Capitalism, socialism and work (2021)

From the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The moment of history we all currently live in is called capitalism, a time when people are constrained to spend a good part of their waking day working for an employer for a wage or salary in order to live. We are ‘constrained’, because for most of us our work in the form it exists is not what we’d choose to do if we didn’t need to get money to live and to provide for ourselves and our families. That is not to say that, in a different kind of society, we would not choose to do a day’s work as such. In fact we would, because work is an important human need, but we would certainly not choose to do it for an employer in a job under conditions of take it or leave it. We would choose to do work we genuinely wanted to do under reasonable conditions and without the gun of material insecurity at our head. Under a different social system than capitalism, we would do a day’s work that was meaningful to us, that suited us and also suited and supported the collective social effort to produce and distribute goods for human need rather than for profit.

Profit is in fact what underlies and generates the production and distribution of goods and services over the whole planet – in the UK, in the rest of Europe, in the USA, in Russia, in China, in Cuba, in India, in Africa, in fact everywhere we look. The rule is no profit no production. And that’s what ties us down to the kind of working day that we’ve not chosen and that most of us would not do if we were free to choose. To take a small example, who would choose to do the job a man does at a supermarket I go to shop in which consists of sitting looking at a screen at the entrance to the store all day and checking to see if anyone is stealing or looks as though they’re stealing? The obvious answer is that no one would freely choose to do that. Yet we can be sure that, if such a job were advertised, the wolf from the door imperative would mean there were many applicants. As Noam Chomsky recently put it: ‘You are allowed to rent yourself to survive. It’s called taking a job’.

To give another example which says even more about the way society is organised and its priorities, a recent Channel 5 television programme illustrated the reality not only of having to take whatever work is available but also of the grotesquely wasteful way in which this society expends human energies and resources. The programme was about the efforts being made to catch people who use the London Transport system without paying their fare or at least without paying their full fare. A huge network of computers and other machinery filling a whole building has been set up employing large numbers of people to catch out the offenders and present them for punishment. One of the programme’s focuses was on two of the employees at the sharp end, those whose job it was to approach suspected offenders, especially those who’ve found a way of underpaying their fare on the underground and have been identified on the computer and camera system. As the suspects exit their train or station, it’s the job of these employees, who are obviously very apprehensive themselves after waiting around sometimes for several hours, to pounce and to try and stop or apprehend the fare dodgers. Some of the scenes, of the encounters, are not difficult to imagine. They prompt the question: Who would want to do a job like that if they didn’t have to? And, of course, the waste of energies and resources involved in the whole operation are quite mind-boggling. And this is the kind of thing that’s repeated many millions of time over across the whole planet – a microcosm of the waste of talents, energies and resources that the market and the profit system generate. How correct is the observation once made that the waste of all kinds generated by this system is so vast and complex that, were anyone to attempt to measure it precisely, they’d be doomed to failure.

Life after capitalism

But how would work be different in the kind of moneyless, wageless society of free access and voluntary cooperation that the Socialist Party has been advocating consistently for well over 100 years? Is it possible to give a detailed account of what it would be like? Probably not, since, as Marx put it some 150 years ago, to attempt to explain in detail what that future society would be like would be akin to writing ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’. Others have tried to do this however, for example William Morris, in his late 19th century novel, News From Nowhere. But inspiring as Morris’s book was in concept, social development soon made its detail look precisely what it was – speculation. In the same way, if, say, 50 years ago – so before the age of modern electronic communication and production, someone had tried to set out a typical day’s work in socialism, it would be sure to seem obsolete now.

In the same connection, the Socialist Party’s pamphlet How We Live and How We Could Live: from Capitalism to Socialism, published in 2006, contained a list of 150 products and occupations associated with money that would not be necessary in socialism. While it’s true that these would be obsolete in a moneyless socialist society, the fact is that even now in capitalism, only some 15 years after the list was published, a good many of the terms in it already seem old-fashioned. This is because capitalism has evolved quickly with the changes and technology advances it incessantly brings into being. So words from that list which are now all but obsolete because the functions and activities they describe have all but disappeared, are, for example, football coupons, cheque cards, telephone meters, overtime payments, pension books, travellers’ cheques, Christmas clubs, luncheon voucher schemes, rent collectors – and that’s to name just a few. Of course, many of the products and tasks listed still do exist, but who knows how many of them will in, say, 10 or 20 years time and how many others we’ve never heard of will have come into being by then?

