Last month’s Socialist Standard contained a review of a new book entitled Waking Up. A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. Though a work of science-fiction imagining a world with far more advanced forms of technology than currently exist, it advocates and attempts to describe the same kind of society the Socialist Party has campaigned for throughout its existence – stateless, moneyless, marketless and with common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services. It depicted, to use the author’s own words, a society of ‘seamless harmony between humans and nature’ with everyone leading ‘their own versions of a good life, respecting each other and the planet’.
One reservation the review had, however, was that there was no explanation of how we got there in the first place, how it all happened. The book’s author, Harald Sandø, has now taken up that challenge by providing a short, imagined account of the ‘shift that changed everything’, of the ‘move from a system of money, ownership, debt, competition, war and scarcity to a world of cooperation, sharing, abundance and peace’. He has also said he may integrate this into a future edition of the book. It happened, his account says, via a shift in consciousness of a ‘spiritual’ kind, whereby people voluntarily ‘began questioning the foundational assumptions of the system’. Even billionaires did this and this was especially important since they were the ones who funded the new system. They became out-and-out philanthropists redirecting private property to become ‘humanity’s shared inheritance’, so that ‘paradoxically enough the new moneyless world was created with money’. All this, we are told, happened in an entirely voluntary way with ‘no war’, ‘no forced redistribution’ and ‘no bloody revolution’.
We have in common with Harald Sandø one important aspect of this vision. That is the idea that the shift from the current society of private ownership and control, gross inequality and production for profit – which we call capitalism – to a society of common ownership, economic equality and production for need – which we call socialism – requires a profound shift of consciousness by the overwhelming majority of the population. We cannot, however, regard as plausible his notion that this will somehow be triggered by the generosity of billionaires electing to share their fortunes. Rather we see the prime condition – the sole condition in fact – for such a change in a spread of consciousness among the vast majority of wage and salary workers, which will then impel them, by democratic use of the vote, to take the power necessary to abolish capitalism and set about organising a genuine socialist society – very much of the kind looked forward to by the author of Waking Up and by a good number of others with a similar vision.
So though we welcome this book as, to quote the author’s own words, ‘a canvas for exploring possibilities’ and ‘an invitation to imagine, question and reflect’, we would insist on the need for democratic political action by the majority as a prerequisite for the successful establishment and organisation of the kind of society we share his desire for.
Howard Moss
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