What is Socialism and why do we want it? Part 2

The second part of this series tries to answer a number of often misunderstood questions.

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Today’s THE LEFT LANE again features a number of photos of working class and popular struggles over past decades. The cover photo commemorates the successful Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963. The action was taken up because the local government–owned bus company operated what was known then as a “colour bar”, meaning it refused to hire any employees except those who were white. After a 60-day boycott, the company was forced to hire the first non-white bus conductor in its history. Read more HERE and HERE . Paul Stephenson, a boycott leader, died in 2024.

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By John Tummon (Guest Post)

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on “What is socialism?” Part 1 came out on Tuesday, 17 December and you can read it HERE .

In today’s article, John sketches out the basics of how a socialist society might/would/could/ should operate, that is, how we could radically rebuild society on a far more co-operative and non-oppressive basis.

PUTTING TOGETHER PIECES IN THE JIGSAW

Politically, everyone under socialism would have the right to jointly decide how the wealth of society is used and how production and repair of goods is planned, how it would meet the needs of people and, at the same time, also protect the natural world on which we depend.

Socialism needs an agreed constitution, with guaranteed civil liberties for all. The existing state machinery must be dismantled and replaced by a new, smaller state apparatus that is built from below. The constitution would specify either a direct, or a representative, government with democratically elected bodies at the neighbourhood, community, regional and national levels.

There will be full accountability of all representatives. They will be recallable at any time and specified ways will be set up to ensure they will be accountable to their electors for their actions and decisions … and at any time requested. Representatives will only serve for a limited time period and cannot be re-elected. This limit is needed to stop the creation of a permanent political class, which would otherwise become distant from the people as we have now.

This is socialism’s alternative form of democracy – active, informed participation, where people can see how their activity makes a real difference, rather than just passively putting a cross on a piece of paper every 5 or so years and then watching politicians break the promises they made in order to get ‘elected’. The Starmer government’s betrayal of the just cause of the “Women Against State Pension Inequality” (Waspi) is a perfect illustration of this.

Economically, products under capitalism are deliberately designed to become obsolete through their planned deterioration in order to artificially stimulate future sales. This is how the illusion of ‘Growth’ appears to happen. We live in a society with over 40 brands of washing powder available at most supermarkets, almost one hundred different personal bank account options, 70 or so family saloon car models available, and hundreds of types of telephones. None of these are designed to last for any significant length of time or to be repaired by people themselves.

While there are endless varieties of products, few are as good as they could be given existing technological know-how. Profit is king. Under socialism, by contrast, research and design of products would be democratically-decided, well-funded and carefully regulated to ensure quality, reliability, durability, functionality, ease of use, ease of repair, good after-sales service and longevity. By focusing on the overall quality of products, socialism removes the need to produce so much. Two beneficial results are that working hours can be gradually reduced and planetary resources conserved.

UNEARNED RENTAL INCOME WILL STOP

Under socialism, land and capital assets will no longer be privately owned. Unearned income gained through collecting feudal-era rents or interest will stop. Each productive enterprise would be managed democratically by its workers and new investment would be socially - and democratically - controlled.

Taxation would be extremely simple. Capital assets would be taxed, but individual incomes would not. We repeat – one tax only - on collectively-owned property.

There will be no "money market" and therefore no interest rate or usury. Nor will there be any basis either for credit-based purchases. The currency will just be a means of exchange, not something to be speculated with. In short, no more debt, just exchange.

Under socialism, industrial, agricultural and public service workers will be responsible for the operation of their place of work. This will include: organisation of the workplace, workplace discipline, and techniques of production; decisions on what and how much to produce will be between each cooperative enterprise and the most appropriate democratic bodies in society. Each enterprise will be responsible for the payment of its taxes and administration. These decisions would be made democratically in each workplace.

Work and methods of working under socialism would be regularly reviewed by workplace organisations and by external support from democratic bodies in society. The aim? To ensure that tasks involving undue monotony, health risks or repetition are eliminated or shared and that workers have enough control and autonomy. Monitors will also check that there is an appropriate balance between the efforts that workers make and the rewards that they receive. As well, skill-enhancement and training will be adequately and fairly provided for. Casual work, agency work and other insecure types of employment contract would be unlawful under socialism.