So if it’s difficult to give an accurate detailed picture of what life will be like in capitalism in say just a few years’ time, how could attempting to describe the precise details of a future society based on completely different premises be any more than speculation? What we can say for sure, however, is that, as long as capitalism continues, worker will continue to compete with worker for jobs, business will compete with business for sales and profit, and nation will compete with nation over sales of goods and services, spheres of economic and political interest, control of trade routes and sources of raw materials. And what we can also say is that the environment will continue to be despoiled instead of conserved. And in all this the individual worker will continue to be a passive spectator swept along by economic forces over which he or she has no direct control.

However, if we can’t give a detailed account of life in the socialist world that urgently needs to be established by the world’s workers, what we can state with certainty is that it will consist of people carrying out meaningful and personally and socially fulfilling tasks in which they realise their potential as human beings. And this will be part of the broader planned organisation of a social system that the population as a whole will have decided to adopt in place of what exists at present. It will be, as one writer has put it ‘a new form of life that does not organise itself around wage work and monetary exchange’, a society in which ‘everyone can go to the social storehouses and service centres to get what they need’. And how will all this be planned? The pamphlet, ‘Socialism as a Practical Alternative’, puts forward some interesting ideas on this. For example, it suggests the following: ‘We would divide up responsibilities while taking into account individual aptitudes and proclivities. Some tasks would need to be performed locally, but many could be planned on a regional or global scale, using advanced computer technologies.’ But this too, in the end, is also speculation and has to be seen as falling into the realm of ideas rather than prescriptions.

What is patently clear is that human beings are doers and that, when the whole structure of capitalism and the colossal waste of energies and resources associated with its money system – banking, insurance and finance, the accompanying military apparatus – cease to exist, those energies and resources will be released for all of us to involve ourselves in being doers in a truly meaningful way and to fulfil our needs at all levels, to engage in what’s been called ‘useful labour’.

This kind of world has been excellently outlined in a recent book highly sympathetic to the socialist objective (Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav), which refers to a world of ‘fully capacitated individuals, in which every single person could look forward to developing their interests and abilities with full social support’.

A final point worth making – and one that has been advanced by many articles in the Socialist Standard over the years and by many books on the subject – is that human beings are essentially a cooperative species. We enjoy reciprocating, working together – even under the constraints of a non-cooperative system like capitalism – and all these cooperative energies will flourish and allow us to flourish in the new society we bring into being. Martin Luther King, not a figure often easily associated with socialism, was surely spot on when he said: ‘Profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ And it’s only socialism that will allow all of us, on a world scale, to set about making that life.

Howard Moss

Rear View: Poor People’s (ongoing) Campaign (2018)

The Rear View Column from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poor People’s (ongoing) Campaign

The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination was covered widely in mainstream media last month. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for combating racial equality through non-violent resistance. For the last five years of his life, King was subject to scrutiny by the FBI. J Edgar Hoover was concerned about ‘communist’ infiltration of civil rights groups and unions but proof proved elusive. Baptist minister King had apparently read some of Marx’s writings and did not like his materialism, but such influences can be seen here: ‘the profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be making a living than making a life.’ He even stated ‘the fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad,’ yet rather than seeking to replace capitalism with socialism he campaigned for reforms to restructure it – e.g. he strived for a universal basic income as well as end to ‘overpopulation’. Days after his death Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in housing basis of race, religion, or national origin. Decades later, Obama’s ‘change’ meant business as usual. Today, racism is waxing not waning, 40 million Americans live in poverty, the top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and ‘just 1 in 10 black Americans believe civil rights movement’s goals have been achieved in the 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr was killed’ (theindependent.co.uk, 31 March). And this, from Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer winning historian, says it all (probably unwittingly) : ‘all the issues that he raised toward the end of his life are as contemporary now as they were then’ (nytimes.com, 4 April). Dr. King focused famously on the ‘Triple Evils’ of poverty, racism and militarism, i.e., symptoms rather than the underlying disease.


