This is Socialism ! (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism means common ownership

The means of production will no longer belong to a privileged minority class, whether private capitalists (as in the West) or state bureaucrats (as in the East). Both private capitalism and state capitalism will be replaced by a system in which all natural and industrial resources will be held in common by the whole community. This is the basis of socialism.

Socialism means social equality

With the establishment of common ownership, the existing division of society into a privileged ruling class and a majority class of wage and salary workers will come to an end. Instead, every member of society will stand equal with respect to the means of production and have an equal say in the way social affairs are run.

Socialism means cooperation

With the disappearance of classes, a common social interest really will exist. People will no longer be alienated, isolated individuals competing in the marketplace, but will be members of a real community of free and equal men and women cooperating for their mutual benefit and for the common good. In line with the nature of humans as social beings, cooperation, not today's competitive individualism, will be the prevalent social ethos, transforming all aspects of social life — work, play, education, the family and personal relationships generally.

Socialism means democratic control

The existing political structures where a government rules over people on behalf of the class that owns the means of production will give way to a fully democratic system of decision-making and administration. Decisions will flow upwards from the broadest possible base rather than from the top downwards as at present. Delegates, subject to the full range of democratic checks and controls, will carry out and supervise the purely administrative tasks that will remain once the political state with its machinery of coercion has been dismantled.

Socialism means production for use

Production for sale with its profit motive will come to an end; goods and services will be produced to directly supply needs without the intervention of buying and selling. The mechanisms of the market will be replaced by a self-adjusting system of production for use. The productive and distributive network will be geared to respond in a flexible way to information about needs, communicated to it directly as required amounts of specific goods and materials.

Socialism means free access

With the abolition of market mechanisms, people will be able to obtain the food, clothes and other articles they need for their personal consumption by going into a store or distribution centre and taking according to their own self-defined needs. Houses and flats will be rent-free, with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, health care, communications, education, restaurants and laundries will be organised as free public services. There will be no admission charges to museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation. Money will become redundant.

Socialism means the abolition of the wages system

Since people will have free access to what they need, productive work will no longer be performed for an employer in return for a wage or salary but will become a voluntary service organised on a democratic basis. The factories, farms, offices, schools, hospitals and other places of work will be administered democratically by those working in them. People will undertake this work service as their contribution to the necessary social tasks of producing the goods to keep the stores stocked with the things for people to take for their personal consumption and of running the free public services and the administration.

Socialism means a world community

Because capitalism itself is already a world system which, either in its private or in its state form, dominates the whole globe, socialism too can only be a world system. This means that socialism could not be established in just one country but only as a world community without frontiers, in which the natural and industrial resources of the Earth will be the common heritage of present and future generations. The world will be regarded as one country and humanity as one people.

Scorpion is on holiday.

Food as a weapon (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the ending of the Cold War. American military power is no longer sufficient to hold its real economic rivals— Europe and Japan—in check, and the three power blocs are squaring up for the battle for world economic domination in the 21st century.

The current battlefield is a scries of talks on world trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which have now been stalled for nearly two years, with the European and US governments hurling abuse at each other over the emotive issue of farm subsidies.

So what is GATT, and why does an apparently minor dispute over handouts to farmers threaten to bring the world trading system to the point of all-out economic war?

The GATT process is aimed at promoting “free trade" amongst the competing states of the world, tearing down barriers to imports and allowing consumers to choose the most efficient supplier of anything from banking services to hairdryers.

In reality, of course, there is never any such thing as free trade among equal players— no ‘‘level playing field". US-based multinational corporations. with the economic battering ram of vast scales of production behind them, and the military and political power of the US state in the not too distant background, are clearly going to make easy meat of the struggling young industries throughout the “Third World”, currently protected by their own governments’ trade barriers.

Trade wars

Now all this is fine with European governments as well. They too have multinationals based on their soil, only too eager to participate in the turkey shoot. In the coming months you will doubtless hear ministers extolling the virtues of Free Trade for the health of the world economy.

But when we come to agriculture. there is a slight fly in the milk churn. European farms tend to be small and “inefficient" (unprofitable), whereas their US competitors tend to be large and “efficient"—fully industrialised and reaping the advantages of economics of scale.

This, of course, would give them a significant advantage in a genuinely free market, almost certainly devastating the European farm industry, and scoring round one of the battle for 21st century economic domination to America.

And American farmers have never been more desperate for markets for grain, which regularly gluts the American market. (Of course, this does not mean that there are no hungry people in America, simply that they can’t afford to buy what lies rotting in warehouses).

In fact this is another bizarre consequence of the ending of the Cold War. since in those good old days the Soviet empire bought all Americas surplus grain and paid on the nose with hard currency.

Europe’s governments, then, urged on by the powerful farming lobby, are determined not to give up their agricultural subsidies, while the US is desperate to prise the European market open.

A few months ago. a high- level EC delegation led by Portuguese Prime Minister Cavaco Silva and Commission head Jacques Delors, visited President Hush in Washington for crisis talks, with Cavaco Silva making it quite clear how deep the rift had become. “Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the apparent political goodwill and the technical proposals put on the table by the US”, he told the European (9 April).

And that’s just about as close as a diplomat comes to calling the other side a dirty cheating liar.

Both sides only entrenched their positions at the G7 economic summit in Munich last month, with John Major suffering a major rebuff to his attempts to break the deadlock, and vowing to continue to “bully, badger and cajole" fellow leaders into living up to the undertakings to conclude a deal by the end of the year.

In fact, although the European side has offered a 30 percent reduction in protection and support for agriculture, this would be on the basis of levels operating in 1986—a real cut of little more than 15 percent (The Grocer, 23 November 1991).

In the EC’s last review of support prices in June 1991. ministers cut a modest 1.5 percent from levels of support for oilseed, and at the EC Lisbon summit price support for cereals was cut 29 per cent. "Still not enough" said Hush.

Agri-business

The Daily Telegraph issued a dire warning following the failure of the Munich summit that the world is edging closer to a menacing era of protectionism. “There is a real danger that the Uruguay round of GATT could breakdown altogether, taking us back to the unstable trade bloc structures of the 1930s” (9 July).

The point is that food production is governed by the laws of competitive production for profit. Manufactures of food only survive by selling at a reduced price against their competitors, and with a glut of unsaleable food on the world market, pressure to subsidise unprofitable, mainly small-scale European producers against their industrialised US rivals is immense.

