1. World Socialist Review
A Voice of the World Socialist Party (USA)
Volume I, Number 1 Grand Rapids, May 1986

1.1 Editorial
To Our Readers,
In your hands is the first issue of the WORLD SOCIALIST REVIEW. The articles that appear in this journal have been written by members of the WORLD SOCIALIST REVIEW. Not all of the articles that appear, or that will be appearing in future issues, will be finely phrased. But, what we lack in refinement of style we shall make good by our deep sincerity and by the correctness and truthfulness of our principles.
We shall for the present, content ourselves with issuing the WORLD SOCIALIST REVIEW four times a year. This could, however, change. We will notify our readers if we increase or decrease the number of issues we plan to put out each.year.
We do regret to inform our readers that if they want subscriptions, they will have to pay a slightly higher price of .30 cents per issue. We deeply regret this, but the high price of postage forces us to charge more to defray the cost of sending each issue to your home.
Finally, let us state that we would very much like to hesr from you. We shall be pleased to consider any articles submitted to us for publication in this journal. However, please do not be disappointed if what you submit does not appear or if it gets slightly edited, we have a very hard job of deciding what is to appear and what is not to appear. Also, because this journal is an official voice of the WSP, all articles do have to represent the platform of the WSP. Hence, the need for editing, we also would like to encourage our readers to send us suggestions on how to improve our journal, to voice their criticisms of the journal or any of its articles, to comment on something they liked and to ask questions about the World Socialist Party and its principles.
Rich (co-editor,)

This article was taken from the Socialist Standard
Official journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain
1.2 Marx's Conception of Socialism
Marx usually referred to the society he aimed to see established by the working class as "communist society". Precisely because he believed that "communist society" would be the outcome of the struggle and movement of the working class against its capitalist conditions of existence, Marx always refused to give any detailed picture of what he expected it to be like: that was something for the working class to work out for itself. Nevertheless scattered throughout his writings, published and unpublished, are references to what he believed would have to be the basic features of the new society the working class would establish in place of capitalism.

1.2.1 Voluntary Association

It must be emphasised that nowhere did Marx distinguish between "socialist society" and "communist society". As far as he, and Engels, were concerned these two words meant the same, being alternative names for the society they thought the working class would establish in place of capitalism, a practice which will be followed in this article. As a matter of fact besides communist Marx employed four other words to describe future society: associated, socialised, collective and co-operative. All these words convey a similar meaning and bring out the contrast with capitalist society where not only the ownership and control of production but life generally is private, isolated and atomized. Of these the word Marx used most frequently — almost more frequently than communist — was association. Marx wrote of future society as "an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism" (PP, p. 197) and as "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (CM, p. 82). In Volume III of Capital Marx writes three or four times of production in future society being controlled by the "associated producers" (pp. 428, 430-1 and 800). Association was a word used in working class circles in England to mean a voluntary union of workers to overcome the effects of competition. This was Marx's sense too: in future society the producers would voluntarily co-operate to further their own common interest; they would cease to be "the working class" and become a classless community.

1.2.2 No Coercive State

In these circumstances the State as an instrument of political rule over people would have no place. Such a social organ of coercion was, in Marx's view, only needed in class-divided societies as an instrument of class rule and to contain class struggles. As he put it, in socialist society "there will be no more political power properly so-called since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society" (PP, p. 197) and "the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another" (CM, p. 81).

Socialist society would indeed need a central administration but this would not be a "State" or "government" in that it would not have at its disposal any means of coercing people, but would be concerned purely with administering social affairs under democratic control. Marx endorsed the proposal of Saint Simon and other early critics of capitalism for "the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production" (CM, p. 98), and also declared that "freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it" (CGP, p. 32). In other words, once Socialism had been established and classes abolished, the coercive and undemocratic features of the State machine would have been removed, leaving only purely administrative functions mainly in the field of the planning and organization of production.

1.2.3 Common Ownership

Natural resources and the man-made instruments of production would be held in common: Marx speaks of "a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common" (Vol. I, p. 78) and, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, of "the co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production" (p. 22) and of "the material conditions of production" being "the cooperative property of the workers themselves" (p. 25). It is significant that Marx never defined communist society in terms of the ownership and control of the means of production by the State, but rather in terms of ownership and control by a voluntary association of the producers themselves. He did not equate what is now called "nationalisation" with Socialism.

1.2.4 Planned Production

Another feature of communist society, in Marx's view, would be consciously planned production. He writes of a society "in which producers regulate their production according to a preconceived plan" (Vol. Ill, p. 256) and of "production by freely associated men . . . consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan" (Vol. I, p. 80).

Conscious planning, conscious control over the material conditions of life, was for Marx clearly the essence of Socialism. In the 1840's, when he used to express himself philosophically, Marx was continually emphasising this point. This was what he meant when he said that real history would not begin till Socialism had been established; human beings were not behaving as human beings so long as they were controlled by blind historical and economic forces, ultimately of their own creation but unrecognized as such; Socialism would allow men to consciously regulate their relationship with Nature; only such a consciously planned society was a truly human society, a society compatible with human nature.

But Marx's approach to planning in Socialism was not just philosophical. It was practical too. He was well aware that to regulate "production according to a preconceived plan" would be a huge organizational task. Indeed, that it would be, if you like, the economic problem of Socialism. Matching production with social wants would in the first instance be a huge statistical exercise. Marx emphasised that for this sort of reason "book-keeping" would be more necessary in Socialism than under capitalism — not that he envisages the books in socialist society being kept in money. Socialist society, he felt, would use some direct measure of labour-time for its statistics and planning (Vol. Ill, pp. 184 and 830). Calculations would have to be made of how much labour-time would be needed to produce particular items of wealth; the real social (as opposed to monetary market) demand for the various items of wealth would also have to be calculated; and all the figures put together to construct a definite plan for the allocation of resources and labour to the various different branches of production.

In a number of places Marx compares how capitalism and Socialism would tackle the same problems, for instance a long-term project which would not bear fruit in the form of finished products for some years but which in the meantime would have to be allocated labour and resources. Under capitalism, said Marx, this creates monetary problems and upsets; but in Socialism it is only a question of "preconceived" planning, of making allowances for this beforehand (Vol. II, pp. 315 and 358). Similarly with miscalculations, say overproducing: under capitalism (where overproduction means in relation to market demand) this causes a crisis and a drop in production; in Socialism (where overproduction would be in relation to real social demand) there would be no problem: it could be corrected in the next plan (Vol. II, pp. 468-9).

In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (p. 22) and in Volume III of Capital (p. 854) Marx lists the various major uses to which the social product would have to be put in a socialist society:

1) Replacing the means of production (raw materials, wear and tear of machinery, etc.) used up in producing the social product.

2) Expanding the means of production so as to be able to produce a larger social product.

3) A small surplus as a reserve to provide against accidents and natural disasters (and planning miscalculations, we might add).

4) The individual consumption of the actual producers.

5) The individual consumption of those unable to work: the young, the old, the sick.

6) Social consumption: schools, hospitals, parks, libraries, etc.

7) Social administration not connected with production.

This is obvious of course but it is as well to spell it out so as to show that Marx did discuss some of the practical problems of totally planned production.

1.2.5 Abolition of the Market

Socialist society, as Marx repeatedly made clear, would be a non-market society, with all that that implied: no money, no buying and selling, no wages, etc. In fact it was his view that proper planning and the market are incompatible: either production is regulated by a conscious previously worked-out plan or it is regulated, directly or indirectly, by the market. When Marx talked about men under capitalism being dominated by blind forces, which were in the end their own creations, it was precisely blind market forces he mainly had in mind. For him capitalism was essentially a market economy in which the allocation of labour and resources to the various branches of production was determined by what he called "the law of value".

Although production under capitalism was not consciously controlled, it was not completely anarchic: some sort of order was imposed by the fact that goods exchanged in definite proportions, related both to the amount of socially necessary labour-time spent in producing them and to the average rate of profit on invested capital. Under capitalism it was the averaging of the rate of profit on the capital invested in the different branches that regulated production. But this was an unplanned hit-and-miss process which was only accurate in the long run; in the short run it led to alternating periods of boom and slump, labour shortage and mass unemployment, high profits and low profits. The assertion by society of conscious control over production, and the allocation of resources to the various branches of production in accordance with a previously settled plan, necessarily meant for Marx the disappearance not only of production for profit, but also of the whole mechanism of the market (including the labour market, and so of the wages system), of production for the market ("commodity-production"), of buying and selling ("exchange") and of money.

The Communist Manifesto specifically speaks of "the Communistic abolition of buying and selling" (p. 72) and of the abolition not only of capital (wealth used to produce other wealth with a view to profit) but of wage labour too (p. 73). In Volume I Marx speaks of "directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with the production of commodities . . ." (p. 94) and in Volume II of things being different "if production were collective and no longer possessed the form of commodity production . . ." (p. 451). Also, in Volume II, Marx in comparing how Socialism and capitalism would deal with a particular problem twice says there would be no money to complicate matters in socialist society: "If we conceive society as being not capitalistic but communistic, there will be no money-capital at all in the first place . . ." (p. 315) and "in the case of socialized production the money-capital is eliminated" (p. 358). In other words, in Socialism it is solely a question of planning and organisation. Marx also advised trade unionists to adopt the revolutionary watchword "Abolition of the Wages System" (VPP, p. 78) and, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, stated "within the co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products" (pp. 22-3) for the simple reason that their work would then be social not individual and applied as part of a definite plan. What they produce belongs to them collectively, i.e. to society, as soon as it is produced; socialist society then allocates, again in accordance with a plan, the social product to various previously-agreed uses.

1.2.6 Distribution of Consumer Goods

One of these uses must be individual consumption. How did Marx think this would be organised? Here again Marx took a realistic view. Eventually, he said, the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" would apply (CGP, p. 24). In other words, there would be no social restrictions on individual consumption, every member of society being free to take from the common stock of consumer goods according to their individual need. But Marx knew that this presupposed a higher level of productivity than prevailed in his day (he was writing in 1875). In the meantime, while the productive forces were being expanded, individual consumption would unavoidably have to be restricted. How? Marx made the simple point that how wealth would be allocated for individual consumption in communist society would depend on what and how much there was to allocate: "The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers" (Vol. I, p. 78).

This was another obvious point, but on three or four occasions Marx went further and referred to a specific method of regulating distribution: by "labour-time vouchers". The basic idea of such a system is that each producer would be given a certificate recording how much time he had spent at work; this would entitle him to draw from the common store of wealth set aside for individual consumption an equivalent amount of consumer goods, likewise measured in labour-time. This, as Marx himself recognised, was only one of many possible systems Socialist society could democratically agree on for allocating wealth for individual consumption in the temporary conditions of relative scarcity here assumed — realistically for 1875 — to exist. As long as the total number of vouchers issued matched the total amount of wealth set aside for individual consumption, society could adopt any criteria it chose for deciding how many vouchers particular individuals, or groups of individuals, should have; this need bear no relationship at all to how many hours an individual may or may not have worked. Similarly, the "pseudo-prices" given to particular goods to be distributed need bear no relation to the amount of labour-time spent on producing them. Marx himself described some of the defects of the labour-time voucher system, but also made the point that any voucher system of allocating goods for individual consumption would surfer from anomalies, being forced on socialist society by the not-yet-developed-enough productive forces in what he called "the first phase of communist society".

When Marx mentions labour-time vouchers in Capita! he always made it quite clear that he was only assuming such a system as an example: "merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities" (Vol I, p. 78) or that the producers "may, for all it matters, ..." (Vol. II, p. 358) receive labour-time vouchers. He also emphasised that these vouchers would not be money in its proper sense: "Owen's 'labour-money' ... is no more 'money' than a ticket to the theatre" (Vol. I, p. 94) and "these vouchers are not money. They do not circulate" (Vol. II, p.358). (See also his discussion of so called "labour-money" in The Critique of Political Economy, pp. 83-6.)

Marx's point here is that the vouchers would merely be pieces of paper entitling people to take such and such an amount of consumer goods; they would not be tokens for gold like today's paper money; once handed over they would be cancelled and so could not circulate. Besides, they would be issued as part of the overall plan for the production and distribution of wealth. Finally, we repeat, any voucher system, whether on a labour-time or some other basis, was seen by Marx only as a temporary measure while the productive forces were developed as rapidly as possible to the level where they would permit socialist society to go over to free access according to individual need.

This is why this is now only an academic problem. The further development of the forces of production since Marx's day has meant that the system he always said was the final aim of Socialism — free access to consumer goods according to individual need — could now be introduced almost immediately Socialism was established. The problem Marx envisaged labour-time vouchers as a possible solution to no longer really exists.

1.2.7 Conclusion

We have seen, then, that Marx held that future communist society would be a classless community, without any coercive State machine, based on the common ownership of the means of production, with planning to serve human welfare completely replacing production for profit, the market economy, money and the wages system — even in the early stages when it might not prove possible to implement the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", which, however, always remained for Marx the aim. Marx, and Engels, never drew any distinction between "socialist" and "communist" society, using these (and other) terms interchangeably. He did, however, believe that this society would only be established after a "period of ... revolutionary transformation" (CGP, p. 32) of a number of years duration during which the working class would be using its control of political power to dispossess the capitalists and bring all the means of production under democratic social control — but, here again, the further development of the productive forces since Marx's day means that the socialist revolution can now be carried through very quickly with no need for any lengthy period between the capture of political power by the working class and the establishment of socialism.

1.2.8 References:

CGP. Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol II Moscow, 1958.

CM. Communist Manifesto, Moscow, 1954.

PP Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow, 1956.

Vol I. Capital, Vol I, Moscow, 1961.

Vol. II. Capital, Vol II, Moscow, 1957.

Vol III. Capital, Vol III, Moscow, 1959.

VPP. Wages, Price and Profit, Peking, 1969.

Critique of Political Economy, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.

(Socialist Standard, December 1973).
1.3 WHAT IS WORLD SOCIALISM?
It is a sad but true fact that many people do not know what socialism is. What is even sadder is that many people who claim to be socialists do not even know. Therefore, this short article will try to explain what basically socialism is and what it is not.
A good place to start is with the explanation of what socialism is not. Socialism is not the state capitalism that is oppressing the workers in the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, Poland or any other country that claims to be socialist. You see these countries have wages, money and a state. These things will not exist in socialism. Socialism is also not the nationalization of industries that Sweden, Great Britain and others have set up. They too have money, wages and a state just like every other capitalist nation. To get to the fact, socialism has never been tried anywhere on the face of the earth. We could go into a more lengthy explanation of why the above systems are not socialism. However, we will let the following explanation of socialism do the talking.
To begin with, a socialist society is a stateless, moneyless, classless society based on production to satisfy human needs. A true socialist society has common ownership of the means of production. These means of production will be democratically run and there will be free access to all the goods produced.
How can the above society be brought about? It is the opinion of the World Socialist Party that this free, democratic society can only be brought about when the working class wants and understands socialism. The organization of a socialist party must of course, begin long before a majority of the working class has become socialist. The socialist party is a part of the process of discovering and solidifying socialists. When the majority of the working class wants socialism, they will through democratic elections, capture the state
When the working class has captured the state, they will have but one option: The state must be immediately dismantled so that the building of the new socialist society can begin.
1.4 SO YOU WANT PEACE
You take part in local demonstrations to keep the United States from getting involved in wars in central America and other areas across the globe. You've even gone to Washington D.C. to show the top politicians you mean business. Fine! But is it really peace you want?
Real peace must bring great changes. For example: there can be no peace while a tiny minority own the means of wealth production and distribution and the rest of us work for them. This sort of arrangement leads inescapably to wars between rival capitalists and to strikes, lockouts and riots on the home front between capital and labor. It also leads to squalor, poverty, preventable disease, and mass pllution of air, soil and water.
So class ownership of the means of production and distribution of wealth must go! Not at some future date while-in the meantime-state capitalism operated by leaders of the Left, or the Right, takes over. There is no percentage for the majority in that sort of set-up, Don't let them kid you. Nobody, but nobody, can operate the wages system in the interest of those who must work for wages. Changing the name to "socialist" without changing the relationships of man to man is like renaming a leopard "pussycat."
Are you interested in a new and different world? One world with one race-the human race-and no boundaries to keep it apart? If not, don't talk to us of Peace!
LET'S BUILD A MASS PARTY FOR WORLD SOCIALISM
LET'S END THE SYSTEM THAT BREEDS WAR

1.5 SHORT TALKS
1.5.1 1. What is the WSP's position on the state?
As socialists, we see the state as the executive committee of the ruling class that makes and breaks the laws through the use of coercive power. While the state does control the armed forces, it does hold somewhat democratic elections which allows for the capture of state power by a socialist majority for the purpose of ensuring a peaceful, democratic revolution. This revolution will dismantle the state with its coercive powers so that a truly democratic administration over things, not people, can be set up. Hence, the establishment of a wageless, classless, stateless society known as; SOCIALISM! Won't you join us in this tremendous struggle for the emancipation of the working class?
1.5.2 2. Why doesn't the WSP ally with other parties for any object?
Because no other political party stands clearly for socialism and
socialism alone,
1.5.3 3. What is the WSP's position on war?
The WSP and its companion parties stand in complete opposition to war. Working class interests are not served by war. War is just something that capitalism drive nations into from time to time. War arises from conflicts between nations over markets, strategic locations, resources, etc. While our party is opposed to war, we are not pacifists. A pacifist holds that when a majority of non-socialists reject war, wars will not happen. We olaim this to be false. We point to the past wars where pacifists denounced war before it started, only to become the loudest supporters of "their" country's cause when war started. This shows that pacifists are as prone as anyone else to fall for war propaganda and to support and die for their capitalist masters. We would also like to state that war cannot be used to establish socialism.
1.5.4 4. Will capitalism collapse?
No. Capitalism will do one of two things. It will either stagger from one crisis to another or it will literally blow itself up. It will never collapse on its own. One just has to look at the many depressions capitalism has endured for the proof it will not collapse on its own. How then, does capitalism end? This is a very simple issue, capitalism must be ended by revolution. A socialist revolution.
1.6 HAD ENOUGH?
You know that capitalism is a sick society! But are you ready to throw in the towel after these many years of bombast from 57 varieties of self-styled revolutionaries? Are you looking for a remote desert island to avoid the Leninist-Trotskyist and whatever Bolshevik strategists and tacticians who daily assault your ears and eyes? Have you begun to suspect, with good reason, that the above mentioned are each offering the same old goods with but a change in the decoration of the package? Do they offer you capitalism, administered by the state, under the peeudo-nym; Socialism?
Alternatively, there is the other hangup. Are you fed up with the learned irrelevancies of the professed socialist intellectuals who write scholarly treatises in scholarly journals of the "left"? Or the so-called democratic socialists? Do they not offer capitalism, administered by the state, albeit they claim a more benevolent state, in the manner of the Scandinavian countries or Great Britain?
What then is socialism? If you work for wages it is not socialism.
If goods and services are sold in the market place with a view for profit it is not socialism. If the world is divided into nations, it is not socialism. If there is any kind of government over people it is not socialism; Unless each man, woman and child in the world has free access to all goods and services it is not socialism.
Investigate the now thing! Establish socialism in the world today. Wfhy settle for less?

2. THE VOICE of the WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY (US)
Volume I, Number 2
Grand Rapids, Fall 1986

2.1 CAPITALISM TERRORISM UNLIMITED
The murder of workers in airports in Rome and Vienna, the killing of two men in a Berlin disco and the bullet which killed a British policewoman have nothing to do with freedom fighting or liberation. Freedom does not arise from the barrel of a gun; liberation will never be the product of the killers who claim to be serving higher causes.
Capitalism is an inherently violent social system. It was founded by violence; it has expanded and prospered due to violence; its much-cherished law and order is institutionalised violence. Killing is not capitalism gone wrong, but the system running as normal. The history of capitalism is a long and bloody story of murdering and maiming and threatening and plundering so that a small minority of the world's population - the capitalist class - may own and control the major resources of the earth to the exclusion of the vast majority who produce all the wealth — the working class. In every country in the world, including the so-called socialist countries (which are state capitalist), the minority on top owe their position to violence.
To those defenders of capitalism who make noises of disgust about the violence of the unauthorised terrorist let us ask, where did the capitalists obtain their property from? They won it in the early days of capitalism by forming armies and terrorising the poor peasants and small landlords and stealing their land from them. The appropriation of capitalist property was a process of successful mugging expeditions: the European aristocracy of today are the inheritors of the muggers' plundered gains. The common lands, hitherto used by the poor, were enclosed and appropriated by capitalists who forced others to keep out. The law of trespass ensured that non-property-owners could be killed - and many were if they tried to enter the land of the capitalists. The early history of capitalism, going on well into the last century in Britain, saw thousands of workers being killed for stealing the necessaries of life. The state, which is the machine of class violence used by the bosses to keep the workers in line, has killed numerous workers who have offended against the sacred rights of property.
How was the British Empire built if not by such terror tactics? The ruling class of Britain, armed with the Bible and the bullet, plundered the earth in the quest for profits. Those who stood in their way were killed. In the sixteenth century, when Britain went to war with Spain - readers will remember the defeat of the Armada - it was nothing different from the battle of power between the gangs of Chicago and New York in the 1930s. Workers were sent to their deaths in these imperial wars in order to determine which national group of capitalist gangsters would own and control new resources, territories and exploitable populations.
In the late nineteenth century two new national gangs of European capitalists came on to the scene: Italy in 1860 and Germany in 1870. They made efforts to enter as rivals in the competition for world domination and so more workers - in their millions - were killed in wars. The workers who were slaughtered in world wars for economic interests which were not theirs were not regarded as the victims of terrorism. But that is precisely what they were.
In this century the British robber class has lost its Empire and must rest content with exploiting the workers at home. The British working class was poor when British
capitalists had an Empire and we are poor today: one thing is certain, the Empire never belonged to us.
Today two new major empires - superpowers in modern times - dominate the world: America and Russia. The President of the USA now sermonises about the evil of terrorism. The status quo must not be disturbed. Does this man Reagan not know that without terrorism the American state would never have been established? The revolutionaries of 1776 who threw off British imperial rule were regarded by the British ruling class as terrorists. Had they been defeated the name of George Washington would have been listed in the history books together with Gerry Adams and the PLO leaders. The rulers of Israel echo their American masters in condemning terrorism. In the 1940s these same leaders who now have state power were themselves terrorists, killing British soldiers in order to gain state power. Once the American terrorists obtained power in 1776 they became legal terrorists and many thousands of native Americans (Red Indians) were murdered callously by the state because they were in its way. In 1986, while Reagan makes complaints about Libyan-backed terrorists damaging American capitalist interests, American-backed terrorists are being given huge amounts of money by his administration in order to dislodge the elected government of Nicaragua.
The class struggle is a messy, violent process. The capitalists will stop at nothing in their struggle for more power within the world market. The Libyan government is seen to represent a new form of Islamic, Arab nationalism which could endanger existing interests in Africa and the Middle East. As capitalism develops - if workers let it — more power blocs will emerge, all competing for supremacy, and one would be naive not to predict such rivalry leading to wars, both local and frighteningly global.
Workers have no interest at all in ever supporting the capitalists of the country where they live. In recent years the Arab ruling class has prospered greatly due to massive oil profits, but the Arab workers are still living in some of the most deprived conditions in the world. Arab workers have nothing to gain by the expansion of their masters' powers. In the USA, the alleged land of capitalist prosperity, it was reported in the newspaper of the Longshoremen's Union in March 1986 that government figures state that 22.2 million Americans are now living below the official poverty line and 9.1 million of them are in jobs but cannot afford to make ends meet. So much for the incentive for workers to fight to make their bosses rich.
Who are the real terrorists? Yes, the deluded workers with home-made bombs and the fanatics who fire at innocent crowds are killers, but let them not divert us from the killing which goes on with the blessing of the boss class. According to a report from the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, in 1984 10.4 million workers were injured and 28,500 were killed in accidents at work. (This is based on information from seventy countries). How many of these deaths and injuries were the direct result of capitalists making a profit out of unsafe working conditions for those they exploit? In a recent report from the Health and Safety Executive we are told that over the last three years 400 British building workers have been killed and 30.000 injured, many seriously. According to the report,
It is possible that economic pressures may have resulted in a general lowering in the degree of safety and supervision on site, and in the increase in the practice of undercutting at the expense of safety.
The recession has led capitalists in the construction industry - notoriously, some of the worst employers in Britain - to risk killing their employees for the sake of offering more competitive prices. We have read no report of Thatcher sending the anti-terrorist squad to the building bosses to ensure that justice is done for the 400 men who have died. On the contrary, it has been recent government policy to go in for what is called deregulation in the construction industry - they have cut the number of inspectors employed to check that building sites are conforming to legal safety standards. According to Richard Peto, Reader in Cancer Studies at Oxford University,
. . . there will be a total of about 50.000 asbestos-induced deaths in Britain over the next thirty years . . . 50,000 deaths is a number so enormous that it is difficult to comprehend. For example, it greatly exceeds the number of murders during the same period . .
Those who die from asbestos-caused cancer - and we have plenty of evidence to show that many workers already have - will die for profit: 50,000 sacrifices to the god of profit makes anything planned by the PLO or the IRA look like kids playing with a peashooter. So workers must beware not to be conned into believing that the "baddies" are only those whose violence is not initiated by the capitalist rulers. While we must oppose the senseless killing of WPC Fletcher we remember the workers who have been murdered, injured and abused by the British police; we must oppose the bombers, but never forget the greater violence perpetrated in the name of profit. When 15 million children under five annually die while food is locked away or dumped in the sea the capitalists are in no position to lecture workers about what is evil. Those who have invested millions of pounds, dollars and roubles in the weaponry which could annihilate the entire planet have no right to tell workers that violence is to be deprecated. Those who allowed thousands to die and suffer at Bhopal in India because there was profit to be made for Union Carbide cannot preach about senseless killing. The numerous capitalists who have investments in bloody dictatorships, such as South Africa where over a thousand workers have been killed in the last year for protesting, are hypocrites when they take it on themselves to attack the Libyan regime. The capitalists are the people of violence and tyranny and any words of theirs against certain violence and some tyrannies are worthless and contemptible.
Only socialists can oppose terrorism because only socialists stand in opposition to the system which causes it. There is no other way to destroy the misery caused by organised violence than to abolish its cause.
Let us consider the other choices which have been proposed. There are those who say that we need new, more responsible leaders: Mondale instead of Reagan, Kinnock instead of Thatcher. Do they really believe that Mondale, faced with a perceived threat to US power, would not respond militarily? Does anyone seriously believe that Kinnock, tied to the terms of the military agreement with the USA which allows British bases to be used for American military attacks, would have acted differently from Thatcher? The fact is that these leaders have no option but to dance to the tune of capitalism, for its logic governs them, not they it, Others rather simple-mindedly argue that more faith should be placed in the United Nations, more appropriately known as the Disunited Thieves. The class struggle cannot be fought out around a conference table and the rivalry between capitalist and capitalist will turn violent quite regardless of resolutions passed by diplomats.
Some argue that Britain should turn from alliance with the American Empire to the Russian. The Russian ruling class could never be so callous as to bomb civilians, we are told. But they have killed over 100,000 workers in Afghanistan since they invaded it and one would be naive to imagine that Russian bombs would not carry out a similar raid to the US one if Russian imperial interests are threatened. It has even been suggested that workers in Britain should support Gadaffy because, in the words of the unfailingly foolish Revolutionary Communist Party, any enemy of the British bosses must be supported by the British workers. According to that logic workers in Britain should have supported Mussolini and Hitler - and, indeed, the RCP urged workers to support Galtieri's struggle for the Malvinas in 1982. This sort of pathetic nonsense is what passes as Marxist-Leninism. From other quarters we are urged to return to religious slumber - like born-again Christian Reagan whose interpretation of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" contains an addendum: "unless under instructions from the White House".
Gadafy is a Muslim, a believer in the faith of Islam which is the Arabic word for submission. It is time for workers to reject the posture of submission for it has been the position of the wage-slave class for too long. There are no answers to violence within the system of violence and that is why peace and security depend entirely on the establishment of a worldwide socialist society now. Tomorrow might be one bomb blast too late.
STEVE COLEMAN
2.2 CAPITALISM'S " M. O. “
Every successful bandit must have an "m.o" (from the Latin modus operandi) The late, famed bank robber and prison escape artist, Willie Sutton, explained that he preferred to use some sort of delivery workman's uniform as an "m,o.” when on the job, because workmen's uniforms are-so commonplace that they attract scant attention from passers-by. Capitalism, a glorified slave economy that masquerades under the guise of "freedom" also has an "m.o," or two or more with which to disguise itself. And so effective, in fact, are these false faces that they have proved to be dynamic in hoodwinking the population—especially the working class section of the population—for centuries.
As an illustration: capitalism, as a system of society, presents itself as a loose network of rival business operations based upon the philosophy of "Each man for himself and Devil take the hindmost," a sort of anarchistic scramble, so to speak, for assets and for life itself among the conflicting elements of the population. But something else looms in the background, something that everybody is aware of and yet which has not yet been fully understood to be a mechanism for preserving the system, as a clagg, rather than as a genuinely free society. That something is government. Although purportedly a mechanism that represents the interests of the entire population, what government amounts to, in essence, is a modus operandi—or "m.o." for melding the various conflicting units of the economy into a unified whole as a sort of invisible, single, corporation made up of entities from manufacturing, processing, distributing, servicing, finance, &c sections. The government itself, in its various parts, plays the role of a board of directors for Corporation Uncle Sam, or John Bull, or Ivan Bear, or whatever.
As of these final decades of the 20th Century, there is still no central world authority—even though capitalism is essentially a world economy—although there is the recognition for such an institution in the generally powerless United Nations Organization and its equally powerless predecessor, the League of Nations. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility that future generations, barring a forestalling by a world socialist revolution, may even live under such a universal government. In fact, there exists today a sizable number of advocates of that sort of authority—the World Federalists—the membership of which is surely more numerous than that of the World Socialist Movement as of this time of writing. Unfortunately, establishment of such an authority would nothing toward alleviating the problems inherent to capitalism because the predicaments and quagmires that beset us continually, are endemic to the economics of capitalism and not to the nature or the structure of its assorted types of government. For that reason, and particularly since at this stage of development, the world is rotten-ripe for genuine socialism, the establishment of a single, world government would not by any means constitute a progressive step.
So what, then, can possibly be the benefit of socialists running for political office? Even during the years that such elected).representatives would be in a minority they would be occupying seats in an Institution that is designed to regulate the affairs of capitalism in the interests of local, regional, national and even the international capitalist class. Good question but one that has an obvious answer.
Socialism will be even more of a world system than is capitalism and, as such, will require central administrative bodies to carry on an overall regulation of production, distribution, servicing, etc. for the community. There will be no national boundary lines but the different areas will certainly require differing sorts of attention depending upon such factors as geography, topography, and climate. There is nothing wrong, per se. with congresses and parliaments where representatives meet to parley over and about the problems that must be tackled. The predicament in our times is that such assemblages must, of necessity, represent the interests of the ruling class in a class-divided society.
In the meantime, socialists elected to congress—or whatever the political body is termed—can do not much more than present the case for socialism at every opportunity. Such representatives may vote for a reform measure should such bill be designed to further the interests of the working class and not be attached to another bill that does not— which is what most likely would be the case. But since the socialist representative has been elected by socialist -voters (the World Socialist Movement respectfully declines the support of non-socialists) the constituency could expect nothing different. Socialists understand full well that they would be as helpless to operate capitalism in the interests of the working class as are the capitalist politicians themselves.
The rationale of the World Socialist Movement in seeking to elect its representatives to—and ultimately to capture the political state through majority representation, is that there is no other way that such control can be gained—at least not for advocates of world socialism. There are at least two good reasons why the World Socialist Movement has always opposed the advocacy of violence as a means for attaining socialism. To begin with, for the frist time in all recorded history a revolution will be the work of a vast majority of the population and in the interests of the vast majority—indeed, of all mankind. Support for a society such as socialism is not something that can be rammed down throats at the point of a bayonet or even by mass bombing attacks. There must be widespread understanding of and approval for such concepts as production for use rather than for sale on a market with view to profit; abolition of national boundary lines; right of access to all goods and services by all mankind. A mass movement of working people imbued with ideas of that sort would have no reason to arm themselves with firearms or bombs. In fact, once such a movement really got off the ground—as it really never has, as yet—it would gain in momentum like a snowball rolling down a hill, sweeping all reaction before it into the dustheap of history.
But there is also a practical reason of a different sort, a fact of life in these times that dooms all working class confrontationists to failure, dismemberment and death as a result of violent demonstrations against the armed might of the capitalist state. The proletariat will never be a match for the capitalist class in the ability to possess and use weapons. The only weapon that the working class can possibly win with is a mass determination to end the wages, prices, profits, money system with such determination being made manifest at the polls. By that time, it will be a foregone conclusion that the "virus" of socialism will have "infected" large numbers among the armed forces, composed in the main of members of the working class. The sophisticated weaponry of the capitalist class can be nullified when there occurs a shortage of help to man it!
There are those, to be sure, who put down the World Socialist Movement as "Utopian," That sentiment is predicated on a contempt for the mental powers of the working class and there is precedent for such feeling in the writings of "great men" such as Lenin and Mao tse Tung. They have both maintained that we would have to wait 500 years before a majority of the working class would understand socialism. But changing the meaning of socialism—attaching that designation to state capitalism whsn operated by professed socialists—is all that either of those worthies were able to accomplish and_.there ia ao indication that the working class in any of the purportedly "classless" society nations are any closer to an understanding of socialism than are the workers in the avowedly capitalist nations. It takes more than the displaying of likenesses of Marx and Engels—let alone those of Lenin, Mao, etc,—to spread the understanding of scientific socialism*
But, the vanguardist radicals protest, how do you expect socialist workers in totalitarian countries to elect representatives to their parliaments when opposition parties are not permitted? The problem here is simple. The vanguardist "revolutionists" are taking themselves too serious­ly. There is no indication that socialist? revolution is around the corner.. But there is little doubt that even in the U.S.S.R. political repression is not as pervasise as it once was. With further growth of a "middle" class (higher income working people) Soviet society is bound to become even less restrictive, even to the extent of permitting legal opposition. By and large, Soviet peoples have the same general outlook as the populations of the "free" world and once a significant section of the working class in totalitarian countries begin acquiring a socialist attitude it is certain that the ruling classes will be quick to toss political "bones" to them in an attempt to quiten them. After all, there are benefits to the rulers in bourgeois-style democracy. It is always possible to know the extent and significance of the opposition. In any case, we have seen examples in quite recent times, in the Philippines and in Latin America, of the forcible ouster of dictators through massive—and generally unarmed—action from the working class.
What then shall we do in the meantime?—a question that is of great importance to the vanguardist radicals? Our answer: In the meantime let us concentrate on building a nucleus of convinced, genuine, socialists through organization and education in order to help speed the day when government (over people) will be converted into an administration over things—an "m.o," of world socialism.
Harmo

