What is Socialism, why do we want it and how should we argue for it?

In PART ONE of a 2-part article, Socialist Platform supporter John Tummon argues for a neglected part of the socialist tradition to pave the way for Left Unity to put together a compelling alternative to capitalism which can win the battle of ideas in the long-term, by focusing on issues the Left has too often ignored but which matter a great deal to people. In this first part, the article looks at different versions of socialism, the basic thinking behind socialism, the ‘wellbeing’ issues that get such a distorted but relentless focus in the tabloids, and at how politics, the economy, taxation and the position of workers would be different under a socialist system.

 What version of socialism?

 I am a socialist who does not believe either in ‘firm proletarian dictatorship discipline’, as advocated by Leninists on this website or the idea that it is possible to get radical reforms out of our current political system that can restore the mixed economy and welfare state of 1945 – 1973. I explicitly reject both the notion that Leninism is a science and the notion that capitalism can be reformed sufficiently from within.

My politics is with Marx in not wanting to do away with a democratic republic, but Marx left his idea of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ vague and lacking in social content, so it was instead shaped, quite differently, by Lenin, in the pursuit of an elitist ‘vanguardism’ – the idea that his party, a small minority of revolutionaries, had the theoretical means and insights to direct the working classes and act in their name and interest; that party, not the workers, became the dictatorship and did so before the Civil War. The democratic rights of the people, as enshrined for example in Stalin’s constitution of 1936, were a mere sham under the system Lenin and Trotsky put in place. Kronstadt, an atrocity led by Trotsky against the sailors on whose blood the regime came to power, foreshadowed the purge of the ‘disloyal’ Left in the 1930s USSR and the subsequent crushing of workers’ movements in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The rest of the Left, internally and externally, was crushed in the name of Leninism.

Social Democrats were keen to point out the absence of basic democratic rights under communism; instead, they told working people that the capture of state power through the ballot box would inevitably lead to socialism. Whenever they got their chance in government, however, they managed little more than to manage capitalism more humanely than the traditional parties, culminating in the postwar Atlee government in Britain. Socialism never came and, over the years, social democrats stopped talking about it and accepted capitalism fully. The Labour Party formally acknowledged this when it abolished Clause IV in the 1980s.

So I am opposed to both these versions.

The Third Tradition within socialism

This split between communists and social democrats left a smaller tradition of revolutionary socialist democracy largely forgotten, a tradition dating back to the history of the early labour movement that preceded the setting up of ‘proper’ social democratic parties, including ideas from Chartism and ‘Utopian Socialism’ about communitarianism, co-operation and self-management; ideas largely ignored by social democratic histories. These socialists also often preached and practiced the liberation of women and a radical gender politics that would often not be matched by the left until the late twentieth century. They designed socialist communities and housing for working people ­the hard thinking about what socialism should be like ­the very thinking that the Leninist tradition says should be left until after the revolution.

Some of these early nineteenth century traditions survived and were further developed by the anarcho-syndicalist movements of direct industrial action and workers’ self-organisation, as distinct from the conspiratorial type of anarchism. The anarcho-syndicalists mistrusted and rejected all centralist organisations and institutions, including political parties, parliaments, church and state; this marked them out in opposition to both the social democrat and communist traditions. I share that distrust.

In the revolutionary period between 1917 and 1923 council republics were the aim of a number of socialist revolutionaries in Central and Eastern Europe. They advocated a more radical and more direct democracy which often went hand in hand with demands for greater control over MPs, championing plebiscites and referenda as well as suggestions for the rotation principle in leadership to prevent the emergence of a permanent leadership. In 1921, some of these socialists came together in the International Workers’ Union of Socialist Parties, also known as ‘Vienna Union’. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a string of independent socialists of this type defied the stark dichotomies between communist dogmatism and social democratic reformism.

