What is the importance of Gramsci's cultural hegemony?

Gramsci is said, in the Prison Notebooks, to have developed a new and original kind of Marxist sociology, which, over the last half century or so, has engendered a vast range of debate, interpretation and controversy by academics and others – the so-called ‘Gramsci industry’. One of the key matters debated has been his concept of ‘hegemony’ (‘egemonia’).

This was the term Gramsci used to describe what he saw as the prerequisite for a successful revolution: the building of an ideological consensus throughout all the institutions of society spread by intellectuals who saw the need for revolution and used their ability to persuade and proselytise workers to carry through that revolution. Only when that process was sufficiently widespread, would successful revolutionary action be possible. So hegemony was what might be called the social penetration of revolutionary ideas.

This outlook is very different from the fervour with which in earlier years Gramsci had greeted the Russian revolution and advocated similar uprisings in other countries. By the second half of the 1920s, with Italy ruled by a Fascist dictatorship and opposition leaders exiled or imprisoned, Gramsci came to see revolution as a longer-term prospect which would depend on the conditions existing in individual countries.

And it is this ‘long-term’ idea of revolutionary change that has been interpreted in very many different ways according to the standpoint or political position of the individual commentator. One way it could be read would seem to tie in closely with the World Socialist Movement's view that only through widespread political consciousness on the part of workers and majority consent for social revolution can a society based on the satisfaction of human needs rather than on the profit imperative be established.

In this light, Gramsci’s hegemony could be seen to have the profoundly democratic implications of insisting on a widespread and well-informed desire among the majority of workers for socialist revolution before such a revolution can come about. Indeed it is clear that Gramsci was not unaware of Marx’s ‘majoritarian’ view of socialism (or communism – they were interchangeable for Marx) as a stateless, leaderless world where the wages system is abolished and a system of ‘from each according to ability to each according to need’ operates.

In an article written in 1920, for example, Gramsci refers to ‘communist society’ as ‘the International of nations without states’, and later from prison, he writes about ‘the disappearance of the state, the absorption of political society into civil society’. However, though he referred to himself as using ‘the Marxist method’, such reflections on the nature of the society he wished to see established are few and far between and cannot reasonably be said to characterise the mainstream of his thought.

Leninist
 When looked at closely in fact, Gramsci’s thought is overwhelmingly marked by what may be called the coercive element of his Leninist political background. So, while undoubtedly in his later writings he came to see the Soviet model as inapplicable to other Western societies, he nevertheless continued to conceive of revolution as the taking of power via the leadership of a minority group, even if in different circumstances from those experienced by Lenin in Russia.

The most important pointer to this lies in Gramsci’s view of the state. Hardly ever does he view socialism other than as a form of state. The overwhelming thrust of his analysis and his recommendations for political action point not to doing away with states and the class divisions that go with them but to establishing new kinds of states.

In 1919, enthused by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, Gramsci wrote: ‘Society cannot live without a state: the state is the concrete act of will which guards against the will of the individual, faction, disorder and individual indiscipline ....communism is not against the state, in fact, it is implacably opposed to the enemies of the state.’

Later too, in his prison writings, arguing now for a ‘long-term strategy’, he continued to declare the need for states and state organisation, for leaders and led, for governors and governed in the conduct of human affairs – underlined by his frequent use of three terms in particular: ‘direzione’ (leadership), ‘disciplina’ (discipline) and ‘coercizione’ (coercion).

So, despite what Gramsci himself recognised as changed times and circumstances compared with Russia in 1917, he continued to be profoundly influenced by Lenin’s view that ‘if socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least 500 years’ – in other words that genuine majority social consciousness was unachievable.

And in line with this, when looked at closely his ‘hegemony’, far from eschewing the idea of a revolutionary vanguard, sees an intellectual leadership taking the masses with them. In other words the ‘consent’ that his hegemony, his long-term penetration of ideas, proposes is not the informed consent of a convinced socialist majority but an awakening of what, at one point he refers to as ‘popular passions’, a spontaneous spilling over of revolutionary enthusiasm which enables the leadership to take the masses with them and then govern in the way they think best.

Human nature
 Underpinning this lack of confidence by Gramsci in the ability of a majority to self-organise is a factor little commented on but particularly significant – and that is his view of what may be called ‘human nature’. In writing explicitly about human nature, which Gramsci does on a number of occasions, he expresses agreement with Marx’s view that human nature is not something innate, fixed and unchanging, not something homogeneous for all people in all times but something that changes historically and is inseparable from ideas in society at a given time.

This view of humanity is in fact described by Gramsci as ‘the great innovation of Marxism’ and he contrasts it favourably with other widely-held early 20th century views such as the Catholic dogma of original sin and the ‘idealist’ position that human nature was identical at all times and undeveloping.