2.3 WHAT JACK LONDON WROTE US
Below is a letter that Jack London wrote to our party (then known as the Workers' Socialist Party) shortly after it had been formed.
Altho Jack London was a great writer he was not a scientific socialist in the real sense of the term. He was very confused on the questions of war, race, "supermen", etc.
Though not actually understanding the principles he endorsed, he was imbued with a working class viewpoint. In spite of a deep but erroneous sense of pessimism, only a short time before his death he welcomed the formation of the World Socialist Party (then the Workers* Socialist Party) and its Declaration of Principles.
Glen Ellen
Sonoma County, California
September 21, 1916
To: Wm. Davenport, Secretary (Workers' Socialist Party)
Dear Wm. Davenport,
In reply to yours of Aug. 29th, 1916 with which I received copy of the "Manifesto."
Please read my resignation from the Socialist Party and find that I resigned for the same reasons that impel you to form this new party.
I was a member of the old Socialist Labor Party. I gave a quarter of a century of the flower of my life to the revolutionary movement only to find that it was supine under the heel as it was a thousand centuries before Christ was born.
Will the proletariat save itself? If it won't it is unsaveable.
I congratulate you and wish you well on your adventure. I am not bitter. I am only sad in that within itself the proletariat seems to perpetuate the seeds of its proletariat.
JACK LONDON
2.4 LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY
In a society that makes possible the production of wealth in profusion, it is outrageous that the vast majority of mankind is in need. To be born poor is to be cursed.
At an early age you become aware of the indignities perpetrated against you by others, which continue throughout your life because you were born into a working class family. You were told that you were poor because your father was stupid or too shiftless, perhaps, to find a decent job. When he was unemployed you were told that he was a lazy good-for-nothing; or that your mother was a bad manager and that your family should feel ashamed at accepting help from the "welfare state;" and quite often you did feel that shame. You were a pale, undernourished kid who lived in a slum and who wore shabby, threadbare, clothes—hand-me-downs from your older brother.
Your mother had the almost impossible task of handling the family budget, "Tell the rent collector when he calls that your mother is out," and when you told him that "Mother says that she's out," you received a clip on the ear for your trouble, You can recall her frequent visits to the sign of the three balls where she would pawn your grandfather watch, given to him as a reward for his loyalty during fifty years of wage slavery by his "benevolent" employer, how your mother managed to provide food for the family was a miracle, but there were times when you all went hungry. She would have made a brilliant chancellor of the echequer, for you were always tightening your belts.
When you started school you discovered that there were others in the same poverty"stratum as yourself. You chummed up with them and participated in feuds with other boys who, although also living in poverty, were better clothed and nourished than yourself. These were considered by the teachers, perhaps, to be scholarship material. You were all taught to be patriotic, to tell the truth in order that you could become good citizens; and you were assured that if you worked hard and were ambitious, you would "get on in the world." You joined with your schoolmates in singing Land of Hope and Glory, and other patriotic songs—and their parodies—with gusto.
When you were pitched out into the world of commerce to earn a living, however, to your dismay you found that life was a different kettle of fish from that which you had been taught. If you kept your mouth buttoned while on the job it was frequently put down as dumb insolence; if you spoke out against indignities you were branded "a trouble maker," Even though it was true enough that you were still patriotic enough, you had discovered that everybody was lying and cheating, including the politicians who ran the nation, who appeared to be "good guys" when they were members of the Opposition and "bad guys" when they were occupying the seats of power. This was all very difficult to understand and you invariably found that more often than not the harder you worked the less pay you received.
You could see no way out of this dilierama and the insidious, sophisticated propaganda of radio, television and newspapers perpetuated your confusion, so that you gave up and just left everything to the glib-tongued "experts" who knew how to disguise their motives with fancy rhetoric.
You were so brow-beaten that you did not think you were worthy of a full life free from anxiety, although you had begun to recognize that something was wrong with capitalist society,, nevertheless, you still voted for Liberal, Conservative. Labour (or whatever the accepted political; parties called themselves)—all reformists—who represented the interests of the capitalist class, the owners of the means of wealth production. In vain you hoped that you might get a larger slice of the pie by supporting social democratic parties, advocates of what is widely thought of as socialism. But you became sadly disillusioned. After all, wasn't it the British Labour Party that coined the phrase: "The inevitability of gradualism?" Creeping paralysis would have been a better term. There have been times, of course, when social democratic parties have used phraseology generally thought of as "socialistic." But they have had their chance to govern in a number of countries and have all) failed miserably to make so much as a dent in the problems of their working classes—as they were bound to fail. How could it be possible to operate an exploitive society in the interests of the exploited?
The World Socialist Movement has an alternative which we think that you really ought to examine. The words "socialist" and "socialism" have been dragged through the mud by the lackeys of capitalism. Britain, for example, is referred to as being a socialist country when the Labour Party happens to be in powerj Prance is referred to as being socialist un Mitterand (although now, since the most recent election, there seems to be at least some confusion as to whether it is altogether or only partially socialist !); and you are told that Soviet Russia is a socialist (or communist) country. So has it been with Cuba since it threw in its lot in the world of commerce with the USSR rather than the USA. And here, there and everywhere, gun-happy, illiterate, peasants in revolt are called Marxists. It would be a huge joke if it were not so tragic. Even those workers who are paid to make us laugh—the comics—get into the act: "A socialist with a knife and fork would like to meet another socialist with a steak."
So what is socialism and what are our credentials? As defined by the World Socialist Movement, organized in Great Britain, Canada, United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Sweden, and France, socialism is "The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community." This Object and the Declaration of Principles that follow it are printed on all of our literature and is accepted by all of the members. No one can join this Movement without accepting the Object and Declaration of Principles, a fact which should make it self evident that none but socialists can belong to it. This is our strength for every member is a propagandist with the same rights and priviledges as every other member; we have no leaders, only representatives duly elected by the entire membership and responsible to the general membership. Executive (or Administrative) committees are elected by the membership of the individual parties. The conferences and balloting arising from them are the highest "authority" of each organization. There are no secret meetings and the public are welcome to attend all sessions. We practice the highest form of democracy possible within capitalism. Funds are obtained from membership dues, donations, and the sale of literature.

Our propaganda consists of indoor educational talks, debates, and outdoor meetings, where there is always free and frank discussion in which opponents can state their opposition. Understandably, the TV and radio stations are loath to broadcast our views although persistent effort to obtain a hearing through broadcast media have paid off in some parts of the U.S. and Canada. The propaganda forces arrayed against us are formidable but capitalism is, nevertheless, digging its grave. The trick is to keep it from digging yours!
We have been organized since 1904 and have seen mass parties of the so-called left come and go. We want your support now and when we put up candidates at election time, but we insist that firstly you must understand the case for socialism. We refuse to compromise, for we want the thought behind your vote and not just a cross on a slip of paper. We have held mass rallies at election time, sometimes larger than those held by the capitalist political parties but they get sparse reportage in the daily press.
Parliament and Congress are the seats of power; power for socialism, and we predict that one day you will be voting for us in your thousands because capitalism cannot solve your problems. Only a complete change in your ideas and your actions will bring about a revolutionary change in society.
Can you visualize what this will mean? Under socialism there will be a completely different world-wide set-up where all goods and services are commonly owned and democratically controlled in a classless society. The need for buying and selling, wages and profits, becomes completely unnecessary for goods will be produced for use and not for profit. The basis for production will be: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, and the production of goods of the highest quality will be the norm because mankind is entitled to the best. Furthermore, socialism will be a society in which war between nations will be unthinkable—there will be, in fact, no division into nations, iust one World.
No! Socialism will not be a land of hope and glory but a world more conducive to the wellbeing of all. The demise of capitalism will even benefit the erstwhile capitalist class. They will finally be able to live like human beings without the need of keeping the rest of mankind in chains by holding over them the “whiplash” of poverty or of potential poverty, a condition of life which carries with it grave threats of destruction and even premature death. In a sense, they—the capitalists— also have a world to gain although, in all truth, we do not expect them to come over to us in droves.
Sid Catt
2.5 THE BALLOT
You can't possibly do anything with it. Throw it away. It's only a scrap of paper." This is the opinion expressed concerning the ballot by our syndicalist friends.
The ten dollar bill is likewise merely a scrap of paper. You can't do a great deal with it any more. But you don't throw it away. It comes in mighty handy when translated into terms of groceries. Regardless of its shabby nature the shopkeeper seems glad to get it. He understands that there is something important behind it.
When we get a rent receipt, or a marriage certificate we notice that they are just scraps of paper, but we don't throw them very far. They serve the purpose of holding the line until we are able to negotiate better arrangements.
When the quarter-time has expired on the parking meter, and the cop on the motor cycle adorns your windshield with a paper plaster, you don't file it in the sewer. Even if you did the stipulated fine must be settled anyway. There's authority behind the paper.
So with the ballot. In a physical sense it, too, can be classified as a scrap of paper. But, with a thinking electorate of men and women behind it, the weight, of public opinion is sufficient to effect a change from capitalism to socialism. The paper is not the objective. It's the instrument for registering what is in the minds of the voters.
2.6 EQUAL TIME FOR THE CAPITALIST VIEW
With the heating up of the situation in Nicaragua, the bombing of Libya and the flood of Rambo-type films in the theatres, the subject of war is once again in the forefront of topics being discussed.
We of the WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT for over eighty years have put forth our views on the causes of war. We claim that war is nothing but the clashing of economic rivalries over such things as markets, private property issues, trade routes and spheres of influence. Of course, the capitalists of various nations are always quarreling over such things, but once in a while these items cannot be resolved peacefully. When such a time comes, wars begin. We claim that wars are therefore fought for the capitalist class interests and do not, in any way, benefit the working class* Therefore, we oppose all wars during peacetime and wartime. We also claim that the only way to end wars is to end capitalism.
Now that we have presented a brief outline on our position to war, we would like to take this opportunity to give the capitalist class and its supporters a chance to present their views in our journal (something that they almost never grant us in their publications).
1. Rear Admiral French E Chadwick, U.S.N.
“Navies and armies are insurance for capital owned abroad by the leisure class of a nation. It is for them that empires and spheres of influence exist. The great war now waging is a culmination of efforts to maintain and extend these spheres." (NY EVENING POST, Dec. 17, 1915)
2. Lammont duPont
“War is caused by economic and political rivalries," (NY HERALD TRIBUNE, Nov. 19, 1934)
3. NATIONAL HUGHES ALLIANCE DECLARATION, issued in 1916, signed by two ex-Presidents, T. Roosevelt and Wm. Howard Taft and 25 leading bankers and captains of industry.
"Our business is business. We are producers, manufacturers and traders, without sufficient home demands to absorb the full yield of fields and the output of factories. Year by year it becomes more apparent that the markets of the world must be kept open to American industries. We cannot extend our trade further than we are able to defend it. The rivalries that begin in commerce end on the battlefields. The history of war is green with international jealousies. Whatever the diplomatic excuse. every conflict in modern times had its origin in the question of property rights*"
4. INSTITUTIONS MAGAZINE
"This is more than war of mechanical monsters clashing in the night., more than a war of production. It is a war for markets—YOUR markets ! The Axis wants your business—wants to destroy it once and for all." (Quoted from a Treasury Department Ad placed in INSTITUTIONS MAGAZINE, April 1943. Ad was captioned, "The Axis Wants Your Business")
Leaflets for distribution are available from our Boston office. If you are a member or a supporter of the WSP(US), why not order a bundle today? Help to spread socialist ideas, distribute leaflets .

5. Bernard M. Baruch
"Before I go any further in this expression of my views, I think it wise to remind you gentlemen of the fact that wars are not fought merely for immediate results. Each participant makes an effort to impose his will upon his enemies by military and economic destruction. But at the same time he keeps in mind the after results—new markets, new trade and new intercourse, always at the expense of the defeated and neutrals." (Senate Comm., NY TIMES, April 7, 1939)
6. David Lawrence
"It makes one shudder to think what the sudden outbreak of peace might mean to the American economy." (NY SUN, April 5, 1949)
7. George P. Taubeneck
"If you are one of those domestic-minded businessmen who are unimpressed with this view (that prosperity hinges on foriegn trade) ponder for a bit the thinking of a gentleman who ought to know about such things.,.. He is R.W. Gifford, vice-president and assistant general manager of Norge Division, Borg-Warner Corp., and chairman of the board of Borg-Warner International Corp.
He'll tell you in just ten words why he considers foreign trade important to this country: Because "all wars are basically economic" and because "we actually need the business."
(from 'Inside Dope. from AIR CONDITIONING AND REFRIGERATION NEWS, Dec. 9, 1946.)
8. Woodrow Wilson
"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a mairket, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused." (as quoted in THE FORGING of the AMERICAN EMPIRE by S. Lens, 1971)
9. U.S. NAVY
"Realistically, all wars have been for economic reasons. To make them politically palatable, idealogical issues have always been provoked.
Any possible future war will undoubtedly conform to historical precedent.
Present differences with our world neighbors, now in the diplomatic stage, we can hope can be kept there. But after all, war is merely diplomacy by force of arms."
(official document distributed by Office of Naval Intell. to U.S. Senate Comm. on Armed Services-April 15, 1947)
So there you have it. The real causes of war, straight from the capitalist class and its supporters. Remember, the next time we have a war for “making the world safe for democracy” or “to end all wars,” that the real reason is not these ideological phrases, but instead conflicts for the benefit of capitalists and their markets. Let's end wars by ending the system that creates wars. Join the WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY, NOW!
2.7 WEIRDER THAN FICTION
"Citizen Hughes" by Michael Drosnin, published by Bantam, $4.50, is a classic account of power gone mad.
The author deals mostly with the last decade of Hughes life most of which was spent as a recluse in a blacked-out penthouse in Las Vegas. Drosnin's work is detailed, readable and presents a graphic account of an emaciated, meglomaniac, junky using wealth and power to satisfy his personal whims (such as buying a TV station so he could watch whatever program he wanted, when he wanted) and petty malice; and does not, like some writers, lapse into snivelling, moralizing, suggestions about preventing such men using power recklessly. Drosnin does in fact, portray Hughes as very much a product and a symptom of his times.
From his penthouse lair, the crazy billionaire sought increasingly greater power. It wasn't enough to buy one Las Vegas hotel, he bought all Las Vegas - mafia? -small fry. It wasn't enough to buy Vegas, he bought Nevada; but, it still wasn't enough, the greedy bugger, wanted all 50 states.
There was one sure way to go about it, first - buy the president: however, here things didn't exactly go to plan. Poor old L.B.J., holed up in the Whitehouse, afraid to show his face on the street, in case it got shot off, had enough problems - no deal. Nixon took Hughes' money, and with immense gratitude repaid him by testing A Bombs in Nevada and by dumping hundreds of tonnes of nerve gas in the sea off Paradise, Bahamas, while Hughes was involved in negotiations with view to purchasing Paradise.
Dicky boy didn't have the last laugh: it is the author's contention that Watergate was a result of Hughes - Nixon machinations. Larry O'Brien, ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was an employee of Hughes, (how come, is a fascinating story, but I ain't telling you everything here) and as such, might know a heck of a lot about Nixon that he didn't want the whole world knowing. Hence, the screwball burglary aimed at getting info, to'neutralize' O'Brien, and the whole colossal cock-up of a comic opera, called Watergate.
As symptomatic of Capitalism, Hughes is shown as a man of great contradictions. His company manufactured nuclear weapons, but he fought to prevent them being tested, because of his fear of contamination, even to the ludicrous extent of identifying himself with the peace movement.
His fear of contamination was so great that every document handed to him had to be sterilized first, and his aides, who handled it were required to wash their hands several times in a manner prescribed by hin). Yet he never washed, cut his hair, and nails or had the bed sheets changed or washed. His room was never cleaned: there were mountains of dust and used Kleenex everywhere: his hair was lodgings for every flea in Vegas, but boy! gotta watch those germs!
Hughes considered himself anti-establishment, (don't get your eyes checked - you read it correctly), his image of himself was a corporate John Wayne cum Darryl Zanuck - a board room swashbuckler, bucking and swashling all politicians, executives, Capitalists etc., who stood in his way.

Like any Capitalist, he would have liked to have had everything his own way -subservient politicians, a docile working class and no government interference or taxation: and came as close as anyone can to achieving that unblessed state of affairs.
Details are given of which politicians he bought, how much they were paid and how they earned it, by killing or delaying certain bills in senate and congress and which legislation beneficial to Hughes they had forced through, and which illegal takeover deals they had turned a blind eye to.
All books on Hughes will neccessarily have the same broad, general thrust - the power of money. It is clearly shown in this one how political office is bought and how Hubert Humphrey failed to become president because he didn't have the loot. The reader is treated to a tear-jerky scene of poor Huby sitting helpless in a stalled, rented bus, broke, weeping tears of anger and frustration as he hears the private Kennedy jet roar overhead, carrying his well-healed opponent to victory in the West Virginia primary in 1960. Humphrey eventually became a Hughes man because he needed - guess what? He didn't beat Nixon in 1968 because Nixon had a lot more of Hughes money.
How the richest man in America was able to evade paying personal income tax for seventeen years,makes fascinating reading, (no kidding), and that ain't all: Hughes Tool, the holding company for his entire empire, avoided corporate income tax for three years. Like other so-called philanthropists, Ford, Rockerfeller, Carnegie, Hughes discovered a way to get great acclaim from the working class for hoarding his wealth and evading taxes, he created a foundation - The Howard Hughes Medical Institute. When legislation was about to be introduced to tax medical foundations, Hughes paid so much in bribes to ensure they would be exempt, one wonders if it wouldn't be cheaper to pay the damn taxes in the first place.
Drosnin gives several examples of how Hughes would become caught in web of his own making, a typical one being when he tried to corner the market on helicopters during the Viet Nam war. He quoted the U.S. government a ridiculously low price to get their orders, which, not surprisingly, he did. He immediately tripled the price, but when various people from congress and senate started asking, "what's going on here?" Howie baby, just as quickly, went back to his original price and lost $90,000,000 dollars.
One event which is of no profound significance, but does underline the sheer lunacy of Capitalism is when Hughes chief gofer, Bob Mahew, was in Miami, planning with the Mafia and C.I.A. an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro. Mafia boss Sam Giancana, wanted to leave Miami for Los Vegas because he'd heard his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, was having an affair there with comedian Dan Rowan. To keep Giancana in Miami, Mayhew sent a C.I.A. operative to bug Rowan's room. A hotel maid caught the guy, playing with his wires, and called in the F.B.I.
Drosnin sometimes takes his reader along a certain line of thought, but stops short of drawing a conclusion, as if to invite each reader to draw his. Such a case is the killing of Bobby Kennedy: was there a connection with Hughes? One must figure it out for one's self.
Whatever the answer, one thing's for sure, Hughes, his henchmen, political joe-boys and other sundry partners in crime, saw the Kennedys exactly for what they are, (the same thing as most of our folk heroes), glorified hoodlums. It's too bad the working class, as a whole, can't see through them.
In his treatment of people working for him , Hughes was a jerk. He liked to create hostile situations where there was no premise for any and constantly feed his antagonists anger while he put on an innocent, hurt act. Too much space is given to this nonsensical drivel, but if you like listening to little old ladies argue you'll love it.
The author claims that much of his book is in fact, an autobiography because it was culled from Hughes secret papers, which were stolen from his Los Angeles headquarters in June, 1974.
It is the author's contention that either Hughes or his executives acting on their own volition, were responsible for the break-in, possibly because three days previously the Securities and Exchange Commission had subpoenaed all documents relating to Hughes take-over of Air West. Nothing was more threatening to the billionaire since it was one of his more illegal than usual business deals. The Hughes people, unlike Nixon's crowd, enlisted the aid of a guy who was no plumber (and is referred to only as the'pro'), who, on completion of the job swiped the papers for himself and tried to sell them back to Hughes cronies. They tried to find the pro, but lost interest after they S.E.C. did. Our friend the pro, stuck with his papers, bricked them up in a wall for a few years before giving them to Drosnin.
The author, who I assume, is no socialist, (I'm sure the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, who he worked for, as a reporter, don't make a habit of employing socialists), does not draw socialist conclusions, but his epitaph for Hughes is deeper than he could have imagined, "he was an American folk hero, a man who lived first the dream, then the nightmare - in that sense, perhaps the single most representative American of the twentieth century."
Ray Rawlings

Is there work after capitalism?
Under capitalism work is necessarily drudgery; and, though the production of commodities (on which capitalism is based) is not drudgery in itself, even the most gratifyingly direct forms of commodity production—that done by artisans, for example—rest on what is at the very least an emotionally repressive basis. A commodity is made to be exchanged: that is its purpose. Work as a human phenomenon, on the other hand, is carried out solely to satisfy human needs, and because people must work together to accomplish this, work is an inherently collective phenomenon as well.
A human community works to satisfy its needs, and that is what the genes and instincts of human beings are programmed to render gratifying about work. Consequently, we can consider only those labor processes which satisfy this condition as "gratifying." And obviously, the labor required to produce commodities does not satisfy it, since it is labor done not directly for purposes of satisfaction but indirectly, for purposes of exchange. Just because work is organized into complex production processes does not therefore make it "toil." And just because it is simple and psychologically stimulating is not enough to make it gratifying.
When capitalism, late in the period of commodity production, arrives on the scene and revolutionizes the production process from top to bottom, "socializing" it, pushing artisan labor to scattered points on its periphery, work has already been steeping in the brine of drudgery for several millennia. The universalization of wage labor (including its refinement, the professional salary) enforced by capital means the locking of the prison door for the "free laborers", the "working poor," who have been literally whipped, beaten and badgered into the condition of having no longer any commodities to exchange on the market (long since taken over by the capitalist class). All they have left is their ability to do work: and all the work they can find to do centers on profit.
Work done under such unnatural conditions cannot but be unpleasant. The worker has no control over any aspect of it, and industrial production in particular is a brutalizing torture. Not only that, but labor performed for the sake of profit itself becomes capital accumulated out of profit, causing the capital to grow in magnitude relative to the workers whose labor generates it.
The accumulation of capital, for its part, becomes a source of ever greater complexity in the production process, pushing workers further and further away from any ability to control the "world of work" in which they are trapped. To human beings it has every aspect of a process operating independently of human intelligence and defying society's best efforts to control it.
But (as the song goes), is that all there is? Supposing no one works for anyone else anymore and no one is forced to find a job to get the money to obtain the things they need: will society still be stuck with the kind of inhuman labor processes it has inherited from commodity production? The answer is quite simply, no.
The commodity, implying as it does the setting aside of wealth from the consumption needs of the community, contains the germ of discontent in- its very being. Abandoning wage labor means eliminating commodity production: regaining control over wealth production. It also means deciding what kind of organized, coordinated efforts people will be prepared to make for the sake of obtaining satisfaction, and on what scale they will be willing to carry this out. But having done that, they will have created a society that runs on labor processes which are voluntary in nature and in which labor is no longer a chore—a socialist society.

