The Conflict Between Utopia and Practical Socialism

The following piece, written by the late Pieter Lawrence, is the third chapter of his 2006 work, 'Practical Socialism - Its Principles and Methods'. 

Link to Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The Conflict Between Utopia and Practical Socialism

Socialism has often claimed to be “scientific”. This may be an ideal or an exaggerated view. It is doubtful if any political or economic theory could claim the status of, say, the natural sciences. Even so, at its best, socialist theory does provide an analysis of the capitalist system that explains how wealth comes to be produced and distributed and who gets what from the pool of social production. It is able to place this in an historical context showing the development of its productive relationships from past systems. It is also able to define the economic limitations of political action within the system and reliably predict the results of various political policies. It is this body of knowledge that can reasonably claim to be scientific socialism.

But then again, over the past two hundred years, socialism has also provided a meeting ground for various dissenting ideas. So, as well as the disciplines of socialist criticism the many people who identify themselves as socialists also include tendencies towards sectarianism, anarchism, radical reformism, and a strong element of utopia.

Socialism has attracted more than those who have been convinced by its intellectual rigour and its ability to clarify the workings of society. Its opposition to the existing state of things has been taken up in a sectarian way as a rationale for dissociating from life or for living in negative defiance of the world. Then again, anti authoritarian attitudes, which arise in socialism from equality and democracy can blend easily with the anti authoritarian attitudes of anarchists which come from a very different tradition. Anarchists begin with the autonomous individual whilst socialists begin with the relationships of social individuals. Socialists aim at democratic society whilst anarchists will always view democracy with distrust for it means that the individual may be compromised by having to concede to the decisions of a majority.  The attitudes of sectarian socialism and anarchist socialism tend to congeal as sterile postures and as perverse features of the status quo. Their main function is the therapy of providing a spiritual home for the socially disaffected. They have little interest in presenting a positive or practical alternative to existing society.

A further outlook which can also be in conflict with practical socialism comes from a tradition of utopian ideas. It is important to make a distinction between utopian socialism and practical socialism but this is not necessarily for the purpose of choosing one and entirely disregarding the other. These two outlooks should complement each other and in their different ways widen our social possibilities.

Ideas of utopia, which may be said to be socialist, arose long before Marxian criticism. Out of the inequalities and miseries of even pre-capitalist societies they arose from a desire for an ideal way to live. Utopians construct ideas of a future perfect society in the hope that one day, society will adapt itself to these visions. Thus the utopian imagination has enjoyed the freedom to indulge without limits any proposal that may come to mind, and which could be part of a perfect world. We may well be inspired by such ideas but we should also recognise that society does not move forward in this way. Utopian socialism can become a problem when its futuristic visions are imposed on the ideas of socialism as a rigid dogma. In this way, socialism can seriously lose credibility.

In fact practical socialism is not focused on future society. It is entirely focused on how we could move forward from where we are now. Its proposals arise from the practical ways we could solve our social problems by taking society forward on a socialist basis. This means applying the principles of common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use in proposing how people in socialism could be organised as a world community. It means the ascendancy of all the useful things of life in place of the economics of the profit system. It also means that the conditions for that forward movement are entirely given by present circumstances. This determines the framework of both the freedoms and the limitations within which practical socialism may be sensibly proposed and argued. 

The methods of practical socialism must be consistent with the actual ways that society moves forward and history is made. Within the constraints of this method its ideas may not be plucked arbitrarily out of a utopian blue.  Practical socialism certainly proposes a rapid development of all useful aspects of society for the needs of all people but its starting off point must be and can only be the existing world.

The Future in History

The part played by utopia in the past is ambivalent. Seen in one light, utopian ideas have been a reminder of humanity’s best qualities and best possibilities. Its ideas have kept sight of the better things we could do in a better life. Despite the horrors and miseries of every age, utopia has upheld the belief that we could all live in peace, security and happiness. Without utopia there would be less hope. It was well said by Oscar Wilde that “A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at.”

Nor is it surprising that most visions of the ideal life have been based on equality and co-operation. It would be difficult to be inspired by propertied society to write a utopia of class, competition, economic exploitation, or profit. There may be one or two literary nightmares written along these lines, but not utopias.

The recently issued “Faber Book of Utopias” edited by John Carey includes over a hundred references to writers who have imagined in different ways an ideal future and which the editor accepts as being part of the utopian tradition. Though many would say that the inclusion of Adolf Hitler and his dream of a future Aryan paradise is surprising.

The list for socialists is quite short. John Ball, the ‘first socialist’, dreamed of a world without property, based on equality and co-operation at the time of the Peasant’s Revolt in the 1380’s. Thomas More, who invented the word, issued his “Utopia” in 1516. Gerard Winstanley was one of the organisers of the Digger Movement at the time of the English Civil War. The contemporaries, Fourier and Saint Simon published utopian works in the early 19th Century.  These were criticised by Marx and Engels. Perhaps the best read socialist utopia after Thomas More’s “Utopia” is “News From Nowhere” by William Morris, published in 1890. The “nowhere” in “News From Nowhere” continues a play on words begun by Thomas More when he combined the words from classic Greek, ou-topos meaning no-place and eu-topos meaning a good place. From this he constructed the word utopia. Some utopian socialists still accept “News From Nowhere” as their guide to how socialism would be organised. For the most part, all these forward thinkers agreed that the best way to live could only be in communities of free and equal men and women who co-operate to provide for each other’s needs and who organise their affairs democratically.

Though William Morris has come to be known as a utopian it is not the intention here to in any way diminish his importance as a great socialist. William Morris was in fact a very practical socialist who was surely entitled to write a visionary book about future socialist society without being categorised as a Utopian. Just as Marx sometimes speculated about what he called “the higher phase of communism”, William Morris also made a distinction between “the morrow of the revolution” and “the fully developed new society.” This clearly indicates that Morris was aware that socialism would be a developing society, different as a mature society from its beginning. Indeed, the very first paragraph of “News From Nowhere” is as follows, “Up at the (Socialist) League, says a friend, there had been one night a brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution, finally shading off into a vigorous statement by various friends of their views on the future of the fully developed new society.”.

It should also be noted that “News From Nowhere” is partly a manifesto on behalf of the aesthetic movement, The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. For example, Collier’s Encyclopaedia says, “His prose tale News From Nowhere (1891) shows a post revolutionary Utopian England in which his political convictions, his craftsman’s tastes, and his Pre-Raphaelite ideas are miraculously reconciled.” Hence, for example, the costumes of the characters. “His dress was not like any modern work-a-day clothes I had seen, but would have served very well as a costume for a picture of fourteenth century life: it was of dark blue cloth, simple enough, but of fine web, and without a stain on it. He had a brown leather belt round his waist, and I noticed that its clasp was of damascened steel beautifully wrought.” So far as I am aware, our modern utopians have not yet suggested that people in socialism will be mostly wearing medieval dress.

It is doubtful if Morris would have approved of the way the details of “News From Nowhere” are now sometimes expressed as a dogma about daily life in socialism.  It is simply a work of futuristic fiction which should not be dogmatised as a bible of the future. His is surely a case of the reputation of William Morris having to be saved from the follies of some of his admirers

The utopian tradition is ambivalent because whilst it urges us to remember the best ways we could live it has also had its dark side. The idea of a future, perfect world has been used by various regimes to justify their acts of repression and cruelty. Millions of people were killed or sent into forced labour in the name of advance towards “pure communism”, the regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot being infamous examples. The mention of Adolf Hitler is a reminder that the psychopathic Nazi regime exterminated more millions in the name of an idyllic, romantically inspired paradise to be lived by an Aryan “Volk”. The Inquisition justified its tortures in terms of a perfect eternal life. This reminds us that the father of English utopians, Thomas More, was a catholic Chancellor of England, an agent of the Pope, who had heretics burnt at the stake. There was not much utopia for those folks, not in this life anyway. Experience shows that whenever a leader or a political vanguard has stood for the promised land, the record of success has not been good.