So the EC’s subsidies pile up yet more unsellable food, and US farming corporations are forced to watch their own surplus production rot in warehouses because it can’t be sold anywhere. The GATT negotiations are therefore a trial of political and economic strength between US and European agri-business, with their respective governments fighting their corners round the negotiating table.

What insanity! Capitalism— the competitive production of goods for sale at a profit—yet again proves itself to be completely unable to cope with a world in which we could provide an abundance of food for each citizen of this planet. It is the only system that actually manages to find adequate food production a major crisis. Surely its time to establish a system where this is an opportunity. through free access to all food production, to abolish hunger once and for all.

Andy Thomas

Socialist Standard Readers Survey (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

An interesting innovation from the Socialist Standard editorial committee in the 1990s. The results from this survey were written up in the November 1992 issue of the  Socialist Standard. (There was a similar type survey in 1994.)

Could a similar type survey be produced today? What with the majority of readership of the Standard now being online, I'm not altogether sure but I would hope that the editorial committee would give it some serious consideration.

Promises, promises (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few months ago we heard the politicians of capitalism making their overblown speeches and promises, vowing they’d do this and swearing to do that when in office. And once again, sufficient numbers of gullible enough voters let them get away with it, put them back in power to run the same old system the same old way.

When they get office we witness all the usual traditional reneging and treachery, the feeble excuses and transparent pretexts for "expediency” and compromise—the same old sell-outs and U-turns on policy and supposed “principle".

All the parties of the Profit and Wages System keep on making promises they never keep. The promise to solve the housing problem, which stays as bad as ever or gets even worse no matter what any politicians say. The promise to do something about unemployment, which has gone on rising over the years in spite of every “job-creation” scheme and YTS programme. The promise to make “our” country more democratic—when more and more civil and legal rights have gradually been eroded away by successive governments of whatever political hue. And with each fresh election the promises seem to get more vivid and extravagant. Kinnock promised us the sun, moon and stars if we voted for him; the Tories promised things which a couple of years ago, under Maggie Thatcher, they wouldn't have dared contemplate for fear of invoking her Divine Wrath.

All the other parties in Britain, such as the Liberals, the Nationalists, the Greens, the SWP, and various far-Left parties, all make promises of some kind. All want power to rule and govern us just like the two main parties of capitalism. And none of them can keep their promises, whatever it is they say they can or will do. This is because the existing social system won't allow it; the profit-motive takes care of that, forbidding any significant change in the way society is run or structured.

One political party stands out for its absence of promises. One party alone doesn't make any: the Socialist Party. We don’t ask people to vote for us as leaders or for any leaders whatever. We tell workers what capitalism is all about, what’s wrong with it. and why it should be abolished and replaced with Socialism. We tell workers all about what socialism really means and how to achieve it. None of this entails making any promises, or making any extravagant claims for ourselves. This is because the Socialist Party doesn’t strive to run capitalism or solve the perennial problems arising within it; that fruitless task we leave to our capitalist opponents to deal with if they can. We are not in the business of theorising quack remedies for the social ills capitalism has created; we want rid of capitalism, lock, stock and barrel, and that’s the only item on our agenda.

Nor do we promise that socialism will be a perfect Utopia; socialists are far too realistic for that. We analyze the real world and offer ways and means of changing it so that the basic needs of the entire human race may be fully satisfied. This, we consider to be a positive step forward in social progress, not to eradicate all problems from human life—which is impossible—but to make it a lot easier to solve them when they arise.

D. E. F.

Letter: Class struggle in sport (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class struggle in sport

Mention the term “class struggle" to someone and they are most likely to recoil in terror or perhaps conclude that you are slightly mad. The John Majors of this world would, of course, have you believe that we now live in a classless society; and if you don't believe him there are always plenty of sociologists around to assure you that yes, there are classes—but it’s OK because everybody's “middle class" nowadays.

On 1 April last members of Canada's National Ice-Hockey League voted 560 to 4 in favour of calling the first ever strike by players in the NHL's 75-year history, and in doing so stuck two fingers up at those academics and politicians who are proclaiming the “death of the working class" and of socialism in general.

Now I'm not pretending that hockey players have spent the past few weeks skating around with copies of Marx’s Capital in their hands, but nevertheless there is a profound sense of awareness on the part of the players that, in the words of one of the ex-stars Tiger Williams. “we have rights just like any other worker”.

The fans in Vancouver, however. are up in arms over the strike especially in a year when their beloved team has a great chance of winning the revered Stanley Cup. How, they argue, can players whose average yearly earnings top $350,000 (about £175.000) choose to go on strike at a time when ordinary fans are struggling to make ends meet?

The facts, though, paint a different picture. The average salary is misleading in that there are a handful of players who earn an amount well into seven figures, thereby pushing the average up. The players were told recently by the owners of the NHL franchises that there would be no money available for increased wages despite a turnaround last year of over $43 million.

On top of this the average pro hockey player can expect his career to last about four years during which he will be subjected to constant media pressure, long-distance travel, niggling injuries, and the physical and psychological grind of playing and training day in and day out. a fact which is reflected in the abnormally low life-span of many professional athletes. Added to this, after his career is over he has little to fall back on in terms of “marketable skills”.

Yet perhaps more than this the strike is about “free agency", or, as described by Pat Quinn. the Vancouver Canucks General Manager, “the right for players to sell their talent to another club— which is at the moment being denied to them by the owners”.

The bottom line being, of course:

that this is entertainment, that tickets are sold for a product, that the value of that product is found in the talent of the players.(Globe and Mail, 2 April).

And summed up nicely by the CBC reporter:

This is not a sport—it is a business, built around one point—the raw talent of the hockey player.

All this goes to show that under capitalism, there exists a fundamental social antagonism between those who own the means of living and those who don’t. The exploitation of wage labour exists regardless of whether one is a factory worker, a working mother, a university professor or a professional ice-hockey player.

What all these people have in common is an interest in getting rid of a social system that has long since outlived its purpose and in establishing instead a way of living in which human talents from whatever walk of life can finally be expressed to the full.

Julian Prior, 

Vancouver

Letter: Socialist voters (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist voters

Dear Editors,

In the May issue of the Socialist Standard, Steve Coleman, in Story of an Election, claims “50,000 genuine socialist votes". In Between the Lines, he points out that £25,000 is needed to stand fifty candidates and have an election broadcast on BBC TV and radio.

This works out at 50p per person; 50,000 could easily afford this over five years, in time for the next General Election. Furthermore, if 650 candidates were to stand this would cost £325,000. Dividing this sum by 50,000 “genuine socialists” would only require £6.50 over five years. Not an impossibility surely.