These socialists saw democracy not just as a political process but as a mechanism of decision-making and balancing out conflicting interests which needed implementing at all levels of society. The key question for them was not about political power but about social power. Democratic processes needed to be adopted in all power relationships – in the family, the workplace, in neighbourhood groups and even in the army. Ideas about industrial democracy, workers’ control, socialisation and workers’ self-management were particularly prominent among left-wing socialists who refused to commit themselves either to the reformism of social democracy or the undemocratic antics of the communists.  

It is among groups of left-wing social democrats, independent socialists, guild socialists, anarcho-syndicalists and unorthodox communists that we find most concern for the fostering of a democratic civil society in the inter-war period. They wanted to empower working people in their everyday lives. They believed that people had to practice democracy on a daily basis rather than delegate responsibility for decision-making to elected representatives or a party vanguard. They had to be encouraged to take control of their lives in a more direct way. Localised direct democracies in which the people could realise democracy in all spheres of life were to be preferred to the deadening weight of heavily bureaucratised parties, trade unions and states. Rosa Luxemburg’s opposition to Leninism was rooted, above all, in different ideas about the democratic organisation of society.

After the Second World War many of these concerns surfaced again with the post-1956 emergence of the first New Left, with the advances of the student movement in the 1960s, with second-wave feminism, with the growth of green/ecological movements in the 1970s and with the revival of notions of active citizenship in communitarian thought in the 1980s and 1990s. 1956 brought various attempts in Eastern Europe to democratise the stalinised people’s democracies. Reforms went furthest in Poland and Hungary and included economic, cultural and political liberalisation as well as experiments with grassroots democracy that eventually resulted in the declaration of a multi-party state in Hungary on 30 October 1956, just before the Russian tanks rolled in.

The significance of 1968 for the left in Europe and North America lay in its championing of anti-authoritarianism and its formulation of a new democratic politics of the everyday which declared proudly that the personal was the political. It highlighted the agency that people had over their lives and contrasted such practices of self-actualisation with the alienation produced by passive consumerism. One of its key concerns was the liberation of women who arguably suffered most from the authoritarian regulation of gender relations.

The Green movement picked up the criticisms of communist and social democratic notions of progress that had been voiced by left-wing dissenters in the 1950s and 1960s. Quality of life, they argued, could not be measured simply in terms of maximising economic growth levels and rising consumption levels.

The social order envisaged by communitarians often involved small decentralised communities in which individuals know each other and interact with each other on a basis of shared norms and values. Communitarian thinkers have also criticised social democrats and communists for being one-sidedly concerned with how to optimise the equal distribution of resources. In doing so, they neglected the central question of involving the people in decision-making processes about such allocations of resources. This is also why the traditional left has been incapable of putting forward a convincing theory of political democracy that puts the active engagement of citizens centre stage.

This is the socialist tradition that I come from and the only one that has the ideas to defeat the bourgeois parties on their most vulnerable terrain ­the terminal decline of their so-called democracy and their vigorous pursuit of consumerism and growth for growth’s sake. Philosophically, nearly all socialists believe that human beings, individually and collectively, are capable of both competitive and cooperative behaviour; people can potentially be both selfish and selfless, but in practice the balance between these two depends on how society is structured and the values and behaviours it encourages and discourages: those made possible, functional, desirable, and sometimes even necessary by a particular society and by a person’s class position in that society.

We are against organising society on the basis of encouraging and rewarding competitive rather than cooperative behaviour in making investment decisions, running transport systems, political decision-making, courts of law, schools, workplace organisation, selling and retailing, designing and manufacturing products, running public services and many other areas of life, but this is how life is at present, under 21st century capitalism. All of this makes it more difficult than it should be to pursue the common good.  

Encouraging people, through mass advertising, to behave as individual, status-driven consumptive units, erodes the social fabric, while the encouragement of competitive aspiration, competitive behaviour and a competitive perspective on the rest of life erodes that very sense of community and social contract on which meaningful civilisation is built; it atomises us. The modern capitalist system rewards selfishness but punishes altruism, harms community spirit and sets up fear and distrust between the unequal groups it creates.