Of Contras, Pros... and Socialists
From the inordinate amount of attention being given to the Reagan Administration's double-dealing in the two affairs of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to the contras, yon would think something really big was happening in US capitalism these days. For Irangate/contragate has become a major media event.
Despite the apparent ferocity of the clashes currently taking place between rival political factions within the capitalist class, from one angle they are actually beneficial to the capitalist class as' a whole: they obscure from view the more basic scandal of the division of the world into political entities or nation-states; they deflect attention from the more insidious ongoing misappropriation constituted by the monopoly of the capitalist class of the means and instruments of wealth production.
Media-generated concern over the poor little Reagan Administration's predicament masks (or perpetuates) the working majority's confused identification of its interests with those of the "top ten" per cent of the population making up the owning class. And—every bit as much as the more flamboyant histrionics of Dallas or of Dynasty— this fondling of the rich and the powerful belies a pernicious cult of personality on the part of the media around the world (and one by no means limited to Russia and China).
The World Socialist Movement, for its part, does not find much of an issue in all of the hoopla. Its one and only reason for existence is to disseminate information relating to the functioning and
foundations of capitalist society as well as to sow the seeds of socialism. The crises that shake our planet and even threaten the viability of life on it do not spring from the actions of conniving, dishonest politicians—though these latter certainly may help to trigger catastrophes.
The real problem is rather the continuation of the system of producing goods and services for sale on the market (ie, commodities) with a view to profit. The real solution is a socialist organiza­tion of society, the introduction of a worldwide society based on production for use.
So while we as socialists may derive some enjoyment from watching the capitalist class being forced to do its dirty laundry on TV (there is after all no reason why its own propaganda can't occasionally degenerate into farce), we ought not to imitate the reformists and ignore the real issue that we never find presented in the media: the urgency of common ownership.
Short of that, all that is really possible is the replacement of one governing party or regime by another. Socialism, or common ownership of the means of production, will on the contrary only come about through the conscious action of the working class around the world, aimed at replacing the entire system of exploitation, and it is only in helping to bring this about that socialists can ever hope to distinguish themselves from both the witting and the unwitting supporters of capitalism.
—Editorial Committee, WSP (US)
A Socialist Lexicon
COMMODITY: Anything produced for sale on the market with a view to profit. It is not itself a thing, but a thing expressing a definite social relationship.
VALUE: A concept of measurement needed in a society based on the production and exchange of commodities. // is a social relationship. (It is a mistake to think that under socialism the worker will get the full value of her/his toil since, in a socialist society, there can be no such concept as value, given that goods and services will not be produced for exchange on a market.)
EXCHANGE VALUE: The proportion in which one commodity is exchanged for another. It is not a synonym for value, given that it refers to tangible items
rather than to a social relation­ship as such.
USE VALUE: Intrinsic utility of an item. Use values exist in all societies. Value and exchange value won't exist under socialism. LABOR POWER: The mental and physical abilities workers possess.
LABOR: The use value that the employers of labor power derive from the exercise of that labor power by the workers. Workers cannot "sell" their labor because it belongs to the capitalist as a consequence of the sale of their labor power (see below). WAGES: The price that employers of labor pay for the workers' labor power. On the average, wages represent the cost of producing and reproducing the various types of labor power (skills or non-skills).
SOCIALLY NECESSARY LABOR TIME: "The labor time required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time." (1)
CAPITAL: Wealth used to produce more wealth with a view to profit through the exploitation of labor. A capitalist is any individual or group of individuals who make their living from the accumulation of capital. "...Capital is the means of production transformed into capital. [But] in themselves, these means of production are as little capital as gold and silver are in themselves money." (2)
7.Marx, Capital, Vol. 1.
8.Capital, Vol. 3, Ch. 44.
From Britain:
No Shmoos Is Good Shmoos
Al Capp, the cartoonist, told a story about a creature called the schmoo, which was ten inches high, something like a pear in shape and creamy-white in color. It had no arms, tiny feet and big whiskers under its nose. The shmoo had only one desire: to serve the needs of human beings, and it was well equipped to do so. Its skin could be made into any kind of fabric, its flesh was edible, its dead body could go brick-hard and be used for building, and its whiskers had more uses than you can imagine. If you looked at a shmoo with hunger in your eye, it dropped dead in rapture because you wanted it, after first cooking itself into your favorite flavor. Since they multiplied rapidly, there were plenty of shmoos for everybody.
But the capitalists hated the shmoos, for the shmoos provided everything people needed; nobody had to work for capitalists anymore, because nobody had to make the wages to buy the things capitalists sold. And so, as the shmoos spread across the face of America, the capitalists began to lose their power. So they took drastic action. They got the government to tell the people that the shmoo was un-American. It was causing chaos, undermining the social order. The President ordered the FBI to gather the shmoos and gun them down. Then things went back to normal. But a country lad, called Li'l Abner, managed to save one female and one male shmoo. He carried them off to a distant valley, where he hoped they'd be safe. "Folks aint yet ready for the shmoo," Li'l Abner sighed. But Li'l Abner was wrong. Folks were ready for the shmoo. It was the capitalists that weren't. The shmoo spoiled their monopoly over the means of existence.
Some capitalists defend their ownership of the resources we need for survival by saying that they got them through their own talent and effort. But everything the capitalist now owns either is or is made of something which once nobody's private property. With what right did anyone transform it into private property in the first place?
Never mind the doubtful origin, capitalists may say. Whatever started capitalism off, the system benefits people, for the following reasons. Capitalist firms survive only if they make money, and they make money only if they prevail in competition against other firms. This means that they have to be efficient. If they produce incompetently, they go under. They have to seize every opportunity to improve their productive facilities and techniques, so that they can produce cheaply enough to make enough money to go on. They don't aim to satisfy people, but they can't get what they are aiming at, which is money, unless they do satisfy people, and better than rival firms do.
Well, improved rpoductivity means more output for every unit of labor, and that means that you can do two different things when productivity goes up. One way of using enhanced productivity is to
reduce work and extend leisure, while producing the same output as before. Alternatively, output may be increased while labor stays the same. Let's grant that more output is a good thing. But it's also true that for most people what they have to do to earn a living isn't a source of joy. Most people's jobs are such that they'd benefit not only from more goods and services but also from shorter hours and longer holidays.
Improved productivity makes possible either more output or less toil, or, or course, a mixture of both. But capitalism is biased in favor of the first option, increased output, since the other, toil reduction, threatens a sacrifice of the profit associated with greater output and sales. When the efficiency of a firm's production improves, it doesn't reduce the working day of its employees and produce the same amount as before. Instead, it makes more of the goods it was already making, or, if that isn't possible, because the demand for what it's selling won't expand, then it lays off part of its workforce and seeks a new line of production in which to invest the money it thereby saves. Eventually, new jobs are created, and output continues to expand, although there's a lot of unemployment and suffering along the way.
Now, the consequence of the increasing output which capitalism favors is increasing consumption. And so we get an endless chase after consumer goods, just because capitalist firms are geared to making money, and not to serving consumption itself.
I'm not knocking consumer goods. Consumer goods are fine. But the trouble with the chase after goods in a capitalist society is that we'll always, most of us, want more goods than we can get, since the capitalist system operates to ensure that people's desire for goods is never satisfied.
Capitalism is supposed to be good at satisfying our needs as consumers. But people have needs which go beyond the need to consume. One of those needs is a person's need to develop and exercise his or her talents. When people's capacities lie unused, they don't enjoy the zest for life which comes when their faculties flourish.
Now, people are able to develop themselves only when they get a good education. But, in a capitalist society, the education is threatened by those who seek to fit education to the narrow demands of the labor market. And some of them think that what's now needed to restore profitability to an ailing British capitalism is a lot of cheap, unskilled labor, and they conclude that education should be restricted so that it will supply that labor.
The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, said in a speech a couple of years ago that we should now think about training people for jobs which are, as he put it, "not so much low-tech as no-tech." What sort of education is
contemplated in that zippy statement? Not one that nourishes the creative powers of young people and brings forth their full capacity. Nigel Lawson thinks it's dangerous to educate the young too much, because then we produce cultivated people who are unsuited to the low-grade jobs the market will offer them. An official at the Department of Education and Science recently said something similar. He said: "We are beginning to create aspirations which society cannot match...When young people...can't find work which meets their abilities and expectations, then we are only creating frustration with...disturbing social consequences. We have to ration...educational opportunities so that society can cope with the output of education...People must be educated once more to know their place."
What we've got here is a policy of deliberately restricting educational provision so that state schools can produce willing sellers of low-grade labor power. It's hard to imagine a more undemo­cratic approach to education. And notice that to prefer a democratic distribution of educational opportunity you don't have to believe that everyone is just as clever as everyone else: Nigel Lawson isn't saying that most people are too dim to benefit from a high level of education. It's precisely because people respond well to education that the problem which worries him arises.
There's a lot of talent in almost every human being, but in most people it remains undeveloped, since they don't have the freedom to develop it. Throughout history only a leisured minority have enjoyed such freedom, on the backs of the toiling majority. Now, though, we have a superb technology which could be used to restrict unwanted labor to a modest place in life. But capitalism doesn't use that technology in a liberating way. It continues to imprison people in unfulfilling work, and it shrinks from providing the enriching education which the technology it has created makes possible.
Is it possible to create a society which goes beyond the unequal treatment that capitalism imposes? Many would say that the idea of such a society is an idle dream. They'd say that there's always been inequality of one kind or another and there always will be. But I think that reading of history is too pessimistic.
There's actually much less inequality now than there was, say, 100 years ago. Then, only a few radicals proposed that everyone should have the vote. Others thought that was a dangerous idea, and most would have considered it to be an unrealistic one. Yet today we have the vote. We are a political democracy. But we're not an economic democracy. We don't share our material resources, and most people in this country would regard that as an unrealistic idea. Yet I think it's an idea whose time will come. Society won't always be divided into those who control its resources and those who have only their own labor to sell. But it'll take a lot of thought to work out the design of a democratic economic order, and it'll take a lot of struggle, against privilege and power, to bring it about. The obstacles to economic democracy are considerable. But just as no one, now, would defend slavery, I believe that a day will come when no one will be able to defend a form of society in which a minority profit from the possession of the majority.
— G. A. Cohen, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University
(G.A. Cohen presented "Against Capitalism," from which the above extracts are taken, in the "Opinions" programs examining capitalism made for Channel 4 by Panoptic Productions.)
Ed. Note: The above article appeared in The Listener (Great Britain) for September 4, 1986. We thought it took an interesting approach to a subject that merits everyone's attention: world socialism. Let us hear any of your comments.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the DeLEONIST KIND
The Discussion Bulletin, published by the Discussion Bulletin Committee in Grand Rapids, Michigan, consists largely of letters and articles contributed by various representatives of DeLeonist groups and others whom the Committee designates as "third force" socialists (those adopting neither a Social- Demo-cratic nor a Leninist outlook).
Despite our long-standing opposition to the DeLeonist analysis, we of the World Socialist Movement are at least encouraged to air our viewpoint in the pages of the Bulletin. The editorial committee of the World Socialist Review feels that the following contribution to DB #21 (adapted as an article for this issue of the Review) deserves a wider audience
for the important information it contains on the history of the Socialist Labor Party of America, as well as for its unambiguously stated views on the subject of DeLeonism. Any reader desiring back issues of the Bulletin can obtain them from the Discussion Bulletin, PO Box 1564, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.

Since the re-making of the Socialist Labor Party's philosophy by Daniel DeLeon and his adherents around 1905, its basic position has been that no "pure and simple" socialist political party can effectuate the Revolution; that there must exist, along with the party, an industrial union organization to back up the ballot with economic force (because the ballot is, after all, "as weak as a woman's tears"—a sentiment attributed to DeLeon) and to organize and carry on the business of the new society.
Just how far from new this SLP-envisioned order would be, however, becomes evident when one notes that the DeLeonists always seemed to regard the parties of Social Democracy as "pure and simple" socialist political parties rather than as pure and simple parties of capitalist reform. As far back as the March 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard*, for example, we find a lengthy editorial-article which examines and dissects an official letter from the SLP of America addressed to "the Affiliated Parties of the International Socialist Bureau." Although the SPGB had never been a member of that organization (the British Labour Party represented it), the SLP had nevertheless taken it on itself to send the SPGB a copy of the letter.
The crux of their argument was that had the "Socialist" parties of Europe paid heed to the DeLeonist message of the need for industrial union organization, Social Democracy would not have found itself in the mess that it did in 1915, with its various
member parties supporting their respective national governments in the slaughter of World War I.
The gist of the SPGB's response
was simple: the SLP of America
did not seem to realize (as
DeLeonists today do not comprehend]
either) that organizing workers
on the basis of individual indus­
tries is really dividing rather
than uniting them; that an economic
organization is, to be sure,
important and even essential but
that it should be based upon
class rather than on sectional -
industrial interests. It ought
to be apparent that when workers in the millions are ripe for socialism, labor union membership will be top-heavy with workers who are socialist-minded.
Not only has the SLP (like the various splinter groups that have broken off from it) shown little ability to distinguish socialist organizations from reformist ones: in January 1917 it even went so far as to attempt the consummation of a merger with the SPA, participating with it in a joint conference in New York City.
At the conference both organizations agreed on the questions
of aim and of reform policies,
but the attempt at unification
failed because the SPA delegates
refused to accept the SLP's
economic program. A Weekly
People editorial for January 13, 1917 claimed that the rock upon which the Unity Conference foun­dered was that of industrial unionism.
But lest this not be regarded as sufficiently conclusive evidence that the SLP advocated (then as now) a conception of socialist
society which was fundamentally no different from that of Social Democracy, let us turn to the SLP's "thinking" on the subject of the Soviet Union. Here again the same self-deception reproduces itself on a political scale: anyone having a minimal acquaintance with SLP history after 1917 knows that even prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, DeLeonism showed a disregard for the need to concentrate on class consciousness as the crucial factor in a socialist revolution (as opposed to sectional recognition for the existing divisions of wage labor).
On the question of "vanguards" and class consciousness, for instance: during the period of World War II the SLP berated Stalin for "betraying" the Revolution. This kind of language makes no sense from a socialist perspective- -unless it were true that (1) the SLP regarded the Bolshevik Revolution as a genuinely socialist upheaval and (2) it really believed that a socialist revolution could be brought about without a majority of class-conscious workers in the population understanding and approving the basics of socialism. Does this not imply that the SLP and its splinter groups are themselves to all intents and purposes believers in "vanguardism"—the same as the Bolsheviks? It is difficult to think otherwise.
Or concerning the nature of
Soviet society: though some
DeLeonists seem to have come to
the awareness that something is
definitely rotten in the state of
the Soviet Union, they seem
equally bent on compounding their
previous error. Rather than decide that it is long past high time to start calling a spade a spade, they instead tend to regard that land as an example of DeLeon's "industrial feudalism."
The problem they evade is that certain important, basic features serve to define a society—features such as the predominant social relationships among the members of the population, for instance. In the USSR the preponderant relationships are those of wage labor and' capital; from which the only intelligent conclusion one can draw is that the USSR is capitalist. It is as incongruous to label the form of society found in the USSR "industrial feudalism" as it would be to call it "capitalist socialism."
But apart from such abuses of language, whatever we might predict for the way in which socialist society will organize production, one thing is certain: once there is a solid majority of class-conscious socialists in the population and this has become manifest to the capitalist class, the era of class societies will come to an end in short order. We can assume that those workers who up until that moment have operated the industries will continue to do so—but it will be in the interests of the entire population rather than for the benefit of private or corporate owners (which includes state capitalist bureaucrats). Even the need for labor unions (of any variety or designation) will vanish.
If Marx's materialist conception of history makes sense, it should follow that the only really worthwhile task for socialists today is to make more socialists (and good ones at that); it is certainly not to turn out prescriptions for what in the end are really just idealized versions of already existing social formations.
—Harmo
(*) Journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB).
WHAT UNEMPLOYMENT MEANS
Is massive unemployment here to stay? Many workers think so. They point to the closures of shipyards, steelworks and scores of factories as big corporations pack up their bags and head for places where low-paid labor forces hide behind every tree. There appears to be no letup in the round of layoffs and sackings that turn whole cities into colonies of the jobless, much less that these places of work will come back to life again in the future. This pessimism is supported and rationalized by some journalists, politicians and economists in newspapers and on television.
It has happened before
Socialists have long memories. We can remember the 1950s and 1960s when the "experts" assured us that unemployment was finished forever because governments had learned how to control it. Mcst workers believed them. They were wrong, and we told them so at the time. They are equally wrong now. Massive unemployment will not last forever—although it may last a very long time, as it did in the 1930s.
And those who say that things are different now because of the microchip are wrong too. Automation of jobs does not in itself cause long-term unemployment. The effect is to shift workers from one area of employment to another. Fewer are needed to do the purely manual and routinely bureaucratic tasks increasingly carried out by the new machines, but more are needed to design, construct, program and maintain them. The rate of unemployment has been much higher than now at times when labor-saving machines were far fewer—notably in the Great Depression of the 30s.
What is employment?
It is impossible to understand unemployment properly without understanding employment itself.
Employment (a "job") is, in fact, a buying and selling relationship, in which one human being sells his or her ability to work to another human being for a day, a week or a month. Like all buying and selling, the sale of working abilities is generally governed by "the market." The seller (the worker) tries to get the highest price (wage or salary) that he or she can, while the buyer (the employer) tries to pay as little as possible.
The great majority of men and women in the industrialized nations of the world can only make a living by trying to sell their mental or physical skills and energy. They have no option but to put themselves on the labor market for most of their lives, because they have nothing else to sell.
Who or what employs us?
In this respect, our lives are very different from the lives of that small proportion of the population who own enough wealth to live off their investments. But investments are not some magical trick which "makes your money." Investments (that is, capital) buy the brain or muscle power of the workers. The big investors, therefore—in private industry or state bonds--are the ultimate employers. It is to them that workers try to sell their intelligence, punctuality and willingness to work hard.
So there is a direct relationship of buyer to seller. What one gains the other loses. But for workers it is their livelihood —sometimes their life--that is at stake.
The owners of wealth only invest if there is a good prospect of making an acceptable profit, but factories and machines and materials do not produce anything by themselves--certainly not a profit. It is only workers who produce, and transport, and maintain machinery, and sell goods, and manage other workers--and produce all profit.
The profit scramble
Prospects for profit, however, are affected by an enormous range of factors throughout the world, and the market is constantly adjusting prices to balance these. Capitalists shift their wealth around the world (or their stockbrokers do it for them), seeking the highest rate of profit at an acceptable risk. As more and more profits are made and re-invested as new capital, production expands, building up into a boom. At such times, more workers are employed than at any other time, more and more goods and services are offered for sale on the market, and yet more capital tries to share in the profits of the boom—and then the whole frenzied mass of investments collapses in crisis and slump, as such a spiral must do.
This trade cycle, as it is called, operates throughout the world now, including the "Eastern Bloc" nations. It has occurred periodically through the whole history of the present economic system, increasing in scale as the world market has expanded. Governments are powerless to control it, and so are agencies like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund. Slumps are not only inevitable— they are necessary, for . capitalism. They restore profitability— eventually.
What can be done?
Many politicians (particularly among the Democrats) push what they euphemistically describe as a "full employment policy." This is dishonest. The record shows that no matter who is in office, the business cycle keeps right on going. In an effort to save face, some economists and politi­cians claim to have discovered "structural unemployment"—which is virtually an admission that unemployment is not subject to government fiat. The hard fact is that there is no cure for unemployment as long as the system of employment lasts.
The best that workers can do, by being active in their unions, is to prevent themselves being played off against one another by employers and to resist the downward pressure on wages and conditions that employers and governments exert particularly ruthlessly in slumps. But this is limited in scope, and it is no comfort those who are thrown on the scrap-heap. When the labor market is a "buyer's market" and supply exceeds demand, workers who are trying to sell their skills are in a weak position.
Working-class strength
And yet the working class as a whole has enormous strength. It is workers—high and low paid, "white collar" and "blue collar" who produce al! the goods, who build and distribute and administer everything in society. It is workers who staff the armed forces and police forces all over the world. It is workers who teach children what to think and believe about society. And, of course, it workers who vote overwhelmingly at elections to keep handing over the wealth they produce to the capitalist class, to maintain nations and weapons and wars, to hang on to the system of employment—and unemployment.
We can end unemployment
We workers who have formed the World Socialist Party and its overseas companion parties urge our fellow workers to give careful consideration to our analysis of modern society. Whether you are working your way through unemployment benefits or "earning," whether you are paid $500 a month or $50,000 a year the facts are the same. We reject the explanations of the paid experts. We reject the nostrums of the left as much as the quack formulas of the right and the vote-getting placebos of the "middle-of-the-roaders." We do not call on workers to march or demonstrate for jobs. It is futile. We do not promise to lead workers out
of their problems. That is a con trick.
What we do say is that workers
can solve the problem of unemployment—by understanding it and by
organizing themselves as a class
which has overwhelming strength.
Our analysis makes it clear that
the system of employment is now
obsolete. It not only causes
waste and misery: it stands as
an obstacle to technological
progress. The working class has
the power to consign the employment
system to the scrap-heap of
history—without shedding a drop
of blood. It has the power to
-run the productive forces of
society to meet the needs of
everyone. To produce solely for
use--not for sale and profit.

Reflections on Socialism
Technology. Private Property and Revolution
The idea of a wageless, classless, moneyless society is ultramodern; in fact it may come of age simply because technology is making it more and more difficult to possess anything. Each time an entrepreneur figures out a way to "own" a product and sell it for profit, someone else figures out a way to take it for less. Satellite dishes beam in broadcasts that are meant to be sold and show them for nothing; a $400.00 computer program can be copied and distributed without paying the fee; books are easily pirated and sold sometimes for a fraction of the publisher's cost; virtually every product in the market can be, and sooner or later is, stolen, copied and counterfeited on so vast a scale that the government can no longer enforce ownership and copyright laws, and the only effective recourse of private companies is to try and maintain their ownership by more and more sophisticated technology: scrambling devices, counterfeit detectors, etc. As this race continues, the absurdity and futility of institutionalized possession becomes more and more evident.
Socialists argue that Socialism, by which they mean production of goods and services for direct distribution without the impediments of ownership and money, can only occur when a majority of people act politically to make it happen. They will not do so unless this idea makes sense to them; unless it seems practical and workable, the only common sense solution to the crisis now wracking this planet of ours.
The problem is that enough people don't yet see it that way: but the need for Socialism is so obviously urgent the insight can't be very far from the surface.
-- Stephen Butterfield

Read our literature. Discuss with us. We understand what is happening—and so will you. Work with us to unify the working class so that it can take control of the future—sooner—and end unemployment for good.

OBJECT
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common control of the means and instruments for production by and in the interests of the whole community.
DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES
The World Socialist Party of the United States holds:
1. That society as at present constituted it based upon the ownership of means of living (i.e., lands, factories, railways, etc.), by the capitalist or master class, and the consoquent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itsolf as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess,
3. That this antagonism can ba abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of tha master class by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of tha nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the power of government, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of plutocratic privilege.
7. That as political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8. THE WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labor or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon all members of the working class of this country to support these principles to the end that a termination may be brought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labor, and that poverty may give piece to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.

Let Them Eat Glasnost
Everyone knows the old joke about Russia's top-down brand of state capitalism: capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism is the opposite. In fact, of course, there are no socialist republics (socialism not being compatible with government), nor are any of the Soviet Union's republics examples of socialism (which requires a classless, moneyless society functioning on a worldwide basis), nor are there even any Soviets (councils acting as the workers' democratically elected delegates) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What's in the name, then? An immense majority who go to the market everyday to sell their only commodity— their ability to do work—to a small minority who....roll up their shirtsleeves and plunge into the "work" of supervising and directing the country's capital inWestments so as to make them yield a profit (someone' s got to do it, after all!).
And now that the USSR's workers, women and men alike, have glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of "openness," they will presumably become happier and more productive and, not least, more accessible to multinational penetration. For even the spectre of communism has at last been incorporated into the marketplace!
Common Ownership
It is no academic exercise to point out that the word "communism" means only common ownership of the means of producing wealth: the right to decide on the use of the mechanisms by which society recreates and reproduces itself. The state is designed, on the contrary, to enforce the will of a minority against the wishes of the majority (in modern times, perversely enough, through the use of "majority rule"). As "open" as the CPSU and its politburo may now be projecting themselves, all the glasnost in the world (though there isn't that much of it floating around anyhow) will not make them communists.
Are We "Commies"?
As communists (socialists) ourselves, our policy has often been confused with theirs. During the second world war, when the Allied Powers calculated it was to their advantage to court Russia's ersatz ruling elite, a great deal of treacle and syrup poured forth from the US government about the heroic Soviet Union, led by that epic working-class genius, Joseph Stalin.
If you were too young during the days of world war II, or not yet born, there are books and articles readily available dealing with the cooperation and friendship between the bolshevik-style Communists on the one hand, and the professed champions of "democratic" capitalism on the other. (For starters, try The Pocket Book of the War, Quincy Howe, Ed., Pocket Books, Inc., New York, 1941.)
However, when the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain were wining, dining and dealing with Stalin in the Kremlin, the World Socialist Party and its Companion Parties in other countries were openly opposing the war as a carnage not worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood. When the secret police of the Soviet Union and the secret police of the United States (the forerunner of the present CIA) were acting in unison, we were speaking out and writing articles attacking the war.
When the Communist Party was recruiting for the war effort, selling Victory Bonds, waving the flag and singing the national anthem of America, as well as that of Russia, we of the World Socialist Party were speaking from the rostrum on Boston Common as our comrades in England spoke in Hyde Park; continuing to urge our fellow workers to organize for the abolition of capitalism everywhere—the basic cause of war.
Are They Communists?
Thus, we are not Communists in the popularly accepted meaning of that much-maligned word. We do not support or sympathize with Russian or Chinese or Cuban or any other state capitalism. We are communists, though, in the classical meaning of the term. We are scientific socialists who advocate the complete and immediate abolition of the buying and selling system in all its forms around the world and the immediate introduction of a system of production for use.
If the workers of the Soviet Union want an "opening" that is socially authentic, they would do well to press for the immediate elimination of the system that keeps them exploited in more or less the same way as it does everywhere else. Perhaps glasnost will inadvertently give them some space in which to think about organizing for a real socialist revolution.

