Letter: If and when (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

If and when

In the May Socialist Standard, page 93, in the article “Is Socialism Inevitable?”, "Socialism is inevitable because men will seek and gain Socialist knowledge” as stated in the article seems to me to have an air of fatalism about it. If you said “Socialism is inevitable if men will seek Socialist Socialist knowledge”, I agree.

The Western Socialist No. 2, 1975, page 10, agrees with my position when it states: “So the road to Socialism is a clear road if our fellow workers will simply blink the fog from their eyes and rub the nonsense from their ears.”

Anyway, there is nothing to say the atomic bomb won’t beat us all and devastate the world.

Edwin A. Watkins,

Victoria, Australia

Reply:

The argument of “Is Socialism Inevitable?” is that the forms of society are not static. The social systems of history have existed for as long as they matched the development of man’s consciousness and productive powers. Ceasing to do so, each was supplanted by another; and the nature of every such change has been the transfer of ownership of the means of living from an old ruling class to a dynamic new one. It can therefore be said that capitalism must give way to another system, and the only form the new system can take is the establishment of Socialism by the working class.

You say “if the working class”, etc., and quote our companion journal the Western Socialist. However, the Western Socialist does not mean what you mean. Its “if” says that the working class, by blinking the fog from their eyes, can establish Socialism tomorrow; failing that, we have to wait a little longer.

The atomic bomb is not an entity outside society, but part of — vide Marshall McLuhan — the message inherent in the capitalist medium.

Editors.