WAGE DIFFERENTIALS GREATLY REDUCED

Minimum wage levels will be set nationally and reviewed democratically and each enterprise will set its own wage levels in the same way, with a steady movement towards complete equality of income. For a time, though, wage differentials, though greatly reduced, will exist as long as there are some people who require this kind of incentive to do their best and so long as other workers will tolerate this. Changes will not happen overnight or by diktat, but the direction of travel under socialism will be clear. People will be given appropriate time to adapt to it, but not unlimited time. 'From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs' will become the general guidance during this process of adaptation. But it is no substitute for the social wage as detailed below.

Housework – carried out for the well-being of its members - including cooking, dishwashing, clothes washing, shopping, ironing, managing financial resources, vehicle repair, house maintenance, gardening, and so on – will, over time, no longer be linked with gender. Wherever some tasks can be performed better on a neighbourhood basis, this will be encouraged and provided for.

Caring for other members of the household and family group, including full-time care for pre-school children, involves emotional and psychological work. It usually matters a lot who will give the care, in order to build secure psychological attachments to responsible adults among young children and which will enable them to develop self-confidence and thrive. Under socialism, advice and support to and respite for carers would be supported, including through the design of social housing and time off work for carers; this would also be funded out of taxation. Caring work and voluntary work would be given a higher value under socialism than it receives at present and, wherever possible, would become a shared responsibility.

THE KEY ROLE OF THE SOCIAL WAGE

The social wage is important under socialism. Free public services, including but not limited to education, housing and health provision, will ensure people of a basic, civilised standard of life. They will not depend on their income and are really the social part of that income, which over time, would increase to its maximum.

With the support of the social wage, wages for work will be more than enough to buy what people need and want for their comfort, since many of the things that cost so much today will be free. This means not only education, including college and other kinds of special training, housing and health care, but also transportation, communication and some entertainment. All these and basic items of food and clothing will be subsidised out of taxes, an area in which Cuba has made some progress. In this way, money’s role in society will gradually diminish.

Under socialism, high levels of equality, job satisfaction, education and an emphasis on caring for each other should substantially limit the need for welfare services to deal with issues such as disability, incurable and lifelong illnesses and old age.

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CHECK THIS OUT ON THE LEFT

A few threads from around the left as 2024 comes to an end and as the space to the left of Labour every day grows ever wider ( as was shown in a recent piece in THE LEFT LANE on how Starmer facilitates the growth of Reform):

1. A columnist for THE TIMES and one for THE SPECTATOR have recently predicted that Jeremy Corbyn --- and the four pro-Palestine MPs --- will form a new political party early in 2025. But in a TV interview in the past week, Corbyn said that this speculation was incorrect.

2. A group called The Collective, which says it does want to form a left party in 2025, will be holding its next planning meeting in London on 25 January. The time and the location have not been released. Nor have the organisers said who can attend. The past two meetings have been semi-secret. Registered as a private company, The Collective claims it has 4000 members and thus brings in estimated revenues of £8,000 a month. How it is spent is unknown. Its Facebook page is of no assistance; it has posted two messages since the general election.

3. Meanwhile, at least four other left groups have recently met to discuss improved inter-group collaboration. These include RS 21, Prometheus: A Journal for Democracy and Socialism, the Talking About Socialism group and the Communist Party of Great Britain which publishes The Weekly Worker. Nothing definite was agreed but a person attending called the meeting “quite positive.”

4. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is holding a conference on Zoom on Sunday February 2nd. The theme is: “Fighting for a new party under the Starmer government. And what role for TUSC?”

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MEANS OF PRODUCTION SOCIALISED

All of these economic changes presuppose that, at some stage in the evolution of socialism, the ownership of, control of and benefit from the means of production, distribution and exchange are taken out of private hands. Instead, they would become socialised and controlled by the people as a whole. Without this fundamental change, a class of rich owners would either continue or re-emerge. It is the key building block of a socialist society which every socialist wants.