But the distortion of language and the use of fine ideals as a cover for repression and exploitation has long been part of politics. This does not detract from the values of equality and co-operation that have been upheld for centuries as part of the utopian tradition.

Marx and Utopia

Karl Marx was both admiring and critical of the utopian writers who were the main representatives of socialism in the early 19th Century. These included Fourier and Saint Simon. Fourier’s vision of social co-operation influenced anarchists, syndicalists and the co-operative movement. Saint Simon published “The Industrial System” in 1820 which set out a program for a technocratic society with a planned economy based on co-operation. Also important at this time were the ideas of Robert Owen.

In recognising the value of these ideas in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said,  “Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society. But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class.”

But then, in criticising these writers, Marx and Engels set out a clear distinction between utopian socialism and practical socialism. They recognised that such writers as Fourier and Saint Simon relied too much on putting forward ideas for great social change without proper consideration of whether they were realistic in relation to the development of society. The ideas of the utopians could not provide the principles of action for a practical, revolutionary socialist movement, mainly because, at the time they were writing, the conditions did not yet exist for such a movement.

Nor could history be made by a group of well meaning individuals thinking up ideas for an ideal society and then causing society to change in line with their scenarios. The utopians were idealist in the sense that they assumed the primacy of the idea in causing social change. The materialist approach required that proposals for change advocated by practical socialists must be constructed in line with the actual social conditions that make them possible. 

This was put by Engels in “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, “The historical situation dominated the founders of socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalist production and the crude class conditions, corresponded crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary then to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and whenever it was possible by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as utopian, the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure fantasies.”

Engels insisted that credible proposals for a new society had to correspond with social conditions that make them possible. “Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realisation were there.”

This materialist approach was also emphasised by Marx in “The German Ideology", “Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

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In their critique of the utopians, Marx and Engels argued that the conditions for the establishment of socialism had not been present at the beginning of the 19th Century but later in the century Engels noted great changes that in his view made a difference to the question. He said,  “The possibility for securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties- this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.” (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.)

Engels argued  that in the 1820’s the way to construct a new society lay hidden in the undeveloped conditions of the capitalist system, but that later the way forward for practical socialism had emerged mainly as a result of  what he called the enormous expansion of  “the modern means of production.”  In line with this there had been the development of class divisions.  Engels concluded that the conditions for the establishment of common ownership had matured and that for the first time in history, socialism was possible.

He expressed this view in 1877 and in retrospect we are surely bound to say that he was too optimistic. The limitations of undeveloped conditions that applied to the earlier utopians applied as much to Marx and Engels, certainly in 1848 .Whatever the case, we are now more than a hundred years further on and there can be no doubt that with the massive developments, not only in the means of production throughout the world, but also in transport, communications and useful institutions, our more scientific outlook and technical culture, socialism is not only materially possible but long overdue. This also means that the work of proposing how the present structure of useful production and administration could be adapted and developed for needs on a socialist basis is also long overdue.  It may be due in part to the many distortions and diversions suffered by socialist ideas during the 20th Century but the state of the world and its recent history shows that the vital work of practical socialism has suffered catastrophic neglect.

Modern Utopians

Utopian socialism is defined as the practice of asserting an ideal vision of future society in the hope that the world will one day adapt itself to this vision.  In its modern version how is this expressed? The question is not easy to answer because mostly, utopia asserts itself as the absence of things rather that the existence of things. There will of course be the relations of common ownership, democratic control and production solely for needs. But from this there flows a long list of negatives. 

In Britain, Parliament will be abolished together with county, district and parish councils.  Apparently, all these features of the state must go.  Democratic practice will not be representative but direct, which means that every person will be able to vote on all matters. The entire machinery of government will be abolished. There will be no civil servants or ministries of any kind. No Health, Housing, Transport or Planning ministries. No planning law. No Ministry of Agriculture or Department of the Environment. No Energy Authority. 

With no property relationships there will be no crime or anti social behaviour. This means there will be no law, police, courts, judiciary or public powers of restraint of any kind. Marriage and the family will be abolished. There will be no schools; no examinations or professional qualifications. There will be no legal right of occupation of any house and with no property there will be no locks or keys. Production will be less technological and more handcraft. Big cities will no longer exist. Communities will be smaller with local production for local consumption. There will be free access to any goods or services that any person might wish for and this will be determined solely by the individual. 

It might be said that this list mainly of negatives is an exaggeration or a caricature of utopian socialism; it is not. These have, however, all appeared in utopian literature at one time or another.  Although this list of things that will not exist may appear to be about future society this is illusory.  It is not about the future at all. It is merely a negation of the present, projected as a vision of the future.  Even utopia must think within the present even if only in terms of its absence.  But this has nothing to do with practical ways for moving society forward on a socialist basis.

Necessity

It is certainly reasonable to assume that in time, socialist society will develop to a point where any great social problems will have been solved. The result will be that pressures of necessity will be lifted and people in socialist communities will enjoy wide options about how to live. But that cannot be on our agenda. The work of practical socialism is aimed at removing the economic constraints of the capitalist system so we may apply all our useful resources to our problems. It follows that our proposals for how socialism could be organised cannot be selected arbitrarily as a matter of free choice. Necessity requires that they must be shaped in answer to the question, “What will people in socialism have to do to solve the world’s problems?” Unfortunately, this practical question seems never to have arisen in the minds of our modern utopians.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (UNO), over 800 million people are seriously undernourished. This has doubled since 1974 when the number was 435 million. 40,000 children below the age of five die every day from hunger or hunger related disease.

This annual number of child deaths remained more or less constant throughout the last quarter of the 20th Century giving a horrifying figure of 365 million preventable child deaths. In socialism this problem would require world food production to be greatly expanded.

Also, countless millions of people live in shanty towns, slums or sub standard housing. This would require an enormous world building programme together with services such as sanitation, piped clean water, supply of electricity and the consumer goods that are now accepted as basic to our standard of life. Such a building programme would have to be preceded by an equally massive expansion of means of production.

Over the past century, the depredations of the profit system have cause relentless damage to our world environment. People in socialism would need to take emergency action to stop this damage. It is widely agreed that we must avoid the risks now being taken with the natural systems on which all our lives depend. This would mean the construction of a safe world energy system together with and many other policies aimed at saving our environment.

Capitalist states have massively increased their powers of government.  These have grown into elaborate and wasteful bureaucracies that rule over the lives of citizens. To replace these pervasive structures, people in socialism would need to put in place a minimal but efficient system of democratic administration.

These are just some of the great projects that communities in socialism would need to undertake to put right the destructive chaos of capitalist society. There are many more urgent things to do and together they add up to action on a world scale.  This will necessitate decision making, planning, co-ordination, and allocation of resources in an order of priorities. These projects would have to be organised in ways compatible with democratic practice. These are the compelling pressures of necessity that would determine the organisation and actions of socialism as it sets out to solve problems. 

This is the challenge of practical socialism.  No doubt utopia can provide a signpost to a better future but it serves us best if it inspires us carry out the practical work of proposing how problems can be solved on a new social basis.  As this work develops by applying a sound method it will surely begin to close the gap between the ideas of socialists and other persons who may be concerned about the state of things but who may not have yet considered the practical socialist alternative.