But despite Gramsci’s stated ‘theoretical’ view on this topic, scrutiny of his writings in places where ‘human nature’ is not raised explicitly but is rather present in an implicit way points his thought in a different, more pessimistic direction.

When he writes about education, for example, his pronouncements about the need for ‘coercion’ indicate little confidence in the ability of human beings to behave fundamentally differently or to adaptably change their ‘nature’ in a different social environment.

In corresponding with his wife about the education of their children, in response to her view that, if children are left to interact with the environment and the environment is non-oppressive, they will develop co-operative forms of behaviour, he states ‘I think that man is a historical formation but one obtained through coercion’ and implies that without coercion undesirable behaviour will result.

Then, in the Prison Notebooks, on a similar topic, he writes: ‘Education is a struggle against the instincts which are tied to our elementary biological functions, it is a struggle against nature itself.’ What surfaces here as in other places, even if not stated explicitly, is a view of human nature not as the exclusive product of history but as characterised by some kind of inherent propensity towards anti-social forms of behaviour which needs to be coerced and tamed.

Viewed in this light, Gramsci’s vision of post-revolutionary society as a place where human beings will continue to need leadership and coercion should not be seen either as being in contradiction with his theory of ideological penetration (‘hegemony’) or as inconsistent with the views that emerge about human nature when his writings do not explicitly focus on that subject.

So we should not be surprised that Gramsci’s vision for the future is not a society of free access and democratic control where people organise themselves freely and collectively as a majority but rather a change from one form of minority authority to another – a change from a system of the few manifestly governing in their own interests to the few claiming to govern in the interests of the majority.

The evidence of Gramsci’s writings, therefore, suggests that the revolution he envisages is not one in which democracy in the sense of each participating with equal understanding and equal authority prevails. Crucially, the leadership function is not abolished.

The hegemonisers will essentially be in charge since they will be the ones with the necessary understanding to run the society they have conceived. What this society might be like he does not go on to say in any detail.

But it would clearly not be a socialist world of free access and democratic control that rejects authority from above together with its political expression, the state.

For Gramsci, any such considerations were at best peripheral to the thrust of his thought and his social vision. And though he did have a revolutionary project, it is not a socialist one in the terms that socialism is correctly understood.

From an article in the Socialist Standard by Howard Moss

Matthew Culbert

The properytless produce all

The capitalist system has resulted in benefits such as an increase in production of food availability, increased availability of health care and medicines, increased availability of modern technologies which can substantially reduce human drudgery. Capitalism did bring substantial improvements in lifespan, health and education. But its profit-driven production is restricting access to these basic services. The new technologies of future can have a potential solution to deprivation but an economic system driven by the profit motive will not make it available and accessible to the masses.

Some conceive of socialism as nothing more than the welfare state or the nationalised ownership of the economy. But socialism to be worthy of a movement to fight for must offer something much more and very different from a larger role for the State and government in society's affairs. Indeed, the State under capitalism already plays a massive role in the running of the status quo. To be worthy of description socialist, it must offer a fundamental change from capitalism. State control leaves intact the power of capital in the factories, offices, distribution systems and other economic institutions. This means the capitalists or their functionaries maintain control over society's most important domain, production and the workplace Socialism, however, is based on the mass democratic participation of working people in managing the day-to-day affairs of the economy and society. The socialist struggle is to transform the economy and society. Socialism must be "the self-emancipation of the working class" -- the mass participation of the majority of society in organising to take economic and political power away from the wealthy elite and to construct a revolutionary post-capitalist society that extends into every nook and cranny of social life. Class struggle is to build the power of the working class to run society in its own interests and requires workers world-wide to overthrow the employing owning class.

Capitalism has made it possible to meet all of the world's needs, but control over capitalism's output remains in the hands of a tiny minority. By placing the means of production under the democratic control of the workers who make the gears turn, socialism offers a way to use society's resources to meet human need. The art of capitalist politics is to enable the wealthy to convince the poor to use their votes to keep the wealthy in power so to continue the enslavement of the poor.

One of the most powerful tools we have in the socialist movement today is the ability and opportunity to help people to share their histories. That’s the only way we’re going to win the debate on issues such as immigration. There are people that are anti-immigrant because they don’t know the stories of their fellow-workers. Some people get stereotyped while others are manipulated. All of this division is being driven by fear. Those who perpetrate hatred are often victims themselves. Understanding one another's history has power. Social change doesn’t need to be complicated. The basis of social change is human connection and communication, engaging with one another and exchanging each other's hopes.