To socialists it has long been apparent that the overthrow of the Kerensky regime in 1917 was not even remotely related to socialism. Accounting for the Bolshevik Revolution which overthrew it, however is greatly complicated on account of the Leninists' avowed Marxism. As a matter of fact, even the anti-Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP/Menshevik) and their comrades of the official socialist and labor parties around the world recognized them as Marxist even while disapproving of their methods—especially their scrapping of parliamentarism for a one-party dictatorship.
But the question of whether classical Marxism really lay at the foundations of the Bolsheviks' various programs (beginning from the time of their November revolution by our calendar) should have been given first priority at the outset. The Bolsheviks and their sympathizers in fact
represented only a small part of the population in 1917, and it makes for very questionable Materialism to assert, as they did, that on the one hand the working class worldwide is a revolutionary class and then to attempt on the other to "lead" a revolution in which that same class admittedly forms no more than a minority within Russian society.
A Peasant-Based Economy
The fact is that the Russian working class in 1917 represented less than ten per cent of the population, the Russian system being mainly a peasant-based, agrarian economy burdened with holdovers from feudalism. The classical impetus to early capitalism in the West—brutal, outright dispossession of the peasantry from their means of livelihood by evicting them from their smallholdings—was still missing in the Russia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Russian serfs even had to wait until 1861 before being officially "emancipated.")
The whiplash of poverty and destitution that drives workers into the factories (after first expelling them from the land, making them an available pool of "free labor power") was not nearly as pervasive as it had been in Britain and Western Europe. Poor as the Russian peasants were, it was not an absolute case of having to work for wages or starve to death in a hurry. Landed estates continued to be a major element of the Russian economy right up until 1917, with peasant laborers beholden, generally, to absentee landlords.
Moreover, even when it comes to the articulation of class interests, the most popular of the radical political parties among the peasantry was not the Bolsheviks—a party rooted nominally in the Marxist tradition of a wage-worker/ proletarian-based revolution—but the Socialist Revolutionaries: a non Marxist, populist-style party with at least some orientation toward individual terrorism; and there were others, some traditionally "right-wing" and centrist parties angling for the peasant vote as well.
lor does the resistance offered the Bolsheviks everywhere in the cities outside Petrograd indicate they were overwhelmingly popular among the workers. But Petrograd fell with hardly a shot being fired, and Petrograd, as the caital of Russia, provided the sinews of war with which the new (Bolshevik) regime could operate.
Kerensky's Fall
The toppling of the Kerensky-led Provisional Government in Petrograd the night of November 6-7 and its sequel are interesting in themselves for the light they shed on Bolshevik theory. The sequence of events went something like this:
The Bolshevik (majority) wing of the RSDLP had won the support of the majority within the Petrograd soviet, which (as was the case with other city Soviets) had an arsenal of weapons at its disposal—a fact which in itself gives an idea of the extent of the powerlessness of the central government, or duma. Bearing in mind that the Russia of 1917 was extremely backward in its communications and transport facilities—a condition that made it all but impossible for a national government to get rapid assistance from other centers,—we can see how the capture of the Petrograd Soviet's support proved to be the Leninists' coup de maitre. For they were able to issue arms to their sympathizers and to re-occupy the offices of their newspapers, which had been seized by Government troops. They were also able to gain control of bridges and main
thoroughfares, railway stations, the State Bank and the central Post Office. Kerensky found himself deserted and had to escape from the capital to seek support elsewhere.
By 10 AM, the Revolutionary Military Committee had announced the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The population was assured of the immediate proposal of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers' control over production and the creation of a Soviet government.'
During that night of November 7th, the Bolshevik forces took over the Winter Palace, which was the seat of the Provisional Government and arrested most of the remaining ministers in the Kerensky government. The Bolshevik consummation of Russia's capitalist revolution was accomplished with a death toll of some twenty persons and a handful of wounded.
That statistic, however, pertains only to the actual transfer of political power and would almost seem to indicate a lack of organized opposition to the Bolsheviks. But the situation was quite different during the days and weeks to follow. In Moscow and a number of other
cities and towns where the Leninists proceeded to take power, they met with varying degrees of opposition from the respective populations. But the acid test of just how popular the Bolsheviks were among the Russian masses was made with the occasion of the Constituent Assembly elections, which circumstances had more or less forced them to guarantee. Election Results
The Provisional Government had been unenthusiastic about calling these elections but had finally set the date, after a number of postponements, for lovember 25th; and the Bolsheviks permitted them to take place as scheduled. They were not pleased with the results. Of a total of approximately 41,700,000 votes cast, the Bolsheviks polled only 9,800,000 (23.5%); the Cadets (a right-wing party) 2 million (4.8%); and the Mensheviks or minority faction within the RSDLP, which by now were acting more or less as an independent party, got 1,360,000—3.3% of the vote. The Socialist Revolutionaries, on the other hand—including both Russian and Ukrainian—polled a large plurality (41%) of 17.1 million votes. By the numbers alone, It was their revolution.
When the Assembly met, there were (out of a total of 703 deputies), 380 regular Socialist Revolutionaries, 39 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, 168 Bolsheviks, 18 Kensheviks, 17 Cadets, four Popular Socialists and 77 minority representatives. This was clear evidence that the Bolshevik November Revolution was no majority revolution but only another example of a minority organization (and a faction at that) being in the right place at the right time to seize power.2 Lenin called upon his loyal sailors from the Fortress of Kronstadt in Petrograd Harbor to disperse the first session declaring that "the workers have voted with their feet!"3 And so the Misnamed Dictatorship of the Proletariat was born.
Why is it misnamed? The precedent cited by Lenin and retained forever after in Bolshevik mythology was the Paris Commune of 1871, which Frederick Engels had declared to be "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.". But it must be pointed out that the Commune was a

multi-party government with Marxists in fact a small minority, compared with Proudhonian anarchists and followers of Auguste Blanqui—the latter certainly no Marxist but an advocate of the very type of minority revolution that the Bolsheviks did pull off almost a half-century later. Unlike the Bolsheviks, however, Blanqui accepted the situation and participated in the short-lived revolutionary government along with his Proudhonian and other opponents.
So the Revolution itself was certainly not an example of a Marxist revolution (one
made by a socialist—class-conscious—working class) on the understanding of Marx and Engels. As far back as 1848, when both were young men, they had seen the proletarian-socialist revolution as having to be the work of the vast majority in the interests of the vast majority.e Such a concept is in hamony with their Materialist Conception of History. Each social order, according to this theory, creates its own "gravediggers," the class that oust organize to overthrow it. Socialism would in that case have to be instituted by a working-class majority, conscious of its place in history. There was no such animal, for Engels and Marx, as a "revolutionary vanguard. "
Russia's Capitalist Revolution
Despite the edited Marxism of the Bolsheviks and all the protestations to the contrary by capitalism's mass media and educational establishments, the Bolshevik Revolution could not have been more than the completion of Russia's capitalist revolution begun the previous March. The bourgeoisie of Russia were entirely too insignificant in numbers to bring to fruition the transformation of a peasant-based economy into one bearing the hallmarks of wage labor and capital as its dominant relationships.
What was therefore needed in Russia to accomplish such a goal was an economy controlled and in fact owned by the state: state capitalism. And that was what was instituted, with varying degrees of intensity, from the earliest period of "War Communism," when the Bolsheviks had to fight off invading armies and white Russian forces on some 21 different fronts; through Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), when outside capital and capitalists were encouraged to inWest and build in "Communist" Russia; and on to Stalin's collectivization of agriculture and the Five Year Plans for industry.
What ensued, over the decades, was a series of periods marked by mass liquidation and exiling of "Kulak" (capitalist-minded) peasants, purges of political oppositionists, slave-labor "gulags," and so on. But always in the background—and this is the essential hallmark of capitalism—the Bolsheviks set about assiduously developing and extending the exploitation of a growing working class via the perfecting of the relations of wage labor and capital.
Thus assured of an expanding pool of captive labor power, the emerging state bureaucracy that encrusted itself around the perquisites of office began to assume, in increasing measure, the more traditional role of a national bourgeoisie, even if it did refuse itself the designation of such.
—Barmo
4.See the Selected Works of V.I. Lenin. Vol. VI, "The Second All- Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers. and Soldiers' Deputies" (Mew York: International Publishers), p 399, for the text of this declaration.
5.The reader will also note that the percentage of seats in the Constituent Assembly shifts in favor of the Socialist Revolutionaries (to 54.1 per cent of the deputies, as against their plurality of only 41 per cent of the popular vote)
6.Referring, apparently, to the mass desertion of Russian troops from the Eastern Front during the
first world war, the seizure of land by peasants and the obvious massive rejection of the Provisional government.
7.See the Preface to The Civil War in France by Karl Marx.
8.See the Communist Manifesto. Section II, "Proletarians and Communists," where they speak of the proletariat using its political supremacy to "wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie" and of "the revolution by the working class." Later, Marx revised himself in favor of "abolishing the wages system" altogether—an act which would make it obviously unnecessary to propose "wresting capital from the bourgeoisie," i.e., transferring it to the state and then abolishing private property.

YOU SAID IT
Our Masters' Voice
WHAT MAKES BUSINESSMEN SO SMART?
"A US slowdown would deal a crushing blow to economic prospects for the heavily indebted developing world," thinks the author of a special report in Business Week 11/9/871, speaking of the recent stock market crash. And even worse,
A new round of Latin American recessions would hurt the struggling democratic regimes in Brazil and Argentina. And economic setbacks could trigger a fresh outflow of capital from the region.
Forgotten, of course, is the period when exactly the same thing was said about the struggling "moderately authoritarian" regimes in the same countries. Dictatorships are actually quite useful for maintaining workers in a state of abject submission to their exploited condition. What bothers the capitalist class is something much less human than that:
low, unless stock prices turn back
up, the evaporation of nearly $1
trillion in shareholder wealth could
contract spending by about 445 billion over a couple of quarters or so
[Business week, 11/2/87]
And what is so bad about that? you might
ask. Citicorp Chairman John S. Seed, in
an interview in the same issue, gives us
the big picture—
I was assuming three per cent economic growth, and now I'm assuming 0.5 per cent. You can't take that much out of the economy [sic] without an impact.
If you're wondering by this time where you as an "average person" fit into all of this high-level shop talk, the answer is, you don't; the economy will keep on going with or without you. Gary S. Becker coolly informs us that
The Commerce Dept. estimates nonhuman wealth [sic] at about $13 trillion. Thus a $1 trillion fall in the value of stocks reduces this wealth by less than eight per cent— and total wealth by less than two per cent. [11/9/87]
Well, after all,...who but the politicians ever told you it was your system?
THE BUSINESS OF RUSSIA IS BUSINESS
It shouldn't have taken anyone 70 years to spot the error in asserting Lenin was a communist; but Mikhail Gorbachev wants to make sure that everybody understands the Soviet Union is a mainstay of the international capitalist system. what, he asks us,
is the world going to be like when it reaches our revolution's centenary? what is socialism going to be like? what degree of maturity will have been attained by the world community of states and peoples? [Boston Globe, 11/9/87]
The chief spokesman for a whole class of inWestors of capital might well ponder this question of "maturity." Since a joint-venture law to attract capital from inWestors in other countries was decreed last January [Business Week, 11/9/87], the capitalist class of the Soviet Union has received 250 joint-venture proposals from interested parties. But
the Soviets are moving carefully because they want to ensure that the first ventures make money.
The trick is how to find a modus vivendi which will allow foreign inWestors to retire their profits without creating a hard-currency problem for the Soviet economy. Although "the Soviets have proved more flexible" than Western companies represent them as being, and while the joint-venture law represents a "skillful device for neutralizing the hard-currency problem" (in one instance), the Vanguard of the Proletariat still needs some coaching:
Sometimes US companies have had to stop and give lectures on profit and loss and balance sheets. The Soviets have been soaking this stuff up like sponges. [Quoting Sarah Carey; Business Week, 11/9/87]
But the road to the "new world, the world of communism" (as Gorbachev terms it) also seems unfortunately to be littered with Just wars:
In exchange for helping Ethiopa crush rebellions in Eritrea and successfully counter Somalia's attempts to "liberate" Ethiopia's Ogaden province in the late 1970s,

the Soviets reportedly demanded and received part of Ethiopia's coffee production, the impoverished conn-try's principal foreign exchange earner, t Forbes, 11/2/87]
To be sure, wheeling and dealing in the world's narkets does also have its shameful parts:
of their position? Just a slip of the tongue, says economist Liu Guoguang in a recent article, "Socialism is not Egalitarianismn; for "the policy of equalizing incomes contradicts the basic tenets of Marxism." [The Christian Science Monitor, 11/18/87]
He is quoted as stating that

The heavy drinking in the Soviet Union simply means that the satisfactions and opportunities available to the Soviet working classes today are comparable to those available to the heavy-drinking English working classes at the time of the Poor Laws. [Mattonal Review, 11/6/87]
forking classes? What working classes? [t is "not easy," Gorbachev assures us Boston Globe. 11/9/871, to ensure "a possibility for continuous progress." So untie "the Soviets" wine and dine international competitors and sign arms deals on the backs of starving children, the "road to communism" as trodden in Russia just gets longer and longer.
.... the upper and middle classes with higher cash incomes and access to specialized supplies enjoy both subsidized food from the state and expensive food from the city markets; the lower classes do not have access to special supplies and can not afford market prices. And so it goes for public health care, public education, etc. [ National Review. 11/6/87]
without a doubt, as Gorbachev says, they "shall never turn off that road."
WRONG BOARD, RIGHT CHAIRMAN!
If there can be socialism in (only) one country, why can't there be socialism in (only) twenty or thirty? All the working 3lass has to do is get used to waiting. Another waiting-room was added not long ago by the successor Gang to the Gang of Four in China—
Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese Communist Party leader and prime minister, has told delegates to the 13th Party Congress In Beijing that the stock and bond markets recently revived in China are not incompatible with Marxist principles. [Boston Globe. 11/9/871
There are, it appears, a lot of other things which are also "not incompatible"
with them: did Chairman Mao tell us everyone would net the same pay regardless
The slogan of equality attracted thousands upon thousands of people to the struggle for socialism as equal distribution of income and confused socialism with egalitarian-ism.
The same Liu also advocates allowing "i people to become wealthy first as part of the goal of common prosperity" and believes that
China should tolerate aspects of capitalism [sic] 'so long as they benefit the growth of the socialist forces of production and do not impinge on the primacy of public ownership. '
Wherever the Leninist parties have come to power, the result has always been the same. They maintain capitalist institutions on the justification that ultimately this will result in the "emancipation of the working class." The goal of the Chinese Communist Party is not (and never will be) to accomplish this "ultimate" goal as its next step.
using the language of Marxism as a justification for this (however much they blunder through the exercise) has become second nature to these old pro's. All the CCP seeks to do is make China "a modern socialist power, prosperous, democratic and highly cultured," in Zhao Ziyang's words. [Le Monde, 10/27/87]
But it is absolute twaddle to speak of
"reforming” a revolution, given that the
term "revolution" itself implies only the
laying of a basis for subsequent changes
which had long been necessary anyhow:
which is precisely the sort of revolution
embodied in the term "common ownership"
(a.k.a. communism). The "nine-years' reform" of Deng Xiaoping is no mare than a
reordering of the China's state-capitalist
agenda. The advantage of the reform (that
it "can attract more people as it gives
them more chances to engage in the State's
management" [China Daily. 10/30/87] is an
advantage only to the accumulating minor
ity which lives off the backs of the wage-
earning majority.
—Ron Elbert
..
IS RUSSIA A NEW CLASS SYSTEM?
For years the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP) had a rather unclear, ambiguous attitude towards Russia. In the 20s and 30s they gave the impression that they thought it was some sort of "proletarian" regime, but from the time of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact onwards it was denounced as "Soviet Despotism" and "Industrial Feudalism." Only in the 1970s was the need felt to embrace an overall theory as to the nature of Russian society.
Given that the SLP had always correctly rejected the view that Russia was socialist, they were faced with three choices: to say that Russia was some sort of deformed "proletarian regime" (as they had tended to do in the 20s and 30s and as the Trotskyists still do); to say it was a form of capitalism (i.e., state capitalism) ; or to say it was a new type of exploitative class society.
An SLP pamphlet, The Mature of Soviet Society, based on a series of articles that had appeared in the Weekly People in 1977 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Russian revolution, discusses these three theories in a fairly abjective way before coming down in favor of the third, that Russia is "a new form of class-divided society... fundamentally different from capitalism."
Since we in the World Socialist movement have always held that what exists in Soviet Russia is a form of capitalism, we welcome the opportunity to reply to objections raised in the SLP pamphlet to our view.
Preliminary Comments
Before doing so, some observations are in order. It is true, first of all, that some state capitalist
theories are quite inadequate for explaining their subject: for example, the Maoist view that Russia suddenly became state capitalist when Stalin died in 1953. More, secondly, is it sufficient to point to the existence of exploitation, class privilege and the state in Soviet Russia and the West to draw the conclusion that the USSR has the same system as in the West, even if this is based on the fact of government rather than private ownership. For these could also be the features of some hypothetical new class society, which is precisely the point at issue: is Russia a new exploiting society, or is it a form of capitalism? If we are to demonstrate that Russia is (state) capitalist we must show, in the pamphlet's words, that its "economic laws of motion" are the same as those operating under capitalism.
The Nature of Soviet Society mentions three aspects of the Soviet economic system which it sees as being incompatible with capitalism:
(1) "The regulating motive in a Soviet enter-
frise is not production or sale with a view to maximum profit for the enterprise, or maximum return on inWestment, but production according to the specifications ox a bureaucratic plan."
(2) "...all basic decisions. ..are made in a
centralized fashion by a
mammoth state apparatus.
These decisions do not
reflect the logic of a
capitalist market—that
is, they do not primarily reflect the workings
of the law of value—but
the interests and whims
of bureaucratic allocation. "
(3) "...the absence of
classic periodic crises
is powerful evidence
that the USSR is not a
capitalist system or a
variation of the mode of
production described by
Individual enterprises in Russia, it is true, are not autonomous, profit-maximizing units in the Western sense. Even though they are engaged in production for sale (i.e., in commodity production), they do not necessarily seek "the maximum profit for the enterprise" but rather to produce

"according to the specifications of a bureaucratic plan." But, as we shall now see, this plan seeks to maximize profits for the Russian economy as a whole.
We deny the validity of the second objection, in other words, and assert that, on the contrary, in Russia "all basic economic decisions...do...primarily reflect the workings of the law of value." Talking about "the interests and whims of bureaucratic allocation" gives the impression that somehow the ruling class in Russia ("the bureaucracy") has a completely free hand when it comes to making economic decisions and is not subject to pressures acting on it with the force of what Marx called "external, coercive laws." It suggests that in Russia there exists a system of production for use, but one only accessible to the ruling class, such as existed (for instance) under feudalism and other precapitalist societies.
If this were the case, then goods and services would take the form of simple use-values. But a basic feature of the Soviet economy is that nearly all goods—producer goods as well as consumer goods—are produced for sale, as commodities, and therefore have an exchange-value in addition to their use-value. It is just not true, as the SLP pamphlet claims, that "market relations" have been
"suppressed" in Russia by "a bureaucratic plan." This rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of "planning" there: what the Plan tries to do is precisely to coordinate market relations between enterprises, to organize and orient commodity production. In other words, it does not abolish the market and production for sale at all but merely attempts (and none too successfully, by all accounts) to control and direct the process.
It is not simply commodity production that exists in Russia. Since labor-power too is a commodity there, wage-labor exists, and, as Marx put it in a well-known passage from Wage Labor and Capital,
capital presupposes wage labor; wage labor presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally evoke each other.
In other words, wage labor, under conditions of generalized commodity production, produces a surplus value which is re-invested as capital in the exploitation of wage labor. This too exists in Russia, and it is such surplus value that the ruling class there is obliged to seek to maximize as the price of staying in the competitive rat race (economic and military) with the other states in the capital 1st world system.
So the Russian ruling class does not have a free hand in economic matters but is obliged to seek to maximize the amount of surplus value extracted from the wage-working class under its control. Interestingly enough, a 1985 SLP leaflet, "Socialism versus Soviet Despotism," does make the same argument:
The Soviet economy, like the capitalist system,
is based on wage labor, which is to say, on the exploitation of wage labor. ..Every Soviet factory, every Soviet mine, every Soviet mill is expected to show a profit. This profit must come from the wealth Soviet workers create over and above their wages—just as the profits of General Motors and Westing-house and IBS come from the surplus value produced by their respective wage slaves. And, just as GM, Westinghouse and IBM strive constantly to increase that share of the workers' production that is appropriated as profits, so, in the Soviet Union, the bureaucratic exploiters of the workers put the pressure on factory managers to turn the screws on the workers.
Bureaucratic Greed?
If this is the case (and it is), then we should ask ourselves whether this occurs just to satisfy the "whim" or the greed of the "bureaucratic exploiters"— or whether it is an expression of the economic laws of motion of the Soviet economy, of which the bureaucrats are but the agents, the same as the capitalist owners in the West with their stocks and bonds.
To maximize the surplus value extracted from the working class—which, we emphasize, is not a whim, but an economic necessity for the Soviet ruling class—
these latter must first have some measure of value and surplus value, which can only be money ("the universal crystallization of exchange value," as the pamphlet rightly calls it). Surplus value in monetary form is profit, so it is the monetary calculation of the rates of profit in the various sectors of industry which provides the Russian ruling class with the information it must have to make its key economic decisions: those concerning capital inWestment.
Profit-Seeking Enterprises
In the private form of capitalism that exists In the west, the spontaneous movement of capital to the more profitable sectors decides where new InWestment will go; the decision is mads through the spontaneous operation of the law of value. But since, as we saw, individual enterprises in Russia are not autonomous profit-seeking units like the private (and state) capitalist firms of the West, this task of allocating new capital to the more profitable sectors falls, in the Soviet economy, to the state.
The state planners are obliged, in short, to try to reproduce bureaucratically the same result that the spontaneous operation of market forces brings about in the Vast, which is another way of saying that they are obliged to try to apply the law of value consciously. This does not rule out, any more than it doss in the West, subsidizing certain politically or strategically important industries, nor seeking a longer-term rather than an immediate short-term profit.
Thus, the Russian economy is just as much governed by
the law of value and the pursuit of maximum profit (even if this is at national rather than at enterprise level) as are the western economies. It too can therefore be properly described as capitalist, but—taking account of the form of ownership and the much more active role of the state—we can qualify this further by calling it state capitalist. It must not however be forgotten that, in the end, there is only a single world capitalist economy of which both the private capitalism of the West and the state capitalism of the Bast are merely parts. Russian state capitalism is not a separate economic system existing on its own.
Capitalism, then, is alive and well in the Soviet Union. It only remains to add that the case against seeing Russia as a new exploiting class system is based not on the theoretical impossibility of such a system coming into being (even though this is unlikely, given the integrated nature of the world economy today), but on the empirical evidence of how the Soviet economy operates in practice, in terms of its own laws of motion.
—Adam Buick
Tribute to Rab (1893-1986)
Last New Year's Eve I. Rab, a founding member of the World Socialist Party, died. The following is a tribute offered in his memory.
While still attending high school in Boston, Rab was the youngest secretary of the Socialist Party of America (Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas) and considered himself quite well grounded in Marxism. In 1916, as a young man enrolled at Ohio northern, he went to Detroit in search of a summer job, fully intending to resume his studies in the Pall. He found employment at the River Rouge Ford plant and also contacted the SP of A. There he met his wife for 63 years, Ella Riebe, whose father had been an organizer for the SP of A in the Montana-Wyoming-Colorado region.
He heard about two Englishmen who were conducting socialist classes. The "Brits" were Moses Barritz and Adolph Cohn of the
Socialist Party of Great Britain who chose to sit out the war in the USA. After his first encounter with Baritz's eye-opening mockery of his reformist position and Cohn's scholarly analysis on the same theme, Rab was never the same again. He knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. So much for the SP of A! So much for college! He would stay in Detroit.
Rab was a quick learner and, encouraged by Cohn and Baritz, despite World War I, organized on-the-job classes using SPGB pamphlets as text in the factory yard during lunch hour. He was warned by his supervisor many times, but he ignored the consequences. His defiance finally resulted not only in his dismissal but in his being blacklisted. By this time he and Ella had two little children, and there was nothing to do but move back home to Boston.
Somewhere around this time, a few scattered comrades in New York and Detroit along with Rab in Boston organized the Socialist Education Society, which eventually evolved into the

