The World Socialist Movement . . . (2003)

From the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World Socialist Movement . . . 

. . . says that socialism will, and must, be a wageless, moneyless, worldwide society of common (not state) ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution;

. . . says that socialism will be a sharp break with capitalism with no "transition period" or gradual implementation of socialism (although socialism will be a dynamic, changing society once it is established);

. . .  says that there can be no state in a socialist society;

. . .  says that there can be no classes in a socialist society;

. . .  promotes only socialism, and as an immediate goal;

. . .  says that only the vast majority, acting consciously in its own interests, for itself, by itself, can create socialism;

. . . opposes any vanguardist approach, minority-led movements, and leadership, as inherently undemocratic (among other negative things);

. . .  promotes a peaceful democratic revolution, achieved through force of numbers and understanding;

. . .  neither promotes, nor opposes, reforms to capitalism;

. . .  says that there is one working class, worldwide;

. . .  lays out the fundamentals of what a socialist society must be, but does not presume to tell the future socialist society how to go about its business;

. . .  promotes an historical materialist approach-real understanding;

. . . says that religion is a social, not personal, matter and that religion is incompatible with socialist understanding;

. . .  proposes electoral action by a socialist majority to facilitate the elimination of capitalism, not to govern capitalism;

. . .  says that Leninism is a distortion of Marxian analysis;

. . . opposes all war and says that socialism will inherently end war, including the "war" between classes;

. . .  noted, in 1918, that the Bolshevik Revolution was not socialist and that that Russia was not ready for a socialist revolution;

. . .  was the first to recognize that the former USSR, China, Cuba and other so-called "socialist countries" were not socialist, but instead, state capitalist.

(From the World Socialism website)

Economists - not on this planet

From the WSM website

Most modern textbooks will contain a variation of the following famous definition of economics as: 'a science which studies human behaviour as a relation between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.'

This makes economics the study of the logic of choice in conditions of scarcity. This is not how most people would understand the term, but check for yourself and you will see that the word scarcity occurs again and again in textbook definitions of economics. Paul Samuelson in his Economics, in a very widely studied economics textbook, speaks of a "large scarcity" and says that if goods were not scarce then there would be no role for a science of economics. So, on these definitions, economics is seen as the study of the production and distribution of scarce goods.

The Scarcity Dogma
This definition, however, can only be sustained by giving a peculiar meaning to the word 'scarcity.' The normal sense of scarcity is that of shortage, implying that something is in short supply in relation to the claims on its use. The scarcity theory economists, however, define scarcity to mean the absence of unlimited supplies. Since no good produced by humans is, or can ever be, available in unlimited amounts all such goods are, by definition "scarce".

They reinforce this with a second assumption - that human wants are unlimited. This provides a fall-back position, since, if human wants are infinite, even on the normal meaning of scarcity as shortage of relation to uses goods are always going to be in short supply. But this assumption of human wants being infinite is equally dubious since, while human wants might be great, they are not unlimited. Nor do they exist outside particular social and historical contexts but are determined by the society in which particular humans are living at a particular point in time and are in practice always limited.

This school of economics (which is the dominant one today) needs the scarcity assumption - whether based on an unrealistic definition of scarcity or on an unrealistic assumption of infinite human wants, because it is the basis of its claim that the best way to solve the perpetual either-or problem, which they see humans facing when it comes to deciding what to produce, is to have recourse to money, prices and markets. They want to be able to prove that the present economic system, under which most wealth is produced for sale on the marketplace, is the best one possible. They need the scarcity assumption, in other words, so that they can beg this question.

The scarcity school of economics is right to see economics as the study of the way in which what to produce and how to produce it are determined under a market system. Where they go wrong is in making such a system the outcome of "scarcity".

Scarcity, in their peculiar sense, has existed throughout human history, but the market system - where everything, including the mental and physical energies of humans, has a price and where everybody has to have money to obtain what they need - only began to come into existence comparatively recently, about 500 years ago, and has only come fully into existence in places like America, Europe and Japan within the last 100 or so years. It is still not fully developed in most of the rest of the world.

The basis of the market system is not some eternal scarcity, but the separation of most people from the access to the land which enables them to produce their own food, clothes and houses. In other words, its basis is the dispossession of the majority of the population of all productive resources except their own ability to work and the concentration of the ownership of these resources into the hands of a small minority of the population. It is this, not scarcity, that makes money, prices and the market the universal features of life they are today.

