The Future Socialist Society by John Molyneux. SWP. £2.
For some reason, the SWP have decided to reissue this notorious pamphlet which first came out in 1987 and which exposes that what they mean by socialism is not the real thing but (as we pointed out in our review in the October 1987 Socialist Standard) a Leninist state.
One of the early measures an SWP government (which is envisaged as coming to power not through elections but as “the party which has led the revolution”) would take would be to abolish universal suffrage:
“There will not be complete universal suffrage because the nature of the system will exclude the old bourgeoisie and its main associates from the electoral process” (p. 9).
The claim is that because the new electoral process will be based on soviets, i. e. on voting at work (and not necessarily by secret ballot), capitalists as non-workers won’t have a vote. But once capitalists have been expropriated (in the SWP’s scenario, by the state) they will cease to be capitalists and so would have to work for the state in order to live. So why would they still be excluded from voting in the places where they would be working? And why would their “main associates”, identified elsewhere (p. 12) as “sections of the middle class” who would therefore have jobs, be excluded? There is only one explanation: all these people are to be disfranchised not because of their economic position but because of their political views as real or imagined opponents of the new government. The Russian Bolsheviks, on whom the SWP model themselves, also began by banning “pro-capitalist” opponents. They ended up banning all opponents.
On economic policy, whereas socialists (and Marx) envisage the abolition of the wages system, the SWP promises that “the wages of the working class, and especially the low paid, will be rapidly increased” (p. 21). So the wages system, which reflects the non-ownership of the means of production by the majority, is to continue, the only difference being that it would be administered by an SWP government that will have nationalised everything. This is state capitalism, not socialism.
Just as over depriving opponents of the right to vote so with regard to technical experts, an SWP government would follow the same policy as the Russian Bolsheviks. We are told that “if absolutely necessary they will have to perform with workers’ guns at their heads” (p. 15). It is not just the absurdity of such a proposition that is significant here–even the capitalists discovered long ago that workers can’t be coerced by guns and whips into working efficiently, and technical experts are of course workers–but the authoritarian reflex that the SWP has inherited from Lenin and Trotsky.
The good news is that there is never going to be an SWP government. Bolshevik-Leninist ideas are so discredited by what happened in Russia that there is no possibility of large numbers of workers being taken in by them again. Once bitten, twice shy.
Adam Buick
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