Pieter Lawrence

Link to Chapter 4

Letter From Europe: Money must go (1982)

From the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article recently appeared in the Luxemburg journal, News Digest.

Those who follow the adventures of the spacewoman Axa in the Sun will remember that when in March she arrived in the City of Artisans the following conversation too place:

Artisan: You're hungry.
Axa: Yes, but I've no money to pay for food.
Artisan: Money? We never use it! Take what you want and eat!
Axa: If your people don't use money they must be happy.

Presumably Axa based this conclusion on her experience of other planets, such as Earth, where money is used and where you do go hungry of you don't have any. In any event she raises an interesting point: would we on Earth also be happy if we didn't use money?

I remember about ten years ago buying a paperback on Euston Station entitles Who Needs Money? The book so intrigued me that I contacted the author who was called, I think, Herbert Lomas. He told me that there was a conspiracy to prevent his idea of abolishing money getting out as his publisher had not printed enough copies of his book and wasn't advertising it properly. I put this down to the paranoia sometimes associated with people who have seen the Light and found the Truth and can't understand why others don't too. After all, the publisher did publish his idea and so did help to spread his idea.

But, conspiracy or no conspiracy, Bertie Lomas at least did not have to suffer the fate of one of his more illustrious precursors as an advocate of abolishing money. Sir Thomas More, the man who inspired the film A Man for All Seasons, had his head chopped off by Henry VIII, not, I agree, for advocating the abolition of money but for remaining loyal to the Pope of Rome, though I'm sure Henry found both these opinions equally obnoxious.

More, who has the unique distinction of having a place both in the Marxist Hall of Fame and as a Catholic Saint on the right hand of God, expressed his ideas in a book entitled (some would say appropriately) Utopia which was first published in Louvain in 1516. It was written in Latin so it can't have had much of a readership at the time, but it has since been translated into many languages and must be the most read book by someone arguing for the abolition of money. In fact since More introduced the word "Utopia" into English (and into most other languages too) a money less society can be regarded as the genuine, original Utopia.

But to return to our question: would we on Earth be happy if we didn't use money? Well, one group who on the face of it would have no reason to be happy would be those whose jobs depend on the existence of money. People who work for banks are an obvious example, but they are not alone. There are also those who work in insurance, in advertising and marketing, those who calculate our wages, pensions, family allowances and all other payments, those who issue, collect or punch holes in tickets, shopkeepers, shop assistants, tax inspectors, accountants, Securicor, salesmen and buyers of all kinds. In fact in an administrative and financial centre like the town of Luxemburg well over half the population must be directly dependent on work connected with the use of money for their livelihood.

Only a minority are actually engaged in the work of producing the useful things or of performing the useful services we need to live. I'm thinking of the street cleaners, the building workers, those in the Arbed factory in Dommeldange and those making lavatory bowls and urinals at Villeroy and Boch — though in More's Utopia even these latter would be out of a job since he suggested that chamber pots should rather be made from the gold which would no longer be needed as money.

I hasten to add that this is not meant as a criticism of those employed in these non-productive functions connected with money (my own job wouldn't be above such a criticism either). I'm merely noting a fact and am fully aware that people have to find work where they can since without a job, they would have no money and without money . . .

But if there's no money, how would you distribute goods and services? "Take what you want and eat", as the Artisan said to Axa. Which seems a good enough to me. After all, you would have thought it unchallengeable that food should be grown to be eaten and not to be stockpiled as butter mountains and wine lakes or worse destroyed — which is what happens today when food is produced to be sold for money.

So the alternative to money would not be a return to barter, nor even equal shares for all, but free access for all to what they needed to live and enjoy life. As in More's Utopia: "When the head of a household needs anything for himself or his family, he just goes to one of these shops and asks for it. And whatever he asks for, he's allowed to take away without any sort of payment, either in money or in kind. After all, why shouldn't he?" Because, some would no doubt reply, there'd be chaos, it would be worse than Harrods on the first day of the sales; people would grab more than they needed. Or would they?

I once heard a Hyde Park orator deal with this particular objection to a moneyless society. He pointed out that even today certain things are free, either completely like the air we breathe or at least at the time of use like the water from the taps in our homes, yet you don't see people going around hoarding air or water; we only use water when we need it for drinking or cooking or washing.

I can give you another example. Down in Vittel in the Vosges there are public drinking fountains from which you can draw without paying the same water for which you pay a ridiculous price after it has been put in bottles. The locals use these fountains regularly nut, once again, take any one time only as much as they need. Sir Thomas More realised the reason for this as long ago as 1516: "There's more than enough to go round, so there's no risk of his asking for more than he needs—for why should anyone want to start hoarding, when he knows he'll never have to go short of anything?"

But back to Hyde Park. A heckler interjected that if things were freely available there'd be no incentive to work so that the stores could not be kept  continuously stocked with plenty of what people needed; therefore a moneyless system couldn't work. Q.E.D. I can't remember how the orator dealt with this point, but it didn't appear to be a problem in the City of Artisans. There people worked because they liked working:

Axa: You work for fun, then, in this City of Artisans.
Artisan: Stupid to work for anything else! 

Why indeed work for any other reason if you've got the choice? Today most people work at boring jobs in offices and factories not because they like the work (masochism is only a minority deviation) but because . . . they need money.

If you think about it, the abolition of money would mean other changes too and the disappearance of a whole host of problems we have to put up with today. There'd be no inflation, no taxes, no devaluations, no theft, no robbery, no muggings, no strikes, no riots, no blackmail, no corruption, no alimony, no poverty, no wars. But in case his paranoia gets worse, let's leave the last word to poor old Bertie Lomas, on the back cover of his book: "If money is the root of all evil why not abolish it and give mankind a new deal?"

Adam Buick

Between the Lines: Utopias and First Tuesday (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Myopic Visionaries

Somewhere in the basement of Channel Four there is an office in which is to be found a team of timewasters whose lifelong project is to make lengthy documentaries about "socialism" or "Marxism". Over the years the C4 audience has been subjected to numerous programmes of this kind. We wait excitedly, expecting a serious analysis of the subjects so seductively advertised in the titles — and with regularity we are left feeling frustrated, cheated and wondering when the case for socialism would at least be mentioned in passing.

Utopias (C4, 10.45 pm, 1 May) was a classical production of the basement timewasters. The programme lasted for over an hour. It was clearly produced with enormous technical care, using props and recordings of speakers which looked like they were going to serve as a backdrop for something more than superficial. The title was intriguing. Socialists are often called utopians, and here was a programme offering eight "socialists" the chance to discuss their visions of what socialism means. Within the first few minutes that sinking feeling began: the declaration was made that this would not be a programme about definitions. Which meant, more precisely, that it would be a programme in which anyone who felt like it could call themselves socialists without being under the least pressure to explain themselves.

Then the visions commenced. Eight miserable bloody visions of capitalism run better than it is now, with the occasional reference to such limited dreams as being elements of socialism. Jack Jones, the first lofty dreamer, who as head of the TGWU advocated the so-called Social Contract whereby trade unions would agree to take lower wages in order to assist a Labour government to manage the capitalist economy, offered the vision of "fair pensions" and an incomes policy as his taste of utopia. Then came a "socialist" economist who talked a bit about the need for morality and the impossibility of doing away with market forces altogether; followed by some ex-strikers from Silentnight who had set up a furniture-making co-operative business and saw this little dot on the market map as their own piece of socialism in practice; Sheila Rowbotham's utopia had been and gone. It was the GLC, and if that was utopia, then Birmingham's a tropical holiday resort.

