What will be common ownership?

 

For a society to be class-free it would mean no group (with the exception, perhaps, of temporary delegated bodies, freely elected by the community and subject always to recall) which would exercise, as a group, any special control over the instruments of production; and no group receiving, as a group, preferential privileges. Every member is in a position to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. Every member of society is socially equal, standing in exactly the same relationship to the means of production as every other member. Similarly, every member of society has access to the fruits of production on an equitable footing.

Once the use of the means of production is under the democratic control of all members of society, class ownership has been abolished. The means of production can still be said to belong to those who control and benefit from their use, in this case to the whole population organised on a democratic basis, and so to be commonly owned. It means a situation  where no person is excluded from the possibility of controlling, using and managing the means of production, distribution and consumption. Each member of society has the opportunity to realise a variety of goals, for example, to consume what they want, to use means of production for the purposes of socially necessary or unnecessary work, to administer production and distribution, to plan to allocate resources and to make decisions about short term and long term collective goals. Common ownership refers to every individual’s ability to benefit from the wealth of society and to participate in its running.

The transfer of the power to control the production of wealth to all of society makes the very concept of property redundant. With common ownership the concept of property in the sense of exclusive possession is meaningless: no one is excluded, and there are no non-owners.

Common ownership is not to be confused with state ownership, since an organ of coercion, or state, has no place in socialism. A class society is a society with a state because sectional control over the means of production and the exclusion of the rest of the population cannot be asserted without coercion, and so without a special organ to exercise this coercion. On the other hand, a classless society is a stateless society because such an organ of coercion becomes unnecessary as soon as all members of society stand in the same relationship with regard to the control of the use of the means of production. The existence of a state as an instrument of class political control and coercion is quite incompatible with the existence of the social relationship of common ownership. State ownership is a form of exclusive property ownership which implies a social relationship which is totally different from socialism.

State ownership presupposes the existence of a government machine, a legal system, armed forces and the other features of an institutionalised organ of coercion. State-owned means of production belong to an institution which confronts the members of society, coerces them and dominates them, both as individuals and as a collectivity.

Under state ownership the answer to the question “who owns the means of production?” is not “everybody” or “nobody” as with common ownership; it is “the state”. In other words, when a state owns the means of production, the members of society remain non-owners, excluded from control. Both legally and socially, the means of production belong not to them, but to the state, which stands as an independent power between them and the means of production.

The state is not an abstraction floating above society. It is a social institution, and, as such, a section of society, organised in a particular way. For wherever there is a state, there is always a group of human beings who stand in a different relationship to it from most members of society: not as the dominated, nor as the excluded, but as the dominators and the excluders. Under state ownership, this group controls the use of the means of production to the exclusion of the other members of society. In this sense, it owns the means of production, whether or not this is formally and legally recognised.

Another reason why state ownership and socialism are incompatible is that the state is a national institution that exercises political control over a limited geographical area.

Since capitalism is a world system, the complete state ownership of the means of production within a given political area cannot represent the abolition of capitalism, even within that area. What it does mean is the establishment of some form of state capitalism whose internal mode of operation is conditioned by the fact that it has to compete in a world market context against other capitals.

Since today capitalism is worldwide, the society which replaces capitalism can only be worldwide. The only socialism possible today is world socialism. No more than capitalism can socialism exist in one country. So the common ownership of socialism is the common ownership of the world, of its natural and industrial resources, by the whole of humanity.

Socialism can only be a universal society in which all that is in and on the Earth has become the common heritage of all humankind, and in which the division of the world into states has given way to a world without frontiers with a democratic world administration as well as local and regional democracy.

MIKE FOSTER PRESENTS SOCIALISM (video)

 

The Law and the State

 

Socialism can only be realised by the triumph of the working people in their struggle against the owning class. Necessary though it is that the workers should struggle on the economic field, the most important battleground of the class struggle is on the political field. It is the only battlefield where the workers can finally win and abolish the struggle altogether by abolishing classes and capitalism altogether.

A wage is a sign of servitude and while the wage system remains employers will act as they do today. They will use their wealth and political power to ensure the subjugation of the worker and the smallness, of his “share.” The unions are trying to effect changes in wages, but not the abolition of the wage system. Even higher wages and shorter hours result in speeding up the workers more and the use of more and better machinery and the careful selection of the most efficient workers, so that the employers are compensated for the increased wages by greater output. The wage is the price of a commodity possessed by the worker, and in selling his labour-power to the master the worker is really selling himself piecemeal.

A popular misconception of socialism is it means nothing more than the control of everything and everybody by the State. Socialism cannot be established by the State as it exists at present. Only when the workers, organised consciously and politically, capture the State and convert it into the agent of emancipation will it be possible to convert the means of life (i.e., the land, factories, transport and communications) into the common property of the whole people.