The working class are wage workers. That is, they depend for their livelihood entirely upon the money they receive from the sale of their labour power. It must not be supposed that a wage-worker class has existed through all time. People are so accustomed nowadays to the wages idea that a great many of them have considerable difficulty in realising that any form or degree of civilisation could have existed without wages. They are so used to the idea that without wages they can get nothing; they are so accustomed to the hard experience that when wages cease to come in they starve; they are impressed and saturated with the concrete knowledge that the orbit of their lives are inexorably prescribed by the magnitude of the magic wage: they are so inured to the aspect presented by these circumstances of their environment, that the admission that under Socialism there will be neither paying nor receiving of wages is sufficient to cause them to reject the Socialist proposition with the remark: "Can't be done!" But the wages system and the wage-worker, as we understand them to-day, are quite modern social characteristics—newer, say, than St. Paul's Cathedral.

When we speak of the wages system and the wage-worker, however, we have in mind a very definite social feature, and it will be as well to explain here exactly what is meant by the terms, for the benefit of those who are new to the study of social science.

If the wage-worker is new, wages, of course, are not. "The labourer is worthy of his hire" was written many generations before the hired labourer was a wage-worker in the modern sense of the term, just as the reference to Joseph's "coat of many colours" was penned ages before the world knew a tailor. Wages are older than the wages system, just as coats are older than the tailoring trade.

The wages system is that system whereupon the whole of the wealth of the community is produced by wage-labour. The wage-worker is one whose sole means of subsistence are the proceeds of the sale of his or her labour power—wages.

Now the wages system, as here described, obviously could not exist save in conjunction with a certain form of property ownership. It is not that this ownership must be private ownership. Property was privately owned centuries before the wages system grew up. The social system which immediately preceded the present one was based on private property, yet very little of the community's wealth was produced by wage labour then.

The particular form of private ownership which is essential for the development of the wages system is that form which provides a propertyless class - that form which takes away from a section every shred of the means of living except their labour power. In other words, the whole of the means of production must belong to a section of the people.

This particular form of private property did not exist till comparatively recent times. Prior to its establishment, the working class had free access to the land and consequently had not to depend upon the sale of their labour power for their livelihood. They did occasionally work for wages, just as they did occasionally sell part of the produce of their labour, in order to procure money to pay taxes, or to purchase the few things required that they did not produce for themselves. But they never became wage slaves while they had access to the sod, for the simple reason that they had at hand the means of producing all the essentials of life for themselves, without being driven to hire themselves to others.

Even the artisans and the handicraftsmen in the towns, where they did work for wages, had their portion of land, on which they produced many of their requirements, and had, besides, reasonable certainty that, when they had become proficient in their craft, the ownership of the implements of their trade would be within their easy reach, and present them with the opportunity of gaining freedom.

So it will be seen that the wages system is by no means an indispensable part of human life. Our ancestors got on very well without it. Indeed, they had neither use nor need for it until they had been stripped of everything they possessed except their labour-power.

Only when they had been driven from their homes and their fields and converted into propertyless outcasts did the working class resort to the labour market for their livelihood. Prior to that, they had produced wealth for their own consumption, and money had played but a small part in their life. Things have changed greatly since those days; People no longer produce the goods they require to satisfy their own needs and it is utterly impossible for us to go back to the state of things wherein each family produced all their own requirements.

To say that we cannot do without wages and the wages system is to say that which is absurd. Though it is true that wages are the means by which the workers live, it is equally true that wages are the means whereby the workers are robbed. The wage serves no other function than to render possible this robbery. It does not even record the fact that its possessor has performed his share of the world's work, for wages have a fleeting identity, and there is nothing to show how the coins they consist of are come by. With the abolition of private property, wages, and money, it will be very easy to assure that each person shall perform his or her share of the necessary labour of production, and the "problem" of distribution, then would be no problem at all.

No Further Comment Needed.

Our British comrades make some valid points in the August issue of Socialist Standard, regarding the fire at London's Grenfell tower.

'Why people wanted to know was there only one fire exit in a building of 120 flats; an exit frequently blocked by rubbish, including old mattresses, which the council did not remove." And how about this gem. "… tower blocks for rich people have multiple exit points, sprinkler systems and efficient fire proofing. A similar fire that swept through Dubai's plush Torch Tower in 2015, yielded no casualties at all."

No further comment needed.

Also in the same issue, when commenting on the war in the Yemen, we read, "…around 1,000 children die every week from preventable diseases like diarrhea and respiratory infections." And this is all because of the continuation of capitalism. How many better reasons can there be to abolish it? 

Steve and John.

Beyond the Grants Campaign (1973)

Party News from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The National Union of Students is conducting a campaign to:

• Raise the Student Grant.
• Abolish Discretionary awards.
• Give married women students a full grant. 
• Abolish the parental means test.

Students, most of them members of the working class, should recognize that, like the rest of the workers, they cannot escape the limitations imposed on them by the capitalist system in which we live.