Rarely has so much valuable TV time been wasted upon such vague and limited visions of what could be. Here was a chance for a socialist to really show what life could be like in a world set free from the bondage of the profit system. A world of abundant resources in which people could give according to their abilities and have free access to the goods and services that they desire. This would have been something to make them sit up, make them now that there is something more that we could have if only capitalism was not here.

Instead of that we are offered neither socialism nor utopia, but the stale reformist outlooks of capitalism's tame leftwing. As is often the case, the worst contribution of the evening was provided by the SWP. David Widgery, who is an SWP Leninist, a GP and a very pleasant fellow, trotted out the usual line that workers must organise to get reforms out of capitalism. As he put it, "In these times, to be a revolutionary means to try to hang on to reforms". So, the total destruction of the capitalist system is to be postponed a while; there are prescription charges to be fought over. We can only hope that the men in the basement (or wherever they are) take a long time before producing their next intellectual tease.

The Practitioners of Genocide

First Tuesday (ITV, 10.40 pm, 2 May) contrasted strikingly with Utopias. It did not claim to deal with any grand intellectual theme; its subject was the My Lai massacre carried out by the US army twenty years ago. It was the most forceful and moving documentary to be shown on British TV for a long time. It should be seen by anybody who has illusions about the glory of war.

The documentary concentrated upon the way that military training brutalised a group of American workers, whose average age was twenty, into Nazi-like sadistic thugs. One of the few surviors in My Lai was interviewed. Like most villagers, her entire family had been killed in the massacre: "The more I think about it, the more I want to cry" she said, two decades after the atrocity had been committed. She had been thrown into a ditch with scores of dead villagers piled in on top of her. She explained how the soldiers had indiscriminately shot old men and women and infants and babies, how they had raped the women and done worse to young girls, how they had tortured the villagers and then lined them up in rows to be shot. Nearly every one of them was murdered in what the US press called the 'Pinkville' massacre.

The interviews with the screwed up soldiers who are still around to tell the tale demonstrated just how much both killer and killed are the brutalised victims of war. To be sure, the uniformed murderers survive, but with what memories? Psychologically, these men were wrecked; Vietnam had taken their minds and left them badly injured. One black ex-GI sat shaking and twitching. He is on major tranquilisers. He cries a lot. He looks over and over again at press cuttings of the massacre. He recalls, self-torturingly, how he personally shot dead about twenty-five villagers. including several little children. He sits next to a photo of his own son who was murdered in a street attack — and he explains that this must have happened as a punishment for his action in Vietnam.

But, as the documentary clearly showed, these men did not decide to go to Vietnam and slaughter innocent people. They did not act upon a whim. They were driven into a frenzy of violent hatred against the unknown enemy as part of their preparation for the job of being good soldiers.

The documentary ended with pictures of the modern US army being trained, explaining that what is happening to the soldiers is not different from the brutalising process which had turned those of twenty years ago into the practitioners of genocide. No doubt there will be some who will have seen this powerful documentary and concluded that this only demonstrates the awfulness of human nature. That would be a false conclusion; these soldiers were not born thugs, it was the system which required them to be that way. It is capitalism which makes killers out of decent men and women. These men should not feel self-guilt about what they have done, but angry about what they were made to become.

Steve Coleman

The dispossessed (1994)

Book Review from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin is a tale of future worlds. One is Anarres and clearly labelled "anarchist". The other, Urras, is less clearly described as "propertarian" and "archist". The plot is briefly but dramatically outlined in the blurb.

"Shevek, a brilliant physicist. . . single-handedly attempts to re-unite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust. Anarres, Shevek's homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic Utopian civilization; Urras, the mother planet, is a world very similar to Earth, with its warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Shevek risks everything in a courageous visit to Urras  to learn, to teach, to share. But his gift becomes a threat. . . and in the profound conflict which ensues, Shevek must re-examine his philosophy of life."

The book's thirteen chapters alternate between Anarres and Urras.

Invited to dislike

LeGuin tells us much that we seem to be invited to dislike about Urras, and just a few things that we are invited to approve (although, depending on your point of view, you may have a different ratio of approval to disapproval).

Urras is an "incredibly complex society with all its nations, classes, castes, cults, customs and its magnificent, appalling and interminable history". It is organized "hierarchically, from the top down". In education there is an examination system that involves "cramming in information and disgorging it at demand". "The state recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself." So there are secret police. And the state uses force, with police helicopters and machine guns, to put down demonstrations that threaten the status quo.

Life on Urras closely resembles, and somewhat exaggerates, life in the USA in the 1970s, when the author was writing (in two decades the general picture has changed little). They burn dirty clothes because new cheap ones cost less than cleaning. There are private cars, "splendid machines of bizarre elegance". Everything is "either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use."

Rats and asylums

There are three competing mail companies. Everything comes "inside layers and layers of wrappings". The basic function of the radio "was advertising things for sale". Other delights on Urras included rats, army barracks, insane asylums, poorhouses, pawnshops, executions, thieves, tenements, rent collectors, the unemployed, and "a dead baby in a ditch".

In the realm of thought and ideas there is also much to dislike about Urras. There is religious bigotry ("He's a strict-interpretation Epiphanist. Recites the Primes every night. A totally rigid mind.") There are "birdseed papers", "written by semiliterates for semiliterates" which manufacture news. Shevek observes that Urrasti people always look anxious: "Was it because, no matter how much money they had. they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor?"

Now to Anarres. the "anarchist country". It, too, has a system and has people doing things and thinking thoughts. Anarres is "an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism. . . (the people) are not only socialists, they are anarchists".

No law, no police

There are no laws, no governments, no police, no money. Or, to add a bit of positive qualification, there is "no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. . . no government but the single principle of free association". While "nominally there's no government on Anarres. . . obviously there's administration. . ." The network of administration and management is called PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. "They are a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administer production". Nobody is ever punished for anything, though sometimes "they make you go away by yourself for a while".

There is no distinction between men's work and women's work: "A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength -what has sex to do with that?" The "dirty work" is done by everyone on one day out of ten on a basis of choice from "rotating lists" "People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them".

Positive

Most of what we learn that is positive about Anarres is in terms of thoughts, ideas, even moral precepts. At a personal level, members of a community were not moved by mass feeling but "there were as many emotions as there were people". The status of religion on Anarres is ambiguous. There is no established religion in the sense of churches and creeds, but "you could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity?" Takver "had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary". One character offers a moralistic judgment: "Having's wrong, Sharing's right." Shevek is described as having been brought up "in a culture that relied deliberately and constantly on human solidarity, mutual aid".

Anarres has a population of only 20 million compared with a 1,000 million on Urras. It was given to the Odonians (theoretical anarchists) as a means of "buying them off with a world, before they totally undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras". There was trade between the two worlds, but in practice Anarres was a mining colony of Urras. For an anarchist society, Anarres is remarkably centralized. Abbenay is the capital, "the mind and center of Anarres. . . There had to be a center. The computers that coordinated the administration of things, the division of labor and the distribution of goods, and the central federatives of most of the work syndicates were in Abbenay, right from the start".

Despite this the people of Anarres have to put up with many shortages and deprivations. Printing had to cover the whole page because paper was short. The economy would not support the building and upkeep of individual houses and apartments. People had to save up their daily allowances for a party. and had to fetch their letters from the mail depot because there were no postmen. However, the general picture is one of high morale despite the shortages and deprivations.

