This is Socialism ! (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism means common ownership

The means of production will no longer belong to a privileged minority class, whether private capitalists (as in the West) or state bureaucrats (as in the East). Both private capitalism and state capitalism will be replaced by a system in which all natural and industrial resources will be held in common by the whole community. This is the basis of socialism.

Socialism means social equality

With the establishment of common ownership, the existing division of society into a privileged ruling class and a majority class of wage and salary workers will come to an end. Instead, every member of society will stand equal with respect to the means of production and have an equal say in the way social affairs are run.

Socialism means cooperation

With the disappearance of classes, a common social interest really will exist. People will no longer be alienated, isolated individuals competing in the marketplace, but will be members of a real community of free and equal men and women cooperating for their mutual benefit and for the common good. In line with the nature of humans as social beings, cooperation, not today's competitive individualism, will be the prevalent social ethos, transforming all aspects of social life — work, play, education, the family and personal relationships generally.

Socialism means democratic control

The existing political structures where a government rules over people on behalf of the class that owns the means of production will give way to a fully democratic system of decision-making and administration. Decisions will flow upwards from the broadest possible base rather than from the top downwards as at present. Delegates, subject to the full range of democratic checks and controls, will carry out and supervise the purely administrative tasks that will remain once the political state with its machinery of coercion has been dismantled.

Socialism means production for use

Production for sale with its profit motive will come to an end; goods and services will be produced to directly supply needs without the intervention of buying and selling. The mechanisms of the market will be replaced by a self-adjusting system of production for use. The productive and distributive network will be geared to respond in a flexible way to information about needs, communicated to it directly as required amounts of specific goods and materials.

Socialism means free access

With the abolition of market mechanisms, people will be able to obtain the food, clothes and other articles they need for their personal consumption by going into a store or distribution centre and taking according to their own self-defined needs. Houses and flats will be rent-free, with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, health care, communications, education, restaurants and laundries will be organised as free public services. There will be no admission charges to museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation. Money will become redundant.

Socialism means the abolition of the wages system

Since people will have free access to what they need, productive work will no longer be performed for an employer in return for a wage or salary but will become a voluntary service organised on a democratic basis. The factories, farms, offices, schools, hospitals and other places of work will be administered democratically by those working in them. People will undertake this work service as their contribution to the necessary social tasks of producing the goods to keep the stores stocked with the things for people to take for their personal consumption and of running the free public services and the administration.

Socialism means a world community

Because capitalism itself is already a world system which, either in its private or in its state form, dominates the whole globe, socialism too can only be a world system. This means that socialism could not be established in just one country but only as a world community without frontiers, in which the natural and industrial resources of the Earth will be the common heritage of present and future generations. The world will be regarded as one country and humanity as one people.

Scorpion is on holiday.

Food as a weapon (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the ending of the Cold War. American military power is no longer sufficient to hold its real economic rivals— Europe and Japan—in check, and the three power blocs are squaring up for the battle for world economic domination in the 21st century.

The current battlefield is a scries of talks on world trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which have now been stalled for nearly two years, with the European and US governments hurling abuse at each other over the emotive issue of farm subsidies.

So what is GATT, and why does an apparently minor dispute over handouts to farmers threaten to bring the world trading system to the point of all-out economic war?

The GATT process is aimed at promoting “free trade" amongst the competing states of the world, tearing down barriers to imports and allowing consumers to choose the most efficient supplier of anything from banking services to hairdryers.

In reality, of course, there is never any such thing as free trade among equal players— no ‘‘level playing field". US-based multinational corporations. with the economic battering ram of vast scales of production behind them, and the military and political power of the US state in the not too distant background, are clearly going to make easy meat of the struggling young industries throughout the “Third World”, currently protected by their own governments’ trade barriers.

Trade wars

Now all this is fine with European governments as well. They too have multinationals based on their soil, only too eager to participate in the turkey shoot. In the coming months you will doubtless hear ministers extolling the virtues of Free Trade for the health of the world economy.