We have now reached a definition of economics: the study of the production and distribution of wealth that is produced to be sold on a market. Economics is the study, not of scarce goods but of marketed goods.

What is wealth?
Wealth "is any material object or service that serves to satisfy some human need or want." An individual item of wealth is known in economics as a good.

Some goods essential to human life, such as the air we breathe and the heat and light of the Sun, are provided spontaneously by nature without humans having to do anything and so are called 'free goods'. Most goods, however, including others equally essential to human life such as food, have to be produced in the sense that humans have to exercise their mental and physical energies to obtain them, even if all that it involves in some cases is picking a fruit from a tree. Most goods, in other words, are products of human work.

When humans produce a good they are not creating something out of nothing; what they are doing is transforming parts of nature into something useful to them. This transformation may, as is the case of the picked fruit, only consist in changing the place of some nature-given material; generally speaking, however, a change of form is involved as well as a change of place.

Production, then, is the process of transforming parts of nature into goods. Apart from "free goods", all wealth is the product of human beings working of materials originally supplied by nature.

Any activity that transforms parts of nature into something useful to humans is productive activity. This is so even if the transformation is merely a change of place, so transportation is a productive activity. So is storage, as preserving the usefulness of some good. Some products of labour are intangible, such as a haircut, and are known as 'services'.

Some people have argued that only tangible goods are wealth, and that therefore only labour that results in some physical product is productive. But they are wrong. The only difference between a tangible and an intangible good, or service, is that in the latter case the product is consumed as it is being produced, but it remains a product.

Goods can be divided into two main groups. First, those which are directly consumed by humans to meet their personal needs, or 'consumer goods'. These may be consumed as they are being produced (some services) or in one go (as food and electricity are) or over a period of time (as clothes, and furniture, and houses, are).

Second, those which are used to produce other goods, or producer goods (also known as 'intermediate goods' and as a 'means of production'. These are consumed (used up) of course but to make other goods and now by humans directly. They include materials extracted from nature, semi-finished goods, tools, machines, buildings, fuel and means of transport.

The basis of the market system is not some eternal scarcity, but the separation of most people from the access to the land which enables them to produce their own food, clothes and houses. As Sir William Petty (1623–1687) put it, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.

However, humans are tool-making and tool-using animals and, apart from very basic productive activity such as picking fruit from a wild tree, production involves a third element: the tools and machinery humans use to transform nature-given materials into wealth. These producer goods are of course derived from the other two since they will have been fashioned into their existing form by past human labour working on nature-given materials.

The 'distribution' of wealth is simply the way in which what has been produced is distributed - i.e. divided up - shared, amongst the members of society.

The Market System
Samuelson describes the present economic system (his ideal system) as follows:

Everything has a price - each commodity and each service. Even the different kinds of human labour have prices, usually called wage rates. Everybody receives money for what he sells and uses this money to buy what he wishes. (His emphasis.)

So, under the market system the vast majority of goods (though by no means all, as we shall see in a moment) come to be produced for sale. A good that is produced for sale is called, in modern economics, an 'economic good' (or, in Marxian economics, a "commodity"- note the difference with Samuelson's use of the same word above to mean simply a tangible good). The concept economic good excludes a whole range of non-marketed goods such as housework, vegetables grown in your garden, do-it-yourself repairs and voluntary work. This in itself confirms that economics is concerned not with the production and distribution of wealth in general, but only with the production and distribution of wealth that has been produced for sale.

Goods produced for the market have an 'economic value' in addition to their capacity to satisfy some human need or want, or use value. This economic value is measured by the quantity of other economic goods they can be exchanged for. It is generally expressed in money as their price.

This means that under the market system the basic underlying physical factors involved in production - nature-given materials, human mental and physical energies, and producer goods - all come to have a monetary value. They become 'capital'. Hence "capitalism" as another name for the market system.

In its original sense capital is a sum of money lent out as interest and is still used to mean this today. Under the market system there is another way - it is in fact the overwhelmingly predominant way - in which those with capital, or capitalists, can make money, and that is to use it to purchase productive resources with a view to using them to produce wealth for sale. It is this that turns them into capital. (Note: somewhat confusingly, economists also use the word capital in another sense to refer to fixed produced goods such as buildings, machinery and plant only, thus excluding stocks of raw materials and of finished products and work in progress as well as the case to pay wages and for fuel and services, which accountants, more logically, count as capital).