Clear aim

LeGuin had an aim in writing The Dispossessed. Fortunately, we have her own account of this. Responding to a question by Lynn McCaffery, she says:

"... The only trouble with an anarchist country is going to come from its neighbors. Anarchism is like Christianity – it's never really been practised – so you can 't say it's a practical proposal. Still, it's a necessary idea. We have followed the state far enough – too far, in fact. The state is leading us to World War III. The whole idea of the state has got to be rethought from the beginning and then dismantled. One way to do this is to propose the most extreme solution imaginable: you don 't proceed little by little; you go to the extreme and say, "Let's have no government, no state at all." Then you try to figure out what you have without it, which is essentially what I was trying to do in 'The Dispossessed'. This kind of thinking is not idealistic, it's a practical necessity these days. We must begin to think in different terms, because if we just continue to follow the state, we've had it. So, yes, 'The Dispossessed' is very much in earnest about trying to rethink our assumptions about the relationships between human beings." (Across the Wounded Galaxies)

Then McCaffery asked LeGuin why-she had set her anarchist Utopia in such a bleak environment:

"The way I created Anarres was probably an unconscious economy of means: these people are going to be leading a very barren life, so I gave them a barren landscape. Anarres is a metaphor for the austere life, but I wasn't trying to make a general proposal that a Utopia has to be that way."

For LeGuin what seems to be preventing people making a better fist of life on contemporary Earth is not so much capitalism as government and the state.

It follows that what she believes desirable is not so much socialism, a system to replace capitalism, as anarchism, a system to replace "archism". That last term isn't actually in the dictionary, not even in a large one. But so much of what LeGuin writes about Urras is also a fair description of capitalism that perhaps we shouldn't be too concerned about her choice of words for its alternative.

The important difference between LeGuin's view and the socialist view is surely about the means of changing from one type of society to the other. LeGuin is vague about these means. Like most anarchists, she doesn't think in terms of democratic political organization for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. She is right to "see the folly of reformism ('you don't proceed little by little')". But organization is important – indeed it is vital. By allowing the "archists" to be well-organized in a favourable environment, and the anarchists to be a minority shipped off to a barren planet, she is not only giving the devil the best tunes: she is allowing him to take over the whole music profession.

One serious criticism of The Dispossessed is that we aren't told enough about the Urras "working class", and what little we are told is derogatory and disillusioning. We know they read "birdseed" papers and get massacred when they revolt, but that's about all. LeGuin sketches them in as semiliterates, as a kind of ancient Roman "bread and circuses" mob. There is something deeply pessimistic about a scenario that envisages the intellectual, material and political degradation of over 90 percent of the population.

This remarkable book stimulates the imagination and paints a picture of a future world that has a good many socialist features even if it doesn't deal at all adequately with the politics of how we can get to that world.

Stan Parker

Feminist future (1979)

Book Review from the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every piece of art can't contain everything everybody would like to say . . . That's the slogan mentality at work, as if there were certain holy words that must always be named.

Thus one of the characters in Marge Piercy's science fiction novel Woman On The Edge Of Time* sums up the author's approach to writing a political story about present and future society without the usual incantation of political jargon. The future society which she so desirably depicts, though not named as such, is socialist in our terms: a moneyless society of common ownership based upon voluntary co-operation, with people contributing according to ability and taking according to need.

The story focuses on an inmate of a mental 'hospital', Connie Ramos. A Mexican-American woman, she is a victim of both poverty and colour prejudice and so is easy prey for the authorities. Having been committed to the institution once, she is sent back on the evidence of a pimp who Connie attacked with a bottle to protect her niece from a beating. She was committed the first time for hitting her daughter Angie although, as she says, "Most people hit kids. But if you were on welfare and on probation and the whole social pigeon-holing establishment had the right to trek regularly through your kitchen looking in the closets and under the bed, counting the bedbugs and your shoes, you had better not hit your kid once."

At a time when child battering is in the news, the author's fictional account shows how poverty can drive a loving parent to violence, and the palpable fact that they are as much victims of capitalist society as are the battered kids. Connie is living on welfare in a one-room flat following her husband's death in prison after a drug experiment. She wakes to Angie's screaming:

. . . She came staggering off the couch and saw that Angie, in kicking the table, in kicking the wall - every blow the blow of a hammer on her aching head - had kicked a hole in her lousy cheap shoes. Those were the only shoes Angie had, and where in hell was Connie going to get her another pair? Angie couldn't go out without shoes. There rose before Connie the long maze of conversations with her caseworker, of explanations, of pleas and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate and trips down to the welfare office to wait all day, first outside in the cold and then inside in line, for ever and ever for a lousy cheap pair of shoes to replace the lousy cheap pair Angie had just destroyed.
"You fucking kid!" she screamed, and hit her. Hit too hard. Knocked her across the room into the door. Angie's arm struck the heavy metal bolt of the police lock, and her wrist broke. The act was past in a moment. The consequences would go on as long as she breathed.

In the course of Connie's incarceration every protest is taken as 'a sign of sickness', and people in a so-called hospital are drugged into zombies. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that such institutions are used by the establishment against, in particular, underprivileged and inarticulate people as "just another way of getting busted', as a sort of warehouse fit only to 'store human machinery' broken by misuse. The story calls into question society's definition of madness.

Contrasted with today's sordid world is Mattapoisett, a village in a future time. Visions of the future often tend to depend almost totally on a 'back to nature' attitude. Unusually, this utopia encompasses both renewable, non-polluting energy sources of the 'small is beautiful' philosophy, and the application of advanced communications technology and machinery to carry out boring or repetitive work. Since unnecessary jobs like 'counting money and moving it about' have been abolished and necessary work is shared out, the workload is reduced to a minimum.

The most interesting aspect of this utopia is not the science fiction 'hardware' but the human relationships which are explored. Mattapoisett is a truly democratic society. Not only are the mechanics of decision-making democratic - local requirements are discussed with 'reps' chosen by lot each year who then meet, discuss and decide at planning councils - but social relationships are too. There are none of the hallmarks of authoritarianism or patriarchy here. No bosses, no leaders, no government. Gone too is that most pernicious institution, the nuclear family. School - that other fearsome institution - has also changed, with the artificial barriers between learning and doing in the real world removed. Children are treated as human beings, totally integrated and contributing to the community in their own right.

Since the characters are given unusual but charming names such as Morningstar, clues are rarely given to test sex role assumptions. Only Connie, the outsider, refers to the women and men as she or he, Mattapoisettians having no gender noun, using 'person' or 'per' for short. Assumptions about sexual and emotional relationships are also tested as the Mattapoisettians are no longer constrained by the concept of heterosexual monogamy.

There is little mention of how the author envisages change to a new society other than 'a thirty year war that culminated in a revolution'. A continuing war with the 'Richies' who have control of the 'space platforms, the moon, and Antarctica' supported by a population of androids, robots and cybernauts, is envisaged.

Utopian novels like Woman On The Edge Of Time are important for visualising a better future. By putting flesh on the theoretical bones of socialism they may inspire people to think about changing the world possibly as much a a library full of books on political science and economy. But there is another important reason. If socialism is to become more than a dream then all of us are going to be discussing how we each want to see the world shaped.

Finishing this book is like waking up thinking it's the weekend, only to find you've been dreaming and it's really Monday morning and WORK AGAIN! Capitalism is still with us, and the last thing to be complacent about is getting rid of it.

Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is  . . . we are only one possible future. 

Paul Moody

*The Women's Press, paperback £1.95

Letter: Herland (1994)

Letter in the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

While I would agree wholeheartedly with Kerima Mohideen that the gender roles we are expected to play in property society are injurious to the great majority of men and women, there were several aspects of the article "Herland" (Socialist Standard, March) which I found confusing as a contribution to a class-based analysis of the problems and potential of humanity.

1. Semantically a matriarchy ("form of social organisation in which the mother is the governing head") cannot be egalitarian and I was unable to gather from the context which of these characteristics the writer regarded as more desirable.