Workers' Socialist Party and finally the World Socialist Party. Alone in Boston, Rab spoke on street corners and attracted enough people to start classes, first in his home and then in rented rooms, empty storefronts and finally meeting halls. Be was a colorful speaker and a superb teacher, so much so that by the mid-twenties a viable group had been organized.
In 1928 he became the director of a sizeable boy's athletic club called "The Vagabonds." Be knew little about baseball but his talks on science, philosophy and current events (from which he always extracted a socialist message) soon had the boys reading Party literature and listening to selected university professors whom Sab had been able to persuade to address the Club in their specializations. At least half the group eventually joined the WSP.
The depression of the thirties provided fertile soil for socialist propaganda, and the Party grew in numbers and spirit. There was much enthusiasm and a youthful mingling of social and socialist activity. A new and busy Party headquarters became a center of many interests. Rab's house became a home away from hone to comrades and prospects
alike. The open-house atnosphere was graciously presided over by Ella, whose children had by then grown up sufficiently for her to become active in the Party. She was secretary of Boston Local during the most dynamic years.
Then came World War II. The Party, even under war-time conditions, managed to carry on successfully. Regular forums, debates, economic classes and discussions, as well as the publication of the Western Socialist were steadily maintained. Of course, during this period, Rab was not alone; there were many members eager to write, speak and even clean up headquarters after a meeting or a social event. It was possible to embark on an extended organizing tour of the Detroit-Chicago area which was instrumental in re-establishing the Detroit Local. Those were probably the happiest and most rewarding years of Rab's life.
After the war, the social climate becane less favorable to spreading socialist ideas. Returning servicemen were forced to reorganize their lives under new circumstances and perspectives, altered hopes and fears. With the cold war anti-red sentiment and the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era, the Party suffered along with every other group that deviated fron the 100 per cent flag-waving jingoism of the period. The WSP continued to hold its own for many years, but it had clearly lost its momentum of earlier days.
It is pleasant to recall that Rab found optimism and encouragement even when
things appeared adverse. One such special occasion was his visit (with George Gloss of Boston) to Great Britain during the early fifties: he brought back unending anecdotes and accounts of the trip. He met people he had known only through correspondence or the Standard, or by reputation. He attended meetings in London, Manchester and Glasgow, speaking at branch and propaganda meetings; he
was thrilled by the size, quality and support of the general membership. The entire experience was one of the highlights of his life.
He had begun his quest for a sane society before the days of radio; yet he realized that modern tines called for modern measures in the use of the mass media. To his credit, he even appeared on the Party's TV broadcasts in the sixties. Rab was disdainful of the concept of "leaders" and "great nen," implying as this does that an understanding of the forces which drive capitalist society was not required. He liked to use the initials ACDSPIE (A Clear, Definite, Socialist Position Is Essential) as a gimmick in lectures and a closing in correspondence.
It is sad to lose him. He symbolizes an era in which one man's voice did not seem so insignificant as today. Although Rab would protest, there is no doubt that the scope of his intellect, the example of his humanity, his expertise as a teacher and his charismatic magnetism combined in a unique personality that inspired people to think... and thinking people to act. Would that there were more "ordinary" nen of his ilk.
NEWS FROM THE NEW WORLD
Imagine no possessions.... MAKE FOOD, NOT MONEY
A system of society where everybody has free access to whatever they want obviously can only work if there is plenty of everything to go around in the first place.
When socialists point out that this is possible right now, a lot of people express serious doubts about its feasibility. This is understandable, given that we live in a form of society— capitalism—where most of us don't have what we want, and where it seems that the things we want are so expensive they must be in short supply; people quite naturally assume that the good things of life really are scarce. Socialism in a world of scarcity would certainly be an impossible dream, and anyone who thought otherwise might well expect to have her sanity questioned.
In fact, however, the only reason so many of the things we want and need for our happiness are scarce is that they are produced for sale at a profit rather than to satisfy wants and needs. It's the price tag on things
that keeps them inaccessible. It's not that we can't produce enough of everything to go around. It's that we don't, because then nobody would be making enough of a profit to make production worthwhile.
A good example is food. It's a fairly well-known fact that many people in this country are hungry. But it is important to realize that people don't go hungry because the food supply is inadequate: there is plenty of food. People go hungry because they can. t get the money to buy it with (in spite of food stamps).
Let's not just talk about hunger in the United States. There are many people who still believe that, on a world scale, the planet can not produce enough foodstuffs to feed all the people in the world. But this belief (which dates back to Malthus) is quite groundless.
A direct-mail brochure circulated recently by Werner Brhard to promote The Hunger Project. cites some impressive statistics:
In the past ten years, we have come to recognize that a virtual miracle has taken place on our planet. Despite the fact that the world's population has nearly doubled in the past 30

years, the world's food supply now more than equals the need for food.
Today, for the first time, ' enough food is produced on this planet to adequately feed every nan, woman and child. In fact, the worldwide level of food production is already sufficient to feed the entire projected population in the year 2000—one billion more people. Even with the expected rise in population beyond the year 2000, projected growth in food production predicts the world will continue to have the ability to feed itself on a sustainable basis.
In addition to the world's food supply having been raised to the level where it more than equals the world's food needs, the statistical evidence and other solid examples of success clearly demonstrate that ending hunger is no longer Merely a diean. Hunger and starvation can, in fact, be ended by the turn of the century.
Socialists agree: for a long time now we have been saying there is a potential abundance of food (and of everything else we need) on the planet.
But the only way to end world hunger for good and all is to make food freely available to people by Instituting the common right of access to it—along with access to all the rest of the world's wealth. As long as goods and services have price tags, some people will not be able to get what they need. (Which is the whole point of price tags—to limit access.)
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole.
goal of ending world hunger. But socialism is certainly possible by the turn of the century. All we have to do is make it happen!
—Karla Ellenbogen
(.> From a brochure announcing "the largest global satellite teleconference in history," to take place on November 14th in 19 countries.
WORLD SOCIALIST REVIEW/12
1988 Elections Profit and Pragmatism

Now that we are well into the pre-election period, all of the aspiring candidates for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination are busy trying out their recruitment-poster tactics on us, in the usual effort to persuade us that they can make the system work (provided we have lowered enough expectations, of course).
What are our "choices"?
DUKAKIS offers farmers the option of diversifying their crops instead of flooding the markets with a relatively reduced range of products and pushes in tandem a "socialized" healthcare scheae (for Massachusetts). GORE proclaims the need for maintaining a strong "defense posture" (otherwise known as "sending signals to the defense industry"), to defend the US's farflung interests against the spectre of coaannisa (i.e., against workers and peasants fighting for their lives with their hacks to the wall). JACKSON emphasizes the importance of economic and social justice as he prepares to continue jet-setting around the world embracing leftist politicians and causes.
BABBIT lives up to his literary namesake, proposing the adoption of government policies which will help to keep business successful and productive; which apparently is an urgent precondition for getting the rest of us that way. SIMM rambles on about education and social issues, as though only some of the issues are social, or, for that aatter, issues. GEPHARDT, along with Gore, advocates continued high military spending but with an emphasis on conventional rather than nuclear weaponry. (This will ensure longer and bloodier wars, which are obviously better than short, apocalyptic, radioactive ones!)
Differences Without Distinction
Sounding more like automaker. competing far customers than candidates grabbing for votes, they advertise their infinitesiaally different approaches to dealing with the issues of the day (housing, taxation, jobs, drugs, etc.). Slick-sounding buzzwords like "partnership" (and more ponderous ones like "infrastructure") trundle through their speeches like inscrut-
able robots.
On the face of it, "pragmatism" seems to be their only shred of a program. As an "approach," it has historically enjoyed a better reception among voters in the OS for enunciating a program than its rival philosophy known as "ideology" although bath are in their essence closely intertwined attitudes. For each represents, in its own way, a virtue eminently suited to the marketplace.
Capitalist production, in its spread around the globe, has made pragmatists of the most diverse kinds of politicians throughout the world's nation-states. But this is very far froa saying that a pragaatic approach epitomizes good judgement or "common sense" in a politician. Any pragmatic political course is one way or another founded on some ideological thesis, if only because all forms of action require a theoretical orientation. Yet not one of the present Democratic Party candidates has ever evidenced any awareness of the connection.
Perhaps this is only because the mass media have increasingly trivialized the discussion of issues and
ideas. But there is another side to the question with which even Democratic politicians should be familiar. Economists call it "effective demand," and, while all of the candidates know about it, not one of them suspects
there might be something wrong with it. It is that old basic rule of capitalist production, that comnodities cannot move from producer to consumer unless a profit is realized in the process; for the wellbeing of the economy
is otherwise in jeopardy.
This is pragmatism of sorts—if we can accept the basic assumption on which present-day society is founded, that profit must be realized to maintain a healthy economy; and provided we can accept a notion of "economic health" according to which people are allowed to drink milk only if they can afford to pay for it—or it will even be produced only if agribusiness can cover its costs.
It doesn't take any close examination of the various procedures being bandied about by this latest team of make-believe surgeons to reveal they are without exception based on the above ideological premise: that human society cannot exist without the selling—and-buying connection. Or that "working for a living"—producing more wealth than that corresponding to one's wages or salaries and benefits, for the enjoyment of a nonwork ing elite (the accumulators of capital) represents just a fact of nature.
All the "can-do" hype now being pushed on the voters by the Democratic candidates is really based on the same dreary old capitalist myth. Unfortunately for their solutions, all based on "working within the system"—i.e. retaining production for profit—they are not, from a human vantage point, very pragmatic.
—Mike Phillips
From the Western Socialist:
Exploitation does not mean simply that the workers do not receive the full produce of their labor; a considerable part must always be spent an the production apparatus and for unproductive though necessary departments of society. Exploitation consists la that others, forming another class, dispose of the produce and its distribution; that they decide what part shall be assigned to the workers as wages, what part they retain for themselves and for other purposes. Under public ownership this belongs to the regulation of the process of production, which is the function of the bureaucracy. Thus in Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class. In Western countries we know only of public ownership (in some branches) of the capitalist State.
—"Public Ownership and
Common Ownership"
(Anton Pannekoek,
November 1947)
A Revolution Still to be Made
Editor's Note: The following text is taken fron a letter issued at the close of a speaking tour of the United States last Spring by two comrades from Europe: Steve Coleman of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), and Richard Montague of the World Socialist Party of Ireland. It was written jointly for distribution to the general public, and we reproduce a section of it here because of Its relevance to the cause of world socialism.
It is with great pleasure that we can report the success of our recent North American speaking tour, organized by the World Socialist Party of the United States. Activities ranged from debates against defenders of capitalism (in one of which an economics professor ran out of the hall rather than answer our case) to public meetings (some informal, others in large halls with audiences of over 100—all well received) to radio interviews (such as the Fred Fiske Show in Washington, DC, one of the most prestigious programs of its kind on which we were kept on for two hours rather than the one originally planned and succeeded in tearing Fiske's apologies for capitalism to threads).
We are under no illusion that the tour was the beginning of a socialist revolution or that the many people who gave us a polite hearing all agreed with us. What the tour did show—and it demonstrated this emphatically—was that there is a wide body of people in north America who are receptive to genuine socialist ideas (as opposed to the Leninist defense of Russian state capitalism or left-wing reformism). Those of us who are part of that wide body have a duty to build upon what exists, expanding the world socialist movement into a known political force in this country.
Our Present Situation
The World Socialist Party of the United States is currently a very small political organization and we do not pretend for one monent that we have all the answers concerning the way to transform society from the insanity of capitalism to the socialist alternative embodied in our object and principles. We do claim that the case for socialism is simple, logical and in urgent need of dissemination throughout the world.
What are the problems we face?
Firstly, the bosses own and control the Institutions of education (indoctrination), the media and the big, well-funded political parties of capitalism.
Secondly, the concept of socialism has been systematically distorted over the past century, both by those who have a vested interest in opposing it and those who claim to be defending it.
Thirdly, many workers have been driven to cynicism by the history of capitalist politics and want nothing to do with any "isms" or political organization.
Fourthly. America is a vast country and the tyranny of distance makes it much harder for those of us who are not rich to organize than for our bosses who possess the technology of mass communication.
Barriers to a Socialist Movement
There is no point in ignoring these obstacles to the growth of a socialist movement In this country. neither should the problems lead us to defeatism. History is the story of humankind overcoming its problems and, without exaggeration, if we are to survive at all it will only be by overcoming the mighty barriers before us and developing a World Socialist Party which can defeat capitalism.
It is instructive at this point to consider the position of our fellow socialists in Ireland, who are mainly based In Belfast: five years ago there were only two of them in the WSP there, fighting a lonely struggle against bigotry and violence. Today they are a party to be reckoned with —probably the most visible party in Belfast—with their own office, a printing press, a regular journal which is selling very well and a growing membership.
So what can be done?
We need a commitment from as many people as possible to join, or at least support, the WSP in its forth American efforts. We do not want support from those who do not adhere to our principles, for only on the basis of common understanding can we be a movement of equality, without leaders or led.
Above all, we need activity of a conscious kind so that we can build this movement on the basis of the strength of principled socialist knowledge.
—Aaron Feldman (WSP-US)
Steve Coleman
Richard Montague

OBJECT
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common control of the means and instruments for production by and in the interests of the whole community.
DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES
The World Socialist Party of the United States holds:
1. That society as at present constituted it based upon the ownership of means of living (i.e., lands, factories, railways, etc.), by the capitalist or master class, and the consoquent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itsolf as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess,
3. That this antagonism can ba abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of tha master class by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of tha nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the power of government, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of plutocratic privilege.
7. That as political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8. THE WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labor or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon all members of the working class of this country to support these principles to the end that a termination may be brought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labor, and that poverty may give piece to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.

Socialism: The Basics
Capitalism is the social system which now exists in all countries of the world. Under this system, the means of production and distribution (land, factories, offices, transport, media, etc.> are monopolized by a minority, the capitalist class. All wealth is produced by us, the majority working class, who sell our mental and physical energies to the capitalists in return for a price called a wage or salary. The object of wealth production is to create goods and services which can be sold on the market at a profit. lot only do the capitalists live off the profits they obtain from exploiting the working class, but, as a class, they go on accumulating wealth extracted from each generation of workers.
Profits Before Needs
With its constant drive to serve profit before need, capitalism throws up an endless stream of problems:
Host workers in the United States feel insecure about their future; the proportion of people living below the official poverty line was 13.6 per cent in 1986.
Even though rooms go empty for lack of (paying) tenants, many people are homeless or inhabit slums.
Though science has made it possible to live longer, old people are lonely, undernourished, routinely abused, neglected and denied adequate medical care.
Food is destroyed and farmers are subsidized not to produce more, yet many millions here and abroad are malnourished or starve outright.
Hospitalization costs skyrocket as a result of investments in expensive new facilities: yet it is not "economically viable" to provide decent health treatment for all.
♦ Homosexuals and racial or ethnic
groups are singled out for social and eco
nomic discrimination and outbursts of bigo
try. Women have to defend the right merely
to be exploited equally.
♦ Better and faster ways to fight more
destructive wars have placed the world on a
permanent war footing.
As long as capitalism exists, profits will come before needs. Some reforms are welcomed by some workers, but no reform can abolish the fundamental contradiction between profit and need which is built into the system. Ho matter whether promises to make capitalism work in the interests of the workers are made sincerely or out of opportunism, they are bound to fail, for they amount to offering to run the slaughterhouse in the interests of the beef.
Why not nationalize industry? That would simply mean workers were exploited by the stiile acting on behalf of the whole capitalist class rather than by an individual capitalist or company. Workers in a nationalized Genera1 Motors would be no less the servants of profit than they are now, when a supposedly "private" board of directors makes all the big decisions. nationalization is state capitalism—it is not socialism.
The socalled socialist countries are
likewise systems where a thoroughgoing nationalization has been put into effect. In Russia and its empire, in China, Cuba, Albania, Yugoslavia and the other countries which call themselves socialist, social power is monopolized by privileged Party bureaucrats. All the essential features of capitalism are still present. An examination of international commerce shows that the makebelieve socialist states are part of the world capitalist market and cannot detach themselves from the requirements of profit.
In fact, socialism does not exist anywhere—yet. When it is established, it must be an a worldwide basis, as an alternative to the outdated system of world capitalism.
In a socialist society:
The earth's inhabitants as a whole will exercise common ownership and democratic control of the earth's resources. Mo minority class will be in a position to dictate to the majority that production must be geared to prof it.. There will be no owners: everything will belong to everyone.
Production will be solely for use, not for sale. Everyone will have automatic free access to goods and services. The only questions society will need to ask about wealth production will be: what do people require and can their needs be met? These questions will be answered on the basis of the resources available to meet them. Unlike under the present social arrangements, modern technology and communications will be usable to their fullest extent, and society will actually be able for the first time to calculate the requirements of production and consumption as a function of the ecosystem.
On an individual scale, nothing short of the best will be available: a society based on production for use will end the cycle of poverty and waste because its first priority will be the fullest possible satisfaction of needs. People will be able to observe without difficulty the basic socialist principle—to give according to their abilities and take according to their selfdefined needs. They will work on a basis of voluntary cooperation, having abolished the coercion of wage and salary work. They will not have to engage in buying or selling, since money will not be necessary in a society of common ownership and free access.
Without national currencies to sustain them, national boundaries will become unenforceable, and national budgets will become
quaint mysteries to future generations. For he first time ever the people of the world will have common possession of the planet earth.
Human Nature...or Human Behavior?
Human behavior is not fixed but is determined by the kind of society people are conditioned to live in. The capitalist jungle produces vicious, competitive, shortsighted ways of thinking and acting. But we humans are able to adapt our behavior and there is no reason why our rational desire for

comfort and human welfare should not allow us to cooperate. Even under capitalism people often obtain Pleasure from doing a good urn for others, and few of us enjoy participating in the "civilized" warfare of the daily ratrace anyway.
Many workers know something is wrong and want to change society. Some join reform groups in the hope that capitalism can be patched up, but such efforts are futile, because you can not run a system of class exploitation in the interests of the exploited majority. People who fear a nuclear war may join the luclear Freeze movement, for instance, but as long as nation states exist, economic rivalry will always be driving governments down the road to war.
lany sincere people get caught up in dedicated campaigns and good causes, but only one solution exists to the problems of capitalism, and that is to get rid of it as a system by replacing it with socialism. But to do that requires socialists, and winning workers to the cause of socialism requires knowledge, principles and an enthusiasm for change. Anyone can develop these qualities—but they are essential for anyone who is serious about changing society.
Changing the World
The World Socialist Party, as an educational influence on the working class, stands apart from all other political parties, whether Left, Right or "Other." It has no other aim than to establish a social order based on the satisfaction of human need instead of on private (or state) profit. The Object and Declaration of Princi
&les found on page 12 date ack to 1904 and were originally adopted here in the US about the time of the first world war. They have been maintained without compromise ever since. In other countries companion parties and groups exist to promote the same object and principles, and they too remain
independent from all other political parties.
An authentic socialist party has no leaders. Ours is a democratic organization controlled by its members. We understand that only a conscious majority of workers can establish socialism. Workers must 1iberate themselves. They cannot be liberated by leaders, parties or gurus acting for them. Socialism will never become a reality through the actions of a dedicated minority "smashing the state," as certain leftists would have it. lor do the activities of paid, professional politicians have anything to do with socialism—as we now know from the experience of numerous (successful) national liberation movements.
Getting out of capitalism means getting it out of our heads first. Once a majority of the working class understand and want socialism, they will take the necessary step of consciously organizing for the democratic conquest of political power. This does not mean administering capitalism on a plea of eventually implementing socialist principles (as in Russia). It does mean using the state to immediately set about dismantling the basic institutions of capitalism: wages, prices and profits.
Capitalism in the 1980s remains a system of waste, deprivation and demoralizing insecurity. You owe it to yourself to find out about the one movement that stands for the alternative to it: world socialism. 0
Potless, U.S.A.
THE DRIVE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE to radio station WANU takes about 20 minutes and passes from the mansion provided as the
residential residence of a retired millionaire Bmovie actor through some of the worst slums I have ever seen. It is hard to believe that human beings inhabit some of the squalid dwellings of downtown Washington DC. There are not supposed to be poor people in America; it said nothing about then in the brochure. This is the land of the affluent workers, isn't it? Richard Montague from Belfast, a city notorious for its slum areas, sighed, "low, this is what I call a ghetto," he said. "Worse than the slums we have at home." 80 per cent of the papulation of the DS capital city are black workers, mainly employed in the lowwage service industries, mainly housed in the kind of rotten conditions which the tourists do not go to see.
Sitting in the radio studio was Fred Fiske, presenter of Washington's most prestigious phonein program. A man given to talking a lot about "the genius of American capitalism" ; a bully with a reputation tor putting callers straight—a bigot with a microphone. For two hours Montague and I debated the case for world socialism, repeatedly confronting the confusion and distortion of our host's capitalist tunnelvision intellect. It was a good two hours: the man who was going to put us reds in our place was put in his place. At the end of the show, as we were leaving, the news came an: four people dead, 15 injured after a tenement building in the South Bronx of Mew York collapsed. Ah, the genius of American capitalism.
On the road from Washington to Charlottesville, Virginia are dozens of caravans [trailer homes]. Holiday homes for American workers seeking a break in the countryside? Mot at all. These were the homes of families too poor to live anywhere but in rundown vans on the side of the road. As the recession hits the USA harder and unemployment rises in the cities, this is the fate of many an American worker.
Slums In America? Homeless in America? Can this be possible in the land of the free? Mot according to Professor Bomhofen, an economist whom I had the pleasure of debating against in Michigan on the question, "Capitalism vs. Socialism.” In stating the case against capitalism I referred to workers too poor to afford shelter: 100,000 officially homeless in Britain and who knows how many more in the USA? With all of the eloquence and erudition which one would expect from a highsalaried apologist for the profit system,
Bornhofen responded, "That's a lot of crap. Why, I doubt if there are more than 1,000 homeless people in America." Well, if ignorance is bliss, Professor Bornhofen should have been one of the happiest men in Michigan that day.
No homeless workers in America—1,000 at the most? Let us turn to the rich oil state of Texas. According to figures published by the Mational Coalition for the
Homeless, there are 25,000 homeless people in Houston alone. The city devotes not a single dollar of taxes to building houses or providing for the homeless; the state of Texas is second only to Mississippi at the bottom of the League table for state provision of social services. One newspaper reports the situation in the following terms:
"In the chapel of downtown Houston's Star of Hope Mission sits a Saturday night congregation that is a cross section of the city's hardcore homeless. Tired old men are here in mixandmatch clothing from
the mission closet. While the physically disabled set their sights on lower bunks, the mentally disabled engage in long conversations with no one in particular. Here, too, are groups of lean young men only a few days out of the Texas Department of Corrections maximum security facility...A few men in their 30s—new to the streets and ill at ease—talk to no one. All need a meal and a place to sleep.... The mission director reads from his list of randomly ordered numbers, and those remaining show their numbered bedtickets and file out towards the 500bed dorm. It's a place to sleep until breakfast call at 4:30 AM. In the huge converted warehouse the roof leaks and itvs cold. Every man sleeps fully dressed. All of this, three meals and a bunk— offered by what is arguably the most generous men's shelter in the state—is provided without the expenditure of a single tax dollar. In Texas the homeless live off the kindness of strangers, not taxpayers." (In These Times, 4/8/87)
Homeless in Dallas
In Dallas, the city known in this country [Britain! from the TV soap opera in which everyone is either rich or very rich, there are 15,000 homeless people out of a population of one million. According to John Fullenwlnder, the Dallas chairperson of the Mational Coalition for the Homeless, there were just under 43,000 forcedentry evictions in Dallas last year: a rate of 16b each working day. And that is just in two cities in one of the 51 states.

All of the other obscenities of workingclass poverty exist in the illusory land of the free. Even the socalled affluent American workers are now caught in the trap of unemployment. The Department of Education has reported that 51 per cent of high school graduates not entering university are without a fulltime job three years after graduation. Among 1824 yearolds the Census Bureau has recorded a 50 per cent increase of those living in official poverty in the five years between 1979 and 1984. lot only are the poor becoming poorer but young workers who had been regarded as economically secure are moving ever more rapidly into the ranks of the officially poor.
Poverty in the USA breeds
its own problems, not least of which is racism. when workers are being squeezed extrahard so that the rich can get richer they soon turn on one another. Violence against American blacks has been on the increase; at the beginning of this year a gang of racists beat up three black men in the white suburb of lew York called Howard Beach—one of the victims was murdered. In one area of Hew Orleans a sheriff has become a popular racist hero for threatening to arrest any blacks caught walking or riding through the white folks' town over which he presides. ("A New Racism," The Nation 1/10/87) In the USA one per cent of the population own 40 per cent of all marketable wealth. That is 20 per cent more than they owned 20
years ago. In short, the superrich are owning and controlling more and more and more. What they possess the overwhelming majority of Americans are excluded from possessing. The power of the capitalist minority is at the expense of the freedom of the wealthproducing majority to own and control the wealth which surrounds them. That is what capitalist freedom means—they own; we don't—they are few, we are many—they have privilege, we work like horses producing profits to feed that privilege. That is the freedom offered by "the land of the free."
Steve Coleman (Reprinted from the Socialist Standard)

Fighting over Money in Nicaragua
Taken by Itself, sandinismo is hardly more radical I:han any program of minimum demands as it might be advanced by a SocialDemocratic party. But what makes it seem progressive is its present head on confrontation with the United States. While OS capitalists could live with the prospect of a declining share in the expanding Latin American markets (which they have been a major force in promoting), they are not about to give away any free capital to their emerging competitors.
It is also true that Sandinista capitalism rests on the new regime's support for the right of workers to organize in trade unions and cooperatives, and on its sympathy with demands for higher wages and better working conditions. The small and medium sectors of the licaraguan capitalist class reluctantly accepted the need for swallowing such a bitter pill as a price for replacing Somoza as the president of their Executive Committee. (How they have to make do with Daniel Ortega.> Somoza's dictatorship was keyed to maintaining workers at belowsubsistence levels so that licaraguan capital could competitively "insert" its coffee, cotton and other exports into the structure of international trade dominated by the United States.
The Sandinista Difference
The new Nicaraguan capital ism seeks to boost itself as an independent competitor in the world markets—spurred, it is true, by the multtnat ional i nspired contrarrevoluci6n. It cannot convin
cingly do so on the same
grounds as those of its preecessor, since this would make the one indistinguishable from the other "somocismo without Somoza." Spea king of the Sandinista philosophy of agrarian reform in licaragua: What Difference Could a Revolution Make?, Joseph Collins argues that.
the Sandinistas' philosophy of agrarian reform is not antiprivate property. Rather, the Sandinistas believe that the right to productive private property carries with it the obligation to use that property for the benefit of the so ciety. Private property rights are guaranteed by the government but only if the owner is using the resource: owners letting their land lie idle, for example, will be subject to expropriation. p361
(Observe how tenderly and solicitously they court the "business elite"!) If we are to accept the altruism implicit in this passage, both sides ought to confine themselves to negotiating shortterm consensus agreements and leave the ownership question for posterity to deal with.
But the Sandinista slogan of "People before profits" obscures the reality of the lowlevel warfare inherent in the employeremployee relationship: the profit of the few—and only a few can authentically be capitalists
requires the poverty and wage subservience of the
many. The erstwhile beneficiaries of somocismo—those large landowners not believed to be the overt cronies of Washington's late S.O.B. —are unambiguous in their recognition of this; constantly accused of "decapitalizing" their holdings (not maintaining land and equipment, sending their capital out of the country, fraudulently obtaining agricultural loans in order to squander, hoard or expatriate the money), they have every reason to suspect that an insecure future lies in store for them.
The Revised Class Struggle
But they are really straw men in the class struggle now unfolding in licaragua. We can get a much better idea of how the mod it Led class relations stack up under sandinismo from a random selection of statements in the abovementioned booh:
♦ [Quoting Xabier Gorostiaga, an official in the Ministry of Planning: 1 "80 per cent of agricultural production is in the hands of the private sector, as is 75 per cent of industrial production. " The 20 per cent of agricultural production that does belong to the state is deliberately called 'Area of the People's Property, I of whichl "the state is not the owner, but only the administrator" [ Gorostiagal. ]p 361
♦ [Decree no. 3, which nationalized nearly 2 million acres on approximately 2000 farms and ranches in 1979 left a full twothirds of the farmland in capitalist hands... [Capitalists are! landowners large enough to hire labor or rent out their land, or both. These landowners are different from small farmers ("campes i nos") who usually use only family labor. These small producers, unaffected by the confiscation decree, controlled less than 15 per cent of the nation's farmland, [p

