Whatever line of work you are in, or if you are out of work, or retired, or a housewife, you face many problems. In the back of your mind you are aware that millions of people are starving to death, that there is a constant threat of nuclear destruction, that there are still thousands of homeless families. But, even with a steady job and a roof over your head, you have to face a weekly struggle to get as much as possible out of a wage or salary that is never quite enough.
When we say that you need a great change in the kind of society you live in, we are not trying to persuade you to give up the things you seek in life. We are all trying to obtain material security and emotional harmony, whether we do this by advocating socialism or by sacrificing any chance of a wage rise for the sake of the bomb, the nation and the employers’ bank accounts. The only difference is that the second way, which has been tried by millions of people for hundreds of years, doesn't work.
It is obvious that the present system, in every country in the world, does not look after people’s needs. That is because it is not based on doing so; it is based on a competition between a certain number of investors, extracting wealth from the rest of us, to pile up under their control. The present social system was not designed to serve human needs. It was not set up. with its market mechanisms of buying and selling and all of its institutions and laws, in order to provide the best for all. It gradually evolved, quite chaotically, out of previous systems.
Human history has moved through many phases, each period quite different from the last. We are not now living under a system of slave-ownership, such as existed in ancient Greece and Rome. We do not work as serfs, a few days a week on our patch of land and the rest of the time on our master’s land, as they did in the Middle Ages, the time of knights, barons and the domination of the Catholic Church. The present age is based on the domination of the "profit motive”, which is in fact more of a motive not to produce wealth than to produce it. It means that wealth is only ever produced if shareholders or the government can profit by selling it on the international markets of the world.
Most anthropologists agree that for many thousands of years, humans lived without money. This was not because they were bartering; they simply made wealth freely available to anyone from the community who had made it. This was not because they were "savages” or “uncivilised”, although if “civilisation” means making nuclear bombs and nerve gas, then they certainly were not civilised. No, they didn't have money because they didn’t have any conception of private property. They simply organised themselves freely and democratically, to meet their needs mutually, in a dignified way. This “primitive communism" is generally thought to have lasted for at least 50.000 years. Then, in the past 12,000 years only, we have developed the concept of private property.
Of course, the various property systems which have succeeded one another, such as feudalism or capitalism, have been necessary at the time. There are certain conditions which would be needed before socialism could be brought into being, and these have not yet existed. It could even be argued that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the capitalist system was useful in opening up lines of travel and communication through trade and enterprise. It was in the search for profit that capitalists encouraged the industrial revolution and the continuing rapid advance of technology, up to the silicon chip. But it has now become an outdated barrier to further progress. The present system across the world becomes more riddled with insane contradictions as each day passes, and these contradictions can only be removed by enacting a great change in the way society is run.
Humans emerged from the animal kingdom. with our uniquely conscious ability to plan society, something above a million years ago. Next to this, these past few thousand years during which we have had the institution of private (and state) property are just a scratch on the surface of human existence. Each system has been ended when it was of no further use. For example, when the early capitalists found that the medieval system of feudalism was obstructing their desperate search for financial profit, they took steps to get rid of it. The measures they took were largely unplanned and unco-ordinated, but they took them nonetheless, similarly, there is now an enormous number of people throughout the world who are being prevented by the present system from satisfying their needs.
But for the first time ever, the class of people who are being frustrated by the present lines on which society is run. form the majority of the world’s population. So when we act together, it will not be simply replacing one band of mediaeval parasites with a team of more up to date, legalised robbers. Ours must be a world-wide, democratic movement, to end all domination and exploitation for ever. This does not mean a return to “primitive communism". We are now in the exciting position of being able to combine the social co-operation of the “primitive" age, with the technological sophistication of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is precisely because modern technology is capable, if developed properly, of providing ample for all, that “modern" communism has finally become a real possibility. What need is there for private property, with the poverty that means in practice for the poorer ninety per cent, when we are now able to manufacture plenty for all?
This brings us to the contradictions of capitalism. These can be witnessed and suffered every day. One minute on a television screen, you see wine lakes and butter and wheat mountains being wasted or destroyed in order to keep up market prices and profits. The next moment you will see pictures of thousands of children, slowly and painfully starving to death. If they had the cash to form a "viable market”, to have “effective demand”, then the governments and food companies of the world would have no hesitation in making plenty of food available to them. As it is, in America last year 32 million hectares were taken out of wheat production, and most food companies have been reducing rather than increasing their production.
Every week, the papers carry stories about homeless people, as if it were unavoidable. But there are now nearly half a million building workers looking for jobs, in this country alone. They are not being taken on, and there are less houses being built than at any time since 1945, simply because there is not enough profit in it. Does it make sense that when you go shopping, you have to compare the prices along the shelves for everything you want, to see if you can afford what you want, or to see if you must take the second best, the inferior version, of a particular product simply because it is cheaper? Why should this be? We all work hard and do what we can for ourselves and others. There are very few people who can claim to be completely anti-social. So why should one person deserve £10 more than another? Why should one person struggle to be able to buy certain things in a shop, when there is someone else who has the power to walk along and buy the whole shop, and dozens more like it?
Clearly there are economic forces at work which are bigger than any individual. The change we stand for is to stop producing wealth for the market, which is for the profit of a few, and to start producing wealth, greater in quantity and quality, for the free and direct use of all. This is the only basis on which we can solve the problems which confront us today; and the first thing we must do in organising this change is to educate ourselves on the question of what kind of system we are living under at the moment.
