Hey, Mr. Speaker: Socialism can work (1970)

From the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

How can we do without money, runs one objection to Socialism, it would mean we'd have to go hack to barter.

Why? Who said that barter and money were the only two ways of getting wealth to people? Obviously if that were the choice, money would win hands down. It is a very convenient invention that saves much time and trouble whenever goods are bought and sold. It would not be very sensible to go back to barter anyway, since money developed out of the barter system when it was seen how convenient it was if all goods could be exchanged for one particular one.

It is not quite true that socialists want to "abolish money”. Socialism will not be like today except that there won’t be any money. What socialists want is a society in which, among other things, money will have become unnecessary. That brings us to the third choice: free distribution of wealth, or if you prefer free access to wealth, where people can take from the common store what they need as and when they need it.

But that’s absurd. There’d be utter chaos. People would just grab as much as they could.

Why should they? People don’t grab those things which even now they can have as much as they like of. Take water. Once you have paid the rates, there is no restriction on the amount you can take. Do we find people leaving their taps running all day or filling buckets to hoard away? Of course not. People know what their daily needs of water are. and that there will always be enough to meet them, so they only take what they need when they need it. There is no charge to use some parks or libraries but people still behave normally: they use these free facilities as and when they want to. In some places they don’t charge for travelling on public transport or (after paying the rental) for local telephone calls. Yet still people behave sensibly: they use the trains or the phones only when they want to. This is normal behaviour. In a socialist society, where food, clothing, shelter, travel, entertainment and the other things people need to live and enjoy life will be freely available, why should people suddenly go mad and start grabbing more than they need? Is it not more likely that, as with water today, they will take only what they need?

There wouldn’t be enough to go round anyway.

Oh yes there would. You needn’t worry about that. Scientists and engineers have long known that mankind has the means — the modern industries and farms, the technical know-how and the skilled manpower — to abolish for ever famine, poverty and slums. There is no technical reason why modern industry should not turn out an abundance of the things people need. We can easily grow more and better food; manufacture more and better clothes: build more and better houses, schools, hospitals and other public buildings. It is a question of incentive. Today where production is geared to profit-making, this is not done because the rule is “no profit, no production”. In Socialism where production will be geared instead to meeting human needs, people can go on producing till all their needs are met.

Who's going to produce this abundance of wealth? If people didn’t have to work nothing would get done.

True, people working on materials from nature is the only way of producing wealth, but once again the underlying assumption, that people are basically lazy, is wrong. Most people don’t want to laze around all day doing nothing. It is normal to want to do something — in other words to want to work. For work is simply exercising your mental and physical faculties. Work may be pleasant (as in your leisure-time activities) or unpleasant (as, generally speaking, in your employer’s working time). Most people, quite reasonably, expect the work they do voluntarily to be pleasant. In Socialism, with satisfying human needs (including the need for enjoyable work) as its aim and where all work will be voluntary, people will ensure that they work in safe and pleasant surroundings and that they enjoy what they are doing to help run the society of abundance which benefits them all.


You still wouldn’t find anybody to do the dirty work.

Well, that depends on what you mean by “dirty work”. What work is dirty and what is not is a matter of opinion. The same work can be pleasant or unpleasant depending on why it is done and on how other people think of those who do it. People who wouldn't dream of being a navvy will gladly dig holes in their gardens. And some of the tasks performed by doctors and nurses are not much different from those done by lavatory cleaners.

Machinery could be designed to do nearly all the dull, repetitive jobs which human beings are now forced to do because it is cheaper to employ them than  to install machines. When society is geared to serving human needs, there will be every incentive to design and install machines to eliminate drudgery. If there prove to be some jobs that cannot easily be done by machines, then either they can be left undone or done (perhaps only for short periods) by people who recognise that someone has to do them. That such people will be found is a reasonable assumption since even today the dangerous, but obviously necessary, job of manning lifeboats is done mainly by volunteers.