Under Somoza, labor legislation included a $2.10aday minimum wage for agricultural workers. But few workers ever got it. In practice, wages typically ranged from 80 to 1.70 a day, except for skilled workers such as tractor operators. ... A few months following victory the new government boosted the minimum wage by 30 per cent. But because the government paid the minimum wage on state farms and attempted to enforce it elsewhere, the average rural wage may "have gone up over 60 per cent, [p 691
While many agrarian reforms have started by giving land titles to tenants and sharecroppers, the Sandinista agrarian reform appears much more conservative. In regard to rent, it no more interferes with private property than do urban rent control laws in many "free enterprise" industrial countries. By making rents low and outlawing evictions the Sandinistas sought to provide secure tenure to poor campesinos while sidestepping the bugbear of private property. [ p 371.
It becomes obvious in retrospect that the workers and peasants thought they were getting a capitalism stripped of its problems, in many (if not most) cases confusing this with socialism (a change in the basis of society). To them capitalism as such ran together with capitalism as they knew it under Somoza. The Sandinistas themselves knew, of course, that the real task would on the contrary have to be to integrate licarafua's national production into the capitalist world economy.2 Since the Somoza regime stood so solidly identified with US imperialism, the ideological version of that world economy inevitably took an anti-imperialistic stance. And if there were any among the Sandinista leadership who really believed that socialism in Nicaragua was achievable
within a worldwide framework of capitalist production, they were quickly disabused.
Now that Somoza and his national Goons have been demoted to the footnotes of history, the Sandinistas have no choice but to try to make capitalism function according to their model. After putting themselves on the winning side by incorporating the demand for land redistribution into their program, they suddenly discovered after the victory that land takeovers were not in the interests of creating a surplus for earning foreign exchange, so they (not altogether successfully) began to discourage peasant occupations. Now they have realized that the wage levels will always be limited by the amount of capital available for paying wages and have accordingly taken steps to dampen wage demands for the duration. (Women still receive lower wages for the same work, although their situation is much improved—reflecting their participation in the revolution.
Profits,Si! Wages—Maybe
Tomas Borge, the last remaining founder of the original Sandinista Front, explained to the disgruntled unions that "without more goods....more money I for wageearners! is no help."s That is, if the goods could not be produced at a profit, they would not be produced. And without increased production, there could be no question of wage increases. Printing more currency to serve as means of payment to workers would only inflate the currency, which would threaten to drive real wages down.
Capitalism in Nicaragua, hobbled by somocista underdevelopment ~lfiougfi it has been, is no different in its essentials from capitalism anywhere else. It has markets, wages and profits; goods and services that are produced by a wageearning class for sale at a profit on the market; wageslaves and profitmasters. It is subject to the same restraints as capitalism elsewhere, as well as to a few others peculiar to it. And, as in other parts of the world, it cannot work in the interests of the working class, regardless of whether the state
"intervenes" or "lets do."
It is the classic function of a party of the Social Democratic or Labor type to agitate for reforms in behalf of both organized labor and unorganized working people. And like Social Democrats and Laborists around the world, the Sandinistas imagine that this trying to cope with capitalism is itself a socialist movement. Given their immediate goal of fitting a reformed licaraguan economy into a highly structured international system of capital accumulation, it comes as no surprise they could not afford to encourage a "land-to-the-tiller" agrarian reform.
No More Selling Or Buying
In a socialist (communist) society there could be no question of redistributing land so that small farmers could sell their produce on the market: there will be no buying and selling of anything. lo one will have to "work for a living"; everyone will be able to get what they calculate they need as a matter of course, either the United States nor Nicaragua would even exist as nation states in a socialist world (since it takes national currencies to sustain taxation, governments, states and national boundaries).
But the Sandinista philosophy doesn't so much as nod in this direction. It only offers a better deal for workers and capitalists; it represents a pact between exploited and exploiter. Lest, however, we should somehow manage to come away with the Impression that sandinismo means marxism or even comunismo, Jaime Wheelock, Nicaragua's minister of Agriculture, has set the record straight. Addressing the national assembly of the Farmworkers' Union (ATC) in December 1979, he rejected the notion that workers on state farms are wage laborers:
They are producers of social wealth, and the consciousness of the
froducer is quite diferent from that of the wage laborer.... He knows that each stroke of the machete is no longer to create profits for a boss, but
perhaps to create a
new pair of shoes for
a barefoot child who
may be his own."6
A strange pronouncement to be coming from the mouth of the Spectre of Communism! For, as every socialist knows, social wealth produced for the market always takes the form of commodities, and commodities as such embody a surplus over the needs of their producers. This surplus is called profit—no matter who (the state included) employs the producers, for no matter what reason. And every capitalist, private or public, also knows that, as long as enough barefoot children whose parents have enough money to spend on shoes need shoes, capitalists will stand ready to supply children with shoes—provided they can see a profit in it.
AD
1. Joseph Collins with Frances Moore Lappe, lick Alien and Paul Rice (lew York: Grove Press, 1986). 2. Pages 38, 69, 71 and 80 [where the Sandinistas called for a halt to the land takeovers immediately after the revolution] . 3. Pg 80. 4. Pp 76, 176. 5. Pg 69. 6. Pg 75.
SPAIN: Working on Felipe's Farm
The Socialist Workers' Party of Spain (PSOE) rode to power in February 1982 on the crest of a wave of optimism which had originated as far away as Paris, France, where the Socialist Party had won a sizeable majority in May 1981, at the sane tine electing Francois Mitterrand president of the republic. So for a few years the air was echoing with promises of reform from the French Alps to the Rock of Gibraltar.
Time passed, and the real implications of pseudosocialism became apparent to French workers, who proceeded in 1986 to reverse their decision of 1981 by voting into office an alliance of the right grouped around the old Gaullist Jacques Chirac and his Rassemblement pour la^ Republique (although still largely excluding the fascist pedigrees of the national Front). In Spain, time also passed but pseudosocialism continued its vogue. The PSOE was still peddling a homegrown version of "reindustrialization" and "restructuring" to workingclass constituents as late as 1987. But serious trouble was brewing, and it broke through the surface early last year, beginning with nationwide worker and student strikes similar to those in France beginning in late 1986.
What explains the mysterious patience of the Spanish workers? Part of the answer lies in the political names that have gained currency
over several decades of class struggle in Spain, and part lies in the na'ivete or forgetfulness of the poet Falange generation. The PSOE has a long history of silent metamorphoses: creeping reformism under Pablo Iglesiasf was defended, Kautskyfashion, up through the Civil War as being compatible with achieving an ultimate
goal of social revolution.
t became the redoubt of Republicanism in Spain in its efforts to repress the Franco rebellion and subsequently in its efforts to survive the Franco repression.
Enter the Gonzalez Team
When the "Felipe Gonzalez team" took over as the dominant current within the party in the early 70s however, any remaining pretext of basing party policy on Marxian principles was quietly scrapped—even as the theoreticians continued to trumpet the party's "methodological" credentials2. The "socialism" which workers would be voting into office a few years later was no longer even rhetorically related to their interests as a class.
It was trickledown economics with a leftwing accent, revamped in its language so the "little people" could understand it: with the PSOE in charge, profits would be made to serve the interests of the wageearning majority; industry would expand, jobs would become at once easier to find and bet
terpaid. This was formula Mitterrandism; and the PSOE, for its part, had absolutely no trouble repudiating its own principles as even a nominal basis for action. It accomplished belatedly in
Eractice what German Social emocracy had done back in the 50s out of theoretical considerations—it opted outright for administering capitalism in an "enlightened" and progressive manner.
Things seemed to go well for it at first. As long as the government could sell workers on the belief that what was good for the peseta was good for them, it could excuse its failures as mere bad luck. And as long as it could keep workers quiet— organized labor especially— the government could count on the confidence and sup port of the capitalist class. But something went wrong:
In last year's election campaign, the Socialists talked too blithely of improving the workers' lot. Given the state of the Spanish economy, with an uncomfortably high inflation and one of the worst unemployment rates in Europe, that was imprudent. [The Economist, 6/6/87]
"Disappointed by what the government has been able to achieve since the election," the writer goes on to say, "hundreds of thousands of Spaniards...have been coming out in a rash ot strikes this year."
Socialism with a Capital "C"
From the standpoint of the unions, however, the government's perplexing fascination with prolonging what was justified as a phase of belttightening3 was not really the straw that broke the camel's back. It was rather the irrefutable evidence (if any was actually needed) that the PSOE had definitively abandoned its identification with people who work for a living, shifting its priorities from eventually redistributing wealth to maximizing profits—at once. [El Pais, 10/26/87.]
It was precisely the government's laborite mask, in fact, that initially shielded it from the reaction accorded to the right In Germany and France. But, as an earlier Economist article put. it, "the tolerance [began] wearing a little thin" 13/1/861, so that it was a "non-labor" issue the struggle of the students against Re government's proposed educational measures, as in France that acted as the catalyst for labor's unhappiness.
The burst of teenage political activity caught the government by surprise and was
greeted with delight by the DGT which provided lueva Claridad [the organ of a militant student tendency] and the student union with printing facilities, meeting rooms and funds. [New Statesman, 4/24/87]
This went well beyond the often lackluster support which labor officials had displayed toward the student movement in France. The motivation was the same; students had "virtually lost hope of finding a job." [New Statesman]
While it is true that the right is presently in a state of disarray, this does not preclude its becoming suddenly inflated with disgruntled workingclass votes. leither worker nor student organizations want to go too far in criticizing the Gonzalez regime: the UGT's Secretary General, IIcolas Redondo, "nevertheless intends to stay on as a member of the party's federal committee in order, he says, to 'vote against and criticise party decisions.'" [ The Economist, 10/31/87.1 (He gave up his seat in parliament last October 20th to protest what he saw as the government's "putting employers' interests before those of the working class.")
Wasting Their Votes
The Economist's moneycolored truisms apart, however, wage slavery can never be in the interest of the working class. Something can only be in your interest if you gain an advantage as a result of it. The capitalist class has an unmistakable interest in the wages system in whatever form works best, but the working class can only find in it a provocation to be endured.
Perhaps this is the face of the future—where it becomes the norm for governments to be composed of parties professing a socialist ideology, a progressive outlook, even having radical credentials, and having to turn ruthless in defiance of their own cherished theories once in office. Workers have had more than their share of false friends and fake fights since Marx first ad
vised the working class to
fo for the jugular and aboish the wages system.
It takes no small degree of disillusionment with that system to ask the exasperated question: What difference is there between electing representatives to power to have them manage your exploitation and having to suffer the election of those who make no secret of their ambition to do the same? The left can't please its constituents any better than the right, and now—in addition to the we11documented evidence provided by Britain's Labour Party that capitalism cannot be managed in the interests of anybody but capitalists—the mounting wreckage of more impressive movements on the Continent (the PS in France, PSOE in Spain) renders the verdict compelling. It remains only for workers everywhere to accept that verdict.
— DE
1.Iglesias was one of its founders and its longstanding General Secretary who was also its first elected deputy in the Cortes or parliament. During his life, reformism (the ascendancy of the "minimum program") was never formally accepted as a basis for party policy, as it had been in Germany.
2.Examples of this divorce abound in a 1976 paperback, Partido Socialista Obrero Espafioi",'" pubIished as part ofa "political series" celebrating the demise of the Franco system.
3.El peso del ajuste ecqnomicp—the burden of econb11 mic adjustment—in the words of licolas Redondo, OGT (Workers' General Onion). [El Pais, 10/26/871
Poverty as a living standard
There are those who take the position that life is getting progressively better, that only a minority experience severe poverty, and that the standard of living for the majority, while being far from perfect, is nevertheless improving all the time. Further, with the help of proper leadership, certain reforms, and the grace of the Good Lard, the system under which we live, capitalism, affords mankind the best of all possible worlds.
Ve register an absolute disclaimer to this approach, because not only is it untrue and unrealistic, but it promotes a toleration that hampers scientific investigation of the case for socialism.
Being Poor
From a socialist standpoint poverty can be defined as the economic, social and living conditions of the working class as compared to those of the capitalist class. It is the contrast between the environment experienced by the working class who, in order to live, have to work for wages, because they are propertyless in the means of production and distribution, and the completely different economic circumstances and environment of that small section of society, the capitalist class, who live on rent, interest and profits and are the owners of the means of life. Viewed from this position the working class must always experience poverty as compared to the wealth and luxury enjoyed by their employers, lo political party, no brilliant leadership, can ever change this fundamental situation within the confines of the present system. The other yardstick is the one used by the government to define poverty, which relates to a certain wage level at any particular time. Under this guideline all families with incomes below a certain figure are living in poverty. This is a misleading approach because it only reveals part of the story, but the ascertainable information that it produces is nevertheless always awesome and frightening.
The United States Census Bureau on September 25, 1976 verified 25.9 million persons lived in families that were below the governmentdefined poverty level of S5500 for a nanfarm family of four. The poverty level was up, due to inflation, from S5038 in 1974. The number of people in poverty was the largest since the 27.8 million in 1967, when the poverty level was $3410. The Census Bureau said that more Americans slid into poverty in 1975 than at any time in the 17 years that the government has been keeping track.
The phrase, "standard of living, should encompass a broader field than consumer goods and services. Tour standard of living is obviously affected by the quality af the air you breathe; the security or otherwise of your means of livelihood; the effect on your mental and physical health that living conditions under this society produces; the quality of education and public information; the exposure to crime and violence, both in the real world and the one on television. And surely our standard of living is most horribly and adversely affected by the most dangerous and devastating threat with which mankind has ever been confronted—the possibility of a worldwide nuclear war that could completely annihilate the human race. As far as I am personally concerned my standard of living is most certainly contaminated by the potential horror of nuclear warfare, which has been unleashed on two occasions in the bombing of lagasaki and Hiroshima.
Working for a Living
Dealing with the consumption of commodities, the working class are limited in their access to wealth by their wages, which are a monetary payment for the sale of labor power. Yorkers can never afford to purchase back the values that they produce—if they could, the capitalist class would be deprived of their livelihood, because it is on the surplus value, produced over and above the
wages paid, that the employing class live.
The commodities purchased by the workers have been manufactured and distributed primarily for profit; their use value is incidental to the reason for their creation. The worker, therefore, comes to the market place first, with a wage that prevents him going beyond a very limited figure, approximating to his costs of production as a worker; second, he finds himself confronted with goods and services that, because they have been produced for profit, are of inferior quality.
The market place is concerned with the realization of profit; quality is sacrificed accordingly in order that sales can be effected in price ranges to meet the pocketbooks of the purchasers. The loaf of bread, the automobile, the house, «ih all produced not primarily to satisfy needs, but to
produce profits. The result s always a conglomeration of substandard products. Food that has been processed and chemicalized so that deterioration will be retarded should sales not be made fast enough; and products made as cheaply as possible, many with builtin obsolescence .
A Decent Standard of What?
The worker is legally robbed in the field of production by only receiving back a portion of the values he produces in the form of wages; then, when he goes to he market place, he generally gets what he pays for, but because of his limited purchasing ability he receives not the best that can be produced, but products that come nowhere near the quality that could, under a sane society, be attained. This, then, is the poverty that the working class must endure. The owning class, however, can afford the very best that can be produced. The rich and the superrich enjoy a life that bears no resemblance to that of the workers.
In actuality the term "standard of living" is a misnomer—it is really a "standard of poverty."
Poverty is shopping in the supermarket and buying food not of top quality because you are operating within the limitations of a wage packet. Poverty is baying clothes and living in dwellings, again of inferior quality, because you cannot afford to go beyond your budget. Poverty is going on vacation and putting up with second rate mass transportation, accomodations and food, because these commodities are produced for the specific consumption of wage workers. Poverty is having to save for a socalled rainy day—the rich don't save: they accumulate—there is a vast difference. Poverty is having to spend a lifetime scrimping to get by, as glorified scavengers ever seeking cheap, inferior merchandise in order to survive.
Poverty does not exist because the capacity for producing and distributing wealth is insufficient, wheat and coffee have been burnt while millions starved; fish thrown back in the sea because it was not profitable to sell; potatoes dumped in order to maintain
S rices; factories closed and ouses not built while millions need jobs. All this as a result of overproduct ion! Poverty exists because ffc"Ts inseparable from capitalism. The wages system and the ownership of the means of production and distribution by a minority prevent the mnority from enjoying the fruits of their labor.
Chronology of Poverty
Chronologically let us consider some facts concerning poverty and the socalled standard of living:
President Roosevelt in a speech made April 20, 1937, said, "I see onethird of a nation illclad, ill nourished. I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factories."
In a news item January 6, 1947 the examination of military recruits for the OS Arny revealed more than one third were physically unfit for service, and in certain parts of the southern states 35 per cent of the patients were found to be suffering nutritional anaemia.
In 1949 there were 10.5 million families with incomes of $2000 or less.
Former President Kennedy spoke of 17 million hungry Americans, and when he sup
Eorted Medicare for the aged e said that the average American worker retires with
$3000 of assets.
Fortune magazine in 1964 said" "that in March 1964, more than six million people live in families whose Incomes are so low that they qualify for free food from the federal government, that 7,300,000 Americans live in housing classified as dilapidated, and that there are nearly two million families who scrape by on cash incomes of less than $1000 a year."
The Citizens Board of Inquiry into Hunger and malnutrition in 1968 stated that 30 million Americans go hungry while 10 million of them are actually starving.
The lew York Times Magazine, March 22, 1970, in an article refers to "...hunger that is so widespread and perpetual—affecting the health and welfare of at least 20 million people..."
This is in America! Further, in the same article, "By count of the Office of Econonic Opportunity (which is always conservative in such tallies) there are at least 1.3 million Americans who have no income, not a penny. The experts who estimate these things believe that in the crannies of the slums and behind the hedgerows of rural America, another six million or more exist on less than $300 a year."
Unemployment
In June 1975 unemployment in the United States was 7.9 million.
In September 1975 the number of unemployed in 18 European countries, the OS, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand jumped to an estimated 17.1 million, according to statistics comEiled by the International abor Organization (ILO). This revealed an increase of 6 million from a year earlier, and the figure represented both the largest total, and the largest 12month increase recorded by the ILO in the past 40 years.
In 1976 we were told that we had 7.8 per cent unem
ployed.
As reported by the OS Census Bureau on September 26, 1976, and as already mentioned, not only were there 25.9 million persons living in families earning less than S5500 a year, which is the governmentdefined poverty level, but the average wage of factory workers in 1975 was $163 per week, the minimum federal wage of S2.30 an hour represents $92 for a 40hour week, and the average payment to retired workers on Social Security in 1975 was $206 per month.
We suggest that these figures might well indicate that at the present time in the united States approximately 25 million people are going to bed hungry every
On August 20, 1980 a report from Washington (UP1) stated: "The World Bank estimated this year 780 million people throughout the world are living xn "absolute poverty.' It described this as 'a condition of life so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy and disease as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency.'"
And so we can speak in general terms about poverty and the socalled standard of living, and in specifics and statistics. But in the final analysis workers must be the judges and draw the conclusions. Surely the evidence is all around us, and we are all engulfed in it to such an extent that most of us are not as yet able to appreciate our own predicament, because the poverty that always stalks us, together with the capitalist Propaganda that always miseads us, has been overwhelming. Society, however, is never static and the insoluble contradictions of the system are on the side of the socialist message. For capitalism with its wars, poverty and insecurity stands condemned—socialism, as a solution, awaits its longdelayed recognition.
Once you have heard, read and understood the case for socialism, and you still are not convinced, you must surely be reasoning as follows, either:
(1) You consider capitalism tolerable, or
<2> You consider that capitalism can be properly reformed. We strongly suggest that neither position is tenable.
— Sam Leight
Reproduced, with minor changes, from Chapter 10 ("Poverty ft Standard of Living") of World Without wages

I THE WAY IT IS • Media and consciousness FREE THE AIRWAVES!
The rapid development of the technology of communications makes present social relations aore and more outdated with every day. The obstacle to a aore free use of these exciting new channels is the sane as that which held back the spreading of knowledge for hundreds of years: the fact that a minority class possess and control the means of communication just as they do the means of production in general.
In 1637, under a decree of the Star Chamber, whipping, the pillory and imprisonment were to be the penalties for publishing without the consent of the licensers, who were headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In later years, an invidious "tax on knowledge" known as the Stamp Duty was the slightly more subtle method used to prevent the majority of the population making "subversive" use of their growing literacy. In 1831, however, and in defiance of the Stamp Duty laws, Henry Hetherington brought out the Poor Han's Guardian, a "weekly newspaper for the people, established contrary to law, to try the power of •Might' price Id. page, in place of the official government red stamp was a black one inscribed "Knowledge is Power," with a drawing of a printing press and the words "Liberty of the Press." The first paragraph of this journal is worth quoting from, if only to demonstrate the difference between this early workingclass paper, and its latterday namesake, the Liberal Kan's Guardian:
fo more evasion; we will not trespass, but deny the authority of our "lords" to enclose the common against us; we will demand our right, nor treat but with contempt the despotic "law" which would deprive us of it.
The Stamp Duty was finally abolished in 1855, but not before Hetherington had served a prison sentence for his pains.
The capitalist state is a coercive machine and overcomes the sporadic resistance of individuals and groups by resorting to force or the threat of it. But it could not survive for long if it had constantly to use such brutal (and costly) methods. In the course of the nineteenth century in Europe there gradually evolved an ideology of reformism, the intention of which was to replace repression with placatory gestures to accommodate the working class into the administration of their own exploitation. This presented the ruling class with a dilemma on the question of workingclass literacy. As a Justice of the Peace was quoted as saying in 1807:
It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes—that they may read the scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a derelish for the laborious occupations of life.
In 1870 this dilemma was solved through the enactment of the Education Act, which provided for a standard system of statecontrolled schooling, capable of manufacturing the raw material for modern industry: literate, numerate and disciS lined wageslaves. The trait ion of independent workingclass selfeducation continued to flourish, however, in Mechanics Institutes, in bodies such as the Yorkers Educational Association, and through the carefully preserved bookshelves of knowledge passed down from one generation of workers to another, cherished for the relevance of their contents to the problems which confront workers: the works of Marx and Engels, of William Morris and Robert Tressell.
A Well Behaved Explosion
The early 20th century witnessed an explosion of large scale communication technologies, once again under the strict and stifling control of the state or of private
business interests. In 1984, more than 150 years after the publication of the Poor Man's Guardian, it is still illegal for anyone to broadcast publicly over the airwaves to others, without the (unlikely) approval of the BBC or IBA. The 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act allows the Home Office almost total power to control and regulate the use of the frequency spectrum. The capitalist class monopolizes the land and factories across the world (including the state capitalist Russian empire); the air itself, however, is no more immune from this tragic abdication of responsibility for our world and lives which we make by allowing a minority to possess that world.
The 1930s saw the evolution of the new culture industry, with an increasingly uniform stateregulated leisure entering the sway of the world market. In marketing communications as a commodity in itself, as huge profits were accumulated. The big telecommunications multinationals such as IBM, ITT, Western Electric and AT&T are usually to be found on the list of top ten OS companies today.
Evading the Monopoly
Of course, there have continually been attempts at various levels to evade this monopoly. In 1962 a young Irish businessman, Konan O'Rahilly, tried to promote a recording of Georgle Fame and came up against the power of EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips, who between them cornered 99 per cent of the market. All the radio stations, including Radio Luxembourg, were working hand in glove with these companies, so O'Rahilly founded Radio Caroline. In 1967, however, the Labor government's Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill outlawed all the pirate stations and later that year the BBC's new 4—channel radio service came into operation with Radio One as a pop channel, all safely under the control of the (Labor administered) capitalist state.