We understand their efforts to prevent a deterioration of their position. However, such action is only defensive. If students don’t look beyond the grants campaign they will find they will have been running fast only to stay on the same spot. As trade unionists have discovered, inflation soon undermines economic gains and the whole struggle has to be gone through again. Moreover, students should understand that education at present is primarily a means of training a labour force for the organization of commodity production in capitalist society. The dominating influence of examinations and the totally undemocratic hierarchical organisation of the university are expressions of this. Education should be a social amenity for the development of individuals’ talents, which it cannot be under capitalism.

So how do we get off the treadmill? 

Some people are advocating throwing the Tories out and electing a Labour government. But what did the last Labour government do? Allowed students’ living standards to decline drastically. Attacked workers’ living standards by means of wage freezes and inflation. 

Changing governments changes nothing.

The only way forward is a revolutionary change to a completely different society:

• World-wide common ownership of resources— not minority class ownership.
• Production to meet human needs — not for private profit.
• Free access to goods and services — not the rationing of a monetary system.
• A free, democratically-run, non-authoritarian, non-compulsory educational system giving equal opportunity for all.

This can only be achieved by the conscious action of the majority of the working class—and that includes most students.

We urge you to join us in the fight to establish world Socialism.

— from a leaflet issued by Socialist students at Aberdeen.

"Daddy, what did you do in the class war?"

The technical basis of modern society is large-scale, mass-producing industry which can only be operated by co-operative labour. By its nature, it draws into the work of producing things millions of people the world over. These millions work not on their own; they work together. No person makes anything by him or herself; he or she only plays a part in the co-operative labour through which things are today produced. Farms, factories, mines, mills and docks are only geographically separate. Technically they depend on each other as links in a chain. They are only parts of a world-wide productive system. In other words, the world is one productive unit.

Common sense would suggest that, to take full advantage of this world-wide productive system, it should be owned and controlled as a unit. That it should belong in common to all mankind and be controlled by them for their own benefit. But of course, this is not so. The means and instruments for producing wealth are not owned in common by us all. They are the property of a few. Nor are they used to make what we need. They are used to make things to be sold. Instead of talking about social transformation our critics say the Socialists Party should be advocating more modest changes such as establishing workers' co-operatives and better welfare provision.

It is self-evident that to maintain an effective modern society, one in which we continue to eat, have clothes to wear, somewhere fit to live and so on that a certain amount of work is necessary. Jobs need doing. We have never heard of a house that built itself or of a cabbage that was self-planting, self-cultivating and self-harvesting that somehow manages to get itself to a greengrocer's shelf. Society has evolved to a point where we can produce an abundance of what we need. Technology gives us the possibility of having less work and more possible leisure. But only if we concentrate on what needs doing and discard that which simply preserves and maintains the status quo. John Lennon summed it up beautifully in his song Imagine. Humanity possesses not only the imagination but also the physical ability to make such a society possible. A society that only produces goods and services if they can be sold for a profit is an anachronism for it creates injustice and suffering on a scale that beggars belief. Wages are not a reward for a job well done, nor are they a share of the wealth a worker has produced, nor a cut out of his employer’s profits. They are the price of a person’s working ability; at any one particular time, the size of the wage represents what can be got for that ability on the labour market.

Many people mistakenly believe that money has always existed and that it therefore always will. The Socialist Party explains why money is out of date. Capitalism as a market system means that the normal method of getting what you need is to pay for it. The normal way for members of the capitalist class to get money is to invest their capital to produce rent, interest, dividends or profit. The usual way for workers to get money is to sell their labour power for wages. Imagine that all the things you need are owned and held in common. There is no need to buy food from anyone—it is common property. There are no rent or mortgages to pay because land and buildings belong to all of us. There is no need to buy anything from any other person because society has done away with the absurd division between the owning minority (the capitalists) and the non-owning majority (the workers). In a socialist world monetary calculation won't be necessary. The alternative to monetary calculation based on exchange-value is calculation based on use values. Decisions apart from purely personal ones of preference or interest will be made after weighing the real advantages and disadvantages and real costs of alternatives in particular circumstances. The ending of the money system will mean at the same time the ending of war, economic crises, unemployment, poverty and persecution—all of which are consequences of that system.

The revolutionary change that is needed is not possible unless a majority of people understand and want it. We do not imagine all humankind's problems can be solved at a stroke. Reforms of the present system fail because the problems multiply and recur. It will take time to eliminate hunger, malnutrition, disease and ignorance from the world. But the enormous liberation of mental and physical energies from the shackles of the money system will ensure that real human progress is made.


