The Cooperative Commonwealth

 

The term commonwealth came into popular usage during the 17^th C English Revolution when the monarchy was deposed and a republic was declared.

 Although the word commonwealth had no connection with the idea of wealth held in common, many radicals such as Gerrald Winstanley and the Diggers saw that it had a deeper meaning reflecting the new models of community they sought to build and not just a new model army.

It was a word to be later adopted in later revolution when the new United States of America accomplished their independence British colonialism. This framing of the states as a commonwealth derives from language of 17th-century thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and refers to the goal of creating a political community for the common good, a formulation of a constitution.

 Massachusetts, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and two U.S. territories, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, all call themselves commonwealths in the formulation of their constitutions.

 

 Now another American state to be described as a commonwealth if statehood is granted to Washington DC.

The would-be 51st US state will be officially titled the “State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth”

 

Socialist commonwealth, cooperative commonwealth

It was related to commonweal – that is, the common well-being or the public good, a term resurrected by William Morris for the ‘Commonweal’ journal of the Socialist League.

The idea of an economic system based on cooperatives has also found a more receptive hearing. America has known many utopian schemes that had co-operatives as its basis.

Member of the national executive committee of the Socialist Labor Party, Laurence Gronlund wrote the "Co-operative Commonwealth," a vision for a cooperative economy and society echoed over the next decades in early-twentieth century U.S. and Canadian leftist circles.

 There have been political parties that have promoted co-operatives as policy.  In the 1930s, the populist Farmer-Labor Party could issue a radical platform:
“We declare that capitalism has failed and that immediate steps must be taken by the people to abolish capitalism in a peaceful and lawful manner, and that a new, sane, and just society must be established, a system in which all the natural resources, machinery of production, transportation, and communications shall be owned by the government and operated democratically for the benefit of all the people, and not for the benefit of the few. Palliative measures will continue to fail. Only a complete reorganization of our social structure into a cooperative commonwealth will bring economic security and prevent a prolonged period of further suffering among the people.”

In Washington state the Washington Commonwealth Federation, based on similar ideas, won control of the state Democratic Party during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In a parallel development in Canada, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was formed with some prominent Socialist Party of Canada members joining.

An alternative term for the society socialists aspired towards has been “cooperative commonwealth”.

Today, having fleshed-out their own visions of the Cooperative Commonwealth, Richard Wolff and Gar Alperovitz have been getting a lot of exposure on the alternative media websites for their own “radical"  models for a co-operative economy. But exactly what is there in their proposals to get excited about? They insist that they are challenging capitalism by presenting alternatives to capitalism, but in the end all they offer are prescriptions for curing capitalism. In their mythical “market-socialism” workers would be self-exploited. 

 Co-operatives are still capitalist institutions i.e. capital - even if it's "collective" or "democratic" or "social" capital - is invested to make more capital. Cooperatives that exist under a market economy inevitably replicate the problems of capitalism due to market pressures as Chomsky points out, as well as Marx’s criticisms of them.

"First, you can’t “out-compete” capitalism. Corporations will always have larger capital to invest in research, technology, and their willingness to cut costs through lower wages, less environmentally sounds practices, out-sourcing, etc, will give them an advantage.
Second, is that co-operatives are subject to market pressures to compete just the same as capitalist enterprises and this lends itself to pressures to create the same practices of corporations."
Third, is that many cooperatives face the same issues as small business owners face. Often worker cooperatives are in the service, food or other speciality industries with lower profit margins and because they are smaller and do not have the advantages of scale which larger companies do.

Lastly is the tendency of worker co-operatives to see their needs and interests as an entity apart from and/or above other workers. After all, as cooperatives exist within a market system, their interests are to compete with other companies and expand their market share."

 The pioneer of American socialism Eugene Debs would use the phrase “cooperative commonwealth” as a synonym for a socialist society. It became the name of the federation of a fairly successful Canadian reforming party

A use of it by Von Mises in his book ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, commonwealth was widely used by opponents of capitalism to refer to their ideal post-capitalist society. The noun was usually combined with a clarifying adjective to form the phrase the socialist commonwealth or the cooperative commonwealth. Sometimes, however, the future society was called simply the commonwealth. This, for example, was the name of a weekly newspaper published by the Socialist Party of Washington (the state) from January 1911 to April 1914.  

