Do-It-Yourself, Majority Revolution
Dear Editors,
Obviously your magazine has a very jaundiced and prejudiced view of the Green movement (Editorial, April Socialist Standard).
Most members of the Green Party, a large proportion of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and none of the various Earth First! group’s activists support capitalism in any form. For a long time now we have seen in market forces the machinery for planetary and human destruction.
People in the Green movement are currently involved in housing and worker’s co-operatives. LETS schemes and permaculture (permanent agriculture) projects that will be examples of how things can be done. We are positively involved in building an alternative. An increasing number of Green folk are involved in the English regionalist-direct democracy scene as well.
We take a proactive stand against centralism and increasing powerlessness of the people. We have not heard your party take a stand publicly. Are you afraid of merging with other radically-minded people while networking with them. Perhaps losing your powers of staying aloof above everyone else!
As to your own brand of ’’socialism" working while others do not, this sounds much like washing powder commercials, "my soap is better than yours" playground childishness. Your political party holds that only it can build “utopia" (literally translated means not a place). I would as an anarcho-socialist contend that being party-political and then opposing the established order is very hypocritical.
I would personally avoid the football-style competitions of major and minor league parties. Instead I and others are trying to shadow institutions' powers, and therefore empower ordinary people to make decisions for themselves and their friends, in a face-to-face direct democracy manner.
This probably all sounds bourgeois to you pure socialists. "How dare politically uneducated people take the glory of genuine revolution from under our noses. Only the SPGB has the answers to the world's problems."
The sad thing is when we are establishing people’s assemblies in inner city boroughs and rural parishes, alternative cooperatives enterprises and land rights campaigns taking back stolen commons (e.g. Reclaim the Land), your party will still be debating in dusty rooms above public houses and making proclamations about your coming electoral glory while contesting a handful of seats. At this rate it will take about 150 to take all the available constituencies. Oh how sad it is.
Tom Paine,
Staffordshire Earth Action Network
Reply:
You’ve got it wrong. We don’t say that it is us, the Socialist Party, who are going to establish Socialism. What we say is that socialism can only be achieved when a majority want it and organise for it, and that it is this majority, not us, who alone can achieve it (naturally we, the present membership of the Socialist Party, hope to be among that majority). The socialist revolution is a do-it-yourself, majority revolution not a party-led revolution.
We also say that, to achieve socialism, this majority will have to organise politically, to take control of state power out of the hands of the present capitalist ruling class (we can't just leave them in control of it, as your strategy implies), and that this will involve, yes, contesting elections and putting up candidates against the politicians who represent their interests (the Majors. Blairs and Ashdowns of this world) and so the formation of a socialist political party. We don’t suffer from the illusion that we are already that part; the most we would claim is that we are the very early beginnings of such a party; and even that might turn out to be an illusion, not that we would care as long as a mass, no-compromise socialist political party eventually emerges from somewhere.
Nor is socialism some ideal society thought up by us and marketed as our patent solutions to society's problems. The idea of a society of common ownership and distribution according to need without buying and selling and money goes back a long way in human history, right back to the original human societies which were actually organised on this basis.
Thanks to the development in the meantime of human technological knowledge and productive capacity it is now possible to (re-)establish a society on this basis, but this time on a global instead of a limited, tribal basis. In fact it is not just possible. but necessary if the problems the world is facing are to be solved.
In dismissing this (which we call “socialism" but which others in the course of history have called “community of goods", "communism”, "pure communism", “the co-operative commonwealth", "making the Earth a common treasury for all" and. yes, ‘‘utopia’’) as just one proposal from one particular political party you are not just factually wrong. You are in fact dismissing an age-old social tradition whose putting into practice today is the only way of providing a framework within which the problems that Greens have highlighted can be solved, and not just palliated as you are trying to do.
If you want to reject the idea of a world community of common ownership, democratic decision-making and production directly for use as “utopian", and to dismiss education and agitation in favour of it as a diversion from the more important tasks of growing organic vegetables on municipal allotments. re-opening public footpaths and opening macrobiotic cafés (not that we’ve anything against these, in fact good luck to you), that’s your prerogative. But at least be honest with yourself and realise that you are not doing anything to get rid of the profit system, but only trying to make things within it a little less miserable and which anyway will in all likelihood be sooner or later undermined by the workings of the profit system and its market forces.
Editors
Building the Party
Dear Editors,
I am writing to tell you about Marxism 95. The meetings I went to were very good (especially the discussion after the talks), but on leaving these talks I was faced by an army of SWP members asking me to join (this even happened after the first meeting—as if going to one meeting organised by the SWP would leave me, or anyone, rushing to join—but faced with this pressure, who knows?). When I answered “No” when I was asked. I was literally pulled over and asked "Why not?”. When I tried to explain that I was still finding out about them I was told "If you want a real change join the SWP" and “Join today and if you find that you have made a mistake, just throw away your membership card." —Of course it is not as simple as that, but they told me that it was.