The act of purchasing productive resources to engage in producing goods for the market is called 'investment' and the monetary gain that results is called 'profit'. The total monetary value of the new wealth produced is a given country over a given period is called either the 'national income' or the 'national product' (the two have the same monetary value). It is distributed by being bought by the members of society out of the monetary income they receive and which is initially generated at the point of production in the form of either wages and salaries or of profits.

It is these relationships, which only arise when the great bulk of wealth is produced for sale, that form the subject-matter of economics. Economics is the study of the factors governing the production and distribution of wealth under the market system of production for profit.

Eco-Socialism

From the WSM website

The Ecological Perspective
Current methods of production cause may undeniably be damaging the world's eco-systems in many ways, as shown elsewhere in this Environment section. Still, the question remains as to whether human productive activity, transforming materials originating from nature into goods suitable for human use, is inevitably damaging in an ecological sense. The massive scale of human productive activity certainly has immense implications for ecology and some radical greens argue that human activity on such a scale is incompatible with a harmonious relationship with the rest of nature.

In considering what we mean by 'ecological damage,' it is important to remember that these ecosystems are evolving. The biosphere as a whole, which consists of millions of mutually interdependent life forms, might be thought of as one single ecosystem.

Yet it is still possible to distinguish various sub-systems, or 'biomes' within it, on the basis of the different climatic and physical conditions that exist in different parts of the world. These range from the tundra of the Arctic, through the coniferous and deciduous forests and steppes, to the savannah and tropical rain forests of the regions near the equator. To each of these physical and climatic conditions there corresponds a stable ecosystem which evolves to its 'climax,' through a series of successive stages. This stable climax will be the situation where the amount of food produced by the plant life is sufficient, after taking account of the plants' own respiration needs, to sustainably meet the food energy requirements of all the animal life-forms within the system. It will be, in fact, the situation which makes optimum use, in terms of sustaining all the life-forms within the system, of the sun's light rays falling on the area.

An ecological climax is defined in terms of the existing physical and climatic conditions. It is clear that if these latter change, as they have done relatively frequently in the course of the thousands of millions of years life has existed - through such things as the sea level, and the coming and going of the ice ages - then the previously existing balance will be upset. A new one will then tend to develop in accordance with the new physical and climatic conditions.

The break-up of an old ecosystem plunges the different species and varieties of life-forms into a state of competition. In the case of plants, the competition would be to capture the sun's light rays. In the case of animals, it would be to recover the food energy produced by plants. The species and the individuals proving to be best adapted to the new conditions ("the fittest" as Darwin put it) would survive and flourish. Eventually a new stable ecosystem, with a different "climax", appropriate to the new geophysical conditions, would evolve. At such times biological evolution would have tended to speed up as whole. Species could disappear leaving the ecological niche they occupied to be filled by newcomers.

The world's eco-systems are continually evolving and hence there is no one 'original,' 'natural' state of the planet. After all, humans are both a product and part of nature and not something outside of it. There is no reason to regard an ecosystem in which humans, like other animals, live in limited numbers as "hunter gatherers" in the forest as any more "natural" than one in which there is a greater number of trees and forest plants. There is no basis in ecology for saying that trees should be the main life-form, nor even that the natural human condition is hunting and gathering.

Ecology and Socialism
The materials humans take from nature can be divided into two categories, according to whether they are renewable or non-renewable. Nearly everything of organic nature is renewable (since more of it can be grown in a relatively short period of time), as are certain natural forces which humans use as instruments of labour (rivers, waterfalls, wind, the sun's rays etc). Non-renewable resources on the other hand - such as mineral ores, coal, oil, clay, sand - are so called because they do not form part of some natural cycle that reproduces them, at least not with a timescale relevant for humans.

Agriculture
The most obvious way in which humans extract renewable materials from the biosphere is through agriculture. Agriculture involves, by definition, a fundamental change in the existing eco-system. The introduction of agriculture to Europe involved cutting most of the deciduous forest. This deciduous forest had represented a stable ecological climax for most of Europe. The land was used to grow plants which humans found useful, to the detriment of both the trees and other plants that had flourished in the forest. Agriculture involves deliberately preventing an ecosystem from developing towards a climax.