 

Nowadays the Commonwealth most often refers to the association of former British colonies.  We share a vision of a real "commonwealth”. It means a global system of society where all wealth is held in common and is democratically controlled by all people. It is a society from which borders and frontiers, social classes and leaders, states and governments have disappeared, in which production is geared to meeting needs, not profit, and in which people give of their abilities and have free access to the benefits of civilisation. This is the real "commonwealth" socialists look forward to.

 

Why The Socialist Party is Unique

 

Class struggle without any clear understanding of where you are going is simply committing oneself to a never-ending treadmill. This is where the Leninist Parties go wrong. They think mechanistically that a sense of revolutionary direction emerges spontaneously out of "the struggle" thus circumventing the realm of ideology - the need to educate. It does not. The workers can never win the class struggle while it is confined simply to the level of trade union militancy; it has to be transformed into a socialist consciousness. Conversely, socialist consciousness cannot simply rely on its own increase in ideological persuasion. It has to link up with the practical struggle. The success of the socialist revolution will depend on the growth of socialist consciousness on a mass scale and that these changed ideas can only develop through a practical movement.

First, let us begin with the structure and organisation of the Socialist Party. In keeping with the tenet that working-class emancipation necessarily excludes the role of political leadership, it is a leader-free political party where its Executive Committee is solely for housekeeping administrative tasks and is not permitted to determine policy or even submit resolutions to conference (and all the EC minutes are available for public scrutiny with access on the web as proof of our commitment to openness and democracy). All conference decisions have to be ratified by a referendum of the whole membership. The General Secretary has no position of power or authority over any other member being the person elected to perform day-to-day duties. Despite some very charismatic writers and speakers, no individual personality has held undue influence over the Socialist Party. The longevity of the Socialist Party as a political organisation based on agreed goals, methods and organisational principles and which has produced without interruption a monthly magazine for over a hundred years through two world wars is an achievement that most left-wing organisations have only aspire towards.

Presently, the sole purpose of the Socialist Party is to argue for socialism and put up candidates to measure how many socialist voters there are. We await the necessary future mass socialist party as impatiently as others and do not claim for ourselves the mantle of being or becoming that organisation. Our function is to make socialists, to propagate socialism, and to generally indicate to fellow workers that they must achieve their own emancipation. We do not declare: “Follow us! Trust us! We shall free you.”

 No, Socialism must be achieved by the workers acting for themselves. We are unique among political parties in calling on people NOT to vote for them unless they agree with what they stand for.

"... if we hoped to achieve Socialism ONLY by our propaganda, the outlook would indeed be bad. But it is capitalism itself, unable to solve crises, unemployment and poverty, engaging in horrifying wars, which is digging its own grave. Workers are learning by bitter experience and bloody sacrifice for interests not their own. They are learning very slowly. Our job is to shorten the time, to speed up the process." - Socialism or Chaos pamphlet

This socialist majority will elect socialist delegates to whatever democratic institutions exist (and these may be soviets or workers councils in some places), with the sole objective of legitimately abolishing capitalism.