Poverty without end

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela died the same week as the anniversary of King’s death. Media reaction was, unlike to that of Dr. King, very mixed. ‘Winnie was working as a hospital social worker when she realized the abject poverty under which most people were forced to live in, created by the inequalities of the system. It is from this point that she strived to bring change and equality’ (standardmedia.co.ke, 3 April). She married Nelson Mandela several years prior to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 (289 murdered). Established in 1912, the African National Congress had employed largely non-violent means in its campaign to secure voting rights for non-white Africans, but this changed in 1961 with the formation of an armed wing. When Nelson was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, the South African state punished Winnie too. She was beaten, tortured and held in solitary confinement. Andrew Malone writes as if she deserved such treatment, describing her as ‘an odious, toxic individual who continued to preach hatred rather than reconciliation right up to the end of her life’ (dailymail.co.uk, 3 April). Yet for a woman accused of murder, fraud, kidnapping and theft, comments from the South African Human Rights Commission in an article titled A tribute to Madikizela-Mandela: ‘A true revolutionary is guided by great love’ (thetimeslive.co.za, 3 April) seem equally over the top. No, the most apposite remarks were made earlier by another and anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘They stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on themselves.’ He went on to say that Zuma’s administration is ‘worse than the apartheid government’ and that he would ‘pray for the downfall of the ANC.’ ‘More than two decades after South Africa ousted a racist apartheid system that trapped the vast majority of South Africans in poverty, more than half the country still lives below the national poverty line and most of the nation’s wealth remains in the hands of a small elite’ (npr.org, 2 April).


One world, one people

'Nothing should be allowed to obscure working class unity nor to hamper its struggle to set up the new social order. We know enough of racism, and of what it does to human beings, to reject it as a destructive, anti-social force. There is a better way; we have a world to win and little time to lose’ (Racist myths, Socialist Standard, June 1988).

50 Years Ago: Martin Luther King (2018)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even before the killing of Martin Luther King, this summer promised to be a bad one for race troubles in America. Many city authorities, fearing an intensifying of the riots, had armed themselves with some formidable weapons.

The Negroes were also preparing and waiting, with no lack of black nationalists to advise them on how to use arms, petrol bombs and the like. This menacing situation was ignited by the assassination of Martin Luther King and the death of the advocate of passive resistance was, ironically, marked by a flare-up of the very violence he denounced.

King had, in fact, been losing some ground to the groups like Black Power and this in itself is symptomatic of the change which America has undergone during the last twenty years. The suppression which the Negroes have suffered for so long was bound one day to erupt. For too long have they been denied the vote, subjected to a host of indignities and restraints. For too long has colour discrimination been a part of the American way of life. For too long has a coloured life been cheap so that, in some states, the murder of a Negro counts for little more than the killing of an insect—and the body silently disappears into some southern swamp.

The predictable result of this has been the Negro protest, the riots and the rise of the Black Power theorists. Kill Whitey and Burn, Baby, Burn are sterile remedies for the Negroes’ frustrations—but who, or what, must bear the blame for them?

Martin Luther King, for all his courage, had little more to offer the American Negroes than a place beside the country’s white workers. For most coloured workers, this is their highest aim—the right of access to the same sort of employment, the same sort of working class homes, the same sort of terms from the hire purchase company, as others.

Many have died in the long history of the American Negro, and many will die in the future. Is the result of it all only to be the exchange of one kind of oppression for another?

(Socialist Standard, May 1968)

The Review Column: Martin Luther King (1968)

The Review Column from the May 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Martin Luther King

Even before the killing of Martin Luther King, this summer promised to be a bad one for race troubles in America. Many city authorities, fearing an intensifying of the riots, had armed themselves with some formidable weapons. 

The Negroes were also preparing and waiting, with no lack of black nationalists to advise them on how to use arms, petrol bombs and the like. This menacing situation was ignited by the assassination of Martin Luther King and the death of the advocate of passive resistance was, ironically, marked by a flare-up of the very violence he denounced.

King had, in fact, been losing some ground to the groups like Black Power and this in itself is symptomatic of the change which America has undergone during the last twenty years; The suppression which the Negroes have suffered for so long was bound one day to erupt. For too long have they been denied the vote, subjected to a host of indignities and restraints. For too long has colour discrimination been a part of the American way of life. For too long has a coloured life been cheap so that, in some states, the murder of a Negro counts for little more than the killing of an insect—and the body silently disappears into some southern swamp.

The predictable result of this has been the Negro protest, the riots and the rise of the Black Power theorists. Kill Whitey and Burn, Baby, Burn are sterile remedies for the Negroes’ frustrations—but who, or what, must bear the blame for them?

Martin Luther King, for all his courage, had little more to offer the American Negroes than a place beside the country’s white workers. For most coloured workers, this is their highest aim—the right of access to the same sort of employment, the same sort of working class homes, the same sort of terms from the hire purchase company, as others.

Many have died in the long history of the American Negro, and many will die in the future. Is the result of it all only to be the exchange of one kind of oppression for another?