T. Hilton,

Stockport

Reply:

If you are one of those who, given the chance, would vote for a genuine socialist candidate, why not start the hall rolling and pay your £6.50 into our Election Fund?—Editors.

Letter: Bicycle Thieves in Bennetts End (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Could it be that the Socialist concept of a society where the needs of the people are freely met is beginning to catch on. Going Places on Radio 4. on Friday 19th June, reported that in order to cut down on bicycle thefts the Police in Hemel Hempstead will be offering bicycles to the public free of charge. Apparently they have so many stolen ones that have not been reclaimed they will be making them freely available to the public.

George Pearson 

London SW20

Reply:

It’s true that there is no point in stealing what is freely available. Which is why this sort of crime will disappear in a socialist society—Editors.

Letter: Money & Survival (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In addition to pointing out some of its deficiencies, for which I am grateful, the criticism of my book Money & Survival in the Socialist Standard, June 1992, was valuable in highlighting for me those differences in approach which prevent my joining the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

It is true that I did not deal with issues such as the historical development of capitalism, class structure or the ownership of the means of production. but this is because they would have no significance in a moneyless society. In pointing out that financial systems inhibit scientific, social and economic progress, that they must be less, perhaps much less, than 50 percent efficient. I am attempting to show the enormous potential that would lie before a world that could free itself of such inhibitions.

The future can only be built upon experience of the past but social circumstances are always changing and our perspectives must change with them. I have no doubt that many of the criticisms of society and capitalism remain as valid today as they had done in the days of Karl Marx but both have changed. In the eighteenth century there were no transnational companies dominating the world, nor production workers with middle class values, nor was there a United Nations drawing the peoples of the world together.

Confrontation, whether in party politics or class wars, invites hostility, holds up the advancement of human society and is self-defeating. The eighteenth century concept that the poor can only be assisted by depriving the rich is derived from illusions of scarcity and exchange value, both of which, as I explained in my talk to my friends in your Bristol branch, are money-oriented concepts that have only had validity in narrow local contexts and are totally irrelevant today.

Confrontation begets confrontation and because the rich live in constant fear of losing their wealth, their power and their privileges, they are only too willing to believe that eventually, however far into the future that might be. those benefits will trickle down to the poor, and that that justifies them in fighting anything or anybody that threatens to take those advantages away. They have the power and resources and even in the unlikely event that they were defeated, another group would arise to grab the spoils.

To assume that once socialism is achieved the money system would wither away is to fail to appreciate the financial and psychological power of the money system. The reverse is true. Only when money has been eliminated can we hope to build a just and forward-looking social system.

There is no short-term solution. The dissemination of such ideas is bound to be a slow process and may never materialise before the human race destroys itself, but that is no reason why we would stop thinking and trying.

Melvin Chapman,

Bath

Reply:

We still can't see how money could be eliminated before socialism is established; nor how socialism could be established without a political confrontation with the privileged class who currently own and control the means of production—Editors.

Between the Lines: The Beggars' Tragic Opera (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Beggars' Tragic Opera

Embarrassing. Condescending. Insulting. Unentertaining. Time-wasting. Infuriating. Boring. ITV Telethon (all day, Sunday 19 July) Semi-recognisable stars sing bad cover versions of bland songs. Cut to twenty seconds on the miseries of living with Alzheimer's Disease. Soft focus; sad classical music. Cut to the man from Kwik-Fit who plays the game of seeing how many times he can say Kwik-Fit and look benevolent within twenty seconds of prime commercial time. Donation: a few thousand lousy pounds. The cost of the same length of purchased commercial space; a lot more. Children with missing limbs are shown playing basketball. The audience cheer. Facially disfigured people plead for funds. The studio audience cheer and wave cheques. Silly little proles with buckets full of pennies scream in ecstasy as the scoreboard shows that five million pounds has been collected. Michael Aspel gives that horrible little grin. Five million pounds: how much to the class who own nothing; what a piss in the wind to the class who possess everything. Cut to the phones where kids donate their pocket money and the poor redistribute crumbs to the poor. Bring on the Chippendales. Forget the suffering and think of a hen night in Scunthorpe as the solution to society's problems. Final collection: fifteen million rotten pounds. Less than last year. Don't they know there’s a recession on? Who will take a collection for the wage slaves who are broke after donating two-hundred quid after one lager too many in the No-Hope Arms? Final shot: a line-up of camera-hungry celebs singing a worn-out American tear-jerker. ’There are mountains in our way. . .' The mountains are made of profit; those in need never get to the top. Telethon hands out sticking plaster to a few of those that fall along the way. Isn't that Cynthia Payne amongst the crew of swooning time-wasters? Well as long as it's for charity—and where was the Minister of Fun? Is this reviewer alone in finding the whole performance of commercialised begging, pumping the worker's guilt and expecting the propertyless to provide for the helpless, a hideous spectacle? Fortunately not. Several disabled workers protested outside the Telethon studio, indignant at a show which makes them objects of pity to be thrown crumbs to the accompaniment of hollow cheers. Fifteen million begged-for pounds; petty cash in the world of military madness. It is when the world is free from money that such offensive spectacles will be unnecessary.

Out with the old, in with the old

Panorama (BBC 1,9.30 pm, Monday. 13 July) was about how the old Russian rulers, seeing the end of their bogus 'communist state' in sight, began setting up private companies in their own names using state funds. These parasites, long the beneficiaries of working-class exploitation under state capitalism, are now private owners of capital. These are the new rouble millionaires whose freedom to exploit we in the West are urged to celebrate as a coming of liberty. An ex-Central Committee member from the discredited Communist Party of the defunct .Soviet Union is shown driving a Merc and looking like any other pouncing thief to be found in the gentlemen's clubs of Chelsea. You won't find them in the food queues. Maybe they'll organise a Russian Telethon so that they can appear on the telly offering a few roubles to the wage slaves out of whose poverty they have carved their privilege.

Thieving Queen

Talking of privilege. The Queen of Mean (BBC, 9pm, Friday 17 July) was good for the bile. The film was about Leona Helmsley, the US millionairess who ended up in prison because she was caught not paying her taxes. The film-makers depicted her as ruthless, callous, heartless and out for nothing but money and power. Sounds like the ideal C.V. for a capitalist parasite. No wonder they call her The Queen. Why shouldn't she live like a selfish, useless, uncaring swine? Since when was there money to be made out of caring? Mind you, Aspel’s probably on his way to a knighthood and someone in the Kwik-Fit P.R. department is in for a handy little Christmas bonus this year.