This revolution within the State, necessary as it is for the social revolution, so far from extending the bureaucracy, will abolish it. The first act of the revolutionary administration will be to take direct control and responsibility from the hands of the officials in every department. The working class must itself become the State. As the revolution proceeds and the capitalist class are stripped of their economic privileges, so the workers’ organisation will cease to be political and will become economic. It will be concerned, not with the government of persons, but with the administration of the social means of production and distribution. Class distinctions having been abolished, class antagonism will disappear and with it the need for a repressive force.

Defenders of capitalism seldom realise how much institutions such as “the law” are part of the social system existing at a particular time and are not eternal necessities of nature. “The law” has changed along with the State that made it. The laws of the ancient patricians, the laws of the medieval barons, have followed the customs of prehistoric barbarians; the laws of the last of the exploiting classes will do likewise and there will thus be an end of laws and the beginning of social freedom.

Civil law regulates contracts and implies private property and the production of commodities. When society consciously regulates production and distribution, contracts will become meaningless. The individual will depend for the satisfaction of his economic wants, not upon some other individual or group, but upon society as a whole; consequently, he will have no motive for entering into bargains or seeking the aid of the law to enforce their terms.

Criminal law also will become meaningless in a society of equals. Time was when, in the interests of capitalism, the idea was spread that there existed a distinct criminal type with marked physical and psychological characteristics. To-day that idea is discredited even among Capitalist authorities themselves. Crime is the effect of social conditions. Crimes against property such as theft, arson, etc., are directly traceable to economic causes which will disappear along with poverty and the fear of poverty. Crimes against persons are also in the majority of cases bound up with these same economic causes; while even the so-called “crimes of passion” arise largely from the unwholesome conditions, moral as well as physical, which are inevitably engendered by capitalism.

Socialists do not pretend that violent anti-social acts will entirely cease to occur, but that they will, undoubtedly, dwindle to such proportions as to render the existing legal methods of dealing with offenders obsolete. The concern of society under Socialism will not be repression but the development of a physical environment and mental atmosphere which will allow for the full evolution of the individual and thus secure his voluntary cooperation with his fellows. Comradeship will take the place of coercion.

Howard Moss Explains Socialism (video)

 

Climate Leaky Treaties

 

Just because Socialist Party holds a different view from many eco-activists it does not mean that we question the seriousness of the present ecological crisis nor that we think we are living in the best of all possible industrialised worlds. Far from it. There is an ecological crisis and it is serious, but its cause is not the pressure of population or industrialisation. The cause of the climate crisis is the capitalist system where firms compete for profits and where the resulting competitive pressures impose the accumulation of more and more capital out of profits as the over-riding economic goal (what some call “blind economic growth"). This being so, the solution lies neither in depopulation nor in deindustrialisation but in getting rid of the profit system that is capitalism and replacing it with socialism and production for need.

We live in a world based on commodity production with the aim of obtaining a profit. In competing with other capitalists, both nationally and globally, it is necessary to drive down costs in order to grab a bigger share of the market. In such a cut-throat society environmental considerations count for little, except perhaps a little electioneering rhetoric. If we are serious about surviving and leaving our planet to our descendants in a liveable state, without a huge environmental debt impossible to settle, what we really need is to urgently abandon altogether the monetary, for-profit economy itself and to embrace the socialist system of resource administration as the truly humane, sustainable and fair system of social and economic organisation that respects nature and the scientific principles of its management. There is, quite simply, no solution to the problem of global warming within capitalism. And the simple truth is that we place our trust in governments to solve environmental problems within the context of capitalism at our peril. They serve to administer the present system on behalf of a minority for whom environmental protection is an obstacle to profit, to whom any means is legitimate in the pursuit of that profit.

When you consider the future of the planet you are faced with two choices. You can continue to support the defenders of capitalism – they come in many disguises – and acquiesce in the destruction of the natural global environment or stand in their way by joining the struggle for socialism and the destruction of a system that will nonchalantly prioritise profit over not only human well-being but the world we live in. But, hey, don’t wait until your living room is a foot deep in water to make up your mind. Think hard and now. Capitalism, and with it the worsening of every environmental problem we cite, or socialism, a world social system that places control of the Earth in the hands of a global majority who will tend to it with respect and without the barriers profit places in the path of production?

Despite the overwhelming evidence for mankind’s ability to produce an abundance of the means of life, including food, there is growing evidence that if humanity continues to ruthlessly plunder his environment in the way it has done over the last hundred years or so then the gloomy predictions of the ‘miserable parson’ Malthus may become true. Rivers, oceans, the atmosphere and the land may steadily become less productive as the result of the irrational drive to accumulate wealth on the part of a minority.