Law under socialism will be decided through democratic consultation. Individual legal decisions will be made by participatory processes, with no secret courts and no lifelong professional judges. The core purpose of law is purely to prevent people from injuring one another, but under capitalism it is also there to protect privately owned capital assets. Small-scale private property, such as personal possessions, would still be protected under socialist law, but land and capital assets would be owned in common, so we would have far fewer and much simpler laws than now. All ancient laws, arising from early capitalism and earlier epochs, will be erased from the legal code to prevent their abuse by powerful individuals and government. There will be fewer laws under socialism, fewer courts, fewer police and far fewer prisons.

PM Margaret Thatcher brought in her hated poll tax in 1990. Each taxpayer was forced to pay the same fixed sum and hence it was a “poll tax” or “head tax.” Starting in Scotland and spreading across England, widespread protests were mounted in 1990. (See HERE). As many as 18 million people refused to pay the tax and as many as 200,000 people attended one march in London. Not too long after, Thatcher was history and the poll tax replaced by council taxes.

MORE EQUALITY MEANS LESS CRIME

A just society with high levels of equality and participation is less prone to violent crime, high rates of obesity, child abuse and escapist drug use. Recent research shows that the most unequal societies also have the highest rates of crime and social problems. Crime may be an individual’s choice and responsibility, but crime rates reflect society and can be changed by changing that society.

Liberty is important to socialists. We believe that no persons or groups, either individually or through government or the media, should impose their will, their way of life, their judgments or their brand of wisdom on the private lives of others. This is true no matter how correct they might think their own way of life to be and how wrong they think others are, provided they do not harm others. This is the true concept of liberty, not the right to become rich at the expense of everyone else.

Media. This is where monopoly ownership especially distorts what we see and hear and in ways that seldom serve the common good. Socialists aim to develop society’s capacities to use reason to address social problems. We cannot expect this to develop, however, with a rabble-rousing media still in place. So it will be dismantled ... and quickly. Media is one of the key areas to democratise society, through mass participation and collective control, along with education, communication and cultural provision and artistic expression. The goal would be to nurture our human capacity for progressive change.

A state broadcaster like the BBC would not exist but be replaced by the licensing of not-for-profit radio and TV stations, as well as websites and social media, all run as cooperative enterprises. History shows that the people of any country achieving a democratic, liberationist socialism in a capitalist world would be relentlessly bombarded with hostile propaganda. So, in the same way as the USA currently does not allow broadcasts from Al-Jazeera and some other channels, signals from foreign broadcasters and internet sites hosted abroad would be blocked in a socialist Britain. Or they might be allowed by a decision of a national legislature and guided by whether such non-British media supported or de-stabilised the pursuit of the common good and the values supporting it.

NO MORE AD INDUSTRY

The advertising industry would no longer exist. The spurious basis on which most products are presented to potential consumers today through advertisements has little or no connection to the kind of information consumers need in order to make rational rather than emotional decisions. Strictly-regulated public information presentations about products, focusing on performance specifications, build quality, reliability, functionality, ease of use, ease of repair, after-sales service and durability is an entirely different matter. The approach taken under socialism would shift the balance fundamentally from consumers having the responsibility to ensure that they are not deceived by retailers to, instead, producers being required to ensure that they do not deceive consumers.

The environment is important to socialists and to humanity; many of us are ’eco-socialists’. Marx pointed out that capitalism led to the “practical degradation of nature”. Of the world’s nine billion people, more than one billion already live in slums and hundreds of thousands are dying each year from the consequences of climate change and coming directly from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition and sudden ecological disasters like Tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and desertification. Billions of others will face disaster from water shortage, the inundation of coastal and riverside communities, and other environmental consequences of global warming. That is, unless there is a radical reversal of the effects. of humanity’s production and consumption. This takes us again to question the mantra of ‘growth’.

The profligate waste of the planet’s resources in pursuit of an unending cascade of commodities as well as artificially-created ‘wants’ generated by the advertising industry only exist because that’s the way that capitalism functions.

STOP THE DESTRUCTION OF NATURAL WORLD

Socialists aim to reconfigure the economy so that it is sustainable and does not destroy the natural basis upon which human, animal and plant life depends. Under socialism, we would gradually replace the use of cars and other motorised, individual forms of transport by providing cheap, accessible and frequent public transport. We would also reconfigure the built environment to encourage and reward public transport, walking and cycling.