Steve Coleman

SPGB Meetings (1992)

Party News from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

50 Years Ago: A Challenge to Mr. Bevin on Post-War Reconstruction (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The S.P.G.B. has throughout its existence urged that the conversion of private ownership of the means of production and distribution into common ownership is the only way to solve the poverty problem; but Mr. Bevin does not subscribe to this. He is a member of the Labour Party, and that Party, far from seeking to abolish the rentier, prepares to establish him more firmly than ever by setting up state industries or public utility corporations and compensating the present owners with Government bonds, or stocks guaranteed by the Government. Has Mr. Bevin noticed, for example, how the rumours of nationalisation of the railways gladdened the hearts of the railway stockholders?The Sunday Express (June 7th. 1942) reported “a slow upward move in home rail stocks. The buying is based on the theory that Britain’s railways will never return wholly to private ownership". The Express went on:—

  That would have most important results for the 500,000 investors in railway stocks. Instead of a fluctuating income dependent on operating results, their revenues would be fixed.

In short, Mr. Bevin. these stockholders are counting on the Labour Party establishing them in permanent security as rentiers. 

[From the Socialist Standard, August 1942.]

Production without profits (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism goods are distributed as commodities through markets and this—what can be sold at a profit—determines what is produced. The key determining factor is market capacity, and market capacity cannot be controlled. In previous societies people controlled production to the best of their abilities and what they produced determined what could be distributed.

Under capitalism the position is reversed. What can be distributed, as sales on markets, determines what can be produced and also the way it is produced. This is a unique and highly dangerous feature of capitalism as it is this absence of control that is a basic cause of all the risks we are running with the destruction of the environment.

We’ve got to reclaim control over production. In socialism this will be democratic control and the only way we can get it is by establishing common ownership. We’ve got to begin that control by first consciously agreeing to abolish the profit motive, markets and the wages system. We’ve got to agree to have goods produced directly for people’s needs through voluntary cooperation.

Cooperation to produce goods directly for needs is not something new. This was how people sustained their social life for thousands of years. We need to get back to it, though at a much higher technological level and also with a vastly increased volume of production.

What do we mean by needs? This cannot be treated as a purely abstract issue outside any historical context. A sensible approach is to ask: Does capitalism produce everywhere in the world enough good quality food, clothing, housing, water and sewage systems, cooking facilities, energy for heating and lighting, health and education services, books, radio and TV, entertainment, and means of travel?

If people had secure use of all these things most would say they were well set up. Obviously capitalism falls a long way short of providing them for every person on the planet. What this means for production in socialism is that, to begin with, the supply of goods and services would have to be greatly increased. This in turn means that the means of energy supply, manufacture and transport will also have to be greatly increased.

One example can be given.

At least two-thirds of the world’s population of 5 billion live in sub-standard housing conditions which range from generally inadequate to the primitive, dangerous and disgusting. Think of Mexico City with its millions living in shanty towns and you get a vivid idea of the scale of the problem. So socialism would have to go in for a colossal building programme.

We are not just talking about buildings, bricks and mortar, roof tiles, and glass. The modern idea of decent housing includes all the necessary services like sewage and sanitation. piped clean water, electricity or gas, and also consumer durables like cookers, refrigerators, central heating, air conditioning in the tropics, telephones, etc.

Before you can produce this enormous quantity of materials for building and all the components for the required manufactured goods—as well as the extra tractors, harvesters, irrigation schemes, etc for increasing the supply of food—you first have to produce increased means of production.

Production for needs on a world scale is going to involve a vast increase in every part of the useful structure of world production: agriculture, mining, manufacture, the chemical industry and transportation. The concept of world production is very important here because what socialism must do can only be achieved through the largest possible scale of production using a worldwide division of labour.

Further, the division of the world into rival capitalist states has resulted in a world structure of energy production that would be unsuitable for socialism. America. Britain, France and Russia poured massive finance into the development of nuclear weapons and in doing so created a huge military/industrial nuclear base. In order to try and get something back out of this colossal financial outlay they decided to make some economic use of the technology, the plants and the skilled labour by building nuclear power stations.

In view of the problems involved—the dangers of running them and the build-up of radioactivity in the environment—no society in its right mind would go in for energy based on splitting the atom, but the economic and military strategies of rival capitalist states has resulted in a distorted and highly dangerous structure of world energy production.

Burning fossil fuels to produce energy also causes pollution and creates the threat of global warming. The risks we are taking with this are incalculable. No one can anticipate a possible point where an alteration in the make-up of the atmosphere could set off a chain reaction which could lead to great changes in the environment that would be a disaster for humankind.

So this is something else that socialism would have to deal with. We've got to add care of the environment to the list of needs.

Meeting needs
Socialism will have a number of advantages in dealing with these problems.

Firstly, the really great difference will be that instead of functioning in a dehumanised way as objects of exploitation within the wages system generating profit and capital accumulation for their exploiters, people will be freely cooperating with each other to do what was necessary for the community. The whole method of organisation would be through democratic control. People will decide what must be done and they will be free to get on with it solely for the benefit of everyone.

Secondly, socialism will remove vast amounts of waste. That capitalism is a society of fantastic waste was put very well by Marx:

  The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand enforcing economy in each individual business, begets by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour power and of the social means of production. not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable. but in themselves superfluous.

(Capital,Volume I. chapter 17. section 4).

The precise amount of labour that would become available for useful production in socialism is very difficult to judge but, at a rough estimate, it is likely that socialism could double the number of people available for this. The waste in terms of mining, manufacture, transport and energy supply that goes into the war machine and to servicing activities like insurance, finance and banking could be diverted into useful production, reducing the amount by which total production would need to be increased.

A third important advantage that socialism would enjoy would be the freedom to select and use production methods strictly on their merits. It would not matter that a desirable method might use more labour than an undesirable one. The selection and use of production methods will be free to take into account a broad range of needs, including the enjoyment of work itself, care of the environment, conservation of materials, social safety and animal welfare.

The fourth advantage that socialism would enjoy is that it will be free to use the planet as a single productive unit. This will follow from the establishment of a common interest amongst all peoples, and it will tend to make for a safer and more rational use of the Earth’s resources.