Concerning the hostility clause,(It only commits the Socialist Party to oppose all other political parties, defined as organisations that contest elections and/or make demands on governments to enact reforms), there needs to be only one working-class class party and that this must be opposed to all other parties which can only represent sections of the owning class and if there were two groups of organised socialists, with more or less the same principles, then it would be their duty to try to unite to further the coming into being of the single "ideal" socialist party, opposed to all others, mentioned in Clause 7. They would both want socialism; they would both favour democratic revolution to get it; they would both be democratically organised internally; they would both repudiate advocating or campaigning for reforms of capitalism. There would no doubt be differences over tactical questions (which presumably would be why there were two separate organisations), such as over the trade union question, the attitude a minority of socialists should adopt in parliament, even over whether religion was a social question or a private matter. But it would be the duty of the two groups to find a solution to this and form a single organisation. Our view is that it is the winning of political control that is more important and that is why we emphasise this.  The Socialist Party stands by its analysis that we should use Parliament, not to try to reform capitalism but for the purpose of abolishing capitalism and that at the same time, the working class will also be organising itself, at the various places of work, in order to keep production going. The case of the primacy of political action has always been prominent in our arguments. We say that the capitalist’s legitimacy comes from their ‘democratic’ rule, so we believe that the capitalist’s legitimacy can be totally be broken by taking a majority in Parliament. But “capturing” Parliament is only a measure of acceptance of socialism and a coup de grace to capitalist rule. The owning class has a supreme weapon within its grasp: political power, – control of the army, navy, air and police forces. That power is conferred upon the representatives of the owners at election times and they, recognising its importance, spend large amounts of wealth and much time and effort to secure it. In countries like Britain the workers form the bulk of the voters; a situation the employers are compelled to face and deal with. Hence the incessant stream of opinion-forming influences which stems from their ownership and control of press, radio, schools to influence the workers to the view that capitalism is the best of all possible social forms. And that only political groups who accept this view are worthy of workers votes. It is the Achilles heel of capitalism and makes a non-violent revolution possible. Therefore, the first, most important battle is to continue the destruction of capitalism’s legitimacy in the minds of our fellow workers. That is, to drive the development of our class as a class-for-itself, mindful of the fact that capitalism is a thing that can be destroyed and a thing that should be destroyed. They must withdraw their consent to capitalism and class rule.

In 1904 the Socialist Party raised the banner for such a single, mass socialist party and proclaimed itself as the basis or embryo of such a party (Clause 8). Not only did the working class in any great numbers not "muster under its banner" but neither did all socialists. So we were left to be a small propagandist advocacy group but still committed to the principles set out in our declaration of principles. But we have never been so arrogant as to claim that anybody not in our organisation is not a socialist. There are socialists outside it, and some of them are organised in different groups. That doesn't mean that we are not opposed to the organisations they have formed, but we are not opposed to them because we think they represent some section of the capitalist class. We are opposed to them because we disagree with what they are proposing the working class should do to get socialism, and for them, of course, the opposite is the case too, they're opposed to what we propose. Nearly all the others who stand for a class-free, state-free, money-free, wageless society are anti-parliamentary. For ourselves, using the existing historically-evolved mechanism of political democracy (the ballot box, parliaments) is the best and safest way for a socialist-minded working-class majority to get to socialism. For them, it's anathema. For ourselves, some of the alternatives suggested (armed insurrection, a general strike) are also an anathema. We shall all present our respective proposals for working-class action to get socialism and, while criticising each other's proposals, not challenging each other's socialist credentials (engaging in comradely criticism). In the end, the working class itself will decide what to do.

 At a later stage, when more and more people are coming to want socialism, a mass socialist movement will emerge to dwarf all the small groups and grouplets that exist today. In the meantime, the best thing we in our party can do is to carry on campaigning for a world community based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth's natural and industrial resources in the interests of all humanity. We will continue to propose that this be established by democratic, majority political action; the other groups will no doubt continue to propose their way to get there. And we'll see which proposal the majority working class takes up.

 It's not us. a handful of socialist/anarchist activists, today who're going to establish socialism, but the mass of people out there. Until they move, we're stymied. Until then we agree to disagree. Those who want to argue that such a society should be established through democratic majority political action based on socialist understanding, and who want to concentrate on arousing this, will join the Socialist Party. Those who will argue that it will come about some other way will join some other group. And while at the same time addressing ourselves to non-socialists we should also keep on discussing with each other. We accept what Anton Pannekoek once said:

'If...persons with the same fundamental conceptions (regarding Socialism) unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussion and propagandise their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of to-day'.

