concern. Rather than re-inventing the wheel or developing new decision-making structures separate to and different from those of capitalism, we should by default use the existing systems, unless an alternative is clearly better. We should view capitalism's decision-making structures as a social tool developed by humans and currently used to smooth the operation of capitalism. But in the hands of a socialist majority, a switch will be flicked in this machine, and - with some tweaking here and there - it will be available to help enable socialism.

Stock or inventory control systems employing calculation in kind are absolutely indispensable to any kind of modern production system. While it is true that today they operate within a price environment that is not the same thing as saying they need such an environment in order to operate. Most students of Logistics will be able to explain how unnecessary dollars and cents are for its operation. The key to good stock management is the stock turnover rate – how rapidly stock is removed from the shelves – and the point at which it may need to be re-ordered. This will also be affected by considerations such as lead times – how long it takes for fresh stock to arrive – and the need to anticipate possible changes in demand. The Just-In-Time systems are another tried and trusted tool of warehousing and supply chains which can be utilised. The existence of buffer stocks provides for a period of re-adjustment.

The “Law of The Minimum” formulated by Justus von Liebig can be applied equally to the problem of resource allocation in any economy. For any given bundle of factors required to produce a given good, one of these will be the limiting factor. That is to say, the output of this good will be restricted by the availability of the factor in question constituting the limiting factor. All things being equal, it makes sense from an economic point of view to economise most on those things that are scarcest and to make greatest use of those things that are abundant. The claim that all factors are scarce because the use of any factor entails an opportunity cost and, consequently, need to be economised is not a very sensible approach to adopt. Effective economisation of resources requires discrimination and selection; you cannot treat every factor equally – that is, as equally scarce – or, if you do, this will result in gross misallocation of resources and economic inefficiency.

In any economy there needs to be some way of prioritising production goals. We can apply Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” as a guide to action. It would seem reasonable to suppose that needs that were most pressing and upon which the satisfaction of other needs are dependent would take priority over those other needs. We are talking here about our basic physiological needs for food, water, adequate sanitation and housing and so on. This would be reflected in the allocation of resources: high priority end goals would take precedence over low priority end goals where resources common to both are revealed (via the self-regulating system of stock control) to be in short supply.

Cost-benefit analysis might be used with which to evaluate a range of different projects facing such a society using some sort of “points system”. 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. The points attributed to these considerations would be subjective, in the sense that this would depend on a deliberate social decision rather than on some objective standard. In the sense that one of the aims of socialism is precisely to rescue humankind from the capitalist fixation with production time/money, cost-benefit type analyses, as a means of taking into account other factors, could therefore be said to be more appropriate for use in socialism than under capitalism. Using points systems to attribute relative importance in this way would not be to recreate some universal unit of evaluation and calculation, but simply to employ a technique to facilitate decision-making in particular concrete cases. The advantages /disadvantages and even the points attributed to them can, and normally would, differ from case to case. So what we are talking about is not a new abstract universal unit of measurement to replace money and economic value but one technique among others for reaching rational decisions in a society where the criterion of rationality is human welfare.

A broad picture of how Production-For-Use would operate in direct response to need can now be projected.

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.

This would be the self-regulating system of production for need, operating on the basis of the communication of need as definite quantities of things throughout the structure of production. Each production unit would convert the requirements communicated to it into its own material requirements and pass these on to its suppliers. This would be the sequence by which every element of labour required for the production of a final product would be known .This system of self-regulating production for use is achieved through communications. Socialism would make full use of the means communications which have developed such as the existing system of information technology that can provide for instant world-wide contact as well as facilities for storing and processing millions of pieces of information.

Feasible Socialism (5)

Present-day society does not concern itself with determining the needs of society. Planned economy and capitalism are irreconcilable contradictions; the one excludes the other. If an economy is planned, then it has also ceased to be a capitalist economy. Experience has proved that planning under capitalism is impossible. When we socialists speak of planned economy we do not mean a plan which leaves all the wastefulness, all the inefficiency and all the criminal parasitism of capitalism untouched. When we socialists speak of a society organized on the basis of planned production and distribution we mean something entirely different. What we have in mind is very simple. It is clear-cut. Do away with production for profit.

The application of new technologies to human society shows what immense possibilities for the satisfaction of human wants are contained in the achievements of science and in its future growth. It can reduce human labour to the easy task of monitoring computerised automated machinery a few hours a day. It leaves mankind free to engage in other pursuits. Everybody is responsible for the welfare of all, everybody works according to his or her ability and everybody receives from the common stock of goods according to need. No exploitation, no oppression, no insecurity, no poverty. Life is made humane. This isn’t a utopia. This isn’t a dream. What we propose is real, capable of fulfillment, by the forces that already exist and are in operation.