The problem of energy supply is one field where a lot of experts are saying that there must be world action based on global consensus. For example in 1983 Janet Ramage wrote in Energy: A Guide Book:

  How about a world-wide electric grid? It could use underground and ocean floor superconducting cables, and the power could come from solar farms in the world’s major deserts. Ocean Thermal Conversion Plants in tropical waters, and wave power stations and wind turbine arrays in remote regions. No atmospheric pollution, no radioactive wastes, no use of valuable agricultural land or precious fresh water. Would it work? There are probably no insuperable technical problems. There is just one question. How do we get there from here?

Ramage understands as well as anybody else that a world-wide electric grid is impossible in a world divided between rival capitalist states. That is why she asks: “how do we get there from here?”

This is where socialism comes in as the only system that could provide the common interest amongst all people, and the cooperation, for the construction of such a world system of energy supply.

The longer term
To begin with, socialism will be constrained by the sheer pressure to deal with existing problems as quickly as possible. We've got to increase world food production as an urgent priority to stop people from dying. Equally urgent is the need to house all people to a decent standard of comfort. Initially this will require a huge increase in production and large-scale undertakings in the context of a world-wide division of labour.

But once the homes are built, and once all the services have been connected, then these will be in place and available for use for a very long time. You don't have to keep on producing them. The same goes for increased means of production.

On the basis of a number of reasonable assumptions—that population numbers reach some sort of stable level; that the means of production are not subject to constant innovation: that people make a sensible decision about the limits to consumption—a point will eventually be reached where we can say enough is enough. At this point production will begin to fall sharply.

When this position is reached it will have important consequences for planning, decision-making and organisation. If you are setting up a world energy system—perhaps a single world-wide electric grid as suggested by Janet Ramage—with inputs of current from various places and based on using the planet's resources in the most advantageous way, then that will require world action, with planning, decision-making and organisation through a World Energy Agency. But once it is in place, and all you've got to do is to maintain it in good working order, you no longer need planning and organisation on the same scale. World action diminishes, leaving people involved in their local affairs.

The same thing goes for food production. We need urgent world action to stop people from dying, but once this was done and large-scale projects like irrigation schemes were completed, this would allow local communities more latitude to make their own arrangements about local food production for local needs.

A practical long-term scenario is a society of zero growth with a fixed structure of means of production producing stable levels of goods for stable numbers of people; a conservation society which could work with a minimum loss of natural materials through things like recycling: a society where, because people will live in cooperation with each other, they will also be able to work in cooperation and harmony with the natural systems of the planet, and where the focus of social life will be mainly with the local community.

Pieter Lawrence

Is human nature a barrier to socialism? (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “human-nature" argument is widely used against those who claim that it is possible for the human species to live harmoniously in a system of relationships based on co-operation, instead of the system of competition (capitalism) that exists at present. When human-nature is mentioned it is assumed that what is meant is an ineradicable factor of aggression, violence, competition and acquisitiveness contained in the human make-up, sometimes also regarded as a manifestation of the Christian doctrine of original sin. Why is the term human-nature used in the way it is in our society? 

With the break-up of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, chattel slavery came to an end and was superseded in Europe by the serfdom of the feudal system. For some historians a period of relative stagnation descended upon Europe they call "the Dark Ages", lasting until the 13th century. During this time feudal Europe became dependent upon the importation of large quantities of spices, there being no winter root vegetables to feed the cattle most of which had to be killed every autumn and preserved in salt and spices. This trade came from the Far East via the Red Sea, over the isthmus of Suez and into the Mediterranean, thus ensuring the pre-eminence of the Italian and French mediterranean ports.

However, the increasing domination of the Ottoman Turks over the Middle East from the 11th century culminated in the virtual closing of the trade routes to the East. The consequent desire to find a new trade route to the spice islands via the sea determined the so-called "discoveries" (the American continent was of course populated with homo sapiens long before Europeans arrived on the scene) of the West Indies and the American continent by Columbus and Cabot and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco Da Gama in the late 15th century.

Slave trade

Unlike Columbus who pursued a course straight across the open Atlantic Ocean, the Portuguese explorers tried to find a route around the African continent. They made many voyages and slowly worked their way around the coast, taking more than fifty years to reach the most southern point, the Portuguese navigator Diaz accomplishing this in 1487. This brought them into contact with the West African slave kingdoms of Dahomey, Ashanti and Benin, the rulers of which were quite prepared to sell black slaves to the "white" European traders who followed behind the explorers. By 1517 the Portuguese and Spanish were carrying slaves to work in the colonies in the Caribbean.

There were however moral reactions in Europe and the American colonies against the slave trade. The Catholic Church at that time granted legal possession of any new territory discovered to the country financing the expedition on condition that those natives embracing Christianity were not enslaved. As the slave trade became more lucrative the practice of freeing slaves who professed Christianity gradually died out, with the agreement and help of the Church. A new theory of superiority and inferiority developed and Europeans began to talk of black and brown-skinned native populations as sub-human and related to apes rather than humans. Doctrines of intellectualized pseudo-science arose to justify this.

“Survival of the fittest”

Although Charles Darwin already knew in 1837 that evolution was an inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence he had accumulated, he did not allow himself to proceed any further with his discovery until he had found an explanation for the fact of adaptation. The solution had occurred to him and was re-inforced after he had read Malthus's Essay on Population. So, curiously, Malthus’s theory of population, which was to become the tenuous foundation for Social Darwinism, helped to lay the basis for the theory of evolution by natural selection some time before the Darwinian theory was declared in 1859 with the publication of The Origin of Species.

Natural selection is a process of adaptation in response to the environment, or changes in the environment, at a very slow quantitative process of modification over a great number of generations, so that in the course of time an entire species could change qualitatively, forming a new species. Conflict is not involved in such a struggle for survival. It is a struggle for existence (as Darwin termed it) only in the sense that every organism strives to maintain itself and does so willy-nilly in relation to other organisms. Darwin himself stated that he used the term in a large and metaphorical sense which included dependence of one being upon another (symbiosis) and embraced not only the life of the individual but, more importantly, success in leaving progency. Therefore, although the mechanism of natural selection takes place in the life process of an individual organism, the end result of survival manifests itself in the evolutionary emergence and maintenance of a new species.

However, because of the attitudes of some of Darwin’s most devoted followers (foremost among them being Thomas Henry Huxley) his theories were mis-stated and misrepresented, and these misrepresentations were seized upon by supporters of capitalism and negro chattel slavery to justify exploitation. It was Herbert Spencer who first spoke, in his theory of sociology, of "the survival of the fittest". Darwin’s theories were also used to defend Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman with whom fittest was equated.e

Racism

Even before the appearance of in 1859, a disgruntled French aristocrat, Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau had published a book in 1853-57, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in which he attempted to justify the subordinate economic and social position of the peasantry and the working class on the grounds of their alleged biological inferiority. This nonsense of de Gobineau’s was given new apparent validity with the advent of Social Darwinism and was used by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his father-in-law Richard Wagner to justify the false idea of German racial superiority, later taken up by Hitler and the Nazis and used by them to treat as subhuman large groups of people on false biological, ethnological and religious grounds.