Imperialism, global capitalism and world poverty can only be properly addressed by socialists if we are very clear on how they affect each other. Internationalism is a fundamental part of being a socialist. Socialists recognise not only that imperialism shapes the world order in its economic, political and cultural aspects, but also that people in the global south countries struggling against it enhances our ability to achieve socialism here. Their super-exploitation for cheap labour drives the enhanced profits that keep capitalism afloat in richer countries like this one. We cannot win unless they win.

Socialism has to be international. If not, it could become national socialism. The long-term and fundamental interests of working people are, ultimately, the same everywhere, but the divisions between us under imperialism are material and ideological. Socialists reject the idea that there is a national solution to the problems of capitalism and stand for solidarity and cooperation between the people in Britain and elsewhere. We will work with others who support the struggles of people in other parts of the world against their exploitation and domination by our rulers, as well as theirs.

US President George Bush ( Republican) and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair ( Labour) jointly launched the illegal Iraq War in 2003.

On 15 February 2003, a coordinated day of protests was held across the world in which people in more than 600 cities expressed opposition to the imminent Iraq War. It was part of a series of protests and political events that had begun in 2002 and continued as the invasion, war, and occupation took place. This is a photo is of one of two assembling points for the huge London march. It was one of those “were you there marches”? ( I was).

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The main points made so far about a socialist UK are:

1) Politics - An agreed constitution, guaranteeing civil liberties to all, vesting power in the people, to be exercised democratically. Of the different conceptions of democracy, my tentative suggestion is that representative democracy is fundamentally hierarchical and leads, inevitably, to a permanent political class operating over the heads of the people.

In the age of the internet and social media, we should instead envisage a system of direct democracy at all levels of society, with online debates on key issues and online decision-making. There would still be a need for accountable groups and people with some executive powers and these would need to be elected, which could also be done online.

2) Economics - Public, social & democratic control and ownership of the means of producing wealth and distributing it, a simple taxation system and a social wage.

3) Law - Laws decided through thorough democratic consultation and all legal decisions made by participatory processes. No secret courts and no professional judges for life.

4) Liberty - No individuals or groups, nor the media, to impose their will, their way of life, their judgments or their brand of wisdom on the private lives of others, provided that harm is done to others.

5) Media - Democratise the media through mass participation along with education, communication and cultural provision and artistic expression. The media will be socially owned and run so as to serve the educational, informational, cultural and entertainment needs and aspirations of the people.

6) Advertising - Strictly-regulated public information presentations about products, focusing on performance specifications, build quality, reliability, functionality, ease of use, ease of repair, after-sales service and durability.

7) The Environment - Ecosocialism will reconfigure the economy to become sustainable and protect and nurture the natural basis on which human, animal and plant life depends. A unilateral reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, an international treaty to cap global carbon emissions, the international rationing of air travel, and a massive expansion of renewable energy.

8) Imperialism - We recognise that imperialism shapes the world order in its economic, political and cultural aspects. Countries struggling against it enhance our ability to achieve socialism here in the UK. Socialism in this and other advanced capitalist countries has to be international or it will fail and degenerate through its isolation in a capitalist world or fail in our duty to the people of the rest of the world to eliminate the crippling exploitation and oppression they face.

9) Racism, Feminism and the right to decide your own sexuality - Socialists support the resistance and self-organisation of people oppressed within this society because of their gender, ethnic origin or sexual preferences.

In each of these nine areas, any new socialist organisation has to be as clear as it can be and push for fundamental, radical changes in the here and now, and enact clear, democratically-decided policies once in power.

John Tummon from the Greater Manchester area is a long-time political activist on the left….and also a reader of THE LEFT LANE.

FOLLOW UP

1. Do you have a different view of what socialism is all about? Put it in the comments section below.

3. As mentioned in Part One, here is the email address of the Network of Independent Socialists if you want to get in touch:
networkofindependentsocialists@gmail.com

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NOTE TO READERS OF THE LEFT LANE

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