Wilson's Latest Gimmick

Harold Wilson, it is said, has always thought Macmillan made a serious mistake when in July 1962, in panic at the Orpington by-election result, he butchered so many of his Cabinet.

Wilson, it is true, has shown no comparable ruthlessness—and if ever a Prime Minister had cause to panic he has now. But panic or not the latest government reshuffle, which had already been dubbed by Richard Crossman in fashionable technological jargon as Wilson Cabinet Mark II, was plainly inspired by the government’s low popularity.

The big move was that of Barbara Castle from Transport to the new Ministry which will combine some of the work of the Ministry of Labour and the Department of Economic Affairs. Castle has proved in her term at the Ministry of Transport that she is a cunning politician and a master of the art of public relations. It was a shrewd, if despairing, move to give her the job of kindling the government’s latest pillar of fire—the promise that, if we all concentrate on productivity wage restraint will come off and we shall soon arrive at the Promised Land.

This must have been about the only ember Wilson was able to find, as he raked about in the ashes of his defeats— his unpopularity, the sour memory of his National Plan, the ludicrous impotence of his Rhodesia policy, the long list of broken promises. Castle, the one-time firebrand, Aldermaston marcher, anti-apartheid campaigner, could be just the person to fan the ember into flame and to mislead the working class into a belief that, whatever may have happened in the past, there is some hope for them in the future.

The working class, as we know, can be infuriatingly gullible. But are they really so far gone that they will be impressed by this latent, and emptiest, of gimmicks?

Johnson—All The Way?

Will LBJ go all the way? Whatever he may have said about his firm intention not to run for office in November, there is still a chance that this is no irreversible decision.

The mounting opposition to Johnson's policies, and the explosive frustration at his failure to build the Great Society to order, seemed to have put him on a hiding to nothing. His one chance was to opt for the nothing, and some of his conduct since his renunciation—for example the peace moves in Vietnam—suggests that he is now trying to build up a campaign from there.

Whatever the truth of this, there is no denying that Johnson had found himself with hardly any room to manoeuvre—an unusual plight for the master politician, the ace fixer, the famous wheeler-dealer. This was the man who convinced millions of Americans that he was their saviour, who won an unprecedented victory in 1964, who was so recently the object of mass adulation. Now, Johnson has given up, or at best is struggling desperately for survival.

There is nothing unprecedented in this. One after another, politicians come, see the problems of capitalism and conquer with their promises to cure them. It does not usually take long for reality to assert itself, for the anarchies of capitalism to expose the promises and to turn the blind faith of the followers in their leader into angry disillusionment.

This has happened to Johnson and it has happened in this country to Harold Wilson, who came to power at the same time as Johnson won his famous victory and who is now similarly discredited and disliked. The fact is that capitalism’s leaders cannot control the system and they cannot break its problems. They themselves are the ones to be broken—and usually the more they promise, the greater the enthusiasm for them, the higher they climb in popular acclaim, the lower and harder they fall.

Demonstration in Washington (1963)

From the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The demonstration by two hundred thousand people in Washington recently to protest at discrimination against the American Negro was an example of self-disciplined protest —restrained, yet massively determined. August 28th marked the flaring of accumulated frustrations that had smouldered for over two centuries. From this time forward the character of the Negroes' struggle is altered, they have a national organisation and specifically formulated demands that they can pursue in the spotlight of world-wide publicity.

‘Nobody knows the trouble I seen’ is a familiar lament of a Negro blues song. It expresses the special misery of 19 million people who have inherited a legacy of hatred and violent suffering. Although it is possible to recognise it as a fact, nobody who has not experienced it can feel on his shoulders the harrowing burden of American Negro history. And even now, for the Negro, life offers unstinted humiliation, for added to his exploitation as a wage worker, in every corner of American social life he faces the pointed finger that accuses him of racial inferiority. 

In public transport, he is still to a large extent accommodated on sufferance, unseen at the rear of the bus, or on segregated trains he is refused the privilege of using the dining car. Of perhaps more importance, he is denied any equal access to education. In the area of employment, he is the last hired and the first fired, which in an economy that for years has supported millions of unemployed, involves the Negro in semi-permanent economic depression. In housing and other social amenities the Negro gets the worst of everything. In respect of freedom of speech and the franchise he is prevented by brutal intimidation, more particularly in the southern states, from exercising his ostensible right to vote. Here again, his right to assemble is jeopardised and made physically dangerous by the police. In some localities, the Negroes' struggle is reduced to one about basic democratic rights, which for many decades white workers have been able to take for granted. In these areas, the political climate for the Negro is no different than in the police state.

