The co-operative commonwealth, common ownership, and the sharing of the commons are overlapping and sometimes poorly understood concepts. Socialism is one of the most complicated political ideas out there, not because it is so hard to understand, but rather because there are so many variety of interpretations of it. Private property is very different from personal property. People have always had personal-use items (homes, clothes, toys, tools, etc.) that they keep, share or trade, and this will always be so, regardless of the type of social system. The important question is who owns the natural resources, tools and technology that people need to survive. Is it privately owned or commonly shared? Common property is also confused with public property. Common property is not property at all, because no one owns it. It is shared or “owned in common.” In contrast, public property is private property that is owned by the State. Because the State claims to represent all the people, State or public property is assumed to be commonly owned. It is not. Common ownership means that common people are in control. Public ownership means that State officials are in control.
Many people think that socialism means government ownership.
It is not true. With socialism, all social decisions will be vested in the
people. Industry will be administered democratically from bottom to top by
those elected directly by the workers in each industry and subject to their
control. All delegates will be subject to recall at any time by those who
elected them. In each workplace (and in each school, hospital, etc.), the
workers will collectively determine workplace policies and will elect a
committee to plan the overall plant operations. In each sub-division of a
plant, the workers will participate in determining how best to implement the
plans of the committee and assure the efficient running of their economic unit.
Bourgeois (parliamentary) democracy fails to deliver such freedom,
predominately because capitalism subordinates the mass of society through the
process of wage slavery. These
capitalist relations not only create material inequality but also inequality in
terms of political influence. Political
power is stacked at the feet of capitalists who control production. The capitalist wage slavery relationship
inflicts a physiological effects, conditioning the working class to a
submissive mentality in the workplace. This
submissive mentality then manifests into passive behaviour in the political
lives of the working class.
The State’s role in the socialist project is not and never
was to nationalise industry and create a vast bureaucratic state-owned economy.
Rather, the workers parties were to be elected to the national government and
would expropriate the big capitalist enterprises. Political power would then be
decentralised and direct democracy introduced, the “withering away of the
state” that Marx and Engels talked about. Socialists seek a better world
founded on common ownership, equality and democracy. In this we see the means
to meet all mankind’s material needs and to personal and individual development
to the greatest possible height. Yet in the name of socialism we see common
ownership changed into state wage-slavery.
William Paul, a member of the De Leonist Socialist Labour
Party, and later member of the Communist Party of Great Britain explains in his
book, The State: Its Origins and Function, published in 1917:
"The revolutionary Socialist denies that State
ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen
why the State cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be
democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their
own ranks industrial administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally
an industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial character.
Thus those carrying on the social activities and industries of society will be
directly represented in the local and central industrial councils of social
administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards from
those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the community. When
the central administrative industrial committee meets it will represent every
sphere of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical State
will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of socialism. The
transition from the one social system to the other will be the social
revolution. The political State throughout history has meant the government of
men by ruling classes; the Republic of Socialism will be the government of
industry administered on behalf of the whole community. The former meant the
economic and political subjection of the many: the latter will mean the
economic freedom of all – it will be, therefore, a true democracy. Socialism
will require no political State because there will be neither a privileged
property class nor a downtrodden propertyless class; there will be no social
disorder as a result, because there will be no clash of economic interests;
there will be no need to create a power to make ‘order’. Thus, as Engels shows,
the State will die out…In the last analysis State ownership is more a mean of
controlling and regimenting the worker than of controlling industry ... The
attempt of the State to control industry is therefore the attempt of the ruling
class to dominate Labour”
Engels himself, in his "Anti-Dühring",
specifically warned against any vulgar equation of socialism with state
ownership:
"... since Bismarck adopted state ownership a certain
spurious socialism has made its appearance here and there even degenerating
into a kind of flunkeyism which declares that all taking over by the state,
even of the Bismarckian kind, is itself socialist. If, however, the taking over
of the tobacco trade by the State was socialist, Napoleon and Metternich would
rank among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary
political and financial reasons, constructed its own main railway lines, if
Bismarck... took over the main railway lines in Prussia, simply in order to be
better able to organise and use them for war, to train the railway officials as
the government’s voting cattle, and especially to secure a new source of revenue
independent of immediate votes - such actions were in no sense socialist
measures. Otherwise the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal Porcelain
Manufacturer, and even the regimental tailors in the army, would be socialist
institutions."