After the war of 1939-45 ideas of inherent class superiority and inferiority became less popular. UNESCO published a scries of pamphlets dealing with the racial question and written by the foremost members of every branch of natural science, all of which, on the basis of scientific assessment, condemned all acts of discrimination based upon alleged biological inferiority as erroneous.

For a time capitalism went through a period of economic boom in which industrial Europe invited in millions of immigrants from what are now called the Third World countries to relieve the relative shortage of labour-power caused by the war. However, with the decline of world trade resulting in rising unemployment from the late 50s onwards, together with worsening conditions and standards of living for the working class, conflict arose with violence and discrimination directed against immigrant groups in Britain and the rest of Europe. It was during this period that Neo-Social Darwinism made its appearance; prominent among its advocates were Konrad Lorenz, Anthony Storr, Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris.

The ideas of the new Social Darwinists are a rehash of some of those of the old (Nature red in tooth and claw) and involve the use of erroneous and unscientific methods to justify them. The most favoured way of doing this was, first, to take the behaviour of some people in capitalist society (described as aggressive, territorial and acquisitive) as being the natural norm for all, and then plant it upon our unsuspecting lower animal ancestors as innate or instinctual, and finally, having done that, to claim that this alleged instinct for aggression and the rest is what we humans have inherited genetically from our animal forebears.

Unfortunately for the validity of this assertion of theirs, painstaking work in the field and scientific analyses by George B. Schaller, Jane Van Lawick-Goodall and Dian Fossey on the nature and behaviour of our nearest primate relatives, the anthropoid Apes (chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan), has shown unequivocally that these animals do not fundamentally possess any of the characteristics of aggression and the rest that have been attributed to them (see their books The Mountain Gorilla, In the Shadow of Man, and Gorillas in the Mist).

However, in spite of the efforts of UNESCO and the debunking of Social Darwinism, old and new, there still remains widespread belief in many erroneous conceptions about the nature and behaviour of the human species, an amalgam of Social Darwinism and upper-class prejudice. It is assumed that those in society who are "successful" (that is to say, have more than enough capital to make it possible for them to live without having to be employed) are biologically superior (solely because of that "success") in comparison to those others in society who are economically forced to earn a living by selling their ability to work.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

Human adaptability

The term nature when used in the context of describing a plant or animal organism can only mean the sum total of biological attributes which a particular organism possesses, so that when the word nature is used in conjunction with the word chimpanzee it refers to the sum total of physiological attributes which a chimpanzee has, and this applies not only to the individual chimpanzee but also to chimpanzees as a species.

In like manner the term human-nature refers to the sum total of biological attributes which is general for the human species, the principal characteristics being upright stance, with bipedal locomotion, prehensile hands with opposable thumbs, stereoscopic binocular colour vision, audio and vocal tract anatomy and, most importantly, the relatively largest and most complex brain of any species of organism living or extinct. According to the available scientific evidence, this unique combination of biological attributes which in fact is the nature of the organism (or human-nature) has not changed significantly over the last 40,000-50,000 years and it enables the human species to condition to a large extent its own behaviour which, in contrast, has changed considerably during that period.

When an opponent of socialism says "What about human nature?", the question that arises is: What is human-nature in contrast to human behaviour? Social Darwinists apparently make no distinction between human-nature and human behaviour and say that human behaviour will only change when human-nature changes, but that this will never happen because, they claim, the nature of the human species has been fixed for all time— the often re-iterated cliche that "you can’t change human nature!" Needless to say that when they talk of human-nature they mean human behaviour. . . . 

Unfortunately, a large number of anthropologists and others in related disciplines use these terms in the same slipshod manner. It is therefore imperative that we use them in a precise way, and not just as a matter of semantic exactitude but so as to convey the real situation. What has to be taken special note of is the fact that the flexibility and adaptability of human behaviour is because of human biological nature and not in spite of it. We must also bear in mind that since the total biological inheritance of the organism is contained in the single-celled zygote (fertilized ovum) behaviour as such cannot be inherited.

So when a supporter of capitalism says "you can’t change human nature", the reply should be: "who wants to? Human nature is alright as it is!" Human nature as it is makes it possible to exist in all kinds of manifestations, not just support for capitalism but also the potentiality of the change from the behaviour of capitalism to that of socialism.

—The above is an edited version of a report of a Socialist Party committee set up to investigate the possibility of producing a pamphlet on the subject of Human Nature.

Saving time—for what? (1992)

Illustration by Peter Rigg.

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Saving time" is an expression we hear all around us in our daily lives; in our jobs, driving to work rather than waiting for public transport, writing out shopping lists during the coffee break, running to the shops, popping in here and there on the way, not forgetting driving the children to school and, if you’re lucky, carrying your mobile telephone. All this saves time—but for what?

Travelling recently on a coach journey that used to take at least eight hours and made three stops for refreshments, we had waitress service instead. Once the coach has left London the waitress sets to work, collecting orders for refreshments and snacks from 46 passengers all in one sweep to save time. Can you imagine all the activity going on in the mini-kitchen about three feet square? When your drink arrives you have to perform a balancing act to drink it, for by now the coach is tearing along the motorway doing at least seventy mph. So, once the drinks are down, a look around for—you’ve guessed it—the toilets! Now, most passengers need to make at least one visit during such a journey; with all the drinks flowing freely it would take a super-man-woman to miss this one out. So to the "loo" aboard this "luxury" coach, well that is what it says on the ticket, and this begins a real adventure. Is it free, is it available, will it still be available when I get there? Once at the door a sigh of relief, but on opening the door, one is confronted with a space so small you almost have to reverse to get in. The toilet paper rolls around on the floor beside the hand towels, and the wash hand bowl is about as big as a yoghurt carton. And all this luxury for the convenience of 46 passengers and crew! The all-important time-saving here is the stopping periods previously made to "water" the passengers

Speeding past

What is also interesting while travelling on this "luxury” coach and gazing out of the windows is the hustle and bustle going on outside. Lorries and cars speed past, carrying in many instances the same goods from and to all parts of the country. And company sales representatives duplicating each other, in the competitive struggle for sales. What a crazy system; they’re trying to save time, dodging behind each other to save fuel, often transporting goods that need not be moved in the first place . . . meanwhile on the coach a change of drivers takes place without the coach stopping.