 Fellow-worker—the future is yours to shape. Are you going to go on in the same old way as your fathers did, or are you going to make an effort to understand the world in which you live? Until you do, you are doomed. You are going to feel the cold, clammy hand of poverty. It is quite simple to understand the fundamentals of Socialism. One doesn’t require an awful lot of study to realise there are two classes in society. You, fellow-worker, belong to the working class, the useful section of society— makes all the wealth. You build the palaces, the mansions.  But you have nothing to sell but your labour-power, which you try to sell to the highest bidder, the amount received in return is only enough to replace your depleted energy and permit you to reproduce the species, so that there may be another slave to replace you when you are thrown on the scrap-heap, no longer fit to be a beast of burden, any more.
The other class—only a small fraction of the population—own and control all the means of living. Only when this tiny section of employers and owners can find a market for their goods is the machinery of production set in motion. Only when this section can find a market for their goods do the working class find employment. When goods are piled high and no market is to be found, the workers are unemployed and go hungry. Goods are produced for profit, not for use.
  Fellow-worker, you have a duty to your children. Your job is to seek knowledge and organise for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. In years to come, when your children ask you, "What did you do the class war. Daddy?” don’t let it be said you hung your head in shame and said, "Nothing” Rather let it be said. "I fought along with my comrades to establish socialism.” The world can be yours to share.

The Fragment of Machines

A wise old bird indeed was Marx.

It is this section in The Grundrisse 1857.
https://www.marxists.org/archive...

Quote:
"As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis."
 http://www.marxists.org/archive/... )

Incidentally, this is (I think) the only passage where Marx uses the word breakdown ( "zusammen") in relation to capitalism. What he is saying is that if capitalism continued long enough it would eventually reach a stage where, thanks to mechanization, an individual product would have so little labour (indirect as well as direct) embodied in it that its value, and so its price, would be virtually zero. At which point the change-over to production to give away or take freely would become a necessity for the survival of society.

I don't think that Marx thought that this stage would ever actually be reached, but was merely extrapolating trends discernable under capitalism to their logical conclusion (a bit like he did too with his mathematical demonstration that eventually the rate of profit must fall).

Capitalism is nowhere near this stage now over 160 years since Marx wrote and, despite robotics, is still (very) far away from it. Hopefully, the workers will have put an end to capitalism long before it reached this theoretical breakdown point. Marx must have thought so too. Otherwise why was he active as a socialist in his day?

Mechanization, automation, robotization are all manifestations of the same trend under capitalism where, under the lash of competition, capitalist firms are driven to constantly strive to reduce the cost of production of what they are producing for sale, i.e. to increase productivity. But productivity does not proceed at the rate that some people sometimes mistakenly assume that it does because they take into account only the last stage of production.

What has to be taken into account is the labour that has gone into the production of a commodity from start to finish. So robots introduced at just one stage of the whole process will only have an impact at that stage. Which is why the increase in productivity in the economy as a whole has been at a rate of only about 2 percent a year, a rate that the capitalist economy can absorb.

Excuse Me

Recently I was excused jury duty by expressing the socialist position in relation to the entire legal apparatus, which by itself would not be worthy of mention.

 What is was the fact that in a room full with about 250 prospective jurors, an approximate quarter filled in forms requesting they be excused. Admittedly some of their reasons may not be commendable, like racist ones for example, but nevertheless, it is heartening to see so many people reluctant to help capitalism's legal Joe boys administrate the stinking system. 

 Steve and John.

A religious decline

A senior clergy leader in Scotland has called for urgent action after Catholic marriages in Scotland fell to their lowest level since 1941.

Monsignor Peter Magee, the head of the Scottish Catholic Interdiocesan Tribunal has suggested that one day in the calendar year be dedicated to the promotion of marriage, as a way of arresting the slide.

last year just 1,346 marriages in Scotland were conducted by clergy from the Roman Catholic Church. This is down from a high of just over 7,000 in 1970, and is the lowest number for 75 years.

Half of all marriages carried out in Scotland in 2016 were civil ceremonies, those carried out by a registrar, a trend that has also resulted in declines of marriages carried out by religious celebrants, with the number of religious marriages falling by 44 per cent since 1975.

The Catholic Church has blamed an overall fall in marriage rates (with 2009 the lowest rate since 1858) on what they characterised as “aggressive secularisation”.

This is a world of potential plenty.

The Socialist Party attitude to Marx is that he was a pioneer socialist, who placed socialist theory onto a scientific footing. We accept his labour theory of value, his materialist conception of history, and his view that socialism must be the outcome of the political struggle of the working class to free itself from capitalist exploitation so call us "Marxists" (despite the shortcomings of this term) but we do not regard Marx as some infallible source of wisdom who never made a mistake.