Another great cause of confusion has been a
misunderstanding of the nature and significance of the regime which followed
the Russian Revolution of 1917, a regime which has probably done far more to
retard than advance the cause of the socialist movement as a whole as it has
been assumed that because the October Revolution was led by socialists who had,
by whatever means, retained state power, the society which resulted was in
some way a socialist one, and, as a result, an example, even a mandatory one,
for others to follow. The Russian economy nor that of its satellites in Eastern
Europe were not in any sense a model for the organisation of a socialist
society but shows how the job should not, in fact, be done.
The opposite of private property is socialism, or common
control of society. There are no genuinely socialist societies in the world
today, nor has there been. Not any. Real
socialism (as opposed to what the Bolsheviks erected under Lenin’s direction in
the former Russian Empire after their coup d’etat known as the October
Revolution) is not the end of democracy but the beginning of true
democracy. Without economic democracy,
political democracy is meaningless. Lenin never made any attempt to introduce
socialism to the Soviet Union. By his
own declaration, he and his disciples set up what he himself called state
capitalism. Leninism and all of its offspring (Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism,
Castroism, etc.) are an aberration from, not the fulfillment of, Marx and
Engels. The socialist movement found itself stunted in growth from the splits
within its own ranks caused by the hands of Lenin and his inner circle reaching
out to control the whole international movement with as iron a hand as they
controlled Russia. Until Lenin and his clique removed their cloaks and showed
their true colors, praise for their accomplishment in the October “Revolution”
(coup d’etat) was well nigh universal among socialists world-wide. Once news
began to trickle out about the lack of real democracy, the increasing
centralized control by the highest organs of the Party with no input from below
appreciated, various atrocities, and the emasculation of the soviets, the
councils of the people in whose name Lenin & Co. ruled with an iron heel,
genuine socialists became more vocal in their criticisms. Rosa Luxemburg was
one of the first, as, of course, was the Socialist Party.
There are times when social and economic problems become so
bad that people are forced to choose between the social system that makes their
lives difficult and a new one that will make their lives better. We face that
kind of choice today. Capitalism—the social system we live under—no longer
serves the interests of the people. It creates countless problems that it
cannot solve. It uses technology to throw people out of work and to make those
who keep their jobs work harder. It creates hardship and poverty for millions,
while the few who own and control the economy grow rich off the labor of those
allowed to keep their jobs. It destroys the cities that we built up. It is
destroying the natural environment that is the source of the food we eat and
the air we breathe. Technology that could and should be used to lessen the need
for arduous toil and to enhance our lives is used instead to eliminate jobs and
increase exploitation. Poverty is as widespread as it has ever been. Wages go
down even as productivity rises. Joblessness, homelessness, helplessness and
despair are spreading. Economic insecurity and social breakdown place an
unbearable strain on our families, our children and ourselves. Emotional
stress, crime, prostitution, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, and many more
signs of unhappiness and hopelessness, are on the rise. Is this what we want?
Should we keep a social system that is destroying the lives, the liberties and
the chance for happiness that our work and productivity make possible? Is it
really worth the price to keep a small and despotic class of capitalists living
in obscene wealth?
World socialism could stop the dying from hunger
immediately, and provide the conditions for good health and material security
for all people across the Earth within a short time. It would do this by
producing goods and services directly for need. World socialism will operate
with one simple and ordinary human ability which is universal: the ability of
every individual to cooperate with others in a world-wide community of
interests. For too long has indignation at human suffering been dissipated by
useless causes. How much longer must the price of failure be the misery of
countless millions? Only useful labour applied through world cooperation in a
system of common ownership can solve the problems of world poverty. We live in
a world which has the potential to adequately feed, house and provide clean
water and decent medical care for every single man, woman and child on Earth.
The resources exist to banish material want as a problem for members of the
human race. Yet millions throughout the world are malnourished, live in squalor
or are actually dying of starvation or starvation-related diseases.
The Socialist Party calls upon people to organise with a
view to substitute the present state of unplanned production, commercial
competition war and social disorder with the co-operative commonwealth for; in
which every worker shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his or her
faculties. Why socialism? Because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of
the few. The Socialist Party has never wanted to set up anything like a
“People’s Democratic Socialist Workers Republic” controlled by a party
“vanguard”. No, our idea is the
Cooperative Commonwealth. Much of the history of the past 200 years revolved
around a vision that life could be lived in peace and brotherhood if only
property were shared by all, eliminating the source of greed, envy, poverty and
strife. This idea is called "socialism" and it was mankind’s most
ambitious attempt at liberation
“What I mean by
Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor
poor, neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor overworked, neither
brainslack brain workers, nor heartsick hand workers, in a word, in which all
men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs
unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm
to all - the realisation at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH.” William Morris, 1896
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