Who benefits from all this saving time? The workers or the employer? If the workers save enough time, they will be found more work to do. More profits will be enjoyed by the employers, whilst many workers will be so tired they will mostly just fall asleep until their next shift. Squeezing a bit more out of the worker’s day and increasing output greatly benefits the profit-seekers, and the pressure by the employer to seek increased productivity is never-ending.

How many of these drivers who regularly ply their way through the blue haze of exhaust, brake and tyre pollution will die from illnesses related to their employment? Lung cancer, respiratory failure and stress are all bound up with the combination of lack of exercise, volume of traffic, bad weather, missed meals, threat of breakdown, etc. Quite a reward for being "King of the Road"!

How much longer are we workers going to put up with this? Can you picture a world without these pressures? Can you imagine a society in which we can enjoy our children, enjoy travelling in comfort and stop worrying about saving time? A society with time to enjoy this beautiful world before it is destroyed by this time-saving lunacy.

Shelf-life

Food additives, preservatives and flavour enhancers are all used to promote sales growth, savings on ingredients and to give a longer shelf-life which mean that the products can be transported further, and therefore a larger potential market is available to the manufacturer.

Along with carcinogenic colourants and preservatives and organic foods polluted by acid rain, there is also another problem we all face: the deliberate irradiation of food, itself a side-effect of nuclear development. The adulteration is never-ending, and all because profit is the driving force. Come on fellow-workers, enough is enough. Let us replace this system which gives rise to such anti-social but seemingly "acceptable" behaviour.

We can establish a socialist society which will end all of this drive to adulterate, this drive to pressure us to save time, so that a few make more profit. With the means of living owned and democratically controlled by the whole of the community, it will be a classless society in which exploitation and oppression of man by man, woman by woman, man by woman and woman by man will be abolished.

The coach journey ended . . .  it was an experience to be learnt from . . . and to be thankful it was over, safely.

S. Buchanan

Boris and the Bolsheviks (1992)

Book Reviews from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

To The Finland Station. By Edmund Wilson. Penguin 1991. £7.99.

Boris Yeltsin. By John Morrison. Penguin 1991, £8.99.

The late Edmund Wilson's book was originally published in 1940. with the subtitle "A Study In The Writing and Acting of History". The aim was to demonstrate a progressive development from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian in 1917. As Wilson stated in his 1971 introduction:

This book of mine assumes throughout that an important step in progress has been made, that a fundamental “breakthrough" had occurred, that nothing in our human history would ever be the same again. I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known.

In the same introduction Wilson made it clear that he expected socialism to be the outcome: "the Russian Revolution was . . .  to scrap a commercial civilization and to found, as Trotsky prophesied, the first really human society".

In fact, what occurred was the overthrow of the feudal nobility. The "hideous tyranny” that followed served to hasten the development of capitalism. Instead of heedingTrotsky, Wilson would have done well to note what Marx had to say on the subject of social change:

Even when a society has got on the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement . . . .  it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. (Preface, Capital Vol. I).

Conditions in 1917, with only a tiny minority of socialists and the workers of the world engaged in mutual slaughter, made a socialist revolution well-nigh impossible.

John Morrison’s book, subtitled ‘‘From Bolshevik to Democrat", gives an account of Boris Yeltsin’s career. As a technocrat he made his reputation as a manager in the civil engineering industry. He became a professional Party man. Later he was promoted by Gorbachev to be head of the Moscow City Party Organisation. His relations with senior colleagues in the Communist Party became increasingly strained over the question of the pace of reform of the economy, with Yeltsin favouring a speedy transition to a “free market". Yeltsin broke with the party and defeated its candidate Ryzhkov to become the first popularly-elected president of the Russian Federation, to gain "hero" status with the defeat of the coup. The book gives a good account of the political manoeuvring within the Soviet Communist Party, but little insight into the economic weaknesses that undermined the Party’s authority.

What is clear is the lack of even lip-service to world socialism by these leaders of the movement supposedly dedicated to that end:

Ryzhkov accused Yeltsin of pursuing a destructive policy which would “lead to the collapse of a state which had taken centuries to create".

Hardly the words of someone dedicated to making the nation-state redundant. From the people in the street, it is no better:

Thousands of Yeltsin's supporters rallied in central Moscow, bearing his portrait and waving Russian tricolor flags. “Boris Nikolayevich, fate has sent you to us” said one banner.

Depressing stuff, seventy years of so-called communist education has left workers clinging to nationalism, religion and leader worship.

Under the Bolsheviks a large area of the world was transformed, from a peasant-based agricultural economy into a modern industrial capitalist society, with all the contradictions. The peasantry of former times has been transformed into a working class, literate, trained in science, technology and the skills of administration. In fact the pre-conditions for socialism have been established. More importantly, the failure of the Bolsheviks to achieve socialism is proof that it cannot be imposed from above.

Workers will find that Yeltsin will be forced to act on behalf of a social class whose interests are diametrically opposed to theirs, just as the Bolsheviks were, but. now out in the open. “The first really human society” can only be brought about by democratic action backed by socialist knowledge.

Joe Carter

War—what it means and why (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

A figure based on statistics for civilians killed in military conflicts throughout the world between the years 1900 and 1990 is a staggering 115,119,000. This estimate given in World Social and Military Expenditures 1991 produced by World Priorities (Box 25140, Washington DC, 2000. USA) is on the low side since it does not take into account the wars of 60 minor nations.

Further, these statistics can only hint at the millions left orphaned and widowed and those who die from the famine and disease that invariably follows war. And we can only gasp in disbelief at the damage done to high-productive arable land, at the loss forever of mineral resources and at the effects of pollution, caused by these wars.

Governments and leaders who instigate wars have become masters of military rhetoric, for they can send millions to their deaths using such excuses as patriotism, religion and democracy. Even in our own century these have been the alleged causes of wars.

Socialists, however, recognise that we live in a world of capitalist domination in which the drive for profit comes before other concerns, and that wars are in reality fought over trade routes (Suez), areas of domination (the two world wars) and mineral resources (Gulf War).

If the recent Gulf War was fought to “defend democracy", then why did $9 billion find its way into Saddam’s hands between 1984 and 1989? Why didn't America retaliate when the USS Stark was attacked by Iraq in 1987 with the loss of 37 US lives, or when Saddam gassed 2000 Kurds in Halabja in 1988?

