The criticism that workers are too "thick'' to understand socialism is put forward by many political parties, including the Socialist Workers Party, the Labour Party and the Militant Tendency. It is almost as if they are suffering from visions of the working class as a multitude of Monty Python-like Gumbies'. living in a world of television, chips, pubs. Rambo and Terry Wogan. For any member of the working class, this is a patronising viewpoint; so let's see whether socialism is a particularly difficult idea to grasp.
Socialism is a world society in which all wealth (the land, farms, factories and all their products, communications systems, buildings) are owned and controlled democratically by all the people in the world. There are enough natural resources on the earth and sufficiently developed technology to satisfy the needs of every human being. The social guideline will be co-operation; all things to benefit all people. There will be no divisions based on economic factors; no money, no classes, no countries, no banks, no soldiers, no lawyers and no employment. Work will be carried out voluntarily according to what each individual decides they can contribute and what they most enjoy doing.
Now if we compare socialism to the present system, capitalism, we find a society where food, clothes, accommodation and all other goods and services which people need are articles of commerce which are produced to be sold at a profit. If you cannot pay, you cannot have. It is a system of competition which divides people. It puts workers in rivalry with one another over jobs, housing and places in the queue for second-rate health treatment. But more importantly, it divides the world into the wealth producers who do not possess (the great majority) and the wealth owners who do not produce (the small minority). It is this monopoly of wealth by a small, privileged minority class which leads to people starving while food mountains rot; millions of pointless deaths in wars over the economic rivalries of the parasites; people dying of hypothermia while coal mines are closed because they are "unprofitable"; and to thousands of people being homeless while construction workers are made unemployed and brick "surpluses" collect dust.
Anyone who can understand the perverse logic of capitalism's economics can easily understand socialism. Officially, an "oil glut" means that there has been too much oil produced. But, of course, most workers can understand that this does not mean that everyone who would like to make use of oil has a sufficient quantity of the substance. The "surplus" spoken of relates to the dealings of the market and not simply to what people actually need.
Who is it that keeps every country in the world running? Who builds the roads and the houses, factories and offices? Who designs and builds and maintains the washing machines and cars and televisions? Who builds the aeroplanes and runs the international airports? Who produces the oil. extracts the coal, runs the hospitals, teaches in the schools and universities, prints the newspapers and makes the television programmes? It is the working class who run this system from top to bottom. Workers are not thick, they are misinformed. They are misinformed by the ideas of a social system which runs in the interest of a minority who live in luxury and comfort off the labour of the majority.
It is important to be aware of the powerful forces which are wielded in order to keep workers in a condition of ignorance and prejudice. influences which are exercised over the minds of workers every day: from the Sun to the Guardian, from Breakfast Television to Night Thoughts, from the infants' school to the universities. Recently we have been instructed to hate the Argentinians and the Russians. Forty years ago it was the Germans. a hundred years ago, the French, four hundred years ago the Spanish. We are never taught to question these views, let alone to consider why we should have to hate an entire mass of people with whom we have had little, if any, personal contact.
A typical geography lesson in school consists of studying maps of the world divided by lines going up and down and across marking all of the different countries. Where are these boundaries when you look at a satellite photograph of the earth? A visit to the so-called Iron Curtain will not reveal any particularly distinctive national landscapes meeting abruptly at the passport barriers and barbed wire. Countries are artificial areas. Some, like Poland or several in Africa have had many different shapes in recent history according to the fortunes of the ruling class owners in territorial negotiation and war.
Religious teaching is based on the idea that people are inherently evil. Would it not make more sense to regard society's wrongdoers as victims of an environment where the majority are deprived of the necessities of a decent life? Theft, burglary and muggings are results of a society of artificial scarcity. In situations where there is no shortage or unreasonable limit to what we can consume, we behave in a rational way — without hoarding, or being greedy or feeling the need to steal. How many burglars do you hear of climbing over backgarden walls with gallons of stolen water?
Faced with the long-term brainwashing that most workers receive from an early age, educating people to think for themselves and to act in their own interests as a class is not an easy task. But is that any reason to stop? The idea of workers being too stupid to establish socialism also assumes that society has become immune to change. Then there is the argument that workers are generally content and would not have enough incentive to act for socialism. But consider the state of the working class; who is content with their lot? The unemployed, the wage and salary slaves performing boring and often useless or anti-social work, bossed about and just as poor at the end of their working lives as they were when they began the grind; the workers in war-tom countries or the millions of people who. quite reasonably, wonder whether they will outlive a nuclear holocaust, the millions of homeless and the refugees? Consider the number of people spending so much energy and time trying to alleviate the suffering which capitalism produces as a matter of course, the people working for Shelter, Child Poverty Action Group, Oxfam, Live Aid, Greenpeace, Help the Aged, anti-racist organisations . . . Has the profit system really produced widespread content?
We live in a very insecure society and who can honestly say that they are exempt from the anxieties caused by this insecurity? The more people who accept an idea, the more possible it becomes and the faster it spreads. One person talking about a society without classes, countries or money could be considered an idiot. Ten people could be regarded as eccentrics, a hundred could be dismissed as a radical sect, a thousand and the movement has become more significant. a million and the avalanche has begun.
Nick Davis
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