Capitalism is production for the market. The surplus-value created by the workers cannot be realized by the capitalist in the form of profit until the product has been sold on the market. It should be borne in mind that the market, under capitalism, has a far wider meaning than is usually understood by that term. The capitalist market is not confined to the consumers who buy the simple commodities required for life – food, clothing, home furnishings and the like. Every capitalist enterprise produces for the market. But each one is itself a market. Mines buy lumber, tools and machines. Steel mills buy coal, brick, concrete, iron, machinery. Machine-tool plants buy machines and metals. Automobile factories buy machine tools, metals, glass, rubber, woolens and even agricultural products. Textile mills buy machines, cotton, wool and synthetic materials.

How does a capitalist enterprise know how many of its products can be sold on the market, in other words, how many it can safely turn out for any given period? It does not know. It cannot know. All it can do is to depend on the market price and a judgment of its trend. Prices are regulated by supply and demand. Low supply and great demand usually mean high prices, and vice versa. If prices are relatively high and it looks from the trend that they will stay high or go higher, the enterprise is stimulated to produce and to capture from its rivals as large a share of the market as possible. The market is the only basic regulator of capitalist production. As we shall see, however, it is a blind regulator.

The capitalist enterprise begins to produce. It acquires machinery or replaces its old equipment with new, more modern, more efficient equipment. It purchases raw materials, and uses more fuel and electrical energy. It may set up an annex to its building, not only to produce a greater quantity of its commodity but to produce each unit cheaper. It hires a larger working force.

By these very acts, it stimulates production in other enterprises. Wages in the pocket of the worker means a greater demand for ordinary consumers’ goods; the industries producing them therefore increase their activities. The machine-tool industry expands production; so do those industries which supply it with raw materials, construction materials, tools, etc. The raw materials’ industries – chemicals, mining, cotton and leather, steel and iron – likewise speed up production. Multiply all this a thousand times and you get a clearer picture of how production gets under way and develops on an even-wider scale. As the market expands, each capitalist is impelled to produce more, in the hope of capturing a greater share of the market and out of fear of losing out to his competitors. They, meanwhile, are prompted by the same considerations and act in the same way. Even in boom times, therefore, or rather precisely in time of economic boom, capitalist production has an inherent tendency to over-production. This tendency to over-produce does not refer to the real needs of society. There is over-production in relation to the capitalist market, that is, there is a tendency to produce more than can be disposed of on the market at a profit.

Let us illustrate the process. The supply of automobiles is low, the demand high; the market price is therefore high. The capitalist is stimulated to produce. Each automobile factory begins. None of them has anything like an exact idea of how much the market can absorb. None of them has an exact idea of how many automobiles its rivals are planning to produce. The competitive race commences. This race stimulates the same kind of unplanned production among the manufacturers of tires and other articles that go into the making of automobiles. This, in turn, stimulates the production of raw rubber for the tyres and the machinery required to process it. The production in the steel mills and aluminum plants is stimulated in the same blind way, each plant producing more and more in the hope of capturing a larger and larger share of the growing market. The same holds true of leather factories; the machine-tool industry; the coal mining and iron ore industries; the plate glass industry; and a hundred others.

The more they expand production, the more complex the problem becomes. The expansion in an industry that supplies automobile manufacturers, in turn stimulates all the industries that supply that one. The echo of the initial stimulus to production reverberates to the most distant parts of economic life and back again.  The trouble is that this expansion of production in boom times is in its very nature unplanned. For example, a 100 per cent increase in wheat production does not require a 100 per cent increase in the production of threshing machines. A 100 per cent increase in the production of threshing machines may mean a 100 per cent increase in the iron that goes into the machines, but only a 10 per cent increase in the production of the tools by which the threshers are made. A 100 per cent increase in cotton textiles may require only a 25 per cent increase in the production of textile machinery. What is more, this small increase in textile machinery for one year may suffice to keep textile production at the higher rate for five years – the market for textiles themselves is more continuous than the market for textile machinery, the one used up far more rapidly than the other.

If all the enterprises could be joined under one roof, and production planned with meticulous care, it would be possible to work out a schedule of expansion for each industry so that each would develop in harmonious proportion to the other. Planning could regulate the proportions in which each industry should be expanded so that the whole of economic life advances harmoniously. But we do not and cannot have that under capitalism. In place of planned production, there is anarchy of production, competitive production for the market.

Does the development of monopoly put an end to competition and anarchy of production? No, under capitalism, monopoly exists side by side with competition, even though it dominates it. As a matter of fact, monopoly makes competition fiercer and more brutal.