The workers of the world do all the producing and wealth creation, yet we are the last to realise the benefits when profits are growing. And the first to experience the hardships of downturns, recession and austerity. The World Socialist Movement, is like no other organisation, insofar as we are the only group calling for an end to capitalism, and for it to be replaced by global socialism. This would be a world based on a revolutionary change in the means of production, from being owned by a tiny minority to being held in common ownership with free access to goods and services according to individual and self-defined needs. It is a great pity that people do not realise that before the environment can become clean and decent a tremendous transformation in human organisations and institutions is necessary and that the main arguments he puts forward are holding up this transformation by offering false solutions to the wrong problems.

If production was geared to meeting needs, on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, then not only could modern technology and industrial resources be used in a non-polluting way (productive units would no longer be under competitive pressures to minimise costs at the expense of social and ecological considerations) but the whole of the world's present population could be adequately fed and housed.

BRIAN MONTAGUE COMMENTING ON SOCIALISM (Video)

 From the 1980s but surprisingly still relevant

Poisoning the planet

 

We may be facing a stark choice: a socialist world or no world at all.

Green capitalism is just as much a pipedream as ethical capitalism or, as we have been saying for ages, capitalism reformed to benefit the workers. The only possible capitalism is the one we’ve got: a profit-maximising one. Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on the expansion of markets, higher consumption and increased production. Corporations will seek out loopholes in every law and regulation that seeks to constrain their business profits and dividends to investors.

Capitalism is the impersonal process of the accumulation of capital out of the surplus value produced by the wage working class and involves competition to transform this surplus value into money by selling the products in which it is embodied. This battle is won by those enterprises that can sell their products at the lowest price due to their employment of more productive methods. This investment in new productive methods depends on making enough profits (converting enough surplus value into money). So, capitalism is the pursuit of profits to accumulate as more capital. Such “growth” is built into it and cannot be stopped. If ever it was, the whole system would seize up and there’d be massive worldwide unemployment. All the arguments, whether or not they are expressed in terms of environmental considerations, must under capitalist conditions produce an answer in terms of profit margins. 

The Socialist Party can clearly see that the system of production for profit is the major cause of pollution. It is capitalism that has forced CEOs to orchestrate and order the use of fossil fuels and the cutting down of tropical forests because this is cheaper and more competitive than the alternatives. What is required to stabilise the rise in temperature is a worldwide political and social revolution to end capitalism and put mankind in full charge of its interaction with the rest of nature (production). Which can only be done on the basis of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity. We argue for the common ownership of the Earth’s productive resources, natural and industrial, by the whole of humanity, i.e. world socialism, for how could production be reoriented towards use instead of profit unless the means of production had first ceased to be the exclusive property of individuals, corporations or states? We don’t see why humanity has to wait till capitalism has nearly destroyed the planet to institute this. It could be implemented now, to avoid the further environmental degradation that will occur if capitalism continues. 

Climate change is not just caused by “technology”, and a return to the “simple life” is no answer (though less passionate worship of "progress” might help). The high rate of technical innovation itself provides cures for its own disease. Dangerous substances can be totally discarded and replaced with chemicals which are more specific, or that break down more quickly. Non-chemical pesticide control can be developed. Factory chimneys can be capped and carbon capture. Sanitation can be fitted with more efficient filtration and with sewage recycled for fertilizer. Single-use plastics can be made redundant plastic can be developed. Industrial processes can all be modified where necessary. No technique of production is indispensable. There is a substitute for anything, or there soon can be if research resources are channelled in the appropriate direction. Something can be done about our environment, and of course, something to a limited degree is being done but the reasons for its slowness and indecisiveness, too late and too little,  are economic, not technical.

Cigarette smoking, for example, provides profits for the tobacco firms and tax revenues for the state, yet intelligent administrators of capitalism can readily see that they lose out, because of the illness and death caused by cigarettes, which lower the productivity of the working class and thereby cut the rate of return on investments in labour-power (the Health Service, schools and universities, etc).

It is the same with pollution. Short-sighted people often talk as though the choice for capitalism was a concern for the environment or economic growth, but the truth is that in the long run, a lack of concern for the environment will cut growth by lowering the quality of human labour-power, the source of growth. Poisoned workers are not so profitable to employ. Furthermore, though government pollution-control laws raise the costs of production, firms do not necessarily mind their costs rising—so long as their competitors are in the same boat.

Not that socialists advocate an internationally mandated programme of regulation and control over capitalist businesses. What we want is for the production of the useful things that people need to live and enjoy life to be taken out of the hands of profit-seeking enterprises altogether. We want the means of production to be owned in common by the whole community as the only basis on which production can be organised to take account of the overall interest of all the members of society. In socialism there won’t be any profit-seeking capitalist enterprises to regulate; just democratically-run productive units producing, in an ecologically and socially acceptable way, what people need.