We are not committed to applying socialist principles in precisely the same way as Marx did a hundred years ago. This is because conditions have changed considerably. When Marx in his day was politically active, the workers were only just beginning to organise politically and industrially. He considered it his task to encourage this, even if the organisations the workers first formed were not explicitly socialist in character. He expected, somewhat over-optimistically as it has unfortunately turned out, that the workers would soon move on to become conscious socialists. In Marx's time, the world political scene too was different. In the capitalist European countries where the bourgeois revolution against the landed nobility had taken place reactionary feudal powers, especially Tsarist Russia threatened. Opposition to Tsarist Russia became something of an obsession with Marx and led him to take up positions, such as supporting the British-French-Turkish side in the Crimean War, and Poland's independence which we have no hesitation in saying was wrong. What Marx favoured was the further development of capitalism since he knew that this would ultimately remove the threat the reactionary feudal powers posed. Developments since Marx have made his tactics (but not his principles) outdated. developments have also made it possible to establish a society of abundance, with from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, now without any transition period while "the forces of production are raised". Production has already been raised immensely since Marx who lived in an era of the horse and carriage and steam-power. The material conditions for socialism have now long been in existence. All that is needed is for the majority of the working class to realise their common interest in abolishing capitalism.  This great and final act as members of the working class will free them from the chains of the wage-labour and capital relationship which now holds them in its grip. Then they will emerge as men and women in a class-free society. The rat-race, the poverty and all the other evils which arise from property society would then have gone from the scene of a truly human society. Men, women and children would then be free to develop their potential and their relations with each other as human beings.

 the Socialist Party has been saying for a long time that sufficient for all could be produced but isn’t being produced. The fertile fields and rich mineral deposits are there in abundance, so are the highly developed and productive machines, the railways, roads, ships and aeroplanes, and everything else needed for production. So are the human beings who could do the work needed to put everyone far beyond the fear of poverty and deprivation. The Socialist Party is well aware that enough is not being produced at present, and this in spite of the curious thing that there are numerous instances of production being deliberately restricted and goods destroyed. It is because the people who want these things have not money enough to buy them, and the people who have money do not want to buy any more of them. So destruction and restriction go on in spite of the well-established fact that if the hundreds of millions of poor people in the world were suddenly told that they could satisfy their needs free of charge there would be an immediate and immense shortage of the necessities of life. End capitalism and have the means of production owned by the whole community, then goods will be produced for use alone, and the supply of them will not be hindered by artificial barriers of profit and private interest.

Free distribution of wealth is now possible because modern industry and agriculture can turn out an abundance of the things people need. A world of plenty is now possible. There is no need for any man, woman or child in any part of the world to go hungry, be badly clothed or live in slums. The technical problem of producing plenty for all has been solved for a long time. The problem now is that the present social system, capitalism, which exists all over the world places a fetter on production because it operates, and must operate, according to the rule of “no profit, no production.” What the world suffers from today is not overpopulation, but the chronic underproduction that is built into capitalism. Not only does world capitalism hold back production, but it also misuses and wastes the resources of the world. Think of the waste involved in training and equipping armed forces and of the destruction of wars. Think of the waste of commerce and finance — of banks, insurance companies, salesmen, ticket collectors, accountants, economists, cashiers. Indeed, it is probably true to say that only a minority of the world’s population is actually engaged in producing useful things.  Once you take account of this artificial scarcity and organised waste of capitalism, you realise that socialism (where people will cooperate freely to produce an abundance of wealth from which they can take freely according to their needs) is not only possible but is also the only solution to humanity’s current problems.  

What is the purpose of government?

The purpose of government at home is to manage and protect the affairs of the dominant class in society by governing 'over' the citizenry to this end to enable the exploitation of the vast majority by the parasitic ruling class in the interest of profit . This is done using both ideological state apparatus, and repressive state apparatus. This is true regardless of the political hue, conservative or liberal, of the government. This is true also regardless of the forms of capitalist ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. production, whether private, corporate or state owned.

 From time to time governments may adjudicate over the affairs of the domestic capitalist class, when conflict arises, financial capital versus industrial, service economy versus agribusiness. Small busines versus big business and so on. One persons 'levelling of the playing field' is anothers 'regulationary infringement' upon legitimate business.
Abroad the purpose is the same to protect, steal and pursue and invade in the interests of the nation state, conditions for gaining markets, raw materials and combining in spheres of geo-political advantage to those ends. War is business by other means just as it is politics also.
Both poverty and war are inevitable concomitants of capitalism.

 The nominal freedom of the citizenry as to appearing to have power by the ballot, just amounts to the freedom to be 'governed over' in the interests of the parasite class. 

The illusory choice is that between Tweedledee versus Tweedledum.

Another Reason For Abolishing Capitalism

An article in the Canadian Jewish News of July 20, by Ron Csillag (RCSILLAG@THECJN.CA), repudiates the claim, made in the book "Canada and the Global Community," published by Nelson Education Ltd., that Israel uses child soldiers. 

195 countries have adopted the UN Convention of the rights of the child, which forbids the use of children under 15, in armed conflicts, the book added. It also says that since 2000, child soldiers, most of whom were kidnapped and forced to fight, were used in armed conflicts in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mali and Yemen.