But when we come to agriculture. there is a slight fly in the milk churn. European farms tend to be small and “inefficient" (unprofitable), whereas their US competitors tend to be large and “efficient"—fully industrialised and reaping the advantages of economics of scale.

This, of course, would give them a significant advantage in a genuinely free market, almost certainly devastating the European farm industry, and scoring round one of the battle for 21st century economic domination to America.

And American farmers have never been more desperate for markets for grain, which regularly gluts the American market. (Of course, this does not mean that there are no hungry people in America, simply that they can’t afford to buy what lies rotting in warehouses).

In fact this is another bizarre consequence of the ending of the Cold War. since in those good old days the Soviet empire bought all Americas surplus grain and paid on the nose with hard currency.

Europe’s governments, then, urged on by the powerful farming lobby, are determined not to give up their agricultural subsidies, while the US is desperate to prise the European market open.

A few months ago. a high- level EC delegation led by Portuguese Prime Minister Cavaco Silva and Commission head Jacques Delors, visited President Hush in Washington for crisis talks, with Cavaco Silva making it quite clear how deep the rift had become. “Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the apparent political goodwill and the technical proposals put on the table by the US”, he told the European (9 April).

And that’s just about as close as a diplomat comes to calling the other side a dirty cheating liar.

Both sides only entrenched their positions at the G7 economic summit in Munich last month, with John Major suffering a major rebuff to his attempts to break the deadlock, and vowing to continue to “bully, badger and cajole" fellow leaders into living up to the undertakings to conclude a deal by the end of the year.

In fact, although the European side has offered a 30 percent reduction in protection and support for agriculture, this would be on the basis of levels operating in 1986—a real cut of little more than 15 percent (The Grocer, 23 November 1991).

In the EC’s last review of support prices in June 1991. ministers cut a modest 1.5 percent from levels of support for oilseed, and at the EC Lisbon summit price support for cereals was cut 29 per cent. "Still not enough" said Hush.

Agri-business

The Daily Telegraph issued a dire warning following the failure of the Munich summit that the world is edging closer to a menacing era of protectionism. “There is a real danger that the Uruguay round of GATT could breakdown altogether, taking us back to the unstable trade bloc structures of the 1930s” (9 July).

The point is that food production is governed by the laws of competitive production for profit. Manufactures of food only survive by selling at a reduced price against their competitors, and with a glut of unsaleable food on the world market, pressure to subsidise unprofitable, mainly small-scale European producers against their industrialised US rivals is immense.

So the EC’s subsidies pile up yet more unsellable food, and US farming corporations are forced to watch their own surplus production rot in warehouses because it can’t be sold anywhere. The GATT negotiations are therefore a trial of political and economic strength between US and European agri-business, with their respective governments fighting their corners round the negotiating table.

What insanity! Capitalism— the competitive production of goods for sale at a profit—yet again proves itself to be completely unable to cope with a world in which we could provide an abundance of food for each citizen of this planet. It is the only system that actually manages to find adequate food production a major crisis. Surely its time to establish a system where this is an opportunity. through free access to all food production, to abolish hunger once and for all.

Andy Thomas

Socialist Standard Readers Survey (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

An interesting innovation from the Socialist Standard editorial committee in the 1990s. The results from this survey were written up in the November 1992 issue of the  Socialist Standard. (There was a similar type survey in 1994.)

Could a similar type survey be produced today? What with the majority of readership of the Standard now being online, I'm not altogether sure but I would hope that the editorial committee would give it some serious consideration.

Promises, promises (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few months ago we heard the politicians of capitalism making their overblown speeches and promises, vowing they’d do this and swearing to do that when in office. And once again, sufficient numbers of gullible enough voters let them get away with it, put them back in power to run the same old system the same old way.

When they get office we witness all the usual traditional reneging and treachery, the feeble excuses and transparent pretexts for "expediency” and compromise—the same old sell-outs and U-turns on policy and supposed “principle".