Doublethink
The present system produces millions of individuals who suffer from a kind of dual personality. On the one hand, we have been taught that as we grow older, we can find happiness and security through hard work and enterprise. We have been taught that by owning a house (paying a mortgage), finding a spouse (human possessions) and setting up a family (just like the ones that produced us), we will receive the reward of a healthy bank balance (hovering around a healthy zero), a place in the sun (crowded beaches once a year), and a fair pension (living death in the gilt-edged knackers’ yard). People begin to wonder, how they could have been so stupid as to have treated seriously the teachers at school who asked them what they would choose to be when they grow up. The dual personality of capitalism, on the other hand, has to swallow the stories with a pinch of salt in order to remain sane.
Half of you says “Yes, certainly” when the boss asks you (tells you) to do your work his way. After all, it's the boss you’re doing it for. The other half, meanwhile, says "Do it yourself, you lazy bastard”, very quietly. Your right hand is reaching out to wave at the queen as she smiles across the screen on Christmas day to assure us she’s still there, polishing the vases down the Mall, whilst your left hand is reaching into your pocket to check just once more whether you really did spend that last fiver last night. Your mouth seems to be saying something about the importance of the family as an institution, whilst your chest is still tense from that row you all had. Your macho head is shouting about the importance of the army, but your knees weaken when you thought you heard a “four-minute” warning siren.
The contradictions of a society based on profit, not needs, are reflected in the confused characters of individuals. The movement for socialism is built out of the real desire for change which exists in millions of individual workers, whether they have to work as builders, secretaries or doctors. It is only the five percent who possess enough wealth not to have to work at all, who have a real vested interest in keeping the present system. There are very few people who like to see children being turned away from intensive care units and allowed to die, because the hospitals do not have the money to pay nurses. And yet that is what doctors at Guy's Hospital in London have been complaining of recently. There are millions of people who are infuriated by the thought of the governments of the world spending more than a million dollars a minute on weapons. There are hundreds of separate campaigns and thousands of charities, aiming to ease some of the problems which abound in the world today. But one thing so far is missing. This discontent needs to be united into one, genuinely democratic movement whose aim is to get rid of the system which keeps creating all of these problems. Anything short of that fails, because it attacks the effects but not the cause.
The social system we create instead must be world-wide and based on the control of all productive resources, including our own work, by the whole community, without distinction of race, age or sex. This would have to be organised on local, regional and global levels. Specialist bodies would exist, as they do now, to investigate what possibilities exist for meeting people’s needs for food, clothing, housing, entertainment and so on. But if we are to establish a democratic society, in harmony with a modern level of technology, the final choice about how we use that technology must rest with the population as a whole. It is a sad reflection on how capitalism has crushed human ingenuity and imagination, that this idea of genuine and world-wide democracy, based on common ownership of the productive machinery, is now sneered at by many blinkered victims of “education”. It is tragic that young people should be coming out of school forbidden to believe that they have the ability to change the world. Their religion, literature or history teachers might speak nonsense about humans being naturally vile, greedy, aggressive, uncooperative and murderous. Their biology teachers, however, will be quite unable to point to any part of the brain, blood or bodily organs bearing any trace of such evil traits. That is because they are social characteristics, representative of a particular period, and not natural at all.
How would this change to socialism help you to solve your problems? Feminists are against the subordination of women to men. If the socialist principles we stand for were implemented through majority support, we would have a society of men and women standing in equality on the basis of common ownership and democratic control. We seek to end the sexual oppression which is closely tied up with the economic oppression of industry and the family in which, so often, a woman and children are dependent on a man who is, in turn, dependent on his employer. In socialism, emotional blackmail will have the carpet pulled from under it by making the best food, clothing and so on freely available to all, directly from the social stocks, and not dependent on the whim of any other individual or bureaucratic committee.
Anarchists are opposed to the overwhelming powers of the state, with its police, army, courts, fuel supplies, computer banks and so on, so they try to engage in something of a running battle against it. The socialist movement aims to build up a majority of conscious socialists, who will then be able to disarm and dismantle the state machine by taking it over legitimately, through the electoral process itself. When a socialist majority send strictly mandated delegates into parliament, it will be on the basis of a complete rejection of the present, capitalist system. So it will not be a question of sitting in parliament and reforming the same old system over and over. It would be immediately ended. In a socialist world society there would be no state or government, no national boundaries, police or armed forces. There would just be a communal control of society by all the people who live in it, the wealth we produce being freely accessible to all.
Many Labour Party supporters are increasingly cynical about their own party. They are against the Tories because Thatcher glorifies the market system, and her followers clap her. while millions are starving because the market system cannot feed them. If you oppose the Tories because of their defence of capitalism, with its production of wealth for profit rather than direct, free use, then the next logical step for you would be to leave the Labour Party, together with the Liberals and SDP, taking it in turns with the Tories to run capitalism (under a variety of fancy labels), and join the genuine socialist movement. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has been going for about as long as the Labour Party, and still has far fewer members. But that is all the more reason for the thousands of people who have been leaving the Labour Party recently, to look further into what it is they have been neglecting and rejecting all these years. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is made up entirely of socialists, who have rejected the profit system in all its forms.
Whatever your previous political persuasion you need change, and you need it now. The only practical way to move away from poverty, war, violence and pollution is to build a practical movement for the socialist alternative. A democratic, political movement based on a conscious desire to establish a society of democratic control and direct satisfaction of needs already exists and has done for some time. Its numbers have remained small so far, only because the discontent which people have felt with their conditions has been channelled again and again into the blind alley of trying to make the present system work for the benefit of all. Socialists do not have leaders or religious faith. We ask you only to consider the choice between production for profit and production for use, and to think it out for yourself. All the time that we are not taking action to change society for ourselves, the way things are is threatening to change us. At best, it would turn us into automatons, slaves of profitability. At worst, ashes.
Clifford Slapper
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