Socialism, by contrast is a direct way of organising society around the common good, the precise and full definition of which we leave to be decided democratically by an active citizenry. Throughout socialist society, in education but also at work and at play, efforts will be made to counter selfishness and the fear of difference, and to promote the values of cooperation and mutuality. In a society in which people are more connected to each other and centrally involved in deciding what happens around their lives, peer group pressure will become a stronger factor and eventually take over the reproduction and imposition of cooperative values and behaviour; there is no state apparatus needed to do this.

We understand and agree that people want to have a secure home where they can be themselves among close friends and family, but people also derive happiness and security from having a neighbourly environment and come together with other people in order to do those things we can only do properly as a group: to work and to enjoy sport and community events, parties, local festivals, social drinking, to build things together and to take part in various leisure pursuits and running local activities like allotments. Human beings, despite all the individualism thrust at us by advertising and politicians, enjoy and benefit from cooperation and doing things as a group but we lose out on a lot of this side of life due to the way we are made to live now.

Human wellbeing is in crisis in the 21st century. Many people have become more self-obsessed, more narrowly focused, retreating into protective individualism, as the public domain seems increasingly dangerous, with the perception of crime running way beyond reality; while crime has been falling steadily since 1995, the majority of Britons think it is rising. We live in what is presented to us as a violent world: the media, underpinned by commercial needs, heightens the climate of fear, because stories that sell fear also sell newspapers and, because newspapers are sold to maximise private profit, this sowing of fear and demonisation is inevitable. We have been made frightened of each other.

Mistrust between different communities and racial groups chases us into our own ‘bunkers’ and there is also a growing mistrust between each of us and all strangers. We have become more fearful of allowing our children out, or having our older relatives visited by strangers. Many of the functions traditionally performed by neighbourliness, such as help in times of trouble, mutual support, sharing of information, and the like, have all but disappeared during this decline in community, while the pursuit of private wealth is not compensating us for this by making us any happier. Instead, the process of economic growth itself has produced a seriously sick society in which a central London ‘thrusting and aspirational’ culture of working 60+ hours per week co-exists with millions of people having to transfer from full-time to part-time work.

In the face of the aspirational, competitive and individualistic values thrust at us from all angles, it is harder to help others than it used to be, and doing so in any structured way has become fraught with bureaucratic barriers, so that where altruism still exists it is harder to express. Perversely, we increasingly devalue older people while we live in an increasingly ageing society. Equally perverse, young people, who are often taking the brunt of unemployment, are increasingly feared or distrusted by large numbers of adults. More than one in five young people in the EU are without a job, but there is insufficient empathy towards them from adults. We fear and disrespect each other.

The richest people in the world are frequently saying that they are miserable and depressed, that it’s not worth getting rich, and, most disturbingly of all, that the process of getting rich is the cause of the problems. Many of us who are not so rich experience daily boredom and alienation and seek escape in drugs, television catatonia and recreational shopping. Rates of depression, family breakdown and suicide have increased throughout the western world since the Second World War. International research has indicated links between higher levels of trust and better mental health in more equal societies, and greater levels of fear, distrust and poor mental health in societies with large wealth gaps.

More and more people are using drugs as an escape or gorging ourselves and growing fat, or both; the volume of waste we generate is enormous. We discard and destroy vast quantities of what are supposed to be useful goods, because advertisers persuade us they are out-dated, or because they have broken and cannot be repaired, even though the technology exists to make them far more durable. Driven to consume more and more, we are willing to pour our waste into the atmosphere, oceans and landfills, causing severe damage to the natural world that sustains us.

