Human relationships in socialism (2018)

From the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

By nature ‘human nature’ is gregarious and co-operative. It is the class division of society that has produced the ongoing alienation, competition and anti-natural behaviour we see. It has criminalised society. Socialism is the negation of capitalism which will be the last class society in history.

With socialism, gangsters’ cliques will lose their socio-economic breeding grounds. Their anti-social and anti-natural survivalist tricks – ‘the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest’ (Karl Marx) will fall into oblivion. Competition for possessions will give way to cooperation for life. Humans will regain their lost original nature once again by demolishing their ‘fear of freedom’ in a knowledgeable coherent relationship among themselves and with their surrounding nature, moving on to a higher phase of social progress, reaffirming equality, freedom, peace and happiness in unison, in harmony. ‘The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism’ (Karl Marx). According to him, with the dissolution of the power of money, private exchange and private property will cease to exist; ‘then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc …’ (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844).

Marx and Engels held genuine socialism to be ‘Communismus, Socialismus, Humanismus’ (German Ideology, Chapter 4).

Engels clearly set out the progression: ‘State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’, it withers away’ (Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

World socialist society will do away with classes and could be organised on a three-tier system of Local, Regional and Global Councils to deal with the administration of all their respective specific responsibilities relating to life, things, relations and problems. Money will go to the museums beside bronze axes. Private property and all its paraphernalia relating to money, wages, profits, private, joint-stock, state, multi-national, transnational and corporate et al. ownerships, and all selfish private interests as against social well-being, will be things of the past. Under such a global arrangement of things and affairs of life, the crimes of today will also generally be a thing of the past. In the event of any rarely occurring aberrations on the part of an individual member of society, the response could be educative and social correctional and compassionate counselling. Humans will have elevated themselves to a higher stage in history as a new-born humane species, leaving behind their prehistory of competition and conflict.

Binay Sarkar