CLIFFORD SLAPPER COMMENTS ON SOCIALISM (video)

 

What Future?

 We live in a society of misconceived priorities. The profit system puts all at risk because the treatment of all issues must be made at the priority cost of profit. Capitalism is turning the land into a giant toxic waste-dump. Oceans are being polluted the air is being poisoned. The media has provided many of striking images of ecological destruction which have fuelled debate on the environment in recent years. Few people have been left unmoved by the devastating deforestation of the Amazon or the mercury-contaminated cratered moonscapes left by gold miners still searching for the legendary El Dorado.

The deforestation in the Amazon is caused primarily not by subsistence cultivators but by commercial interests clearing land for pasture. Cattle ranches occupy vast areas of cleared land and result in huge profits for the owners. The loss of animal and plant species and renewable timber resources are simply not part of the profit-and-loss calculations. Capitalism, then, is bound to come into conflict with nature. It cannot go green because it simply cannot change its economic essence.  Given the nature of capitalist production for profit, it is therefore simply idealistic for the Green movement to express the hope that the government will make a substantial and unequivocal commitment to climate change. So long as profit is the purpose of production even the most well-intentioned, ecologically-minded government will encounter serious resistance to ecologically sound but expensive production methods.

Many pessimistic environment activists retreat into defeatism, predicting an approaching Apocalypse. Equally as many keep the faith that ecological problems can be solved with a little more legislation, a few more laws and a change in regulations. The Socialist Party rejects both reformism and defeatism, recognizing that the roots of the climate crisis lie in the capitalist system and its uncontrollable production for profit, a system incapable of incorporating the rational and democratic decision-making process which will be necessary to ensure an ecologically-sustainable future.  It is the uncontrollable nature and ecological unaccountability of capitalist production which must be abolished to rid the world of environmental destruction. The Socialists Party works to replace a divided world governed by capital with a state-free and money-free commonwealth.

As could have been anticipated, the repeated reports and studies from the climate think-tanks all suggest remedies to redress the issue fall only within what socialists term reformism, amounting to the same battle cries of the well-meaning, though less well-informed, without visible results for decades. It is perhaps a forgone conclusion that their recommendations will not fair any better in the years ahead as past research and we may well wonder how long before the academics and activists conclude capitalism can’t be tinkered with in our interests. Instead of producing volumes of papers each year, which on the face of it are only of any use in the armoury of the socialist, wouldn’t it be wiser if the “experts” decided to work out how much better the world would be if we freed production from the artificial constraints of profit, and organised production in a rational and sustainable manner and to the benefit of all? Or would these same experts fear they would be labelled socialist and their research studies have taken less seriously?

 

A collapse of present-day civilisation might indeed occur and would involve far fewer people surviving and at a far lower standard of living, but it would not result at the end of humanity and certainly not of the planet on which we live. Yet how likely is it that there will be a societal collapse caused by climate change or other ecological factors? In answering this question, we need to look not mainly at technical questions such as how energy is produced and how crops are grown, important though these of course are. Rather, we need to examine the economic basis of society and see the implications of the ways in which production as a whole is organised and of how priorities are considered. Only by replacing the profit system with a truly democratic organisation can we give the environment the priority it deserves. Capitalism can do no more than tinker with the problem.  Capitalism is the worst possible social system for the kind of rational, integrated action which is needed. Socialism, in contrast, will provide the kind of framework within which global warming and other ecological problems can be tackled and solved by that marvellous resource—human ingenuity.

Remembering the UCS Work-in (video)

  The Socialist Party never condemned the UCS workers. Quite the reverse. It was heartening to see a group of workers refusing to passively accept the sack. At least they didn’t meekly accept their fate or rely solely on appeals to Labourite and trade union leaders to save them. They took positive action on their own account. 

We wished them luck in using their bargaining strength to get the best of redundancy terms they could. 

The Socialist Party has always given its general support to the industrial side of the class struggle while leaving the specific tactics to be adopted in this struggle to the workers immediately involved. If after considering the situation carefully the UCS workers democratically decided on a peaceful, disciplined “work-in” that was up to them.

The Socialist Party will continue to urge workers everywhere to resist attacks made on their living standards by their employers. This is a basic necessity so long as capitalism lasts. At the same time, we recognise such action to be purely defensive, besides never-ending, and which still leaves the factories, mines, shipyards, land, transportation systems, and the other places where wealth is produced, in the hands of the owning class. We, therefore, have organised politically to work to bring nearer the day when capitalism’s inhumanity, waste and chaos will be swept away by the democratic action of the majority of the world’s working class.