Post-War Reconstruction (1941)

From the August 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

ONLY SOCIALISM CAN PROVIDE THE FOUNDATION

The dislocation caused in people’s lives by this war has set many of them devising plans for making the world a better place to live in when hostilities have ended. Ideas thus generated find expression in schemes for remedying the outstanding evils of which the majority of people are victims—unemployment, insecurity, poverty, war.

The Socialist claims, and proves, that these evils cannot be remedied within the framework of the existing social order. Nothing less than social revolution offers a sound basis for post-war social reconstruction. The abolition of private ownership of the means and instruments of production and distribution, the end of the wages system, the production of wealth solely for use instead of for profit—this, and nothing else, will provide the foundation for the construction of the social system that we so urgently desire. Any planning for “a brave new world” that does not include these fundamental changes is doomed to bring disappointment to those who hope to experience substantial improvements.

Unemployment presents a problem that has occupied the attention of social reformers for years. A multitude of schemes have been applied—and failed to check the tendency for unemployment figures to rise. There is no cure for unemployment short of its abolition, and this can be achieved by abolishing employers, employed, and unemployed alike.

Ownership of land, machinery, factories, mines, railways, road transport, sea transport, etc., places some men in the privileged position of employing others. Non-ownership and, in consequence, the necessity to live by selling their physical and mental energies, makes other men seek employment. Socialism, by placing the means of wealth production under the democratic ownership and control of the whole of the community will ensure that everyone contributes to the common effort without entering into contract with his fellows on the basis of economic privilege.

Economic insecurity is bred of capitalism. Men are related to one another in a capitalist world, not as individuals, but as commodity owners. The buying and selling of commodities, including the workers’ energies, is the essence of this system. Buying and selling gives rise to competition, competition breeds struggle, and in the struggle no man can claim to be absolutely secure; any adverse turn of the struggle may reduce him to the ranks of the most poverty stricken.

Given common ownership of the means of production and distribution, the wealth produced by the common effort will be accessible to all. Modern scientific methods of production ensure that there shall be plenty and none need be short of the essentials and comforts of life. With the social store available to everyone according to their needs, the dependence of wives on their husbands, of children on their fathers, of the sick and aged on charity, of men on their ability to hold down a job, will vanish. Each will enjoy the security afforded by all.

Poverty is the lot of the working class in present-day society. From poverty spring the many subsidiary evils to which a lot of the would-be post-war-re-constructors direct their main attention. Poor housing and unemployment are only problems for the poor. Ill-health and crime are largely the result of poverty. The most glaring contradiction of capitalism is the abject poverty that exists beside the super-abundance of wealth. In any effort to reconstruct society after the war it will not be sufficient to attempt to alleviate poverty, it must end. Socialism alone shows the way.

If the wages system is retained after the war, then poverty will be retained, for the two are inseparable.

Man’s ability to work we call his “labour-power,” and wages are the price he gets when he sells it to an employer. This labour-power is a commodity, produced to be sold, and the orice it fetches is determined, as is the price of all commodities, by agencies outside the individual owner’s control. Price is the monetary reflection of value, and value is determined by the amount of social effort necessary to replace the commodity. So wages fluctuate around a certain point, the cost of reproducing man’s power to labour. No amount of legislation within capitalism, no philanthropic effort can alter this fundamental economic law. All attempts to remove poverty by price control, minimum wage rates, family allowances, or any form of currency juggling fall to pieces against this “law of wages.”

The end of the wages system will ensure an end of all poverty. Capitalism has shown us the enormous powers of production that man can wield. All such powers have not yet been unleashed. Capitalism has arrived at a stage where it must limit expansion of productive powers in the interest of profit. Socialism will release all pent up forces and enable men to produce wealth in such abundance that a condition of poverty, as we know it to-day, will not be conceivable.

War, that most colossal of all tragedies, must be ended for all time. All post-war reconstructors are agreed upon this. Only Socialism offers a guarantee of a permanently peaceful future.

To-day, wealth is produced for profit; workers receive wages for producing it, and it then passes into the hands of the owners of the means of production. The total value that the workers produce is greater than the amount they receive in wages. The surplus accrues to the owners and becomes divided among all sections of the owning-class, landlords, industrialists and investors. But in the process, in order that the owning-class may enjoy the privilege that ownership implies, the wealth must be sold; it must be converted into money. So out goes the product of the workers’ toil, out into a world-market to compete with similar products produced by similar workers in other countries. And from the ensuing competition follows the struggle for trade routes, for spheres of influence, for control of sources of raw materials, for empires. From this source, also, comes international diplomacy, tariffs, State subsidies, trade agreements, political pacts, military alliances and war.

No amount of tinkering with the effects of a system of production for profit will eliminate this competition. It can be raised from a local plane to a national one by State control, it can be raised from a national plane to a continental one by federal union, but it cannot be eliminated without at the same time eliminating the private property basis of present-day society. To guarantee against further and more disastrous wars Socialism alone offers a way.

Unless the Socialist proposition for the revolutionising of society is accepted, and struggled for, by the majority of the workers after the war, then capitalism will present us with some problems that will have tragic results.

This war is unleashing forces that will sharpen the class conflicts of the future, that will present the administrators of capitalism, no matter who they may be, with a task of such magnitude that they will not be able to trifle with half measures. It is quite possible that, in order to avoid the worst effects of post-war chaos, the State, in this and other countries, will assume control of industry and transport. “Private enterprise” capitalism may give place to “State capitalism,” and support for its measures gained on the claim that it is “Socialism in practice.” The danger lies in the fact that capital, entrenched behind the State, can be even more repressive and more vicious than in its present “democratic” form.

The one way to insure against this is to establish Socialism. For that purpose it is necessary to organise consciously, politically and democratically for the conquest of the machinery of Government in order that this machinery may be converted from an instrument of oppression into an agent of emancipation.

The possibilities of “a brave new world” after the war depend upon the degree of class consciousness that the effects of the war engender in the minds of the workers and their understanding of the role they must play to build such a world. The reformation of capitalism will avail them nought. It is their historic task to abolish the last of the class societies and to establish a classless one. To this end alone they should bend their present and their post-war effort. Their unswervable object must be to establish a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. Anything other than that will not be a reconstruction but merely a reshuffle.

W. Waters

(This article was written for the Post Office workers’ journal, London Post, and appeared in the July issue.)