In the age of global consumer capitalism, the defining predicament in the western world is not a lack of wealth, but a lack of meaning. From a mass of psychological studies, there is one factor that stands out as differentiating happy from less happy people – a sense of meaning and purpose in life. A lack of purpose is the hollow centre of life in modern consumer capitalism. It is the hole we try to fill with consumption and we are told that this is good and socially useful because consumption increases growth.

For lots of us, despite all the wealth around us, its unequal distribution means that our 21st century lives also involve a loss of material security ­ more and more people have to work part-time, or via an agency, or on contracts that the employer can end at any time, or on unpaid internments, while increasingly large swathes of the population of the western world have no paid jobs at all or jobs that are repetitive, poorly paid and drearily dull. People find that they cannot be sure of keeping their home; we owe lots of money debts because of entering into credit arrangements to enable us to buy things that would otherwise have been out of our reach because our wage levels have declined in real terms since the 1980s, over the same period that profits and the unearned incomes of the rich have soared.

A deep distrust of our politicians has developed, and more and more of us doubt whether they can do anything about the state human society is in or, even if they could, whether they are to be trusted to get it right. Politics is volatile and protest burns ever more brightly, and briefly, but seems never to get past the point of what it is against.

Socialists, on the other hand, aim to strengthen the bonds of solidarity in society (social, intergenerational, across cultural and other differences). Socialism, because it is built around equality and on people working and deciding things together in pursuit of a common good that people themselves define, injects meaning into life and into work, where the product of work is owned in common, so everyone has a stake and takes responsibility for their part in the greater whole. It provides material security via the social wage and production based on need and, by building up the values of mutuality and helping each other in time of need, develops psychological health and a self-confidence rooted in having a clear and valued role within a supportive, cooperative community.

Politically, everyone under this version of socialism would have the right to participate in deciding how the wealth of society is used and how production is planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the natural world on which we depend. We reject the idea that the undemocratic regimes that existed in the former Soviet Union and other countries were socialist, because they set up no structures to allow this to happen.

Marx argued that proletarian democracy started from the assumption that the formal democratic mechanisms had to be filled with social content. Furthermore, political democracy was in need of being supplemented by the democratisation of power relationships in the economy and in society as a whole. The council democracy of the Paris Commune was to provide a model for Marx’s understanding of a genuine proletarian democracy. Contrary to Leninism, socialism has to be based on constitutional government that guarantees civil liberties to all, made possible by dismantling the existing state machinery and replacing it by a new, smaller state apparatus built from below – a representative government, with democratically elected bodies at the neighbourhood, community, regional and national levels. In all of these, representatives would be fully accountable, which means they are recallable at any time and have to account to their electors, as a collective, for their decisions at any time. Even if not recalled, they can only serve as a representative for a limited time period, and cannot be re-elected. This limit is to stop the creation of a permanent political class, which would otherwise become distant from the people, as we see now. Political parties are unnecessary for the purpose of making decisions on the basis of the common good; in fact they work against it, and would be phased out once socialism is established. Socialists aim to develop such democratic and accountable structures and practices in the here and now as well as after capitalism has been dismantled, in preparation for diminishing the role of the state in society.

This type of society calls for an active citizenry, as against the widespread disillusionment with politics under 21st century capitalism, with its narrow and elitist version of democracy. We believe that if people are given real power to decide the things that matter to us on a regular basis, from neighbourhood and workplace level to national level, and are given the information on which we can make confident judgments, then we will attend meetings, respond to Internet questionnaires about policies and play an active part in running society. This is socialism’s alternative form of democracy actual 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 years and then watching the politicians break the promises they made in order to get elected.

Economically, socialism structures society so that things will be manufactured and products designed because they are needed, not just because they might make money for someone. Laws would prevent products being designed to become obsolete or to deteriorate in order to artificially stimulate future sales, which is the norm under capitalism. 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, around 20 celebrity magazines, over 50 brands of mp3 player in the shops (not counting the internet) and more than 500 different types of telephone you can install for your landline.