Again the repressive atmosphere in which the Negro still has to live, there exist counter tendencies. On the one hand there are social pressures acting against the exercise of colour discrimination. Without doubt there is an hardcore of prejudice built into attitudes of older generations, younger generations will be more susceptible to attacks on this issue through the media of radio, television, cinema and the press. There are dozens of books and pamphlets now available on archeology, biology and all departments of the social sciences that refute, and reveal the intellectual shallowness of, bigoted views on race. Against this phalanx of argument, documented with detailed evidence, the enunciation of prejudice remains the preserve of those whose thought processes are captivated by blind irrationality.

On the face of it, there would seem to be a good deal of affinity between the aspirations of Negroes in America and the economic and social reforms that the Kennedy administration seeks to bring into effect. But in truth, the American Government is moved by political and economic compulsions that take into account the interests of Negroes in only an incidental way. It was the Eisenhower Administration that saw the uneducated, under privileged Negro represented the greatest single aspect of manpower wastage in the United States.

To an economy dedicated to a doctrine of steady expansion, the unfitness of the quality of Negro labour power is an enormously inhibiting factor. This applies especially in the southern states, where  since the end of the second world war, there has been a rapid development and intense concentration of secondary industry, a phase in the history of the total economy which amounts to a second age of expansion. Indeed, the financial cost of local prejudice to the American capitalist class runs high. Enormous amounts of money are invested in the institutions and general facilities for education. This represents an investment in the quality of tomorrow's available exploitable labour power. That a large section of the working class should remain more or less unaffected by this preparation process is a costly economic absurdity.

The unfitness of the Negro for exploitation in a community geared to production of an increasingly complex technical nature is of critical relevance to the future of the American state, both economically and militarily. Reformist politicians who exercise power in the administration of capitalism are not men of principle but are flexible "realists," who react promptly to the needs of the moment. And though they may describe their ends and their motives in terms of glowingly humane moral appeals which are often hard to resist, ultimately their eye is on the fast buck and the military strength of the power they represent.

The question that Negroes must ask themselves is whether capitalism can accommodate all their needs and aspirations towards material security, the freedom and opportunity to develop their individuality and the realisation of harmonious integration with the rest of humanity.

Capitalism cannot give the working class of any colour material security. Its entire method of producing and distributing wealth is based on a system of sale for profit and there can be no security in a distribution system that overrides human needs in favour of the vagaries of market demands. A system that always includes the risk of creating unemployment and so shutting off the provision of material necessities. Even the earning of a regular wage is not enough to provide these necessities for individual needs from birth until death.

The part of this Negro protest demanding scope for the development of individuality cannot be realised within capitalism, the very basis of which is the exploitation of man by man. The contribution of the individual to society through his work is made under capitalism the very means by which he is being brought under economic subjection. Under the duress of his poverty, the worker is forced to sell his physical energies to an employer for wages. The very essence of his individual existence, his power to labour socially, is brought under the control of another, his employer, in exchange for wages. How then can any wage worker of any colour, who donates his whole life in the employ of other men, who works most waking hours of most of his working life at the direction of other men, possibly develop individuality?

Again, capitalism can never provide the Negro with his dream of true social integration. Because capitalism is based on the ethic of material interest at the expense of other men, it inevitably must remain a divided society. There can be no social integration for any man whatever his colour where there is no genuine world wide community of interests and where almost every aspect of social life is in vicious competition, individual against individual, group against group, nation against nation.

It is vital that sooner or later Negroes should transcend any strong identification they have with what they may regard as an exclusively "Negro" interest. At the moment, at least in America, this is made extremely difficult for them. In a hundred and one ways, American life drives the Negro into insularity and narrow fugitive attitudes, and to some extent, especially where democratic rights are concerned, their views can be understood.

At the same time, it must be remembered that there are no solutions to the problems of this world that hold out hope to any particular section of men without holding out hope at the same time to all men. Individuals have had the courage and the generosity to rise above the embittering agony of their recent history. James Baldwin writes ‘I am not a nigger—I am a man.’ We equally wish to simplify things and join in the refutation of ‘ Niggers,’ ‘ Yids,’ ‘ Wogs,’ ‘ Proddydogs,’ ‘Jocks’ and ‘White Trash’. We too want to celebrate —Man.

Pieter Lawrence