Another point I would like to comment on is a talk on the Saturday by Bernie Grant MP, who is a member of the Labour Party. I was in no doubt that he is on the left of politics—but not the left of Socialism, on the left of Capitalism because Labour are certainly a capitalist party and in my opinion there is a massive gap between capitalism and socialism. When I brought this comment up after the meeting, the three or so SWP members that I was with admitted that Labour are a capitalist party and said that Bernie Grant would probably be in the SWP but "he can have a bigger influence and meet more people in the Labour Party". I then said maybe I should join the Conservative Party so I "could have a bigger influence and meet more people". They told me that was not the same, but I think that it is.
Adam Jaffer,
Coventry
Socialism in a single country?
Dear Editors,
As a newcomer, while supporting the goal of socialism globally, I question your rejection of the idea that it cannot or should not occur in one country beforehand, especially as this appears incompatible with the declared principle of a "speedy termination" of capitalism.
Given that formidable beneficiaries and advocates of capitalism world-wide are united in their determination to maintain their system, attempting to overcome them all simultaneously does not seem the best use of limited resources, nor does it provide a tangible stimulus to the world’s exploited to break free from lifelong restraint.
To use a demolition analogy: it's unnecessary to destroy a dam by exhaustively coating the entire surface with voluminous plastic explosive in order to shatter every part synchronously.
The same result is achievable by concentrating a limited charge in one place, so allowing what is constrained to first break free with such drive that the rest of the barrier steadily wears away in conjunction with an increasing rate of escape.
One nation succeeding through socialism would make the advantages so clear to others, so quickly, that any countermeasures to bolster the international profit system would be swept away by the dynamic surge for the same benefits.
A sufficiently developed nation could go it alone and meet all its needs and requirements through socialism without being isolated from the rest of the world (though even isolation— as duress to reconform—would fail since retaining global ties would be preferable rather than essential).
Any raw materials that had to be imported could be bartered for. And if necessary, by exporting surplus goods, foreign currencies could be obtained for maintaining world-wide communications and transport links etc.
Preserving these international relations would not be a betrayal of socialist values nor an act of reformation. It would be a means to and end. whereby the baby gains protection and its diet is supplemented, while also enabling all to observe it swiftly growing strong, healthy and contented.
Without any financial restraints, wastage of resources and dog-eat-dog disunity, the full benefits of common ownership could be realised throughout the pioneer nation, transforming and improving lives to such an extent that a socialist chain reaction would inevitably be triggered across the planet.
By insisting on simultaneous global socialism, or none at all, time might run out due to capitalism’s destructiveness before the former can be achieved.
Max Hess,
Folkestone, Kent
Reply:
We don't say that socialism should not be established in one country but that it can't be. If it could, then we wouldn't be opposed to this, but it can’t because capitalism is a world system. not just in the sense of being dominated by the operation of world market forces but also in terms of the underlying technical conditions of production and world-wide division of labour which socialism will inherit.
No one country could be self-sufficient not even the most developed country in the world, the United States, nor the largest Russia, nor the most populous, China, nor Japan, nor even a multi-country trading bloc like the Common Market And the idea of any other part of the world going it alone is just ludicrous.
What this means is that no one part of the world can opt out, at least not without suffering a drastic reduction in the amount and variety of goods and services available to satisfy the needs and wants of those living there. People would be deprived of products from other part of the world or would have to work longer and devote more resources than otherwise to producing them.
In these circumstances, even if private property and the profit motive were to be eliminated within its frontiers, the country concerned would hardly provide the attractive model you assume for people in other countries to want to follow.
You say that this drawback could be got round by bartering with the outside, capitalist world, but have you thought this through? The products to be acquired from the outside world would have to be paid for (whether in money or in kind) at the full market price. But these outside products would not be able to be acquired unless some products produced in the country had first been exchanged on the world market. For this to happen they would have to be competitive in terms of quality and price with the same products produced in the capitalist world, otherwise no other country would want to buy or barter for them.
So already, to participate in the world market, the isolated would-be socialist country would have to behave capitalistically, striving to keep labour costs down and so further restricting the already reduced standard of living of the population. As people would be unlikely to agree to this voluntarily a new ruling class to enforce this would be likely to emerge. The end result would be not "socialism in one country" but state capitalism in one country.
There is another point you overlook. Abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism is not like demolishing a dam. It requires the existence of an active and participating socialist majority. Without this there can be no socialism, so for socialism to be attempted in just one country there would have to emerged a socialist majority in just that country. But how likely is this to happen in practice?
We think it is highly unlikely. Given the fact that social conditions and problems are basically the same all over the world, and given that socialism is the idea of a world society where the resources of the Earth belong in common to all humanity, we can see no reason why socialist ideas, when they begin to catch on, should only spread in one particular country and not in others.
In our view it is much more reasonable to assume that socialist ideas will spread more or less evenly in all countries. In which case, apart from being impossible to achieve anyway but the problem of perhaps having to try to establish socialism in one country won’t even arise.
Editors
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