For an ecosystem involving agriculture to be a stable one requires deliberate action on the part of humans. This involves not only planting fields and keeping them clear of other plants which might grow there ('weeds'), but also to maintain the fertility of the soil which, without agriculture, would spontaneously renew itself.

Things go wrong when humans ignore the ecological consequences of their actions, for instance, by permitting overgrazing by their domesticated animals or by taking out of the soil without restoring the minerals and organic materials that are essential to normal plant growth. However, if humans observe these rules, then, as a number of historical examples testify, an ecosystem in which humans practice agriculture can be as stable as one from which humans are absent, or one in which they practice hunting and gathering.

This was understood and practiced in the relatively self-sufficient agriculture communities which existed up until the coming of capitalism, where what was produced was largely consumed on the spot. The human waste resulting from consumption, together with animal waste and those parts of plants and animals that were not used for food and other purposes, were restored to the soil where they were decomposed by insects, fungi and bacteria into the elements that sustain the soil's fertility.

When, however, the place of production and the place of consumption are separated, this cycle tends to break down. The result is that the fertility of the soil diminishes. If an area specialises in the production of a crop for export, i.e. for consumption elsewhere, this means that some of the mineral and organic matter incorporated into the crop will leave that area for ever and not be restored to the soil. The same applies to animal rearing. Animals require large amounts of calcium for their bones, as well as other minerals such as phosphorus, iron and magnesium, which also come from the soil, via the plants on which they feed. If these animals are exported, whether dead or alive, and consumed elsewhere, then the minerals they contain are lost to the soil of the area where they were raised.

A complementary problem arises at the other end, at the point of consumption: what to do with the human waste which, when the points of production and consumption were the same, was automatically restored to the soil and recycled by nature? Releasing it into the sea or into rivers or sewers means that it is lost to agriculture, even if not, unfortunately, to the biosphere (this contributes to water pollution by encouraging the proliferation of some life-forms - for example, algae and bacteria - to the detriment of others which the water normally supports.)

The 'solution' that has been found under capitalism, because it is the cheapest in terms of the labour content of the products, has been to use artificial fertilisers - nitrates and phosphates that have been manufactured in chemical plants. This works in the sense of allowing the land to go on producing the same amount, or more, of the same crop or animal, but at a price in terms of polluting the water in the region concerned. Artificial fertilisers, not being held by the soil in the same way that organic waste is, tend to be leached off by rain into waterways where they cause pollution.

The ecological solution to the problem is to find some way of restoring to the soil the organic waste resulting from human consumption in urban areas. Barry Commoner suggested that this might be done by means of pipelines linking the town and the countryside. A longer term solution would be that envisaged by those early socialists who looked forward to agriculture and manufacturing industry being combined,

gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto)

Non-Renewable Materials
Concern has been expressed that non-renewable resources will eventually run out. Still, despite some wild predictions that were made in the recent past, depletion of non-renewable resources is not an immediate problem. One advantage non-renewable materials have over most renewable ones is that they can normally be used more than once. With the important exceptions of coal, oil and natural gas when burned, they can be recycled. A proportion of some metals is lost through corrosion but all metals can in principle be recovered and re-used. It has been suggested, for instance, that most of the gold mined since Ancient times is still in use. Much of the iron, copper, tin and other metals mined since the same time is still around somewhere even if not still used as gold is. Resources can be conserved by making instruments of production easier to repair and by manufacturing goods of all kinds to last rather than to break down or become unusable after a carefully calculated period of time, as is common practice under capitalism.

Non-renewable resources can be replaced in many cases by renewable ones. Electricity generation is a case in point (Energy Production).

Non-Polluting Technology
The techniques employed to transform materials must, if they are to avoid upsetting natural cycles which are fundamental to nature, avoid releasing into the biosphere or leaving as waste products, toxic substances or substances that cannot be assimilated by nature. In other words, a non-polluting technology should be applied. This is quite feasible from a technical point of view since non-polluting transformation techniques are known in all fields of production. However, they are not employed on any wide scale today because they would add to production costs and so are ruled out by the economic laws of capitalism.