Communications technology in the 20th century has been developed according to the needs of profit and, as a corollary to this, according to military needs. By the midseventies there were, according to IASA, about 3,700 satellites in space. Of these, only a handful were communications satellites; the vast majority served the military establishments of the superpowers, in command and message systems, logistics, interception and surveillance.
Under capitalism, the latest advances in communication technology will be used to improve the efficiency of profit accumulation while dividing people more and more from one another and from their own selfdetermined needs. For example an advertisement for one of the home microcomputers on the market speaks of the delights of "balancing the family budget" (working out what you can no longer afford after splashing out on the computer) and of "the fascination of controlling your own private little world" as being "addictive."
Multilateral Media
With the advent ol socialist democracy, there could be a real proliferation of mulilateral communications systems. We must forget the false division between the passive entertainment of the media and the active process of education. In the wards of Brecht, "Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication." But for the devices at the disposal of humanity to be used to enhance, rather than obstruct, the democratic control of society, we must replace the social relationship of employers and employed which permeates the world today with social relationships of equality and cooperation:
A microphone is not an ear, a camera is not an eye, and a computer is not a brain. . .as we design technological systems, we are in fact designing sets of social relationships. [Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee]
The forms which communica tion takes will be directly related, in other words, to the form which society takes. If we are to start communicating with one another globally on the sophisticated level which modern technology has made possible it is a social revolution, rather than a technological revolution, which is urgently needed.
— C Slapper
NEWS FROM THE NEW WORLD
Imagine no possessions.... A WORLD COMMUNITY
lo one pretends to know how a moneyless world connunity night be run. But it never hurts to toss a few ideas around on the subject. Even though the exercise is no more than brainstorming, it is precisely out of learning to project alternatives that we can get a practical sense of what we want that world connunity actually to be like. We can do this without resorting to ideological devices like blueprints if we stick to the range of immediate possibilities which ca?italist society has already nherited fron the past ana has developed for us.
1. "Socialism" and "communisn" both mean free and
unconditional access to
whatever goods and services
people are willing to pro
duce. What could a "community" consist of that had
ceased to place itens of ne
cessity up for sale on the
market? Since trade is the
sine qua non of the nation
state, a world connunity
which has elimitiated the
need for using money will
therefore have ceased to re
Suire national boundaries, describing such a connunity as a "world governnent could not mean anything that we now use the tern to mean. It will not possess government like features, or even resemble a confederation of governnen like bodies, since its components will be socioeconomic units rather than political ones. It will know only the boundaries of language and culture, and even these will have a longtern tendency to become blurred and indistinct.
2. But—you might ask—
don't we need political
boundaries? Rational fron
tiers as we know then are
merely symptoms of a larger
divorce of work fron enjoy
nent; their very possibility
requires a process of pro
duction which transforms
itens of use (wealth) into
commodities—goods and ser
vices defined as being in
excess of the producers
needs. Once the work requir
ed for human survival was
placed on this basis, con
flicts inevitably arose over how the resulting wealth was to be distributed. Society became divided into owners and nonowners; into classes which "have" and classes which "have not."
Every state represents simply the institutionalization of this whole process all over again. Those who have thus nade themselves the owners of the earth's productive resources use the state to secure their position. Traditionally the private owners of commodity wealth in one state have always needed as much protection fron their equivalents in other states as fron those who produced the wealth which they ordered produced.
If the earth's entire population as a whole owns all the wealth produced on it, no group can be in a position to refuse to share productive resources with anyone else, lo one will have a basis far denying anyone else access to the things they need. lo one will be able to force someone else to work or have the ability to refuse them goods and services for failing to work.
A Society Without Employers
Without employees, there can be no employers. Without em ployers, there can be no governnent. A worldwide connunity is incompatible with the concept of employment. Its "politics" will center instead on the satisfaction of mutually negotiated needs. Although people's needs are predominantly local in character, their satisfaction will still take ?lace in a global context, nstead of an impersonal narket mechanism laying prices on everything, normal patterns of usage, the availability of materials and the sustainability or the difficulty of the labor process will determine what scale production should most appropriately take, ranging fron local to worldwide.
Production Without Money
It is having to use money to obtain goods and services (resulting fron the twofold distinction between owners and producers on the one hand and producers and con suners on the other) that places the control of resources and decisionnaking in the hands of a minority in the first place. The controllers of markets are those who accumulate capital; in a socialist society (one which has ceased to use money and works without markets) , the power of control will revert to people again. Governnent will cease to be necessary. States will becone functionless.
3. Thinking of such a world community or commonwealth as a single administrative entity is probably a large oversimplification. Because local users win of necessity have first call in making the bulk of the decisions regarding the disposal of resources, it could only have a loose unity at best. This follows from the fact of common ownership itself, which really signifies that no one has private possession of the means of producing goods and services. What will make world socialism different from what we now know is the way these local users will integrate their needs and activities to constitute a single worldwide social organism. People will coordinate rather than "plan their production and consumption.
Existing international agencies, generated by the complexity of administering today's system of global markets, could in principle be easily adapted to this mediating function. At first, they will probably continue acting as representatives of a system of national states. But as the full impact of free access begins to set in and the social patterns of a noneyless world connunity begin to consolidate themselves, pressures will build to restructure these agencies fron the representation of states to the direct, manysided global analysis of localuser needs. How far this transformation might go is not for us to say; but that it must happen seems probable.
4. Does a world community of producers, on the other hand, really have to operate as a centrally structured unit, with largescale decisions taking precedence over smallscale? The word "community" is closely related to the idea of communication; that is, the viability of a world community is bound up with the free and
feneralized provision of inormation by everyone to everyone .
A Democracy of Information
A community on a world scale may thus be defined as a worldwide democracy of information. In the absence of the power to deny anyone access to resources, "rule by the people" will not involve making use of any instruments of rule. (Whether this actually fits the concept of rule at all may be disputed. ) As long as the channels of communication are adequate to all demands placed on them by society at large, the distribution of wealth can always be coordinated with the activities of individuals as they express their needs on a regular basis.
5. We should think of a world community, therefore, less as a set of institutions than as a common vehicle: an arrangement, shared by the earth's entire population, for relating common patterns of living and working together for each other's benefit on a world scale. Such an arrangement will only work if it is grounded in people's actual living requirements, as expressed and determined by them, speaking for themselves as producers and consumers. The affairs of the world community will be shaped through continual, widespread discussions and formulated as an everchanging mass of information. This "mass of information" will be all that will be needed in the way of a central plan.
A direct result of removing the blinkers imposed by the market system will be that people will put away the capitalist neurosis of regarding nature as an enemy to be conquered; by cultivating the habit of discussing each other's mutual needs on a global scale, they will find it natural to conceive them in the context of the ecosystem.
6. Organizing society in this fashion will obviously require a mature basis for ordering our social relations. But it is just such a basis that we already possess in embryo under capitalism: for working people now run the (antisocial) capitalist system from top to bottom. Ve already have the knowledge and the skills to replace economic development (the accumulation of capital based on national markets) with a worldscale production originating directly in demands made by the users themselves. Production for use eliminates any need to "enrich" the poor because it means the liquidation of the system which grows out of, generates and enforces poverty. We have all the means at our disposal for converting to a system of production aimed at satisfying everyone's present and future needs; all the tools for making interdependence give way immediately to interaction now lie waiting at our fingertips.
We are foolish to pass up the chance to use those tools.
— RE
Books of interest to socialists - IS THERE A "ROAD"TO SOCIALISM?
State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management. Adam Buick & John Crump (The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1986)
You have only to attend a meeting of any of numerous groups identifying themselves as "socialist" or "communist" to find out one thing: with few exceptions, they do not define their immediate goal as being worldwide in scope. They regard replacing the buying and selling of necessary goods and services with free access to the same as a very longterm aspiration (though the notion enjoys wide acceptance as an abstraction). Between the cup of communism and the lip of capitalism, they claim, there lies a wide gap, and that gap can only be bridged by a complicated and unpredictable series of shortterm objectives. Eventually society will be transformed, it is true, but not starting from the present reality as we
currently understand it.
Those groups organized as formal political parties seeking to attract the support and/or the votes of workers and other sectors of the population thus find themselves nailed fairly tightly to a framework of nationalism which has to justify itself through an appeal to "proletarian internationalism" or something similar. Followers of Lenin and Trotsky, for example, advocate setting up a "workers state" which will liquidate the institutions and mechanisms by which private owners of the means of production perpetuated their legal monopoly over the output of goods and services, ccording to this scenario, the exploiting (capitalist) class continues in existence for a while but is sternly regimented by the party in control of the machinery of state and enjoying the wellinformed support of the ma
jority.
In State Capitalism Adam Buick and John Crump carefully dissect the concept of state ownership of the means of wealth production and lay bare the mass of rationalizations leading up to it. First they establish the general boundaries of discussion by defining what the term capitalism means, then they distinguish between two models of capitalism: the one traditionally accepted as such (private capitalism, the earliest form) and the other representing a number of historic adaptations or variants of capitalist monopoly over social production (in response to some structural failure on the part of the "private" model). Since this second type is characterized by the nationalization of enterprises with or without a thoroughgoing state management of the system of production—it is of course best described as "state" capitalism.
This result can be accomplished in two ways. Either he state can bail out individual capitalists by taking
over the legal proprietorship and control of their businesses without a major political upheaval occurring (as has become common in western Europe); or a revolutionary opposition can develop within the boson of capitalist society and, with varying degrees of Majority support, raze the preceding regime to the ground, totally reorganizing the system of exploitation (as in eastern Europe, Russia and China). In the second case, a new capitalist minority replaces the old, leaving the sane or equivalent relations of production intact. Though fron a narrowly legal angle the new minorlty renounces all private title to the systen of production, they nevertheless retain Monopoly control over it.
"Socialist" Profits?
In the fourth chapter, the authors deal with a question which everyone has sooner or later asked: What Makes a statecapitalist economy different fron a "classical" one? They tackle a couple of fan! liar old fallacies: nanely, the belief that
"Socialist" profit is not capitalist profit because "all profits belong to the people" or, to put it another way, because "the state distributes profit for the benefit of the people. "Socialist" wages are not the nark of an exploited working class, but are the neans by which social wealth is distributed according to each individuals contribution to production. (Ch. 4, "The Capitalist Dynamic of State Capitalist Economies")
In the end, however, no natter on what ideological grounds wage exploitation is put into effect, the leopard cannot avoid keeping its spots. "Profit is pursued because, due to the coupetit ion which is inherent in world capitalism, state capital continually has to invest newly acquired surplus value in a compulsive effort to accumulate and hence expand itself." (p 101)
Before going on to socialism as the alternative to either state or private capitalism, they briefly out
line some of the ideological underpinnings on which the justification for state capital isn rests, showing how the thinking of its advocates evolved out of "classical" socialist theory (as found in the writings of Marx or Engels) into its Leninist ana postLeninist forms.
Basic Features of Socialism
Having comprehensively Mapped out the statecapitalist terrain, Buick and Crump have no difficulty elucidating the basic features of a socialist society: It must be worldwide; all goods and services will be produced for use only and distributed free; it will have no classes, states or national frontiers; no exchange of goods and services will take place—since there will no longer be any market to regulate consumption.
The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of "economic calculation" in the sense of calculation in units of "value" whether measured by money or directly in sone unit of labour time. (Ch. 6, "The Alternative to Capitalism")
The need for planning will be net by establishing "a rationalized network of planned links" occupying the successive phases through which the cycle of product i on/consunpt ion passes. "Planning" in that context will Mean only the coordinating of "a direct interaction between human beings and nature." (The authority of economists rests partly in fact on the working class's uncritical acceptance of their doctrine of an inherent natural scarcity. )
If the language in the last chapter makes heavy use of the conditional tense, this does not imply any prediction of Utopia. It only acknowledges that workers have so far failed to shake themselves out of the slumber of poverty. This is a process which necessarily must take place on a world scale (if not everywhere at precisely the same tiMe); for a whole society to Make the changeover to production for use requires a conscious
understanding of the stakes by enough of the world's population to constitute a political force greater than any that capital can muster in its own defense.
Such an intense concentration of wellinformed opinion has not yet occurred nor will it ever—if workers (including both highly paid professionals and exploited agriculturalists) continue to limit their thought horizons to those of the national state into which their destiny as wageslaves has thrust them. The admirable thing about State Capitalism is that it provides a sorely needed theoretical framework for tearing loose of the deadly embrace of nationalisM. This fraMework (as noted in the book) has been slowly emerging within the world socialist movement in the decades since the Bolshevik revolution, Most significantly in the propaganda of our companion party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The book itself makes a highly readable contribution to this ongoing effort to create a classconscious, socialist majority—one that will finally get capitalism's funeral cortege rolling toward the cemetery. 0

YOU SAID IT Our Masters' Voice
FOLLOW THE RAINBOW BRICK ROAD
So anomalous is the US political system that a presidential candidate like Jesse Jackson can appeal to organized labor as only a segment of a larger constituency and yet still come across sounding like the worker's last best hope for getting "a fair days pay for a fair day's work." Says Irving Bemen of the National Committee for Independent Political Action,
the National Rainbow Coalition is not a labor party and it is institutionally related to the Democratic Party, even though it is not part of the Democrat ic Party as such. But its basic thrust and program and its constituency makes it come closer to a labor party than anything we have seen in 50 years. [Socialist Action, Dec 87]
In a country which spawned the Horatio Alger Syndrome and Rugged Individualism Complex, workers have never advanced a candidate who exemplified the class struggle (with the one exception of
Eugene Debs) someone whom
they believed represented their interests and whom they thought would use political office to advance them at the expense of employers. On the contrary, the US worker's unsexed political consciousness always ends up me 11. i rig down i n to daydreams about that Great Big Happy family in the Sky. The Rainbow Coalition is really just the most recent example of this, as we see from a cam paign leaflet quoting Jesse Jackson:
There is nothing wrong with the American worker, the family farmer or the small business
person. Economic violence is no accident. Deregulation, uncheck ed corporate greed, incentives to merge companies, purge workers and submerge the economy must be reversed. ["Bold Leadership /Sew Direction"]
You see: If we would all Get Responsible the System would Work! At a Jackson victory celebration following the supertuesday primaries in the Southern states, Reverend Herbert Daughtry told the excited crowd:
We're going to reshape the American landscape and make America what it ought to be—a place Where all the American people, Black, white, red, yellow and brown, can live together in peace and pursue the dream that this country belongs to all of us. t Front1 ine, 3/28/88]
In a debate with the Trotskyists, Irving Beinen (quoted above) was led to defend Jackson's record as a candidate in the following terms:
He's against plant closings. Is that in the interests of the capitalist class? He's marched on picket lines supporting workers in the most important strikes of the country. Is that in the interests of the capitalists? [Socialist Action, Dec 871
(Well, yes.... it depends on which group of capitalists you're referring to.) Beinen further elaborated on this conception of representing class interests in describing the Democratic Party:
It's a capitalist party whose main base consists of workers, Blacks, Latinos, poor people, even unemployed people. It is controlled lock, stock and barrel by big business and by capitalists, without any question.
Jackson's plan, he asserted, is to "weaken that control." It must be obvious, however, that any plan to operate the profit system in the
interests of the exploited majority must always stumble over its own feet, since not all the money in the world could ever suffice to eliminate that majority's poverty and powerlessness. Capital requires poverty, just as a living organism requires oxygen. It breathes in surplus value—all that "extra" stuff that the little workers don't need and that belongs by divine right to their betters. "Weakening the control" of one group of capitalists could not have more effect than to strengthen the control of another group. What we really need to do (starting right now) is to eliminate capital period, brother.
WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Obscurantism is alive and well on Wall Street. Donald Trauscht, vice president of finance and strategy for BorgWarner Corp., "has decided to peddle big pieces of his company [sic! to forei
fners." [Wall Street Journal /24/881
Well, so what? Honey is money, after all. But it does tug at the heartstrings a little bit: "There is sadness in my heart," he bleats, "but I'm a realist. I know where we're at." This reflects a belief that "a lot of the country is up for sale right now," as Douglas Lamont of Northwestern University puts it. ("Right now," even!) Trauscht shares Lamonts worries:
As a citizen and a patriot, I'm concerned. I don't want this country to be owned by foreigners.
One of the spreading consequences of last yearvs stock market crash was a scrambling of the very delicate web of paper profits that the capitalist class had so laboriously reconstructed following its last debacle in 1973. One mi 11 ionmil ion dollars just "disappeared" in a day's trading. Overextended companies are now having to retrench by selling off "pieces of themselves" to buyers "with stacks of yen or marks."
Donald Trauscht is not shedding such bitter tears over earthly goods like work and play, marriage and di vorce or even life and death:
Critics point out that the sales put more US assets under foreign control. That funnels more profits overseas. [Wa11 Street J ourna1 2/24/88] The same critics "also worry that the trend will cost US jobs."
So just think about that one for a minute. US multinationals have no trouble pulling up operations in established industrial centers, selling entire plants and sacking the workforce, plunging the cities that depended on them into permanent depression, transferring capital you can't eat abroad to countries where dictators have been groomed to keep labor cheap and then repatriating the profits—all the while promoting the most savage and bloody repression. Somehow these multinationals are "different" from foreign companies, whose greedy boards of directors "aren't as likely to be concerned about displacing workers" (in the words of Mark Barbash, deputy director of Ohio's Development Department) .
If you get the impression that someone is shedding crocodile tears, that impression is eminently justified. Because as human be
ings with wants and needs we
all fall into the category
of "foreigners." If capital
ists worry so much about
foreign competitors gaining
control of "our" multinatio
nals just imagine how wor
ried they would get if we
did. Ron Elbert
Oscar Wilde on “Living for Others”
The following article is taken with permission from The Nation (2/20/88), where It appears as "Minority Report" (a feature column) . The writer— Christopher Hitchens— not only expresses an insight into the underlying realities of exploitation and social class but also reminds us of a few things about Oscar Vilde that the capitalist class would presumably prefer to play down as quaint or awkward.
That said, we do take exception to what seems to be the author's implied existence of a "middle class," since the liberal middle class of Wilde's time has itself become today's conservative "upper class", having changed only its ideological diapers in the process. Developed capitalism knows only two classes: those who own the means of production and those who work for them to produce and distribute wealth, either to the former's profit or to their minimum cost. A worker is anyone whose only source of income is the sale of their mental and physical abilities.
—The Editor
.... The salient point about (Oscar) Wilde was the economy and address of his wit. He did not froth with bons mots like some second-rate charmer. He was a tough and determined Irishman who more than once flattened bullies with his fist, and most of the time—if we exempt pardonable and tempting sallies about blue china and decorative screens—his drawling remarks were not snobbish or mannered. I suppose that people need to see him as a species of languid dandy, which is why The Soul of Man Under Socialism Ts almost never discussed when dear Oscar's name comes up.
Try to find that essay in
any of the current anthologies of Wilde. First pubished in 1891, it was geldingly retitled The Soul of Man while Wilde was in prison. It expressed the sensibility that had impelled him to take the side of the Irish rebels and, in particular, to oppose the British government's attempted frame up of Charles Stewart Parnell, who, like Wilde, was destroyed on a charge of immorality when all else had failed. It gave Wilde the same distinction as that which he acquired by being the only writer m London to sign George Bernard Shaw's petition for the Haymarket martyrs. And it contains the following imperishable sentence:
The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.
This is not the flippant remark that philistlnes might take it to be. It is in fact what is truly meant by "compassion," a word now made to sound sickening in the mouths of Democratic hypocrites.
What those hypocrites mean when they intone the hack word "compassion" is that we should not forget the needy and the desperate as we pursue our glorious path of selfadvancement. This is the rough equivalent of the older injunction that we should remember the wretched in our prayers. Wilde was proposing something infinitely more daring and intelligent—that we regard poverty, ugliness and the exploitation of others as something repulsive to ourselves. If we see a slum, a ghetto, a beggar, or an old person eating pet food, we should not waste pity on the victim. We should want the abolition of such conditions for our own sakes. The burden of enduring them is too much.
This is why early social
ists were quite proud to be accused of spitting in the face of charity. The principle that an injury to one is an injury to all is not j'ust talk; it is the expression of a solidarity that recognizes mutual interest. As Wilde also wrote, in his review of Edward Carpenter's Chants of Labour, "For to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing." His appreciation of paradox here makes an excellent match with his rejection of sentimentality.
There is another sense in which it would be nice t.n think that Wilde intended his insight about "living for others." In the great workingclass novel The Rag7 ged Trousered Philanthropists the laborer Robert Tressell describes the feel ings of charity and grati tude that, overwhelm the ere dulous, patriotic men who worked alongside him. They were content to spend their entire lives living for others—their betters—each of them confident of his own sturdy independence. This type did not disappear with the waning of the Industrial Revolution. You can meet him today, the despair of "progressive" intellectuals, as he bellies up to the bar with his "can't fool me" talk and proceeds to speak, sometimes using the very same phrases, in the tones of the President's last lying paean to native virtues. Praise for these philanthropists, especially at times when they are needed to be expended in war, is the only official rhetoric you hear that mentions the word "class." Almost the only place that class distinctions are stressed these days is at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Class Factor Downplayed
They deserve to be stressed more often. Society labors on, supporting both an enormously wealthy upper class, whose corporate holdings are frequently tax free or even tax subsidized, and a growing underclass, which is sporadically and pathetically cited as a spur to conscience. lever is it asked, What are these classes for?
A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles.

The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth. A rising tide, as we have recently learned, does not lift all boats, nor does a falling tide sink them all. If people were to recognize that they are all in the same boat, they would take better care of its furnishings, its comfort and its general decor. This is what Wilde meant by the importance of the aesthetic. Radicals have been taught to distrust any toogreat display of individualism, and where they forget this lesson there are always conservatives to remind them (a madly sweet but slightly lugubrious example of this style appears In the current lew Criterion, reprobating my good self). Wilde himself was haunted by a Podhoretzlike chaplain In prison, who reported that the cell reeked of semen. (How could he tell?) We are in the debt of the brave man who taught us to ask, of their majesties, whether they deserve us, or our continued amiable subservience.
— Christopher Hitchens

ON SECOND THOUGHT From the Western Socialist:
Despite those who insist that criminals are born and not made, facts da prove that crime increases in ratio to poverty and misery and that given similar conditions, peoples will react very much in the same way regardless of color or creed. Given a socialist environment of abundance, human beings will behave in a sane and social manner.
We can safely assume that even should housing improvements be made in the Megro slums, the general status of the Megro will remain unchanged. He is a most pathetic victim of this society, as he is exploited as a wageworker and segregated and discriminated against because of his color. Just as long as this system continues so long will poverty and want stalk him, slum reforms or no. The Megro can not solve his basic problems within the confines of a capitalist society and sooner or later will have to join hands with his fellow workers everywhere for the task
of ending the last of all slave societies.
— C Rothstein, "The Slums of Miami," JulyAugust 1948

Survival of the Filthiest
Of all the pseudoscientists in economics, anthropology, history and other fields who have erected so many obstacles to the clear understanding of reality, Herbert Spencer was perhaps the most outstanding. The opinions he held and the conclusions he reached in his work, Social Statics, were adopted wholesale by readers on 'both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain he developed a strong following, but nowhere so avid and devoted a set of disciples as among the burgeoning class of tycoons in the DSA—who, as we shall see, had the opportunity to make a unique and profitable application of his ideas in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Making an analogy with Darwinian biology—which hit the world like a cloudburst in 1859—he tried to show that just as nature worked automatically to select her "elite" and thus accomplished the "survival of the fittest," so too society could approach perfection to the extent that free play was allowed its "elite." He set forth his position very clearly in the statement: "There cannot be more good than that of letting social progress go on unhindered; an immensity of mischief may be done in... the artificial preservation of those least able to care for themselves." He defended cupidity (that great capitalist virtue) as part of the universal struggle far existence. The possession of wealth, to him, was the hallmark of the fittest, to be pursued like the Holy Grail.1
The Success Ethic
Success, sans the saving grace of stewardship, was alone considered of account. Calvinism, the doctrine of thrift, hard work, etc., was here revealed in all its squalid nakedness, shorn of any pretext of "conscience." Mo wonder the developing capitalists oi the "new" woiiu hailea these iindings as those of "science"!
These were the years fallowing the close of the Civil War and the proclamation of freedom for the chattel slaves of the South, of the passing of the 14th Amendment US Constitution; the days of "bindthe nation's wounds," of "Reconstruwhen the "freed" slaves found themselves more insecure and more enslaved than they had been on the plantations and when, together with the "poor white trash," they wandered aimlessly across the land in search of sustenance.
They were equally the days of the Spencerians in business who, recognizing the value of political power, were not content to delegate that power to sycophants and stooges but who sought to rule directly instead, as members of the House and Senate; more members of the capitalist class, as such, held office then than at any other period in DS history. Later, through the refinement of brainwashing techniques and the promise of rewards, they learned to cultivate a reliable, corrupt and mendacious class of mouthpieces. In 1886 Senator George Hearst, father of Villiam Randolph, confessed to his colleagues: "I do not know much about books; I have not read very
much, but I have traveled a good deal and observed men and things, and I have made up my mind after all my experiences that the members of the Senate are the Survivors of the Fittest." [Emphasis added.]
These were also the days of expanding capitalism. The year after the war ended, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, envisaging the consequences of th^ war boom, put it this way:
There is an increasing tendency in our capital to move in. larger masses than formerly. Small business firms compete at more disadvantage with richer houses, and are gradually being absorbed into them.
The Spencerian concept of "survival of the fittest" not only was accepted by business and industrial magnates but also dominated the thinking of the Supreme Court of that day. In 1865 all the, Justices had been born before 1820, at a time when industrialism had not yet made its imprint on the life of the country. Three of them had seen the light of day in the 18th century, and two had been born back during Jefferson's first administration.
Social Darwinism and Legal Personality
That such a court could narrowly interpret the 14th Amendment so as to allow the Reconstruction states to curtail the "privileges and immunities" of the black "freedmen" already showed an implicit bias toward Spencerian ideology. However, it still allowed the states to "regulate" business. The chief dissenter was one of the younger justices, Stephen J. Field, then sixty years old. He was the first to designate corporations as "persons' in his interpretation oi the 14th Amendment. The next step in his logic was easily taken: Mo corporate "person" could be deprived of property by any state without "due process of law." Therefore, since limitations on railroad rates, etc., might reduce the corporations'
?rofit or the value of its holdings, such imitations, under the 14th Amendment, were unconst i t ut i ana1.
The Court and Capital Rights
The trend was confirmed: in 1882 a native of the industrial state of Massachusetts and a firm believer in progress through Spencerian "freedom", Horace Gray, was ap
?ointed to the Supreme Court. For the next wenty years, Gray was the dominating force on tie Court. During that period many of the earlier regulatory decisions were overturned. Then in 1902 Oliver Wendell Holmes succeeded Gray, and in 1905 the great dissenter made his famous observation that "the 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics."
But up to then, and even in the following years, the Court certainly acted as though it did. Between 1890 and 1910 only 19 decisions based on that amendment involved black people, while 289 dealt with corporations. These, by and large, helped to sustain capitalist impulses after the Civil War. It was in the last quarter of the 19th century that the foundations for the great fortunes were laid: Armour and Morris in meat, Pillsbury in flour, Rockefeller in oil. The "new" Vest was opening up with vast opportunities and produced "the men to match its mountains. Leland Stanford left lew York and went out Vest to establish the Central Pacific Railroad. One of his opponents said of him: "lo shelion defending her whelps or a bear her cubs, will make a more savage fight in defense of her material interests." The modern "Robber Baron" had appeared upon the stage of history.
The fittest to survive" were thus overwhelmingly rich white men with numerous wageslaves at their disposal. lot surprisingly, they turned out to be "more equal" than those black exchattel slaves whom their predecessors had liberated into unemployment. The first section of the 14th Amendment reads:
lb state shall...abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person, within its jurisdiction, the equal protection of the laws.
While its second section did not give blacks the vote, it did penalize any state withholding that privilege, by reducing its representation in Congress. The radicals of the Worth insisted that the South ratify the Amendment, which President (Andrew) Johnson considered to be "unconstitutional" and which he advised the states to reject. Tennessee alone failed to follow the Presidential advice and reentered the Onion.
Keeping Black Labor Cheap
Emancipating the South's plantation slaves and then not lifting a finger to protect them from the revenge of their onetime oppressors (who had meanwhile constructed a "stab—intheback" theory around then) meant, in effect, securing an abundant supply of dirtcheap labor for the indefinite future. The "fitter equals" who invested their capital for a living had reaped a potentially enormous harvest (of surplus value), and it remained only to achieve a modus vivendl with the regrouped descendants of the slaveholders. This was not long in coming.
A series of Supreme Court decisions beginning with United States vs. Reese in 1875 and ending wiTE theXTvil"Eights cases of 1883 made discrimination easy. The ruling in these cases was that while the Federal Government might continue to protect black citizens from discrimination by the state, it could not protect them from the acts of individuals, even if the latter were organized. This, as an eminent American historian says, "was practically an invitation to lynch law."
But state laws could discriminate on grounds other than those of race in the
name of cjlvil rights; and they could discriminate on grounds of race if they alleged they were protecting "social" rights. And so the industrialists consolidated their conquest of the South.
This homegrown variety of racism, the assumption of white supremacy as something naturally good for business—in a word, the "survival of the fittest" concept as expounded by Spencer,—is still ingrained in large measure in the collective psyche of the lorth American ruling class. A byproduct of the pursuit of profit, it permeates the social scene like a blight.
And not only in the domestic class struggle can we detect Spencer's pseudoscience, but also in foreign policy. The doctrine of "Manifest Destiny' was an early "pragmatic" version of it. Repeated aggressions against Cuba, Puerto Rico, Central America, the Caribbean, the assault on Mexico, the annexations of California, the Philippines and Hawaii—all of these carry its hue.
Ve ask all workers to recognize racism for the divisive class swindle that it is. It is only society operating as a harmonious whole that is "fit to survive." Men and women of" good will and tremendous courage have spent their lives trying to roll back racist attitudes in the United States; but most have failed to understand that capitalism in this country depends for a part of its profits on pitting blacks against whites. In the judgement of the market
?lace, the heritage of racism would be jetisoned only if doing so proved to more profitable than retaining it.
Let us recognize instead the need for replacing the system of profitbased production which serves as the basis of racist behavior. Socialism (common ownership) is possible now. All that is lacking is the knowledge of how matters stand and the desire to sake the change. 0
1. Socialists do of course recognize the value of Darwin's work. Ve give a place to the "struggle for existence" in nature. But another, countervailing concept also issues from the same science of biology, that of mutual aid. Mutual aid complements the noCibn of "survival of the fittest" (as Kropotkin pointed out). In fact, humans, who are gregarious animals, could not have developed through the ages without cooperation. (As Labriola wrote: "Presocial man is a historical unreality.") Moreover, we have now reached a point of human development where the concept of "survival of the fittest" has become more and more inconse
?uential and "mutual aid" increasingly mportant.
Adapted from "PseudoScience and Capitalist Use Thereof," an essay by the late comrade Bill Pritchard.

OBJECT
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common control of the means and instruments for production by and in the interests of the whole community.
DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES
The World Socialist Party of the United States holds:
1. That society as at present constituted it based upon the ownership of means of living (i.e., lands, factories, railways, etc.), by the capitalist or master class, and the consoquent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itsolf as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess,
3. That this antagonism can ba abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of tha master class by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of tha nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the power of government, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of plutocratic privilege.
7. That as political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8. THE WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labor or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon all members of the working class of this country to support these principles to the end that a termination may be brought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labor, and that poverty may give piece to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.