2. I was under the impression that, as socialists advocating the abolition of the wages system we were not merely suspicious of "wages for housework" but hostile to such campaigns and had recently debated a group with the precise title.

3. It is, frankly, outrageous to claim that a fable which sidesteps an inconvenient reality by positing a biological impossibility (asexual reproduction) is "firmly rooted in material possibility". Such literary devices are perfectly valid to make a point but the article sheds very little light on what point is being made. It is clearly sterile to argue that if things weren't as they are they'd be different so we must assume some point is being made about female potential: I cannot but suspect that here we have the extremely dubious contention that there is something intrinsically female about the more positive aspects of humanity. In fact in the course of capitalism women have developed their potential for being every bit as destructive as men; real flesh-and-blood women (as opposed to fictional characters) have become active participants in military carnage, fervent spouters of superstitious nonsense from pulpits and avid consumers of pornographic displays - all activities which are not only profoundly negative but were once almost exclusively masculine. In other words, the prospect which is truly "rooted in material possibility" is that of the female of this species becoming as brutalised as the male. To say that "women should always be able to organise as women as well as with men" is to say nothing: unless working class women and men choose to organise together for the overthrow of the system which threatens to dehumanise us both, it seems to me far more likely that the negative trends will continue than that the utopian ideal will be realised.

John Usher, 

London

Reply:

1. Perhaps "matriarchy" ought logically to be the exact opposite of "patriarchy" and therefore incompatible with an egalitarian society, but this is not the way the concept has been used in anthropology. The 19th century pioneers of anthropology believed that the first human societies had been matriarchal in the sense of tracing descent through the female line. Engels took this up in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State arguing that originally society had been communistic as well as matrilinear and that the switch to descent through the male line (which he described as "the world-historic defeat of the female sex") was part of the same process that led to the replacement of egalitarian "primitive communism" by class-divided, state-rule society. In other words, in the socialist tradition matriarchy has been seen as a feature of the egalitarian, communistic conditions in which humans originally lived while patriarchy was the form the family took in the unequal, class societies which have followed. Although later anthropological research did not bear out a one-to-one link between matrilinear and non-property societies as some unequal property societies were found to be matrilinear, it remains a fact that societies where  women were not oppressed have existed.

2. It was to this past existence of societies where women were not oppressed that the article was referring when it said that the Utopias of writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin were "firmly rooted in material possibility". Obviously, this wasn't a reference to the mode of reproduction (without men) in Gilman's Herland but to the fact that societies in which women were the equals of men had existed and so could exist again. Gilman used the literary fiction of a long-established all-woman society, as a society in which literally every task was performed by women, to make the point that women were just as capable as men of being architects, engineers, scientists, decision-makers and the like. Socialists have never doubted this, but many people used to especially in 1915 when Herland was written.

3. The article did not say that Socialists advocate wages for housework, which is really a demand for bigger payments to be made to women by the capitalist state so as to make them less economically dependent on men, less of "a slave of a slave". Maybe it would be in the unlikely event of it being achieved (where's the capitalist state going to find the money to finance it when it's already cutting back on its existing social security payments?), but this would still leave women economically dependent - on the capitalist state instead of on a wage - or salary-earning man. Socialists want an end to the economic and social dependence of women on men, i.e. women's liberation, but the way to achieve this is to establish Socialism, a society of common ownership and production solely for use, not profit, where everyone - men, women, children - would have free access without money to what they require to satisfy their needs.

4. Nor did the article say that women are somehow better than men. What it did was to re-iterate Gilamn's elementary point that women are just as capable of running society as men, concluding with the additional socialist point that women have an important role to play in the movement to establish socialism and that in fact an all-male or male-dominated socialist revolution is a contradiction in terms. The Socialist Party has always said that the majority class must actively participate in their own emancipation, so, since half are women, how could this happen if women did not participate just as actively and as massively as men, with all that this implies about the relationship between men and women?

Editors.

Herland (1994)