All the parties of the Profit and Wages System keep on making promises they never keep. The promise to solve the housing problem, which stays as bad as ever or gets even worse no matter what any politicians say. The promise to do something about unemployment, which has gone on rising over the years in spite of every “job-creation” scheme and YTS programme. The promise to make “our” country more democratic—when more and more civil and legal rights have gradually been eroded away by successive governments of whatever political hue. And with each fresh election the promises seem to get more vivid and extravagant. Kinnock promised us the sun, moon and stars if we voted for him; the Tories promised things which a couple of years ago, under Maggie Thatcher, they wouldn't have dared contemplate for fear of invoking her Divine Wrath.

All the other parties in Britain, such as the Liberals, the Nationalists, the Greens, the SWP, and various far-Left parties, all make promises of some kind. All want power to rule and govern us just like the two main parties of capitalism. And none of them can keep their promises, whatever it is they say they can or will do. This is because the existing social system won't allow it; the profit-motive takes care of that, forbidding any significant change in the way society is run or structured.

One political party stands out for its absence of promises. One party alone doesn't make any: the Socialist Party. We don’t ask people to vote for us as leaders or for any leaders whatever. We tell workers what capitalism is all about, what’s wrong with it. and why it should be abolished and replaced with Socialism. We tell workers all about what socialism really means and how to achieve it. None of this entails making any promises, or making any extravagant claims for ourselves. This is because the Socialist Party doesn’t strive to run capitalism or solve the perennial problems arising within it; that fruitless task we leave to our capitalist opponents to deal with if they can. We are not in the business of theorising quack remedies for the social ills capitalism has created; we want rid of capitalism, lock, stock and barrel, and that’s the only item on our agenda.

Nor do we promise that socialism will be a perfect Utopia; socialists are far too realistic for that. We analyze the real world and offer ways and means of changing it so that the basic needs of the entire human race may be fully satisfied. This, we consider to be a positive step forward in social progress, not to eradicate all problems from human life—which is impossible—but to make it a lot easier to solve them when they arise.

D. E. F.

Letter: Class struggle in sport (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class struggle in sport

Mention the term “class struggle" to someone and they are most likely to recoil in terror or perhaps conclude that you are slightly mad. The John Majors of this world would, of course, have you believe that we now live in a classless society; and if you don't believe him there are always plenty of sociologists around to assure you that yes, there are classes—but it’s OK because everybody's “middle class" nowadays.

On 1 April last members of Canada's National Ice-Hockey League voted 560 to 4 in favour of calling the first ever strike by players in the NHL's 75-year history, and in doing so stuck two fingers up at those academics and politicians who are proclaiming the “death of the working class" and of socialism in general.

Now I'm not pretending that hockey players have spent the past few weeks skating around with copies of Marx’s Capital in their hands, but nevertheless there is a profound sense of awareness on the part of the players that, in the words of one of the ex-stars Tiger Williams. “we have rights just like any other worker”.

The fans in Vancouver, however. are up in arms over the strike especially in a year when their beloved team has a great chance of winning the revered Stanley Cup. How, they argue, can players whose average yearly earnings top $350,000 (about £175.000) choose to go on strike at a time when ordinary fans are struggling to make ends meet?

The facts, though, paint a different picture. The average salary is misleading in that there are a handful of players who earn an amount well into seven figures, thereby pushing the average up. The players were told recently by the owners of the NHL franchises that there would be no money available for increased wages despite a turnaround last year of over $43 million.

On top of this the average pro hockey player can expect his career to last about four years during which he will be subjected to constant media pressure, long-distance travel, niggling injuries, and the physical and psychological grind of playing and training day in and day out. a fact which is reflected in the abnormally low life-span of many professional athletes. Added to this, after his career is over he has little to fall back on in terms of “marketable skills”.

Yet perhaps more than this the strike is about “free agency", or, as described by Pat Quinn. the Vancouver Canucks General Manager, “the right for players to sell their talent to another club— which is at the moment being denied to them by the owners”.

The bottom line being, of course:

that this is entertainment, that tickets are sold for a product, that the value of that product is found in the talent of the players.(Globe and Mail, 2 April).

