Socialism
can protect the planet and its peoples. The struggle for a livable
and sustainable world is a life and death issue. Socialism
is the idea that working people makes all of society run so why
shouldn’t they run all of society? There is throughout the world a
widespread popular perception that socialism is a coercive system,
and the experiences of the former Soviet Union and its satellites
states have justified that perception. Generally speaking, while the
world's peoples dislike capitalism, they fear socialism. This issue
is often at the heart of socialist's problems in persuasion. In the
face of the crisis in socialism the Left has to present an
alternative programme. We must bring socialist ideas anew.
The
Socialist Party rejects any notion of class dictatorship and any
dictatorial form of government and ever-expanding state apparatus.
Socialism is not state repression. We identify socialism first and
foremost with common ownership of the means of production, and with
the mass participation in and control over economic, political, and
social institutions and structures. Socialism has been the goal of
the working class political movement. The Left's unity is based on
support
for capitalism
and refusal
to fight capitalism.
Our
vision is where society becomes a "self-administered"
economy involving democratic bodies (elected by the entire adult
population and subject to recall ) at the global, regional and local
levels where decisions are made by the people actually
affected by them. Working
people must be able to express their needs and desires in the process
of decision-making, in the formulation and the implementation of the
allocation of resources. There is the assertion that the problem of
the sheer complexity of the economy makes such an aspiration an
illusory one, that it is not feasible, not workable in practice. They
claim industrial democracy of that scale is utopian. They insist that
the present price mechanism and the market system are indispensable
to directing resources in the most efficient way. Even some who claim
to Marxists suggest that some form of market will remain even in
money is replaced by labour-value vouchers of some sort. The
Socialist Party contests this argument and in fact posits that
assessing needs and directing resources to satisfying them will
actually be far simpler than employing use of money in those
calculations.
There
already exists a self-regulating system of stock control. How does it
work? You go to a supermarket and take something off the shelf.
Others do the same. What happens? The shelf empties and this
triggers an order for fresh stock from the suppliers. The suppliers
too might find they are running low of particular input to
manufacture the good in question. So this too triggers orders for
more stock of the input in question. And so on and so forth, all
along the supply chain. The economy knows exactly what the real
preferences of people are! These preferences are indicated by the
rate of take up or depletion of stock. Stocks which are are not
depleting very rapidly suggest that people don't have a particularly
strong preference for them while stock which are depleting rapidly
suggest a strong preference is being expressed. All this information
is instantly picked up and acted upon in a completely self-regulating
manner. The problem of the critics of socialism is that are not
looking at production and distribution in terms of a feedback
mechanism but are fixated on the idea of a priori central planning –
the command economy - deciding what to produce first and then setting
about to organise production according.
Capitalism
is built upon monetary accounting while socialism relies on
calculation-in-kind. There is no general unit of accounting involved
in this process such as money or labour hours or energy units. In
fact, every conceivable kind of economic system has to rely on
calculation in kind, including capitalism. Without it, the physical
organisation of production (e.g. maintaining inventories) would be
literally impossible. This is one reason why socialism holds a
decisive productive advantage over capitalism because of the
elimination for the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and
labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting. In
socialism calculations will be done directly in physical quantities
of real things, in use-values, without any general unit of
calculation.
Needs will be communicated to productive units as
requests for specific useful things, while productive units will
communicate their requirements to their suppliers as requests for
other useful things. Such non-monetary calculation of course already
happens , on the technical level, under capitalism. Once the choice
of productive method has been made, according to expected
profitability as revealed by monetary calculation, then the real
calculations in kind of what is needed to produce a specific good
commence so much raw materials, so much energy, so much labour. In
socialism this choice too will be made in real terms, in terms of the
real advantages and disadvantages of alternative methods and in terms
of, on the one hand, the utility of some good or some project in a
particular circumstance at a particular time and, on the other hand,
of the real “costs” in the same circumstances and at the same
time of the required materials, energy and productive effort. On the
one side would be recorded the resources (materials, energy,
equipment, labour) used up in production and on the other side the
amount of the good produced, together with any by-products. As
already stated this, of course, is done under capitalism but it is
doubled by an exchange value calculation: the exchange value of the
resources used up is recorded as the cost of production while the
exchange value of the output is recorded as sales receipts. If the
latter is greater than the former, then a profit has been made; if it
is less, then a loss is recorded.
Such
profit-and-loss accounting has no place in socialism and would be
quite meaningless.