Conclusion
The underlying principle behind the changes in the materials and productive methods used, which is demanded by the need to take proper account of the ecological dimension, is that the productive system as a whole should be sustainable for the rest of nature. In other words, what humans take from nature, the amount and the rhythm at which they do so, as well as the way they use these materials and dispose of them after use, should all be done in such a way as to leave nature in a position to go on supplying and reabsorbing the required materials for use.

In the long run this implies stable or only slowly rising consumption and production levels, though it does not rule out carefully planned rapid growth over a period to reach a level at which consumption and production could then platform off. A society in which production, consumption and population levels are stable has been called a "steady-state economy" where production would be geared simply to meeting needs and to replacing and repairing the stock of means of production (raw materials and instruments of production) required for this.

It is obvious that today human needs are far from being met on a world scale and that fairly rapid growth in the production of food, housing and other basic amenities would still be needed for some years even if production ceased to be governed by the economic laws of capitalism. However it should not be forgotten that a "steady-state economy" would be a much more normal situation than an economy geared to blindly accumulating more and more means of production. After all, the only rational reason for accumulating means of production is to eventually be in a position to satisfy all reasonable consumption needs.

Once the stock of means of production has reached this level, in a society with this goal, accumulation, or the further expansion of the stock of means of production, can stop and production levels be stabilised. Logically, this point would eventually be reached, since the consumption needs of a given population are finite.

So if human society is to be able to organize its production in an ecologically acceptable way, then it must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism of capital accumulation and gear production instead to the direct satisfaction of needs.

Zapata

Book Review from the WSM Website

Zapata of Mexico. Peter E. Newell. Freedom Press, London.

The Mexican Revolutionary War which began in 1910 saw political power transferred from a reactionary military dictatorship allied to foreign capital to the liberal constitutionalists of the rising national bourgeoisie.

Zapata supported the overthrow of dictatorship but once this was achieved his Liberation Army of the South refused to disband his until their primary objective had been fulfilled. That objective was the return of communal lands that had been appropriated by plantation owners during theperiod of dictatorship. The new government refused to redistribute landand so fighting continued for the rest of the decade until Zapata's peasant forces, a people in arms, could no longer maintain a guerrilla war against the larger and better armed government forces.

Zapata resisted entering the politics of the national government, though he encouraged the tradition of direct democracy in the communities he fought for. At the height of Zapatista military success they conquered the country's capital. When Zapata was invited to sit in the presidential chair in the National Palace, he is quoted as saying 'It would be better to burn it, for I have seen that everybody who has sat in this chair has become an enemy of the people'. Despite opportunity and popular support Zapata refused to install himself as national president.

Though Zapata's political writings and speeches are restricted to the aims of the revolutionary peasant army it is thought that he was influenced by the ideas of Ricardo Flores Magon, a Mexican anarchist whowas then publishing a newspaper from the USA. The Zapatista slogan oftierra y libertad - land and liberty - was taken from Magon. However, the Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of World Workers), an anarcho-syndicalist industrial union founded originally by Magon considered Zapatismo to be reactionary. They politically and militarily opposed the peasants until increasing industrial action led to the new liberal government proscribing the union. Many members subsequently switched sides. Zapata did use the examples of the new governments repression of industrial workers as evidence of the counter-revolutionar ynature of Mexico's new political leadership.

Zapata is not thought to have been religious, in fact he is said to have written " . . . ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for tyranny . . .", but deplored the anti-clerical violence of the new liberal government which aimed to reduce the power of the churches. The banner of his 'Death Legion' depicted 'Our Lady of Guadalupe', a Mexican apparition of the Virgin Mary, above a skull and crossed bones.

Since the revolutionary war, inspired by the popular image of Zapata's heroism and virtue as a leader, rhetoric from anarchists to governments promising reforms have invoked the name of Zapata. Zapata has even appeared on banknotes. Newell's respected biography does not dwell on personality traits, military aptitude or leadership skills but describes the material history that produced Zapata, the revolutionary war and its outcome.

This republication of Newell's book of 1979 begins with a new introduction which relates Zapata to the contemporary Zapatista movement, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional. The book contains a list of sources, references, bibliography and internet links and an appendix which discusses the land question in greater detail.

Further Reading:
From the February 1994 Socialist Standard 'Class War in Mexico'
From the November 2005 Socialist Standard 'Are We All Zapatistas?'