The Socialist Party's Practice

 

Environmentalists rightly show how many of our current production methods are unsustainable in that they damage the environment for the present and future generations. For example, they advocate a range of farm practices designed to reduce the need for high inputs of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Integrated plant nutrition with a combination of organic and mineral sources of soil nutrients with tillage and crop rotation can increase crop production; and integrated pest management reduces the need for chemical pesticides by making use of biological controls to minimise disease and damage by pests. However, such methods could only be used to their full advantage when we eliminate the market forces that drives short-term, low-cost methods. This short-termism has prevented progress on a whole range of environmental issues.

We expect a majority of the workers of the world to become socialists, but not simply by clicking on to our website and visiting our social media outlets. Contrary to rumour, the Socialist Party does do not insist that the workers be convinced one by one by members of the party. We anticipate actual experience of living under capitalism, as well as obviously encountering the arguments of a growing number of already convinced socialists, to do the job.  We hold a stubborn insistence that socialism will be made by a socialist majority. The Socialist Party believe that the job of a socialist party is solely to make more socialists (and of course to get elected to all the representative bodies of the world and abolish capitalism when they convince a couple of billion people that it's a good idea.) It has no objection to workers, and socialists, getting involved in fights for partial demands but doesn't believe the party should do that. The party doesn't support anything (other than world socialism) because that might lead people to support the party for the wrong reasons.

The Socialist Party and its companion parties have as their objective the replacement of  capitalism with a global society of common ownership, voluntary work and free access, which is socialism. This society can be achieved if and only if a majority of the workers of the world understand and want it, in other words if most of the world working people are convinced socialists. This socialist majority will  elect socialist delegates to whatever democratic institutions exist, with the sole objective of legally abolishing capitalism. The Socialist Party considers that the Parliamentary process of the  democratic mandate would smooth the transition. We are also aware that the socialist majority might have to use force to impose its will under certain conditions and circumstances, but consider this unlikely.

Hence the sole purpose of the party is to (a) argue for socialism, and (b) put up candidates to measure how many socialist voters there are.

The Socialist Party is also unique among political parties in calling on people not to vote for them unless they agree with what they stand for. We  don't see it as the party's task to 'lead’ the workers in struggle' or to instruct its members on what to do in trade unions, because they believe that socialists and class-conscious workers are quite capable of making decisions for themselves.

 Capitalism (or property/class based societies in general) necessitates a state. Hence to bring about a stateless society which is what is meant by anarchism you need to get rid of capitalism. And that logically entails getting rid of the need for money and the market as well, very much echoing Engels to Cuno in 1872:

 “And since the state is the chief evil [for Bakunin], the state above all must be abolished; then capital will go to hell of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Abolish capital, the appropriation of all the means of production by the few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential one: the abolition of the state is nonsense without a social revolution beforehand; the abolition of capital is the social revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.”

The difference between socialists and anarchists is not over the aim of abolishing the State but over how to do this. Anarchists say that the first objective of the workers' revolution against capitalism should be to abolish the State. The Socialist Party says that, to abolish the State, the socialist working class majority must first win control of it and, if necessary, retain it (in a suitably very modified form) but for a very short while just in case any pro-capitalist recalcitrant minority should try to resist the establishment of socialism. Once socialism, as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole people, has been established (which we have always claimed can be done almost immediately), the State is dismantled, dissolved completely We are not talking years or decades or generations here, but as a continuation of the immediate revolutionary phase of the over throw of capitalism.

We should be more demanding on labels we ascribe to people. The very words "socialism" and "communism" are connected with the idea that the means of production should be owned by society as a whole (or socially, hence "socialism") or by the whole community (or communally, hence "communism"). And it is far better that people who are opposed to it are not called "socialists" or “communists". Marx used the words 'socialism' and 'communism' in reference to a future society interchangeably. He did not use the word 'socialism' to mean 'the lower stage of communism' as distinct from the higher which Lenin did in his usage. Lenin's definition of 'socialism' or the 'lower stage of communism' differed from that of Marx in that it included wage labour ('All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state ... and get equal pay') and commodity production, thus equating the transition period with the first stage of communism.