We do not need endless varieties of a product, none of which is as good as it could be; under socialism, research and design of products would be 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 if things last longer and need replacing less often, then productive working hours can be reduced. Human society should not need to produce more and more stuff in an endless race to secure ‘growth’, regardless of the human cost and the cost to the environment.

Under socialism, land and capital assets will not be privately owned, so unearned income through collecting rents or interest will not be possible. We also emphasise that each productive enterprise would be managed democratically by its workers and that new investment would be socially controlled: the investment funds would be generated by taxation and distributed according to a democratic plan agreed and reviewed at all political levels after full consultation with all involved. This social control of new investment is to ensure it goes where it is most needed and would stop important investment decisions being made by the market on the basis of what will have the greatest potential rate of profit.

Socialists aim to convert existing surpluses of capital back into socially useful initiatives that meet the diverse needs of the majority of people. Investment funds will come from taxing capital assets held by cooperative enterprises, as will funds for free goods and services (including infrastructure, schools, hospitals, urban mass transit, basic research facilities). A round of budget and investment hearings would be held, probably annually, and expert and popular testimony will be sought and made public via the Internet, to facilitate an informed public discussion. The national legislature would then bring together the recommendations reached by each democratic level after this public discussion and decide the overall amount and nature of capital spending on free (public) goods, on infrastructure and on which areas of the cooperative production sector it wishes to encourage and invest in. After this has been divided up regionally, communities would then allocate their funds to their own community banks; the use of these funds will be monitored locally, regionally and nationally in order to learn what works best and make suitable adjustments to investment in the future.

Taxation under socialism would therefore be extremely simple: capital assets would be taxed but individual incomes would not. Because of high levels of equality within socialism, there would be no need for the progressive taxation of citizens, a system used under capitalism to compensate people for being the poor or needy losers in a society that depends on gross inequality and sees this as inevitable. Large-scale compensatory income-transfer and subsidy by governments distorts capitalism’s own markets and encourages inefficient industries; it also causes lobbyists to spend vast amounts of money on trying to change tax rules and capitalists to pay accountants vast sums to find ways around paying taxes. Different taxes or tax rates for different groups of people encourage division and feelings of unfairness within society. Socialism would avoid this at all costs. We repeat: one tax only.

Workers under socialism will be responsible for the operation of their place of work: organisation of the workplace, workplace discipline, and techniques of production; decisions on what and how much to produce will be a shared responsibility between each cooperative enterprise and democratic bodies in society, but each enterprise will be responsible for the payment of its taxes. These decisions would be made democratically in each workplace: workers would meet all together at least once a year in a general assembly, where they would elect a supervisory body on the basis of one-person/one-vote, with more localised or section meetings in between. Scientific, managerial and technical experts will continue to be necessary, but they would be responsible to the workforce as a whole through the supervisory body instead of to a board of shareholders. The supervisory body would monitor, collect, and analyse information relevant to the enterprise.

The supervisory body would appoint, guide and monitor the enterprise’s senior management, all of whom would be chosen from among the workforce, while junior managers would be elected by the workers they directly manage; the general assembly would also elect a watchdog body to supervise cases concerning internal discipline, harassment in the workplace and safety at work. The enormous success of the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque country since the 1950s shows how well this cooperative model works.

Social Democracy and Leninism-Stalinism share a very different concept of running society’s organisations and public services: top-down central planning, known in Britain as nationalisation, in which hierarchical organisations are run by highly-paid managers and workers do as they are told and need strong unions to fight back against what is, in terms of social content, capitalism run by the state. If these organisations did not amount to this, why did the Conservatives take 30 years before they decided to privatise them?

As for the supposed achievements of central planning, as Khrushchev said, it consisted mostly of setting unrealistic targets in ignorance of capacity and actual conditions of production and shouting endlessly at real productive facilities to achieve or surpass them: a bit like Blair’s target culture but even less sophisticated.