Under the conditions of “free enterprise,” a big multitude of capitalist enterprises compete with each other for the market. The weaker fall by the wayside or are absorbed by the stronger. The many are centralized into a few. The few tend to unite with each other into a cartel or a single trust, which has a complete monopoly in the industry. All the branches of industry undergo the same process, in one degree or another. But inasmuch as each combination or merger of enterprises is much stronger than all these enterprises when they existed independently, the competition between monopolies for the rule of the market becomes more violent.

If competition between one steel mill and another is replaced by a cartel in which they agree to share the market, or by a single trust which they establish, a new competition for the market develops between the steel trust and the aluminum trust, or between both of them and the newly-developed plastics industry. If coal and oil and electrical companies cease to compete with other coal and oil and electrical companies by establishing “horizontal trusts” (trusts covering a whole branch of economic life, like all of coal mining, all of steel making, etc.), a violent competition develops for the “fuel” or “energy” market between the coal monopoly and the oil monopoly. The competition is now between mighty and extremely ruthless giants. Competition between monopolies extend on a world-wide scale, in the form of struggles between the monopolies of one nation and those of the others.

 Production is carried on in every capitalist country in an anarchic, unplanned manner, and that it cannot be otherwise. What is the result?

As production gathers speed, free rein is given to what we have called the inherent tendency to over-production. Remember, the capitalist enterprise does not have an exact knowledge of the state of its particular industry, to say nothing of the market as a whole. Rising prices give the capitalist both the urge to produce in greater quantity and the confidence he will find a profitable market for his products. Each one produces without a knowledge of the proportions in which his enterprise or industry should expand with relation to the expansion of the other enterprises in the industry, or in relation to the expansion of other industries. Capitalism has no way of establishing what the total demand is, and therefore cannot organize the production of the total supply to meet this demand.

The automobile manufacturers (assuming that all of them work it out together) decide that the market will absorb sufficient automobiles to warrant an increase of production of fifty per cent. Steel, however, may very well increase sixty per cent in the rising market; rubber, seventy per cent; plate glass, eighty per cent; aluminum, ninety per cent. Each of these increases is based not only on a judgment of what automobile production will require, but on a judgment of what will be required in the form of steel, rubber, glass, aluminum and the like, in a hundred other industries, in tens of thousands of other enterprises, each of which operates independently, with its own production schedule, separate from all others.

There is no way of telling immediately that the demand has been exceeded by the supply. The rising market stimulates production in expectation of sales. Machinery and raw materials are not bought only for the orders received and guaranteed, but also for orders that are expected. Finished products, as well as raw materials, begin to accumulate, in the stores, in the warehouses and in the factories themselves. Industry begins to overproduce without knowing it and without being in a position to know it in advance.

At a certain point a collapse takes place, and very suddenly. Not enough buyers are to be found for the accumulated commodities of one enterprise or industry. Because of over-production, supply exceeds demand. Therefore, prices fall. If the enterprise is not ruined entirely by the fall in prices, it is at least compelled to suspend production or to cut down drastically. Workers are discharged or their wages reduced. Orders which the enterprise previously placed with other concerns are reduced or canceled altogether. Laid-off workers mean a reduction in the market of consumer goods. Canceled orders means a reduction in the market of industrial consumption.

Each enterprise is connected with all the others by thousands of ties. The collapse of one directly or indirectly, immediately or soon, affects others, and they in turn affect still others, until virtually all are involved. If, for example, automobile production declines, the production of steel, coal, aluminum, brass, rubber, glass and all the others which were dependent upon automobile production, also declines. There is in turn a decline in production in the enterprises and industries which depended for their market upon them.

Banking, which is inseparably connected with industry, is stricken by the collapse. In the boom period there were large borrowings by industries which were expanding to meet the rising market. With the fall of prices, the collapse or retrenchment of enterprises, the latter are unable to meet their obligations to the banks. What is more, individual depositors begin to withdraw their funds, fearing a coming crisis or needing money because they are now without work. The difficulties in the sphere of production, on one side, and the difficulties in the sphere of finance, on the other, combine meanwhile to upset or knock out entirely the small retailers and businessmen, dragged down by large stock accumulations, loans they made to finance these accumulations and falling prices.

Capitalist economy thus reaches the stage of crisis, which it experiences periodically. It is the kind of crisis that occurs only under capitalism, a crisis generated by over-production. Thousands of enterprises go bankrupt. Industries slow down production or stop producing altogether. Millions of workers are thrown on the street, without employment and without a source of income, except, possibly, inadequate relief or unemployment insurance. Plants do not operate because too many machines and too much raw material have been produced! People cannot buy the food and clothing and home furnishings they need because too much of them have been produced! Small businessmen are ruined. Millions of workers go hungry. Their homes are lost. Their family life becomes a nightmare of insecurity. Suffering and privation spread like wildfire.