Of course, it is horrifying that children should be allowed to fight in wars, whether forced or not, but isn't it also horrifying that adults should fight too? So why not abolish war? And if that isn't possible within capitalism, then abolish that A.S.A.P. 

Steve and John

Those with money, eat; those without, don’t.

Money dominates Mankind almost completely in modern capitalism. Humankind's history shows no other human invention to which we have been so subservient towards. Most people have only vague notions about the nature of money. It is credited with magical, mystical powers which really stem from its users. It has no use or existence apart from men in society. Men do not derive power from money, but money derives its power from men.

It would be reprehensible for those in the Socialist Party to sneer at the myriad worldwide charities and NGOs all vainly striving to address and redress the countless oppressions and outrages that abound around the globe. Such activity is actually testimony to the highly social nature of the human species even in this most cut-throat capitalist society. Nevertheless, all these well-meaning, good-intentioned people have yet to grasp that their own activities, however benign, are actually serving to prolong the very conditions they seek to alleviate. Capitalism can only function in one way – the pursuit of profit. In specific, transitory circumstances where adequate profits cannot be realised, then crops will not be grown (or alternatively, be stockpiled or destroyed), and governments, as the agents of the dominant class, simply help facilitate this process. The plain incontrovertible truth is that there is but one root cause of world hunger and that is capitalism. The aid organisations responded in the best and only way they know to the obscenity that is world hunger. Ever-generous both with their time and their funds they keep requesting more and more of both. It is tragic that they never make that leap of the imagination to realise that no matter how much the capitalist system is tinkered with, it cannot be made to operate for the benefit of humanity at large. Lock, stock and barrel, the capitalist system has to go.

In capitalism everything produced by labour is reduced to money terms; has a price. All spheres of human activity are measured by cost. Every human relationship is either directly affected or tainted by money considerations. Working-class family life, particularly, centres around the wage-packet, which determines the standard of living, amenities and social status enjoyed, type of clothes and education of the children, the future wage-earners. Success is measured by pay, irrespective of the usefulness of work. The basic capitalist relations of buyer and seller, employer and employee, landlord and tenant, into which all enter, are regarded—almost revered—as indispensable, yet they need not exist at all at society's present technological development.

The rich are not rich merely because they have money, but because they own the means of production and distribution. The rent, interest and profit they accumulate, derived from the sale of commodities, produced by workers but owned by capitalists, represents their real wealth. The poor, on the other hand, are not poor because their wages are low but because, not owning means of production and distribution, they are compelled to continue as workers for wages whether high or low. Humanity has transformed the Earth yet the fruits of science and technology are not readily available to us. The money-system's straitjackets and stifles our every move. Millions still starve and live in slums. Capitalism's antiquated social relationships prevent abundance for all.

Rather than the social division into rich and poor, those contrasting extremes of wealth, the Socialist Party points the way to the next stage in social evolution, a world-wide, money-free, class-free society in which all the productive means would belong in common to all humanity. In socialism the means of life would be produced in abundance solely for use and distributed freely, not exchanged or sold, rendering money unnecessary. Freed from the debased motives engendered by capitalism, all individuals could realise their full physical and intellectual powers. We inhabit a world of potential abundance for all, but it is also the case that we have trapped ourselves within a social system of mass deprivation. Throughout the world, millions upon millions of men and women are denied their basic needs. Even in the so-called rich countries, poverty is the lot of the majority. Poverty characterises the life of every worker who is deprived of access to what society could provide for them, but they cannot afford to buy.

Socialism will discard the old rules of the buying and selling game of the market and will distribute what is needed on the basis of free and equal access. Money will be abolished: you cannot buy from yourself what you commonly own. The satisfaction of human needs will involve people giving according to their abilities and taking according to their needs. Free access means that no human being will need to buy anything. Anything that society can produce will be there for the taking. Decent food; the best houses possible to build; gas, electricity, water; TVs, computers, entertainment; all medical and educational services - all completely free and available for all.

Socialists do not have a narrow conception of need. We would not wish to give the impression that socialism will do no more than satisfying basic living requirements - although doing that alone will be a momentous step forward for the millions of workers now denied the satisfaction of their most elementary needs. More than that, socialism will allow humans to be creative and to explore our wider needs. 