From the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have always been fascinated by accounts of societies that are different from ours, whether they be real or imagined. They serve as a reminder that things need not be as they are in our world today and that our lives need not be one endless round of compromise with the grim and confusing reality that surrounds us. Women's Utopias such as Herland and the more recent Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy describe forms of social organization that historical and anthropological research has shown to be possible. They also respresent a development of the ideas of Marx and Engels but as is the case with much that women have to say, and perhaps because it is not expressed in the dry, pseudo-scientific style of political philosophers, these Utopian visions, firmly rooted in material possibility, are vastly underrated. Herland was written in 1915, twenty-five years after William Morris published his News from Nowhere. Both novels describe a world where private property and class privilege no longer exist. News from Nowhere however barely explores the role and status of women in its Utopia and, in failing to do so, throws little insight into a deeply-engrained power relationship of present-day society. As a consequence, it is limited in exploring how people can bring about social change. In that respect, Herland is a less comfortable read than News from Nowhere as it reminds us of how deeply crippled most of us are by social conditioning and how much there is to overcome in order to bring about the necessary fundamental changes in society if we are to survive on this planet. Fortunately, what could be profoundly depressing is leavened by sparkling wit, and the book is a really entertaining read. Personal is Political For the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the personal was also political and her own life and ideas were intimately connected. Like William Morris, she was familiar with the ideas of Marx and Engels and other prevailing political and economic theories of the time. She was involved in the American Socialist Movement and saw herself as a socialist-humanist. She always brought her own experiences to bear on her work and studied ideas in order to understand her own insecure and intensely unhappy early life and first marriage and to gain control of her own destiny. She had little time for the psychological leadership of experts and the detached, academic and so-called scientific approach to understanding human behaviour, in particular that of women. In Herland, she exposes the fallibility of the sociologist who makes assumptions about the society he is about to experience on the basis of observing a single fact. He notices some women climbing trees and deduces thereby that the inhabitants of the society he us about to involve himself in must be arboreal. In fact they are not, and all his scientific insight and his role as commentator on human behaviour is about to be rendered useless as he is gently drawn into ways of living and relating that are completely new to him. The author after coming close to losing her mind, herself rejected the authority of the psychiatrist who attempted to cure her depression by advising her to rest, to live as domestic a life as possible, to limit her intellectual life to two hours a day and to never touch pen, brush or pencil. Instead, she faced the fact that she was not happy in her marriage or in her role as a mother, left home and divorced her husband. He promptly married her best friend and the couple took on the care of Charlotte's child. Charlotte, from a position of great financial insecurity launched herself into a career as a writer. The three adults remained close friends for the rest of their lives but Charlotte was severely censured by the press for divorcing her husband amicably and for no apparent reason, for maintaining a warm relationship with his new wife and for, as the media saw it, abandoning her child. This very honest working out of relationships finds a different interpretation in Herland. The community of Herland is characterized by sisterly solidarity and friendship which is not destroyed even when the men appear. In their world it is also recognized that while every woman may at some point feel the urge to be a mother, not every woman is either interested in or suited to bringing up children and children are better off with those who are. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's experience as a woman under capitalism forced her to recognize that our society is not merely class divided but patriarchal in nature as well. For her, the subordination of women dehumanized half of the human race and retarded all human progress and this has important implications for how we organize for change. In order to make our society truly human, women need to regain power over their minds and bodies and challenge the centuries of dominance that men have become used to. This is the central theme of Herland. Unlike News from Nowhere, Herland is not a static Utopia that we arrive at after a period of social upheaval - it is a society that has spent generations perfecting itself and remains always open to change. It is both a strategy for change and a complete way of life. Amazon Jungle Herland is written in the style of a Boys' Own adventure story. Deep in the Amazon jungle, three amateur explorers, men of course, find their way into a world inhabited only by women. Instead of meeting with exciting adventures in which they can display their superior macho skills - one man even has notions of ending up King of all the women - they are gently disarmed of all their prejudices and pre-conceptions about women and two of them are re-educated into new ways of thinking and relating to women. This is altogether a much more painful and demanding experience. far from behaving like detached and culturally-superior observers of an alien culture as did many of the anthropologists of Charlotte's day, all three of the men become heavily involved in the lives of the Herlanders and learn to adjust to their ways. Herland is a matriarchal society. A matriarchy is not simply a refelction of a patriarchal society which is also hierarchical in nature. It is an egalitarian society, a sisterhood in which women's capacity to bear children is of central importance and held in high regard. The anthropologist Evelyn Reed in her book Woman's Evolution has shown that many of the earliest human societies are likely to have been matriarchal and such societies continue to exist - just about - to this day. There have been no men in Herland for centuries. This has given the women the much-needed personal and social space to recover their automony as women. Every woman needs that space for herself. Women should always be able to organize as women as well as with men. In Aboriginal society, individual members of a group might express their need for personal space by going on a walkabout. Men and women retained control over separate spaces for themselves as two distinct and autonomous groups. They often led much more separate lives than we understand in our society and Aboriginal women tend not to be impressed with women who are dependent on the views and approval of men. Biological Urge The women of Herland reproduce simply by responding to the urge to be a mother. This biological urge is the driving force behind all their creative activity. Indeed in the interests of population control, collectively agreed by the community, the women restrict themselves to one child each and channel their mother urge into other activities. They are not at the mercy of their childbearing capacity although the idea of abortion is abhorrent to them. In many of the matriarchal societies described by Evelyn Reed, it would appear that women had similar control over their fertility. They knew about contraceptive medicines and practised periods of abstention from sexual intercourse. It is possible that they had a better sense of their biological rhythms than we do and knew when they were most likely to be fertile. Travelers noted that women in some Native American communities only had three or four children and they were shocked to hear that women in our society sometimes had ten or more children. All the women of Herland are single mothers - like many lesbian mothers today, they are not dependent on a relationship with a man for their sexual pleasure or in order to become mothers. Unlike for most women in our society there is no tension between their responsibilities as mothers and fulfilling a socially-useful and challenging role in the community. This is because in matriarchal societies, child-rearing is a communal and public activity. No mother is separated from other members of the society with solitary responsibility for her children. The women of Herland have managed to fulfill their need for food, shelter and transport in ways that are technologically developed as well as ecologically-sustainable. As far as food production is concerned, they are gatherers and cultivators. But there are no farms on Herland and virtually no domesticated animals, apart from a few cats left over from a previous era. The idea of eating meat and drinking the milk of animals other than themselves strikes the women of Herland as a rather cruel and abhorrent idea. Instead, they live on the rich variety of fruits and nuts which they have gathered from the forest which surrounds their dwellings. The trees bear the marks of cultivation. Their branches are trained so as to make the fruits easily accessible and species have been bred so as to obtain a high yield. While Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision of food production might seem a little twee by comparison with real-life examples, it is not dissimilar from the way some forest-dwelling peoples use their environment even to this day. In fact, the destruction of the forests by large-scale capitalist development projects such as dams and mines has particular implications for the lives of women among indigenous forest dwelling communities around the world. For the women who used the forest as a source of food, fuel, as a hygienic place to relieve calls of nature and a place of spiritual retreat, it represented social and economic independence. The impact of capitalism on their lives has thrust them into dependence on the wage-slavery of the men in a matter of months in some instances. There are no schools in Herland but learning as an ongoing process is of central importance in the women's lives. They are all open-minded and critically receptive to new ideas and fail to understand how religious beliefs going back thousands of years continue to hold such a powerful grip on the minds of people in our society. They set out to teach the men about Herland by enquiring about the world they have come from. Teaching for them is about sharing ideas and experiences, a much more egalitarian process than we experience in our schools and colleges. They meet the most conservative and sexist views of the men with patience and respect and draw them gently away from their prejudices and preconceptions with questions and information that might open their minds to alternative ways of thinking. Having captured the three explorers, the women of Herland decide that it is in their interests to allow this contact with men to develop. Nevertheless, they continue to retain their material and intellectual independence. Three of the women form intimate relationships with the men. Two of the couples marry but retain independent living quarters. Their relationships, particularly that of Ellador who marries the former sociologist who is perhaps the most receptive to the women's culture without feeling either that he has to challenge it or lose his own cultural and sexual identity in the process, are not dogged by the possessiveness and insecurity that so dogs relationships in our society today. Instead, they have an easy-going friendship based on shared interests, a meeting of minds, mutual trust and pleasure in each other's company. As far as Ellador is concerned, sex does not figure very highly in the relationship. It is an aspect of our culture, which she says she has yet to understand but she treats their different sexual needs with honesty and sensitivity and her partner finds himself being drawn into a calm and and deeply-rewarding understanding such as he has never experienced with a woman before. Terry on the other hand who is the most macho of the three men attempts to impose his desires on his partner during a much more stormy relationship. Unlike in our society where rape within marriage and date rapes are only just beginning to be recognized as such, the whole community of Herland responds to this attempted rape and Terry is asked to leave with no hope of reconciliation with his partner. Even the other two men recognize that they have a responsibility to deal with this man who they liked at the beginning of the book and whose behaviour they tolerated as long long as it did not implicate their own wives, sisters and daughters. Continued Relevance Although it was written nearly eighty years ago, Herland continues to have relevance today. In News from Nowhere there is a chapter on "How the Change Came About". We read of much that is familiar, of workers organizations, of mass demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and much more. In Herland the author reminds us of the central role that women have to play in bringing about a revolution. We should bear in mind that during the period when Charlotte Perkins Gilman and William Morris were writing, women had already made an enormous contribution to the working-class movement. Yet that is barely acknowledged today. In the early days of the trade union movement, their role as workers as dependent on a wage as the men was not recognized by those who advocated the family wage as opposed to equal pay. The enormous amount of unpaid work that women do continues to remain largely unrecognized and the women who do it largely unorganized. Any efforts to organize by such groups of women such as the wages for housework campaign is viewed with suspicion even by many of the male-dominated organizations on the left. The women who so staunchly supported the Miners' strike of 1984 were denied membership of the NUM. These are just a few symptoms of the deep-rooted sexism in our society that continues to exclude women from political action by failing to recognize the particular ways in which capitalism affects their lives. Herland demonstrates how class conscious women in full control of their minds and their bodies can organize themselves in peaceful co-operation and overcome this sexism and how they must play an important role in bringing about and maintaining the revolution. Men, deprived of their patriarchal role, will find for themselves a much more meaningful existence in the process. Kerima Mohideen The article elicited the following response in a later issue of the Socialist Standard.