Is it not so, when you come to think of it, that your everyday experience confirms that Socialism is practical? Common sense of course shows that it is desirable.

How we shall get Socialism (1977)

From the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Speaker! Do you seriously believe that your little party, just a few hundred, talking to this crowd in Hyde Park every Sunday, can bring about Socialism? And if it could, do you really imagine that the capitalists with the army, police etc. would allow you to do so?

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Short answer : NO! we do not think that our small party will establish Socialism: the working class will — and YES! the capitalist class cannot prevent the working class establishing Socialism.

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Long answer (explanation): The careful reader will observe that the question (or questions) contain a contradiction. If the small Socialist Party is the only threat to capitalism, the capitalists have nothing to worry about. But the questioner, having pre-supposed that the workers will never become Socialists, in the next breath is predicting what the capitalists will do when they have. Questioners and opponents frequently put questions in this mixed-up way.

Now the first question. To establish Socialism the majority of the electorate (who happen to be workers) have got to become Socialists. If they don’t, capitalism continues. If there is one lesson the last hundred years has taught it is, above all, that no “seizure of power”, “blind revolt” or General Strike can abolish capitalism.

The majority have got to break with social reform. This, for many workers, is quite difficult. The pioneers of Socialism, including Marx and Engels, could have had little idea of the potency of modern “social security”, which siphons off much working-class discontent and seriously retards the growth of class-consciousness. In spite of this, the fact remains that capitalism is a revolutionizing system: compelled by its very nature to organize, train and educate a revolutionary working class.

It is not true that rebellion only proceeds from destitution. On the contrary, Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders quotes a professor of sociology, Bernice Allen: “We have no proof that more material goods (cars, washing machines) has made anyone happier — in fact the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction’. In some cases, the more “prosperous” workers become, the more dissatisfied they are. In trying to buy off discontent the capitalist class is on a slippery slope with no return. In 1930 Franklin D. Roosevelt told the New York Bankers Guild: “We’ve got to give them bigger crumbs — to stop them taking over the table”.

How long it will take the workers in their millions to see through the reformist racket is impossible to say — except that, small though we may be, it partly depends on us. As with any idea, it has to be explained. Sheer disenchantment of itself leads nowhere but to smashing windows, rioting etc. Discontent is the rich soil of Socialist propaganda, but without the seed of Socialist theory — no new world will bloom.

It is the Socialist who provides the catalyst. It is the Socialist who makes precise the vision of a future society, to turn mere rebels into conscious revolutionaries. The Socialist transforms the miserable degrading requests of Claimants Unions for a few more pennies, or of trade unions for longer tea-breaks, into the dazzling vista of a new world. It is the Socialist who raises mere destruction of the old into construction of the new.

For the Socialist, whether many or few are immediately espousing the cause does not absolve him from the duty to put forward his proposition. The mere raising of it elevates public discussion above the saloon-bar level at which so many self-styled “experts” pitch their fallacious nostrums. “Whether we like it or not — and most of us don’t — recent events have forced us to take some interest in economics” said the Radio Times recently. Exactly! We think Socialist economics provides the answers, and to evade the responsibility of explaining it to our fellow-workers would be criminal.

Even so, this is no mere academic exercise but a matter of life and death — Socialist life or capitalist death. What the questioner does not grasp is the urgency of Socialism: without it, the crises and calamities of capitalism will continue inexorably.

As for the second part of the question: the colossal preponderance of the working class numerically today — its immense technical knowhow — and the operation of sophisticated modern productive processes — make the idea of attempts by rebellious capitalists ludicrous. What about the armed forces? They are 90 per cent. working class.

Next question!

Horatio.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1977)

From the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Speaker! You claim that yours is a Marxist party aiming to establish Socialism by peaceful means, i.e. elections. And yet Karl Marx advocated “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, which, whenever it has been established, has always resulted in a reign of bloody terror. Now then—answer that one!

Okay, pal. We’ll have a go!

