This article and the one on the following two pages should be read together since the first expresses some views which are countered in the second. Peter Nielsen is a former Labour parliamentary candidate.
"All it takes to do away with the ills of capitalism is a politically aware and motivated working class which wants and understands socialism." So said the Cover Feature, “What makes you angry?”, in the July 1992 edition of Socialist Standard. All? In a political environment where the word “socialism” is applied with such disregard for its real meaning, “understanding” it is no easy matter for people whose general political awareness is shaped by the capitalist agenda on which all mass media discussion takes place.
The experience of the working class of so-called “socialism” has not been a happy one. “Socialists” of many hues have come and gone this century world-wide, their promise unfulfilled through subversion and betrayal. In Britain, all the achievements of previous Labour governments have been partly or wholly destroyed since 1979. Cowed by Thatcher, seduced by an establishment which it has never repudiated anyway, and betrayed by its leaders. Labour now seeks an electoral mandate to govern the same old rotten system under Tony Blair declaring itself “a socialist party”. Coupled with the slavering triumphalism of the capitalists that “socialism is dead” following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ordinary people are understandably lost in a maze of meanings. Worse still, the disowning of socialism by the Labour Party in recent years has only reinforced the capitalists in their propaganda that socialism is associated with hopeless idealism, incompetence and failure. The fact that the chronic economic and administrative incompetence of the nomenclatura of Soviet state capitalism caused it to collapse in chaos and defeat only adds to the scepticism of working class people. In their eyes, through their mass media, all systems end up with people at the top looking after themselves.
If socialism is to advance and not continue to be scandalised by vested interests who patronisingly describe it as a good idea which will never work in practice because of “human greed”, the task of socialists is not only to expose the ills of capitalism, but also to meet the challenge of cynicism and hopelessness so successfully nurtured by decades of Tory propaganda and Labour betrayal. Socialists need more than a definition of socialism. They need a language of socialism which expresses the rights and moral standards by which human beings must live to survive in peace, freedom and with justice. It must be capable of being articulated in a consistent way and of being recognised each time it is spoken.
The language of socialism must be the language of the ethical. It must not waver from principle. The concept of human rights must be total. It must not only concern itself with freedom from victimisation, false imprisonment, torture and execution. If anything, such acts are sanitised by being on the human rights agenda rather than in the sphere of criminality where they belong. Human rights must extend to the fields of economics, housing, health, education and the environment and they must be applied universally. The redistribution of wealth and the democratisation of industry must not be a mere policy option for socialists seeking votes in elections but must be taken for granted as an inevitable consequence of supporting socialism. Socialism should be synonymous with the highest standards of life. Human rights in the social and economic spheres demand the elimination of poverty, unemployment, homelessness and alienation. They also demand the highest levels of performance and professionalism in all work by each other for each other.
No conflict
There should be no conflict between the good of the individual and the good of the community. The two are inseparable. Individuals benefit from communities organised to provide the best in public services, and communities benefit from free and fulfilled individuals realising their full potential be they highly gifted or severely handicapped. The full realisation of the potential in all human beings is the ultimate guarantee of the best society that can be conceived. Th waste of one human being through neglect and exploitation denies others the fruits of their endeavour.
Such general tenets are not, as cynics would have it, the utopian beliefs of idealists and dreamers. They command wide support according to the ICM State of the Nation polls published annually in the Guardian newspaper. For years, they have shown big majorities who regard unemployment more serious than inflation, who think that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, who oppose privatisations, who regard environmental protection as more important than producing “cheap” goods, and who prefer better public services to lower taxes. Substantial minorities still oppose Britain's nuclear weapons and support more trade union involvement in industry and the economy. There is an even split between those who believe that more socialist planning would be the best way to solve Britain's economic problems and those who did not.
These views are some way from being those of “a politically aware and motivated working class which wants and understands socialism”, but that is not the point. Given that such opinions are expressed in the context of the capitalist agenda by people who have rarely or ever been exposed to a true socialist alternative and whose most recent encounter with commentaries on socialism was intended to consign socialism as variously “unworkable”, “failed”, “discredited” and “dead”, they must be regarded as remarkable. They should tell us that all the political parties represented in Parliament, including the Labour Party, should speak for less than half of the people and that there is a huge political void waiting to be occupied by advocates of socialism.