And summed up nicely by the CBC reporter:

This is not a sport—it is a business, built around one point—the raw talent of the hockey player.

All this goes to show that under capitalism, there exists a fundamental social antagonism between those who own the means of living and those who don’t. The exploitation of wage labour exists regardless of whether one is a factory worker, a working mother, a university professor or a professional ice-hockey player.

What all these people have in common is an interest in getting rid of a social system that has long since outlived its purpose and in establishing instead a way of living in which human talents from whatever walk of life can finally be expressed to the full.

Julian Prior, 

Vancouver

Letter: Socialist voters (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist voters

Dear Editors,

In the May issue of the Socialist Standard, Steve Coleman, in Story of an Election, claims “50,000 genuine socialist votes". In Between the Lines, he points out that £25,000 is needed to stand fifty candidates and have an election broadcast on BBC TV and radio.

This works out at 50p per person; 50,000 could easily afford this over five years, in time for the next General Election. Furthermore, if 650 candidates were to stand this would cost £325,000. Dividing this sum by 50,000 “genuine socialists” would only require £6.50 over five years. Not an impossibility surely.

T. Hilton,

Stockport

Reply:

If you are one of those who, given the chance, would vote for a genuine socialist candidate, why not start the hall rolling and pay your £6.50 into our Election Fund?—Editors.

Letter: Bicycle Thieves in Bennetts End (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Could it be that the Socialist concept of a society where the needs of the people are freely met is beginning to catch on. Going Places on Radio 4. on Friday 19th June, reported that in order to cut down on bicycle thefts the Police in Hemel Hempstead will be offering bicycles to the public free of charge. Apparently they have so many stolen ones that have not been reclaimed they will be making them freely available to the public.

George Pearson 

London SW20

Reply:

It’s true that there is no point in stealing what is freely available. Which is why this sort of crime will disappear in a socialist society—Editors.

Letter: Money & Survival (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In addition to pointing out some of its deficiencies, for which I am grateful, the criticism of my book Money & Survival in the Socialist Standard, June 1992, was valuable in highlighting for me those differences in approach which prevent my joining the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

It is true that I did not deal with issues such as the historical development of capitalism, class structure or the ownership of the means of production. but this is because they would have no significance in a moneyless society. In pointing out that financial systems inhibit scientific, social and economic progress, that they must be less, perhaps much less, than 50 percent efficient. I am attempting to show the enormous potential that would lie before a world that could free itself of such inhibitions.

The future can only be built upon experience of the past but social circumstances are always changing and our perspectives must change with them. I have no doubt that many of the criticisms of society and capitalism remain as valid today as they had done in the days of Karl Marx but both have changed. In the eighteenth century there were no transnational companies dominating the world, nor production workers with middle class values, nor was there a United Nations drawing the peoples of the world together.

Confrontation, whether in party politics or class wars, invites hostility, holds up the advancement of human society and is self-defeating. The eighteenth century concept that the poor can only be assisted by depriving the rich is derived from illusions of scarcity and exchange value, both of which, as I explained in my talk to my friends in your Bristol branch, are money-oriented concepts that have only had validity in narrow local contexts and are totally irrelevant today.

Confrontation begets confrontation and because the rich live in constant fear of losing their wealth, their power and their privileges, they are only too willing to believe that eventually, however far into the future that might be. those benefits will trickle down to the poor, and that that justifies them in fighting anything or anybody that threatens to take those advantages away. They have the power and resources and even in the unlikely event that they were defeated, another group would arise to grab the spoils.

To assume that once socialism is achieved the money system would wither away is to fail to appreciate the financial and psychological power of the money system. The reverse is true. Only when money has been eliminated can we hope to build a just and forward-looking social system.

There is no short-term solution. The dissemination of such ideas is bound to be a slow process and may never materialise before the human race destroys itself, but that is no reason why we would stop thinking and trying.

Melvin Chapman,

Bath

Reply:

We still can't see how money could be eliminated before socialism is established; nor how socialism could be established without a political confrontation with the privileged class who currently own and control the means of production—Editors.