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Your first point is quite right. The SPGB does work for the establishment of Socialism by peaceful, orderly, sensible means, i.e. elections (Parliament).

Next, wherever K. Marx used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” he could only have used it to mean the conquest of political power by a majority of the people. Implicit in the whole concept of Socialism is democratic operation, because it can only be run by a majority. There is overwhelming evidence to show, from the whole of Marx's and Engels’s writings, that Marx’s meaning for this phrase (or slogan) was democratic taking of power by a free majority.

We all know, of course, that this question had been enormously complicated by the Russian Bolsheviks, especially Lenin. Finding themselves unexpectedly in power in 1917—in a vast backward country where public administration (due to the disastrous defeats in the 1914-18 war) had collapsed—Lenin and Co. were faced with the problem not of the “proletariate” but the stubborn, obstinate, ignorant Mujik, the mass of the population: peasants.

Confronted with this dilemma, Lenin adroitly invented “the dictatorship of the proletariate and peas- antry", which would have made poor Marx spit blood. Marx’s perfectly sensible straightforward proposition that capitalism converts peasants into a majority of wage-workers, who then democratically assume political power, became a complex mumbo-jumbo of the Party leading the workers, leading the peasants, leading nowhere!

In the sixty years since then, the question has settled itself because the European Communist Parties (including the British one) have all renounced the "dictatorship” rubbish—it loses votes! Another little paradox the Commies have never explained is why you have to run election candidates to establish illegal dictatorships.

The SPGB has never advocated or even used this phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Its Declaration of Principles stipulates the capture of the political machinery by conscious democratic vote.

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Many very well qualified scholars have rigorously examined the whole of Marx’s writings on this question, and come up with indisputable proof that his use of the phrase was for the proletariat as the majority.

Lucien Laurat in his book Marxism and Democracy wrote: “The phrase ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ is to be found in three places in the works of Marx, and two in those of Engels . . .  it is quite clear that for them, this ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ was synonymous with democracy.” Laurat gives an example from Engels, written on 29th May 1891:

If anything is certain, it is that our Party can only come to Power under the form of the democratic Republic. Precisely this is the specific form for the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariate’ as the great French Revolution has already shown.

Since Laurat’s book was written some other examples have been found, but the use of the phrase by Marx and Engels was very scanty. Michael Harrington, who is chairman of the left-wing committee supporting Jimmy Carter and therefore (like Laurat) could not be accused of supporting the SPGB, says in his book Socialism:

It was during this ‘ultra-left’ period that Marx used the fateful phrase 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. It is, alas, of little political moment that it can be demonstrated that when Marx wrote this he did not mean ‘dictatorship’, at least, as the word is now commonly employed.

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Whatever Marx did or did not say, the position of the SPGB is the only feasible one for 1977: Socialism through democratic political action. Regarding the questioner’s third, and last point: apart from Lenin’s and Brezhnev’s Russia, regarded by most as a phoney today, the only place and time claimed to have been ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was Paris in 1871.

The majority party in the Commune were followers of August Blanqui, the secret conspirator and godfather of dictatorship. “They started out from the viewpoint that a small number of resolute men would be able to seize the State, and draw the mass around a small band of leaders.” (F. Engels, Introduction to Civil War in France.)

And yet, when these same “Blanquists” issued proclamations to the rest of France, what did they propose? The free-est, most democratic administration France had ever heard of. In the words of Engels: “They proposed a free Federation of all Communes with Paris.” Marx added, in Civil War in France: “The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage, responsible and revocable at short notice.” That is obviously what he called the proletarian dictatorship.

Even the correspondent of the London Times reported that the change in Paris was astounding. For the first time since 1848 the streets of Paris were safe at night without a police force, therefore no dictatorship.

If the questioner wants to blame the working men’s City Council of Paris for the reign of terror which followed its bloodthirsty suppression in 1871, he might just as well blame the unfortunate street girls of London for being murdered by the psychopath Jack the Ripper.

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And the NEXT question, please . . .

Horatio