Letter: Sitting duck rules (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sitting duck rules

Thank you for publishing my letter plus your reply. However, I'm afraid that good at criticizing the status quo (who isn’t? It’s a sitting duck) you weaken completely when asked for your alternative.

Without money, how can it be decided whether I’m to have the use of a pair of low-quality, plastic shoes (the present reality), or of a Rolls Royce (which, of course, I richly deserve)?

Without the need for money, how on earth am I (and a few million others) going to get up and go to work each day?

Politics is the art of the possible and. having recently exceeded the allotted three-score and ten, the SPGB should seriously consider what Marx and Engels would think, say and do were they here today.

With or without class and money, the tough-minded people—the aggressive, assertive minority—will pursue their interests at the expense of the rest, who have neither the energy nor courage to oppose them. What humanity needs most is for the powerful and influential, in all walks of life, to decide to co-operate with each other for the good of all.

Allan Bula

Guildford

Reply:

Though you speak of money as an indispensable facility, on your own evidence it is not: instead of enabling you to get things, it prevents you from doing so. How was it “decided” that you have low-grade plastic shoes? Obviously, you want better ones but your choice is nullified by your pay-packet. Nor does the capitalist class or the government "decide” that you shall have only so much money. The government (any government) would like to have everyone in work, well paid and contented; it does not choose but is forced into policies which have the opposite effects. For the capitalist class as a whole, workers are customers. Each capitalist would like all the others’ employees to have plenty of money to buy his wares; but he must try to keep his own employees’ wages down. No "decision” is made. It is the way capitalism operates.

You need to reason this out. The sellers of wealth are the owners of it. If common ownership existed, there would be no owning class; the means of living and the products would belong to everyone. Can you explain what basis there would be for buying and selling, and what function money could possibly have? As for its being an incentive, you clearly see it as the reward of labour. Yet you acknowledge (see above) that it provides an inadequate reward for you. We are saying that Socialism would provide incomparably better material rewards, and therefore as much incentive as you need.

Without class there are no interests and no powerful people: power is political. Since a class society produces competing interests, it is impossible for "the powerful and influential” to co-operate "for the good of all” (you say this yourself in the preceding sentence). But society has been and is ruled by so-called strong men, and the .result in your own words is that the status quo is “a sitting duck”—i.e. has almost nothing to be said in its favour. Why do you think it will be different in the future? Socialists take the realistic attitude that a change of rulers makes no difference because the problems are produced by the class structure of capitalist society. Your view is the Utopian one.

Editors.