 For too long our needs have been over-influenced by the selling process and the crude mind manipulation of the advertisers: in a socialist society we can begin to think about what we really require to be happy human beings and we shall set about supplying ourselves with the resources needed to live as fully as we can.  Socialism will not only be able to satisfy our existing needs, but it will enable us to question and challenge those needs - to escape from the poverty of capitalist-determined needs. Needs are social. We are only free to have goods and services to use if it is technically possible to produce them and if there are people ready to do so. In a socialist society, there is not going to be a sudden, utopian-like abundance of everything: the skies will not rain with goodies. Socialism will release from the constraints of profit the abundant resources of the planet and these will be used to allow us to live decently and well. We will have to realise that living in a world of cooperation entails giving as well as taking. In a worldwide human family, there will be no shortage of willing volunteers to ensure that those who cannot work are cared for; there will be no problem of people refusing to do what cooperation demands of their humanity. In a world of free access, it will be a pleasure to fulfill the necessity of working to produce goods and services, sure in the knowledge that one is not doing so to make a boss rich but to make all of our fellow inhabitants of the global village rich in the quality of life. No-one will be forced to do anything as a matter of compulsion in a socialist society: if anyone declines to participate in work he or she will simply be regarded as very odd. The last thing anyone will do once he or she is free to live in cooperative equality will be to spurn sociability and intercourse.

For years members of the Socialist Party have argued the case for such an exciting alternative of living. For how much longer we will remain a small minority? Will our fellow-workers continue to accept a world of misery and insecurity in the midst of potential plenty? Or will they unite to build a social system where never again will the cry of a hungry child whose parents lack the money to feed it be heard ever again?

Pro-Life Until The Money Runs Out.

Assisted Suicide in Canada: What doctors think – the times.co.uk

I will leave it up to the reader to look up the article but the main idea is the hesitation with assisting a person's wish to die. I have always been a pro-choice person and over the years my ideas did not change a bit. 

A system that extorts you to death, will keep you alive if it means more profit. They will keep you hooked up to a machine and make you breathe even if you do not want to. That is until the money or funding runs out. I am so over with the sentimental, religious or pro-life approach. If a person does not want to participate in this system or society anymore, instead of finding it horrible/unbearable/unbelievable, just honour the person's wish at least. People get told what they should believe in, how they should live and how they should die, how they should love and even how they should make love.

 It is the time that society honours each person's wish as at least a small step towards respecting self-determination. Capitalism is the arch-enemy of self-determination even though the rhetoric sounds like it is pro-choice. Pro-profit it is and it will remain until we toss it into history's graveyard and put a stick through its heart so that it does not rise from death. Socialism is pro-choice and socialists respect people's right to self-determination. 

Steve and John.

Does support for Marxism make any sense today?

I don't think you need to support Marxism but understand what it is and is not. It is an indispensable analytical tool in cutting through the crap of capitalist economics.

It has nothing to do with any of the post-feudal or state capitalist developments of the last century or this one. Russia, China, Cuba, Korea etc are all examples of state capitalist dsevelopments. Discount any references ot socialist/communist/ socialistic countries. They do not exist.
Marx essentially was analysing capitalism.

One criticism of Marx’s Capital is that, written 150 years ago, it is describing conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain which have long since disappeared. It does do this, but this is to miss the point. Marx was analysing an economic system, not the particular political, sociological and historical conditions under which it happened to operate in his day. It was written not, or not just, as a criticism of conditions in mid-Victorian Britain but as an analysis of capitalism in general, of the capitalist economic system as such irrespective of the conditions in which it operated.

As Marx was writing in mid-19th century Britain, most of his concrete examples are drawn from the experience of capitalism in and up to that period. Then, the main industry was textiles whose products were exported throughout the world; the main source of energy was burning coal in steam engines; and the dominant form of ownership of means of production was a factory owned and managed by an individual capitalist family.

Marx’s examples are drawn from the 1860s but, even before he died in 1883, things had begun to change. The production of machines was becoming more important than textile production; coal was about to be used to raise steam to drive electricity-generating turbines; the joint stock company with limited liability was becoming the dominant form of capitalist ownership. But these developments did not alter how capitalism worked as an economic system. It continued to operate in the same basic way that Marx had analysed.

Technology and the political and sociological framework are even more changed today but capitalism as an economic system still works in the same way. The fact that Marx never saw a motor car or an aeroplane or radio, television, electronic computers or knew of nuclear power or genetic engineering does not affect his theory.

That Marx’s analysis of capitalism was not tied to conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain is shown by the fact that the same economic laws, the same economic drive to accumulate capital out of surplus value created by wage-labour, operated also in the former USSR. The institutional framework there – the absence of individual capitalist ownership and the almost total state ownership of the means of production, and the distribution of the consumption part of surplus value amongst various layers of state officials – was quite different from what obtained in the West. Yet capitalism existed there. Even the abolition of private capitalists and capitalist private property rights is compatible with the existence of capitalism.

Marx’s analysis of the way capitalism works is valid wherever there is sectional ownership and control of the means of wealth production and where production is carried out by wage-workers for sale on a market with a view to profit. As this is undoubtedly still the case today, Marx’s Capital remains valid and relevant.

( Edited abridgement  of an article by Adam Buick in September 2017 Socialist Standard Entitled 'Analysing an Economic System.)

Matthew Culbert