Political void
The crunch is, how is it to be occupied? Who will occupy it? The Lahour Party has abandoned it if it ever occupied it at all. Socialist thinkers and activists are scattered across a profusion of parties and organisations which collectively represent a common rejection of capitalism and its wars, its environmental vandalism, its poverty, starvation, homelessness, unemployment and racism, and its ambition for the usurious enslavement of all humanity. How many more decades will it take socialists to work through their differences towards a socialist consensus? Is there no synthesis of socialism, democracy, peace, freedom and justice to which we can all subscribe?
If objectives can be broadly agreed, then two steps towards unity will have been made possible: A united critique of capitalism and a united vision of what should replace it. There only remains agreement about the process of achieving it. That will be difficult and will require the putting to pasture of some sacred cows on the left. It will be an iconoclastic endeavour, not against socialist sentiment but against long and dearly held convictions about the “only” way to defeat capitalism in a left culture in which there are many “only” ways including insurrection, revolution, entryism, the ballot box and just waiting around until the system grows rotten, collapses and dies.
The achievement of socialism is the responsibility of all who take up the cause irrespective of which organisation, if any, they identify with. Socialism is no longer a luxury which can occupy our intellects in interminable arguments about strategies for achieving it to the exclusion of events unfolding around us. Socialism has become an urgent necessity. To hand over the world's economy to the business élites to exploit for profit, by collusion or by default, is a recipe for social and environmental disaster. If socialism is denied for lack of the will to unite, it will amount to a criminal act of passive surrender to the capitalists and to betrayal of the working class. It is not just about filling a vacuum left by the Labour Party’s rightward shifts. It is also about a vacuum in the understanding of people who have never thought about politics, who are dissatisfied but don’t know what with, some of who may even vote for the Tories without being sure why. That requires that socialists organise to demand the attention given to the capitalist parties in the media, on the stump and on the street. Socialists must speak the language of socialism which the people understand. Above all, they must reach the people, confronting the capitalist agenda issue-by-issue, blow-for-blow.
United Left
Demanding attention requires presence. Presence comes from the status conferred by the strength of a united socialist front which cannot be dismissed as “marginal” or “extreme”. The capitalists may control the media through the ownership of its assets but they do not own the right of communication and dialogue between peoples any more than they own the rain in spite of their efforts to privatise it. Their monopoly of the use of the media and of the agenda should not be surrendered by default. As long as these powerful levers remain in their hands, the capitalists retain the ability to contain everything a divided Left can throw at them A united Left could not be denied, especially if it scored enough points under the capitalists' own rules of access to the media, namely by the election of MPs and councillors.
The point is not to sign up to the traditions of British politics and the institutions of the establishment which sustains them. It is to give united public expression to the socialist cause in a form which is familiar to people and which can reach people in an age of mass telecommunications which demands presence and status to justify participation. Virtue is not enough. A show of strength is needed, strength in numbers which demands attention and can show that socialism is not a scattered body of non-conformist belief but a philosophy which is the true reflection of the natural state of human society. To a rising generation which has known no other political environment than that which exists today, and to who this century’s two World Wars and the Cold War exist only in history’ books, the arguments for socialism must address the world as it is today. Not the “modern” world of Tony Blair which accepts a limited democratic influence over the forces of international capitalism, but the modern world whose awesome problems of inequality and environmental plunder and destruction can only be solved by co-operation through assent, inseparably by socialism and democracy.
The capitalists are rampant in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the ascendancy of the so-called New World Order. If they are to be challenged, it must be done before it is too late. Socialists bear that responsibility. United we stand, divided we fall. After all, if professing socialists can’t get their act together, how will the people ever be persuaded “to want and understand socialism”?
Peter Nielsen
Blogger's Note:
Here's an obituary for Peter Nielsen which dates from 2018, and which gives more background on his political and personal life.
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