The inevitable result of capitalist production is capitalist collapse. Production expands under capitalism only to come to a periodic standstill. Crises of general over-production can be delayed in appearing, but so long as capitalism exists they cannot be abolished.

The periodic crisis and collapse of production affects all the classes of society, but in different ways and in different degrees. The ruin of the middle classes is speeded up and strikes more and more of them. The weak ones who are driven to the wall by the crisis end up in the ranks of the working class. Their enterprises are absorbed by the more powerful capitalists, who are able to weather the storm with greater ease. The higher standard of living which the worker enjoyed during the “prosperity days” is “evened out,” so to speak, in the days of crisis, depression and stagnation. The modest savings with which he may have hoped to enjoy a comfortable old age, or which he may have planned to use presently in order to “go into business for himself,” are wiped out. The comforts and little luxuries he may have accumulated during the boom – a partly-paid-for home, a good radio, an automobile, time-and-back-saving electrical appliances for the home – must be disposed of for a song during the crisis.

Just as the boom brings big capital the overwhelming bulk of the benefits, in the form of stupendous profits, so the crisis brings the working class the great bulk of the burdens. The capitalists have large reserves, the workers have next to none. The capitalist class suffers some losses, but on the whole it survives the crisis with comparative ease. The big ones emerge from the crisis even stronger than before. While it rages, they swallow up their smaller and weaker competitors. They enter the new boom period with increased monopolistic strength. The crisis period shows most glaringly how reactionary anti-outworn a social system is capitalism. It allows the spectacle – what else can it do, being what it is? – of millions without work who want to work, of millions without adequate food because there is too much food, of industries shut down tight when there is just as urgent a need as ever for industrial products. The consequences of production for profit, of unplanned, unorganized, anarchic production, are shown in all their ugliness.

Capitalism refuses to resume production – because it cannot – until it has been stimulated once more by the prospect of a profitable market. It awaits the rise cold-bloodedly. Just as cold-bloodedly, it undertakes the wholesale destruction of useful commodities. Crops are burned in vast funeral pyres. Vegetables, coffee and other foodstuffs are dumped into the sea and destroyed as though they were poisonous. Hundreds of thousands are paid subsidies out of the public funds to “plow under,” to annihilate the precious yield of agriculture – cotton, wool, corn, wheat, rice, fruit, tobacco, hogs, sheep and cattle. Hunger stalks a land of plenty!

It is then we see the system in all its hideous absurdity, as the great destroyer of social wealth, and of human happiness, security and life itself. The wondrous productive machine which it developed and which, if rationally organized, could easily supply the needs and comforts of all, proves to be a mechanism that degrades the people to poverty, wretchedness, suffering and every social iniquity.

In a rational, planned society, people released from tasks in one sector of the economy could easily be found work turning out a new range of goods elsewhere. But we do not live in a rational, planned society. People only get new jobs in this society if the goods they make can be sold at a profit. There are three ways in which they can be sold: as consumer goods (to other workers), as capital goods (to the owners of other factories), or as exports (to workers or factory owners abroad). If none of these three markets is expanding, then you can make the most wonderful and useful things in the world, and still end up on the dole queue.

 Production can be worked by plan, the people as a whole deciding what they need and producing a sufficient supply to meet it. . Leisure could be used for creative development. All could live a comfortable life. Service replacing profit, planning replacing person whim, production could become both scientific and moral having for its motive the provision of the means of well-being for all.

This age, marred by the private ownership of the means of life, with all its crippling effects on science and industry with its immoral emphasis on acquisition, and with it: inevitable consequence of wealth and poverty, of class; distinctions and class discords, must go.  The regulation of production must not be left to the whim of individual producers, nor to groups of producers. That was why the instruments of production must be vested in public, not private hands. The interest of consumers and their need are the pivot around which productive industry should and must revolve. Consumers must be consulted, and consumers' needs must be ascertained. In proportion to the relative importance and urgency of those needs, goods must be supplied. Data to gauge those needs must be collected and then weighed need against need.

When it has been determined in which order and to what extent the various needs are to be supplied, then orders can be issued to producers specifying what commodities and in what quantities goods shall be produced. In that way factory workers and groups of factory workers, peasants and groups of peasants, will know what, where, and when to produce. There will be no glut, because need has been gauged; no slump, no boom, no unemployment. The Plan demanded, not only the ownership and control of all the resources of production, but also that the pace of production should be speeded up, in order that commodities of every kind might be available for distribution without delay.

'The X Factor: Revolutionary Political Consciousness'

An audio recording of a talk given by Glasgow member, Brian Gardner,  to the SPGB Summer School, 2015.

'The X Factor: Revolutionary Political Consciousness'

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio/x-factor-revolutionary-political-consciousness

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.