Someone once said: "Governments are not elected, they're dismissed'. At a time when opinion polls are showing the Tories bottom and Labour top. it's something worth thinking about. Why in 1985 should voters want to put back in power the party they removed in 1979? They've got short memories, it's often said, and this may be part of the story. But isn't it also true that the present polls are not so much a thumbs-up to Labour as a thumbs-down to the Tories? And isn’t this always part of the continual see-saw of parties in power?
The plain fact is that whatever government is in power there's always widespread dissatisfaction with the state of things. In the end this results in enough people switching their vote to bring a change of government. Do those who switch their vote believe that a different government will remove their dissatisfaction? This must be doubtful, because what most of us feel isn't just disappointment about a particular government failing to keep certain promises or deal with obvious problems. It's something deeper than that, something not easy to get to the root of. and so workers are tempted to blame sitting targets like the government in power, a racial minority, lack of discipline in schools, trade unions, or even "human nature". And it isn't surprising that we should make a sitting target of the government of the day because they're the body that makes the rules and regulations that run our lives.
The powers-that-be aren't alarmed about voters doing this either. On the contrary, the mechanism which allows people to act on their feelings of dissatisfaction by sacking the government in power and voting in another one is extremely useful, in the countries where it exists, for the safe continuation of the status quo. It's a safety valve which the "one-party state" varieties of capitalism (Russia. China. Angola. Syria, for example) don't have and the absence of which makes them a prey to explosive situations — as we've seen recently in places as far apart as Chile and Poland. Without an electoral channel for dissatisfaction, the lid is hard to hold down. It's far better, more stable and more efficient from the point of view of those in whose interest government over people exists (the small minority who own or control the means of producing wealth in all countries of the world) for there to be a choice between supposedly different political parties.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that as countries develop along the road of advanced industrial capitalism they are more and more likely to adopt parliamentary systems of government. Recently established parliaments in countries like Spain. Portugal and Greece illustrate this point, as do the abortive attempts at parliamentary government in Chile, Turkey and Uruguay and even the gropings towards more democratic political forms in Eastern bloc countries (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland). Present developments in Russia itself suggest a growing awareness there that without political "pluralism" and the freer expression of ideas that goes with it economic development is hampered and social dissatisfaction is harder to contain.
What then is the root cause of this dissatisfaction? To find it, we have to look not at the differences between what political parties here have to offer but at the similarities between them. The differences, when examined closely, don’t amount to much — half a per cent on or off income tax. a bit more or a bit less state ownership, marginally different amounts spent on health or education, preference for one kind of weapon of war rather than another, and so on. The similarities are far more important. They consist of:
- an acceptance that a small minority of the population will own the vast majority of the wealth and that the mass of the population will therefore own very little save their ability to work;
- a commitment to running a commercial system based on buying and selling where goods are produced not to satisfy people's needs but only when there's profit in it for the owning minority;
- the enactment of legislation to facilitate the making of profit for the minority;
- the use of a police force and judicial system to deter or punish people who don't conform to the dictates of legislation and the keeping in readiness of armed forces for use against foreign powers who might threaten the markets, trade routes and sources of raw materials essential to the maintenance of the owning minority's wealth.
- an acceptance of the system of "employment" whereby the majority of people (the workers or employed) have to seek work in exchange for money from the minority (the capitalists or employers) who own the land, factories, machines, offices, and so on or from the state (in education, health, transport) which exists to maintain minority ownership.
These are the factors — present whichever party or parties are in government which cause the perpetual dissatisfaction among the governed. We're dissatisfied. for example, because we own very little which we can truly call our own and therefore live in a state of material insecurity. Because the available goods and services are rationed by the money we have in our pockets, we're naturally prey to the mentality of scarcity, to wanting to grab as much as we can while we can get it. It's hard for us to shake off neurotic preoccupations about material possessions and assess our real needs.
More importantly, however, we're dissatisfied because we need to be employed. Employment means spending most of our waking hours performing tasks which we have chosen to do principally because we need the money — the wage or salary — they bring in. It's true that some forms of employment are less unpleasant than others and some are even pretty tolerable, but rarely is our job the work we'd do if we had a completely free choice of activity; and at any rate rarely would we go about it in the same way. In addition, everyone likes variety and the chance to do different kinds of work at different times in our lives — even perhaps on different days of the week or month. But this is hardly ever possible under the system of employment. Instead we have to count ourselves lucky to have a job at all. We have to stick to it and forget about whether we enjoy it or have talents which could usefully be employed elsewhere. Add to this the fact that employment puts us in a social and geographical straitjacket (who wouldn't like to mix with new or different people, travel more, move to another place now and then?) and we have a recipe for dissatisfaction which not even the most drastic government legislation could fundamentally alter.
The recipe doesn't need altering of course, but replacing by a quite different one. Which one? Well, if a fundamental problem is the employment system, a solution might seem to be unemployment. But as the present four million unemployed will testify, it isn't. And this is one of the paradoxes of the system we live under. We're driven by economic necessity to spend most of our lives seeking or being involved in activity which most of us find unpleasant, and even on occasions to demand the "right" to engage in it. The only unemployed people who don't have to face this topsy-turvy situation are those who own enough wealth not to have to look for a job — the Dukes of Devonshire, the Lord Sieffs and the Tiny Rowlands of this world. Not that such people are necessarily happy in their particular brand of unemployment and in fact many of them choose to engage in work of some kind. But it's work chosen freely and not out of financial motivation. And, in a society rationally organised in the interests of all its members, it 's precisely this kind of work which will be available to everyone — freely chosen and self-determined. Employment — wage slavery — will cease to be the be-all-and-end-all of our lives.
We're talking about a society without money, wages or financial incentives of any kind. The only "incentives" to work will be our biological need to expend energy, our desire to realise our talents and the common interest we all have in co-operating with our fellow human beings.
The rub, of course, is how to establish this kind of society. But the means are with us — the vote — providing we use it not as we've done before to dismiss governments who are "to blame" or to elect new ones we hope may dissatisfy us less, but to bring ourselves — wage and salary earners — to power as a majority for the purpose of running the world and using its wealth and resources in our own common interest. At present we use the vote to choose who will make the decisions about our own lives — we allow democracy to go only as far as the ballot box. The truly democratic use of the vote will be to bring in a society of common ownership and voluntary work in which we will all participate in the process of democratic decision-making about every aspect of our lives.
Howard Moss
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