Socialism Now (1989)

From the January 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following text was presented at the international conference in Barcelona on Models of the Future, New Technologies and Cultural Tradition. We live today in the epoch of the commodity. The vast amount of wealth produced throughout the world takes the form of goods and services which are marked, which are intended for sale in order to realise a profit. As Karl Marx wrote at the beginning of Das Kapital, wealth under the capitalist mode of production presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities. In this respect little has changed since his day, except that the buying and selling relationships which characterise the commodity form of wealth production now permeate almost every conceivable form of human activity. To enhance the efficient realisation of surplus value, the dignity of all human relations have had to be further and further debased into the mould of what Thomas Carlyle, as early as 1840, called the cash payment nexus. But this form of society has developed only in the most recent fraction of human history and pre-history. The question I intend to pose here is how the commodity society and its culture can be transcended.      In the literary tradition of utopias, the first tendency was to place the social paradise firmly in the distant past, with the implication or hope that through some religious or moral upheaval such a state of grace might one day be returned to. In the first century BC, Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses of the Golden Age when men of their own accord, without threat of punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what was right. Likewise, in the fourteenth century AD the English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in his poem The Former Age of a time without profit, property or war, but bemoaned the terrible moment when this was spoilt by men digging up bits of metal in the darkness, Looking for gems in the rivers. The parallel here with the Biblical idea of the Fall is quite apparent. Other medieval utopias added a magical element, such as in the Land of Cockagne where roasted geese would fly through the air advertising themselves by shouting Geese, all hot! all hot!. In the land of Cockagne,         All is common to young and oldTo stern and haughty, meek and bold . . . For drink there is no need to ask,To take it is the only task. This second type of utopia set in the authors time but in far-off lands found its English archetype in Sir Thomas Mores Utopia of 1516. More recently, the principles of social harmony and equality which feature merely as ideals in the early utopias, have become far more tangible possibilities. In the last century the American author, Edward Bellamy (author of Looking Backward, 1887) stated revealingly that The Golden Age lies before us and not behind, and it is not far away. Return to the Garden of Eden has re-emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a real political demand that the earths resources should become a common storehouse for the benefit of all. As a starting point, however, the literary tradition of utopian vision is of great importance, for in it we see attempts to explain the property relations which poets like Geoffrey Chaucer clearly regarded as in some way unnatural, artificial and undesirable. In the mythical convention, our social exit from the Garden of Eden coincides historically with the rise of private property and the state. But with the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, there began to develop the possibility of a genuinely scientific basis for translating these poetical myths into anthropological reality. It has since been shown by modern anthropology that, for the majority of the 50,000 years of the species homo sapiens, and for an even greater majority of the evolutionary timespan of our immediate predecessors, there was a complete absence of the modern social relationships which we now take for granted. The political state and the property relationships which have given rise to money simply did not exist.      The conditions of early agriculture, with its fluctuations between scarcity and surplus, appear to have generated the power struggles, with the subsequent evolution of property relations and money. The technology of the late twentieth century, with its potential capability of meeting the needs of the whole population, could lay a foundation for transcending those class relationships of sectional ownership and control, which have evolved during the past few thousand years.      Repeatedly in recent years, statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation have demonstrated that world resources could be sufficient to feed the total world population several times over if fully cultivated. A UN Report of 1970 states that the surface of the earth has hardly been scratched. The 1976 UNFAO Yearbook found that enough grain is now produced to provide everyone on earth with more than 2lb. (3000 calories), and a special issue of Scientific American in September of the same year reported that current resources could meet the needs of twelve times the world population at that time. But the world market system is such that production must be trimmed to match sales potential. For example, we have the quota system which is a fetter on the production of wheat, rice, sugar, coffee, cocoa, rubber, tin and copper, while so many millions are starving or destitute. And this purely to defend the profit margins of companies like Nestles, which has a higher turnover than the Swiss government and spends more on advertising each year than the entire UN World Health Organisation budget (Swiss Information Groups for Development Policy: Nestles Report, 1976). With the removal of this profit barrier, incredible forces of production would be unleashed.      What then of the technology we inherit from the unplanned and uncoordinated leaps and bounds of the worlds scientists over recent generations? It has become a cliche to state that todays global distress and dislocation results from the intrinsic nature of the technology itself. This is to mistake substance for present use. With a global transformation of social relationships, in which the capital-labour conflict between owners and non-owners of productive resources would be replaced by production for use under social control, present technology could satisfy all basic material needs. The paradoxes of modern technology have been well summed up by Mike Cooley, who writes, for example, that todays computers objectify the knowledge of skilled workers into push-button machines: so the employer now appropriates part of the worker himself through the intervention of the computer and not just the surplus value of the product. Thus we can say that the worker has conferred life on the machine and the more he gives to the machine the less there is left of himself! At the same time, he re-iterates the warning that no technological design is ever completely independent. As we design technological systems, we are in fact designing sets of social relationships (Architect or Bee?, 1980). The key determining factor in the future development and use of this technology will be whether or not the class ownership of these productive resources persists, with its resulting drive for profit and therefore a cheapening of production costs. In a rare comment on what might follow from an abolition of the capitalist law of value, Marx stated that: In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production, but the time of social production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility. (Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) With the nineteenth century evolution of the modern capitalist economy, there arose the demand for an end to wage slavery. Still, however, there was the assumption of needing to look backward, in the English case to peasant independence prior to the Enclosures of common land. The idea of forward-looking political action and the visionary power of utopians were, however, combined to powerful effect in the late nineteenth century. In the English context this can be seen most clearly in William Morris whose News From Nowhere (1890), although often seen as mere romanticism, was in fact intended as a direct inspiration to the socialist movement within which he played such an active role. Drawing equally on the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, and his pre-Raphaelite-based concern with art as creative labour, he set out the possibility of a world in which the money system had been replaced by a democratic community in which wealth was produced purely for use, not for sale, with the many social benefits which flow from that premise. Of course, there are many advances which the present century has been able to add to the insights of nineteenth century revolutionary thought. The Womens Movement, the surge in recent years in awareness of environmental issues, and the increasing understanding that state capitalism is not a step forward but the re-emergence of the same monster under a different guise all these are major aspects of such advance. But the key contribution made by pioneers like Morris remains as valid and important today that is, that emancipation must be organised by those who are to be emancipated, and must depend on the consciousness of a majority. There can be no socialism without socialists indeed, without their being in a clear majority. This logical combining of socialism and democracy as mutually integrated ideas has understandably been so far less well received in Spain, France or Latin America, where anarchist and syndicalist tendencies have been stronger than in England. But the notion of socialism as the ultimate extension of democracy in the economic field, and the idea that means must harmonise with ends in its establishment these arguments remain compelling in their logic throughout the world today.      At the turn of the century, the social democratic movement was split between those who believed that the problems of capitalism could only be solved by getting rid of capitalism itself, and those who thought it more practical to wrestle with the effects of the profit system, reforming its problems away one by one. In France, Paul Brousse of the latter tendency boasted of being a Possibilist, supporting what Karl Popper was later to call piecemeal social engineering. But the social system we inhabit must at any point in history either be firmly grounded on human interests or based on minority interest, as expressed in the present epoch by the surplus realised through the market sale of commodities. There is not a possibility of compromise between these options of production for profit and production for use. Moreover, human society must either continue to be, or cease to be an organised expression of alienation, in which our powers and capacity to control ourselves and our environment are placed outside of our conscious control. This process, in which the power humanity has to shape its future is externalised or channelled off into some real or imaginary outside force has taken many forms historically. Whether feared and worshipped as God, elevated into the inevitable as market forces, put into a uniform, elected or supported as the state forces of an authoritarian government, what we see is humanity as a whole discarding our responsibility for our future by bowing to the transient power relationships which have so far evolved. It was this paradox which the poets referred to above were trying to solve by writing with relish of a Former Age of social harmony and one-ness.      It is because of the misery which still prevails that people continue to be so interested in better times and places, whether in the past, the future or the other side of the world. But the old dream of social unity, which must also mean global unity, has now been thrust noisily on to the stage of possibilities as the twentieth century approaches its end. It was the commodity, the production of wealth for profit, which encouraged the building of a world market. This has forged a kind of global unity, but on the fragile foundation of continuing competition. Ironically it is now only by abolishing the commodity form of wealth production, with all its destructive side-effects, and replacing it with production for use, that a real global and social unity can be established. Clifford Slapper