The Gulf War was fought for several capitalist-oriented reasons: to stabilize the world oil market, to protect Americas strategic imperialist interests in the Middle East and, as Simon Tisdall observed recently in the Guardian (20 May), “Bush also quickly realised that here was a crisis that might be blamed on him: hence the overwhelming magnitude of his response”.

War today means huge profits for sections of big business. For instance, “three quarters of Britain's biggest companies help to support oppressive regimes” (Guardian, 17 May). Between 1985 and 1989, US firms made $52.8 billion from arms exports (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook 1991), while at home British tank manufacturers Vickers bid for orders worth $2.5 billion. As well as this, governments sell military knowledge. Between the years 1979 and 1990 "Britain provided military training for 110 countries . . . Training in Cambodia included sabotage and mine-laying courses" (Guardian, 15 January).

The capitalist system of profit before need is fraught with contradictions. Six times as much public money in the world is spent on weapons research than on health research programmes (World Social and Military Priorities 1987-9). And in the Third World there are slightly over 8 soldiers for every one doctor, in spite of the fact that “the chance of dying from social neglect, malnutrition and preventable disease is 33 times greater than dying from war” (Ruth Leger Sivard, World Social and Military Expenditures, World Priorities, 1989).

During the 80s, NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries provided 89 percent of Third World arms. This has done nothing to bring peace, stability and prosperity, "only chaos and carnage to the very peasants whose sweat and toil earn Africa the foreign exchange to buy these weapons" (New Internationalist, July 1991).

The death of over 115 million people in the interests of profit is proof that the need for world socialism has never been more pressing. War is competition for profit writ large, the continuation of business by other means. It is not enough for the capitalists that the workers must suffer from continual exploitation, earning only enough to keep them in a fit mental and physical state in order to accrue more profits for their "masters". What adds injury to insult is when the workers are conned into fighting workers of other nations suffering under the same exploitative system—all for the right to be exploited by the more affluent victor. The working class has in reality only one enemy: the capitalist system.

John Bissett

Editorial: What classless society? (1992)

Editorial from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody really believes that we live in a classless society. Not even Major. He knows as well as anyone else that at the top are a small group of big businessmen, financiers, landed aristocrats and rentiers living off their investments. Around them is another group, many of them the first group’s relatives, who occupy the top posts in the civil service, the judiciary, the armed forces and the Church. In Russia they would have been known as the Nomenklatura. Here they are called the Establishment. A more accurate name is the capitalist class.

It is not their posh accents, their old school ties or their titles and honours that makes them privileged. These could disappear without ending class privilege. As could other frills like the monarchy, the House of Lords, Henley and Ascot. Their real privilege is in being rich.

Being rich doesn’t mean having a country estate, a chauffeur-driven Rolls, a yacht and the like. Rich people do have these things, it is true, but any rich person who spent all their income on them wouldn't be rich for long. The trick is to use your money to acquire a regular income that enables you to sustain a life of privilege. And the way to do that is to invest your money, to use it as capital and live off the profits.

How the rich got their money in the first place— whether through inheritance as most do or like most of the others by financial wheeling and dealing—is irrelevant. To stay rich they have to become capitalists. They must use a part of their wealth to purchase a stake in the ownership of the means of production.

Profits are an unearned property income that accrues to those who invest their wealth as capital. Making profits is what capitalism is all about. It is what motivates production. But it involves depriving those who actually produce the wealth of society of a part of the fruits of our labour. This is why capitalism works in the interests of the rich. As a profit-making system it works, and can only work, in the interests of those who live off profits and never in the interests of the rest of us.

Capitalism is a system of exploitation. One class, thanks to its ownership rights over the means of production, is able to live off the work of the other class. Not that the two classes are equal in numbers. In Britain those rich enough to be able to live off their profits can’t amount to more than 2 per cent of the population. Their exploitation of the rest of us is quite legal. In fact property rights are entirely granted and maintained by the state.They amount to a licence to levy a tribute on production.

The way to end exploitative class society follows from this. We, the non-rich, must use our overwhelming numbers to win control of the state and revoke all private property rights over the means of production. At a stroke this will render null and void all stocks and shares, title deeds and other legal entitlements to live by exploiting others. These will become useless pieces of paper. The means of production will become the common heritage of us all and the way will then be open for us to democratically control them in the interests of the whole community. With the capitalist class off our backs, we can begin producing things to satisfy people’s needs and not for profit. This is what a classless society must mean. Nothing short of it merits that description.

Against the state (1992)

Book Review from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Volume IV: Critique of Other Socialisms by Hal Draper, Monthly Review Press

Marx and Engels gave few details about what they thought socialism would be like. However, they both wrote an enormous amount about what they thought socialism would not be like. Or rather, they provided a critique of "other socialisms"—hence the subtitle of this volume of Draper's exhaustive analysis of Marxian politics.

The "other socialisms" were Utopian Socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen gave useful criticisms of existing society and interesting ideas for a future society, but were naive about how this was to come about); Sentimental Socialism (not a school of socialism but a tendency to be found in various schools, substituting the power of love, humanity or morality for the class struggle); the Anarchism of Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin (criticised for the authoritarianism inherent in its anti-democratic nature); Reactionary Anticapitalisms (those who yearn for a pre-capitalist golden age, as in the writings of Thomas Carlyle); and Boulangism (after General Georges Boulanger in France, an arch-opportunist and a forerunner of "National Socialism").

Marx and Engels were also confronted with a "socialist" ideology which was patently anti-socialist—Bismarckian Socialism (or so-called "State Socialism"). In late nineteenth century Germany the Bismarck regime introduced nationalisation and social-welfare reforms; in part this was to undermine the growing support for the German SDP led by Lassalle, who proposed similar statist reforms (and criticised by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme). It is this Bismarckian, statist conception of "socialism" which—via Lenin in to Bolshevism and the Fabians into Labourism—has become world famous. The irony, however, is that this conception of socialism is largely anti-socialist in its origin.

Draper accepts that in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian Engels gave a "definite repudiation" of "the view that statification equals socialism, or that statification was progressive", but that doesn't stop him peddling the Trotskyist (that is to say, Bolshevik) nonsense about the need for a "workers' state". Engels, in the same place, is quite clear:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective capitalist. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more it actually becomes collective capitalist, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-workers, proletarians. But the capitalist relation is not done away with; it is rather brought to a head.

Lew Higgins