6. World Socialist review 6 1989
a voice of world socialism

6.1 Too Lazy To Work?
Everybody seems to be upset these days about welfare. The percentage of Americans who live— somehow—on welfare monies seems to be steadily mounting, and a rising outcry is heard against the imagined throng of lazy rascals among them who simply do not want to work but who would rather live off the backs of the taxpayers.
Now, there are a couple of interesting oddities about this and about other conclusions, by many, on the issue of welfare. Take, for example, the case of the so-called lazy bums who do not work simply because they do not want to work. Nobody would argue that 100 per cent of the unemployed are simply too lazy to work. There are always a few, it is acknowledged, who are honest and industrious, but who cannot find jobs. The worst diehard enemy of welfare would admit to this.
But the strange thing about this assessment is the fact that immediately one wonders why those few honest and industrious among the welfare recipients cannot find jobs. If 90 per cent of the unemployed don't work only because they do not want to work, it should follow, logically, that there must be a great number of jobs that are available. Why, then, would the 10 per cent find any difficulty in locating the anxious, would-be employers of their labor? Something funny about that argument, isn't there?
What upsets socialists about welfare, is something altogether different than the usual complaint. We do think it is a shame, of course, that so many Americans must get by on the skimpy income allotted by welfare while it is continually drilled into their heads that they live in the richest country in the world. And yet this is not nearly so upsetting to us as is the knowledge that the real recipients of welfare are not at all those who make up the official roles. The one in seven or one in six, or whatever the figure may be, who wait from month to month for the welfare checks are working class people, even though they may be unemployed for reasons of physical disabilities or for any other reasons. The real recipients of welfare (and what welfare they receive!) are the members of the capitalist class. And here there is no one in seven or one in six figure, either. In this case the percentage is one in one, or 100 per cent. Let's look into this proposition.
There is only one way to create wealth. That is by applying physical and mental energy to raw materials. Now this sort of activity is the function of the working class, not the capitalists. The function of the capitalist class is to own the industries and to employ those who don't
own the means of wealth production to work in them. True, there are capitalists who work and who draw salaries. But they do not work for a living. They could, and in fact do, employ substitutes for themselves for less than their own salaries— substitutes who have degrees in Business from the finest schools in the world. The $50,000 (or whatever) per year they draw from their business as the salary of management would hardly pay their liquor bills. Any capitalist worth talking about can—and frequently does— spend far more on one social gathering than a welfare recipient could gross in an entire lifetime on welfare.
So what, you may ask, is the point? The point is that if people do not work—and most of the able-bodied adult members of the capitalist class either do not work at all or occupy some managerial function as a hobby—then somebody must be supporting them. They don't eat their money or their certificates of wealth-ownership. They are supported, and in style, by those who do all the work—many of whom, from time to time, must hold out their hands for crumbs of tax money during periods of unemployment. Let's straighten out our perspective. Let's organize to abolish welfare for unemployed workers and for the permanently unemployed capitalist class. Let's unite for world socialism.
—Harmo
Originally published as “Who's on Welfare?” In the Perspective for World Socialism (1974), a selection of WSP radio talks.
6.2 The “Housing Question”
On the Brink
IF SOME WILD-EYED LOOKING MAN with a long beard and ragged clothes approached you in the park with a dire warning that nearly 19 million Americans could be homeless by the year 2003, would you just ignore him and shrug off the whole episode? Probably you would. But no less a body than the Congress of the United States commissioned a study—carried out by an academic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—drawing this very conclusion. [Jonathan Kozol, "A Reporter at Large: The Homeless and their Children—I," The New Yorker, 1/25/88.]
In a social order where life depends on getting money, you might thinkmoney would always be forthcoming. This would demonstrate that spending money was as natural an act as eating, sleeping or swimming. In a social order in which "life" means "earning a living" (for the majority), you might think everyone could count on finding some kind of domicile. And this would in turn demonstrate that money was a rational survival tool. (Having a domicile costs money, of course.) Unfortunately, capitalism is not a rational social order; the market system guarantees no one an income sufficient to cover any of life's basic necessities—certainly not a home, which is one of the most expensive. "Between 1978 and 1980,"Kozol writes, "median rents rose 30 per cent for households with incomes below $300,000. Half of these people paid nearly three-quarters of their income for their housing. Forced to choose between housing and food, many families in this situation soon were driven to the streets. That was only a beginning. After 1980, rents rose at even faster rates." This 1988 article, in fact, often reads like a re-edition of Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Kozol writes:
In the past seven years, homelessness has become a nationwide phenomenon. The homeless are not just in midtown Manhattan. They are also in the streets of Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Miami and St Paul. They are in the Steel Belt They are in the sun Belt. They are in Kansas City and in Seattle. In Denver, where evictions rose 800 per cent in 1982—a consequence of unemployment, insufficient numbers of low-income housing units and the influx of poor families seeking work that they could not find in the East—hundredsof families were locked into waiting lists for public housing. Many were forced to live in shelters or on the streets. In Cleveland, in one classic situation, a worker's being laid off caused the loss of his home and then the dissolution of his family....

The income needed to buy or rent a home is derived either from profits or wages (which includes everything from professional remuneration to hourly rates for casual labor), depending on whether or not you own any means of production. Laborpower generates profits at the point of production, profits generate wages in the market, and wages regenerate labor power. Various subsidies to non-working or otherwiseneedy workers have been imposed on capital since the New Deal, such as social security, food stamps, Medicare, unemployment and work-men's compensation, housing projects, welfare programs, etc. But as a general rule, unemployed persons don't get paid, the market is oblivious to their presence, and their living requirements are not acknowledged. Underemployed persons find themselves in essentially the same predicament.
But finding a home is no simple matter in a market-based society. Not only will no houses get built if there is no profit in building them; no one will get paid enough to be able to buy or rent them if capital cannot profitably employ any wage-earners. It is perfectly possible for nouses and apartments to stand empty at the same time as workers are searching frantically for a place to live. An expanding economy might provide a cushion for the worker, but not a contracting or "reindustrializing" one.
Since 1980, homelessness has changed its character. What was once a theatre of the grotesque—shopping-bag ladies in Grand Central Terminal, winos sleeping in the dusty sun outside the Greyhound station in El Paso—has grown into the common misery of millions. "This is a new population," an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts said not long ago. "Many are people who were working all their lives. When they lose their jobs, they lose their homes. When they lose their homes, they start to lose their families, too." Evenin New York City, which has a more or less permanent population of long-term unemployed, 50 per cent of the people who were served at city shelters during 1984 were there for the first time. Roughly the same percentage holds throughout the nation. ["The Homeless and their Children"] Empty houses and apartments (or even empty lots) likewise can't be given away to those with no homes: the same class arrangements which make it undesirable to employ "too many" people also make it undesirable to relinquish potentially (or even marginally) lucrative real estate by making it available to the homeless. For example, in November 1987, MIT had the police evict, amid sledge hammers and violence, the homeless population of a 33 day-old squatter settlement (The Tent City Community) that had set up on its property. MTT needed the land to construct a two-million-square-foot development project known as University Park. Tent City residents weren't after the whole two million square feet: all they asked was to be allowed to move into three university-owned homes that had lain vacant for eight years.
Annually, 2.5 million people annually lose their homes, although some of this number eventually find other housing. The number of homeless people in the United States could be as high as two or three million. But from a capitalist perspective, the "housing question" affects only consumers equipped with spending money. A front-page headline mTheWall Street Journal for February 5, 1988 apprised us of A Dream Deferred. Even With Good Pay, Many Americana Are Unable to Buy a Home. Percentage of Owners Drops For First Time Since '30s As Prices Outpace Salaries. The Journal's statistics were scrubbed sparkling clean: "Nationally, home prices rose 108 per cent between 1976 and 1986 while median family income rose 97 per cent The median price for new and existing homes hit $108,000 last fall, up 17 per cent from a year before...." If we consider three trends that have emerged in contemporary capitalism, however, The Journal's reasoning sounds curiously out of touch: • All during the 70s and 80s, capital has been running away overseas in search of those hordes of ideal workers who will diligently perform their tasks and live with docile tranquility on wages which are a fraction of the equivalent wages in developed countries.
While the US share of international markets has been falling, and lapses in the race to gain a competitive edge in technology have made further inroads into the US position, corporations have steadily rolled back organized labor to amere 15 percent of the workforce.
Despite the shift to high-tech in the sphere of production, most new employment is now in the low-paid service sector.
These factors, operating together, have exerted a downward pressure on earnings, with a consequent faltering of working-class standards of living. As organized labor has reeled under capital's three-pronged onslaught, real wages have tended either to stagnate or to fall, even while the price of housing has catapulted upward. The result: a growing army of marginalized workers who find owning or renting a home problematic—if not utterly impossible. During the Reagan administration, subsidies to the working and non-working poor were systematically gutted on thepleathatcapitalists needed "incentives" to invest. Whereelseto get it but from the pockets of the poor? A handy new doctrine invented in the late 70s (called "supply side economics") was deployed to prove that the needs of the poor were, in fact, considerably less pressing than the weak-minded Keynesians had led everyone to believe. This rationale was used to justify massive cuts in what has euphemistically been called "social welfare" spending (including federally funded low-income housing).
Opposing a thing, it has been said, is the best way to perpetuate it. Proposals to alleviate the antisocial effects of capital's tendency to undermine the very living standards which it has itself rendered possible only end up (when they are successful) expanding the scale of misery and suffering. Capital reflects all anger back on those who experience it; it can even turn a profit at the box office from anger and resentment against the profit system. Society has reached the point where people ought to realize that the only way to guarantee the satisfaction of their needs is to eliminate the requirement of having to pay for everything, both at work and at large. It is technically possible right now to produce all necessary goods and services for nothing and distribute them fornothing. If a majority of people were to act on that insight at the same time in a conscious, political way, the "housing question" would become defunct literally overnight.
-D. Anthony
1. The academic was an associate professor
named Phillip Clay. The study was financed in
1987.
2. Street Magazine, January 1988.
3. Dennis Gaffney,, "MIT Tears Down Tent
City," The Progressive , March 1988.
12."The Homeless and their Children."
13.The Wall Street Journal 2/5/88.

6.3 Liberating work vs. Liberating Production
Self-Management and State Capitalism
THROUGHOUTTHE STATE-CAPITALIST WORLD, the scramble is on. A trend whichhas been a long time maturing in the policies of governments identifying themselves as "Marxist-Leninist"—the introduction of "market socialism"—is at last reaching the political surface. In Poland Solidarity has won a "crushing victory" and now has "control of the upper house, or Senate" according to an article in the Boston Sunday Globe [6/11/89],1 which means that eventually it will be taking its turn at being used to sell the workers their poverty pills. Paraphrasing statements made by Bronis-law Geremek ("Lech Walesa's key political adviser") at a campaign meeting, the writer tells us that The election involves Solidarity in the direction of Polish society and gives Poland a chance to move toward genuine democracy and a Western-style free-market economy. But it can only happen in an evolutionary, step-by-step process. Solidarity must not be pushed into a corner by too many expectations, and, like it or not. Solidarity is going to have to cooperate with the party leaders who have done everything they can since 1981, including martial law, jail and murder, to keep Solidarity from having a hand in how Poland is run.
But this gives the impression that the issue is either political democracyvs economic development or independent vs "company" trade unions. While both of these elements are present, more is afoot than that. What the writer does not mention (or perhaps neverknew)isthatonJuly 26,1981 Solidarity's national leadership adopted a resolution declaring its "full support for the social movement for workers' self-management" and urged the union to back "the establish-t of workers' councils as the essential force for the struggle for economic reform."2 This declaration was the outcome of a proposed "Law of Social Enterprise" put forward by the "Network" of pilot workplace organizations, a"horizontal structure" which appeared in mid-April of that year, based in the workforces of 17 major factories throughout Poland.3 The "social enterprise" it advocated was both an "economic unit and....a fundamental form of property in the means of production" (apart from cooperatives, private enterprises and state enterprises)—a concept which "immediately gained enormous popularity," as Zbigniew Kow-alewski put it.
6.3.1 Unpopular with the government
The government slapped a label of "anarcho-syndicalist" on the Network, claiming that it sought to "align" itself with the Yugoslav reforms of the 1950s. (This was not an altogether strange assertion, since the inspiration for Yugoslavia's brand of "market socialism" grew out of a Republican-Communist alliance during the Spanish civil war against the National Labor Confederation (CNT), which sought to legitimize and coordinate worker-led takeovers of factories and other workplaces in Catalonia in the wake of their hastily departing Francoist owners. Although it had been caught by surprise, the CNT saw this an opportunity to implement directly its theory of self-management.) (See box)
The Network laid a strong emphasis on market economics, not for theoretical reasons but arguing that the Soviet Union would not tolerate an economy being run under its very nose by workers' councils in the enterprises. Kowalewski summarizes the Network's position as follows: The law of value... .cannot be suppressed in a post-capitalist economy. It has to wither away, in parallel with other market categories, including the buying and selling of labor power. The re-establishment, to a certain extent, of the operation of the law of value as an element of control over the plan, is one of the indispensable objectives of reform of economic management in the revolution against the bureaucratic regime. [p34]
Avoiding the "Yugoslav trap" (that is, the inability of the Yugoslav economy to liberate itself from the imperatives of capital accumulation) became a major theme of the discussion. Karol Modzelewski, a leader of Solidarity in Lower Silesia, argued that everything hinged on "the way in which the power over distribution and utilization of the surplus product which belongs to society as a whole is exercised, and....who exercises control over that distribution."4
The notion that Poland has a "post-capitalist" economy, with a surplus product belonging to society as a whole, is quaint enough in itself; but the idea that a "surplus product " should be "held in trust" at all (responsibly or abusively ) involves a serious misconception. In ureal socialist/communist society there can be no "law of value," because there will be no buying and selling of goods and services: and this is the only "post-capitalist" kind of economy there can be. The workers of the Network were falling into the same old delusion that labor can manage capital (which certainly is the theory in Yugoslavia). Their use of the phrase "post-capitalist" betrays, besides, an acceptance of the Leninist myth that the state can manage amarket economy—claiming at the same time to have abolished the market— without this making it a capitalist one; that this arrangement constitutes the lower end of a long-term transition to "full communism"; and that the difference between capitalism and socialism/communism is chiefly an ideological one.
6.3.2 A variant theory
Self-management, reduced to its content and taken to its radical limits is, in fact, a variant theory of common ownership of the means of production. In its rigorous form self-management is advocated by libertarian communists, and its difference with common ownership lies mainly in the arguments made on how to bring it about (overthrowing the state vs. taking it over). But the term is also used widely as a way to describe running an enterprise in a market system (as in Yugoslavia), or alternatively as a "dual-power" model of class struggle (Ernest Mandel).5
There is a Yugoslav author—J.E. Dirlan—who actually does claim that labor can manage capital: "The Yugoslav system of social ownership and workers' self-management can be viewed as one in which labor employs capital, instead of a system in which capital employs labor, as is the case under capitalism."6 The writer quoting him—Gerry Hunnius—adds by way of explanation: "Theoretically all citizens possess ownership rights and delegate authority to manage property to autonomous enterprises and institutions which in turn are managed by the workers directly or through their elected organs of self-management." [p 274, emphasis in the original]
The semblance of a paradox in the above is merely apparent, however. If we say that capital employs labor, we mean that funds for paying wages are set aside by the capitalists (those who make investments with a fund of capital) out of profits. For labor to employ capital, on the other hand, could only mean that wage-earners (who depend for their living on someone paying them for exercising their ability to do work, i.e., who are employed) arrange for the accumulation of capital to be carried out primarily for the sake of their wages. How does one go about employing one's employers? Capital is not accumulated to pay wages to workers; nor are capitalists ever laid off when wages go down. Wages are inherently subordinate to profits. The fact that the capital-labor nexus exists is itself proof that capital always has the upper hand; and it is no revolution to rhetorically defend the sacrosanct rights of working people while letting them be exploited for the sake of some "higher good."
Hunnius writes that "integration of the plans and activities of individual enterprises [in Yugoslavia] is now increasingly being transferred to autonomous associations of producers, economic chambers and other groups... .This transfer of government functions to autonomous associations of producers is one step toward the final goal of the 'withering away of the state.'" [p274] The state, unfortunately, is also the "executive committee of the capitalist class," which means that unless capital is first abolished as a political act, the state will always have a market economy to regulate and to thrive on. The author implies that capitalism without the state (if it could be achieved) would amount to communism (or socialism). Construing Marx's famous phrase in a narrowly technical sense like this displays no small ignorance of the subject.
But there are others who reinforce their ignorance with great learning. Branko Horvat, in his book. The Yugoslav Economic System (The first labor-managed economy in the making)* gives us a cook's tour of self-management as practised in Yugoslavia. As he describes it, the Yugoslav economic system is an experiment which has evolved (since the 50s) out of workers' councils, elected managing boards (composed of at least 75 per cent production workers and acting as executive organ) and enterprise directors ( originally appointed by the state but now recruited by competitive selection locally) into an elaborate set of marketing institutions, with control structures diffused broadly throughout the enterprise.
6.3.3 "Classical free competition"
During the 50s and 60s, he states, the basis was laid for "classical free competition of numerous small enterprises," with the state systematically withdrawing from its former role of guiding the planning process. But without comprehensive planning, the result was only increasing chaos. This, he says, is why the process of integration was initiated:
Working collectives themselves had to resume economic coordination in a state that was withering away. The circle of organizational development seemed closed. The process was started by a fully integrated, state-managed economy, passed through a period of radical decentralization, and is now moving toward another stage of full integration in the form of a labor-managed economy, [p 164]
The reader may be puzzled as to how all this differs objectively, in any essential respect, from traditional capitalism; and the clue to the mystery lies in the spectacles through which Yugoslav theoreticians view the concept of exploitation. Horvat summarizes: "Thus the Yugoslav variant of socialism appears to imply social ownership, self-management in the economy and the absence ofnonlabor income and exploitation. The term 'working class'... .was [construed] to mean 'all working people who are participating in the social process of labor and in socialist economic relations.'" [p 20; emphasis added.] The author also actually believes that Yugoslavia has succeeded in abolishing the wages system by virtue of the enterprise's external autonomy combined with its internal democracy [p 24].
In this rose-colored view, exploitation is not referred to as expropriating the surplus value produced by others (which is where the concepts of alienation and exploitation overlap), but as "earning nonlabor income": "If a person or a group of persons are earning nonlabor income, they are exploiting others, and, insofar as this happens, social property is transformed into private property." [p 170] This has the effect of rendering the concept of exploitation essentially a moral-sentimental one rather than one which describes definite economic relations. This outcome is perhaps inevitable when one divorces income from exploitation in this manner, maintaining that income is not per se exploitative; theproblemremains, though, that income is the device which implements the otherwise abstract condition of exploitation.
This idea that workers can manage the production of surplus value in their own interest is perhaps typical of a capitalism run entirely by workers—even to the point of legally annulling private property. If it retains wages, prices, and profits, it still cannot be considered socialism.
—ROEL
1. The overview title of the article promises to draw "The Lesson of Solidarity," but the article's actual headline turns into "Fighting system from within," and the content is a thick-headed exercise in media stereotyping.

14."Debate over workers' self-management" in Poland: The fight for workers' democracy,7hi%-niew Kowalewski, Socialist Action pamphlet, San Francisco, 1988, p 32.
15.Kowaleski,p32.
16.Kowalewski, p 35.
17.Hurmius, p 274.
18.See for example his article, "The Debate on Workers' Control," in the collection Workers' Control: A Reader on Labor and Social Change, edited by Gerry Hunnius, G. David Garson and John Case, Random House, New York, 1973.
19."Origins of the Spanish Collectives," Tom Wetzel, Ideas and Action, No. 9, Spring 1988.
20.M.E. Sharpe, Inc., White Plains, 1976.

6.4 Salvadoran Capitalism
Under the Gun
THE ACRONYMS OF THE Salvadoran class struggle—which are frequently among the world's longest and most exotic—include one which was intended evidently to carry withitaconnotationof combat: ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance), a name which suggests arena de combate. The brainchild of Roberto d' Aubuisson and the winner in lastMarch's Salvadoran presidential elections, ARENA is well known as the party of the death squads and perhaps less well known as the party of El Salvador's "Fortune Fourteen" (the coterie of wealthy families who export coffee, cotton and other products and monopolize control of the Salvadoran state through the military.
AREN Ahas graduated from being merely a school for psychopaths to a political hit squad staffed directly by members of the capitalist class (the oligarchy). These newcomers are not just tokens. The development marks a reversion to the older style of domination, before it became necessary to hand over the repression of dispossessed peasants to the military—and with it, direct control of the state.
A century ago, the capitalists of El Salvador took their cue from the land grabs that were then the fashion among Liberals and instituted laws legalizing the seizure of farmlands, their conversion into coffee plantations and the "disriplining" of the surplus population thus created to work on their new plantations. They created a military machine specifically for this purpose. In time this machine became an all-encompassing vehicle of government, for the Liberals found they could not rule anymore without converting the military into a political party.
6.4.1 The Alliance for Progress
After the second world war, Salvadoran economic development came under the tutelage of the United States, which, smarting
from the embarrassment of having inadvertently sponsored the Castro regime in Cuba, had launched the Alliance for Progress and was pushing broad-based industrialization (under the doctrine of import substitution) as a strategy for profit-making. This reflected the capitalist belief that poverty could not possibly be a cause of discontent, and a development policy which intensified the poverty of the workers would thus undercut their susceptibility to insidious doctrines of revolution "imported" from Russia. But the more development went ahead, it seemed, the more the workers (who had come to supplant the dispossessed peasant farmers as the principal exploited class) became difficult and uncooperative. The decade of the 70s witnessed an outpouring of organizing andreform efforts by the "working poor," culminating in a coup d'ltat by junior military officers, who set up a junta in October 1979.
6.4.2 Government by terror
In El Salvador, terrorism has been raised to the level of a fine political art: beginning with the matanza (massacre) of 1932, when the army and the civilian guards slaughtered some 30,000 rural coffee workers and peas-ants made desperate by the depression. (The latter had let the newly formed Communist Party talk them into an uprising.) The myth of Communist infiltration was also added to the brew in 1932—a byproduct of having prevented the Leninists (led by Agustfh Farabundo Marti, the namesake of today's FMLN) from taking office after they had won some electoral victories.1 In the 60s and 70s, the CIA helped to foster the infrastructure of surveillance and extortion that later became the death squads.
Although coffee no longer forms the dominant source of the oligarchy's profits, most of El Salvador's workers remain rural.
or they have formed cooperatives (with encouragement from US development agencies); however, even this little bit smacks of "communism" to the high-strung Salvadoran capitalists. El Salvador was from early on Central America's most proletarianized economy, and the relatively violent methods by which the coffee barons carried out their initial expropriations over a century ago have ensured ever since that exploitation would always be carried out under the gun. Whenever it seemed they could afford the luxury, they would make a show of constitutional formality by having the generals operate as elected officials.
But the effervescence of the 70s, followed by the discrediting of the generals as a political force and the US's clumsy attempts to wrest the initiative from the burgeoning popular organizations,2 created a situation of flux that could not be dealt with in the usual way. The right was forced temporarily to step up the repression in semi-clandestine fashion, working outof the ministry of Defense through the "security forces," even as US -inspired constitutional and agrarian reforms were being implemented over their heads by the nominal rulers in the junta. The Fourteen Families sulked in their tents all during the Duarte years (1984-1988). Taking advantage of the Christian Democrats' self-destructive alliance with the meddlers from Washington, the rich went from funding paramilitary pogroms to infusing d'Aubuisson's ARENA with wealth and influence—and their own presence—to the point where they could take over the Legislative Assembly in 1988.
6.4.3 Massive voter abstentionism
This is the general backdrop against which the March presidential elections were "fought." Most of those eligible to vote abstained on the advice of the FMLN; ARENA supporters went to the polls in full force. (It is illegal—and possibly fatal—not to vote in El Salvador.)
The party downplayed its ultralight ideology and promised what Salvadorans appear to want most—change. ARENA promised peace, health, education and jobs to the voters. Apparently many Salvadorans hope that ARENA will be able to put the country ba * " "
TheseTimes,ZP9W] If this is true, it demonstrates an astounding narVet^, for it is exacdy what Duarte and the Christian Democrats had promised the voters in 1984, when he defeated d'Aubuisson—with a critical boost from the American Institute for Free Labor Develop-
world socialist review/6
ment(ATJFLD).3 Another critical factor was a pact he had made with the leaders of the agricultural cooperative organizations and labor unions, who apparently actually expected aChristian-Democratic government, once elected, to legislate in their behalf.
Abolish wages and profits?
No political party in the election particularly encouraged Salvadoran workers to think in terms of abolishing the wages system. But the objection that El Salvador is not ready for such a revolution no longer holds any water; if anything, in terms of social organization, it is probably better suited for it at present than any of its neighbors. The first coffee barons, in militarizing the expulsion of peasants from their lands, set up an economic battering ram that pulverized the Salvadoran social fabric—in contrast to Honduras or Guatemala, where "development" was largely the work of the United Fruit Company up until the 1940s and kept most surplus value production in a potential condition. Class consciousness has reached a very acute stage of development in El Salvador.
On the other hand, where it concerns the formal, abstract side of class consciousness—having a theoretically defined point of view—Salvadoran workers have up to the present gotten no help from their leaders on the left Common ownership of the means of wealth production (socialism) or anything claiming to resemble it is not on any leftwing agenda.
The FMLN, an umbrella organization uniting many diverse tendencies, can only maintain its cohesion as an opposition force by hewing to a cautious, diffident reformism, and the apparent belief of many of its leaders that its proposals contain some element of "socialism" comes nowhere close to a policy of common ownership of the means of wealth production. Assuming workers are successful in driving the oligarchy from El Salvador, their next set of rulers and employers will have their work cut out for them cutting a path back to competitivity in the world's markets. It is precisely because the current repression is directed against working-class organizing as such that the social space needed for socialist consciousness to emerge is missing. Salvadoran workers are currently fighting for aright to organize that workers in Europe won over a century ago.
Now it is ARENA'S turn to attempt to move the hour hand backwards; it is said to "enjoy considerable supportnot only among the upper classes but also among segments of the lower class and peasantry outside FMLN zones." [The Progressive,Tcbraary 1989]
Yet if there is really any belief that
uly any b
things will change for the better under ARENA, it is difficult to guess on what the belief could be based. In a 1987 CISPES interview, the FMLN'S Salvador Samayoa (former minister of Education following the October 1979 coup) described then-president Duarte's policies in these terms: "Over 80 per cent of the people want dialogue and a political solution to the war, while the [Duarte] government stubbornly persists in blocking the way to apolitical solution... .The Duarte government has sunk the nation into the worst economic crisis of our entire history. The standard of living of the whole population has deteriorated and the economy has contracted... .The economy is practically in chaos....Nobody has expressed support for the government's economic policies." [April 1987] The alternatives proposed by ARENA do not exactly improve on this scenario. In fact, its chief distinction from the Christian Democrats has been to advocate denationalizing the banking and export industries.
6.4.4 The workers in their place
Nor is ARENA inclined to act otherwise; Washington only cultivated the Christian Democrats for their ability to keep workers' demands to a minimum, and the "extreme" right would hardly be proposing an alternative to that. AIFLD had been sent down (that is the only appropriate term for it) by the Reagan administration to combat independent trade unionism in El Salvador by forming "parallel" unions that would genuflect obediently whenever the government acted; meanwhile the government did its best to repress strikes (it was successful in 152 cases out of 155—after Duarte's pact with the unions). When the umbrella structure set up by AIFLD, the UPD (Popular Democratic Unity), had the gall to protest its outrage at Duarte's betrayal, AIFLD set about destroying its own creature by withdrawing all of its support and generating yet another puppet organization, the Confederation of Democratic Workers (CTD). Meantime, indiv idual unions within the UPD had regrouped, in alliance with the disillusioned peasant cooperatives and other social groups, to form the National Unity of Salvadoran Workers (UNTS); this presently brings together some -102 organizations, including associations of slum dwellers.
After the October 1986 earthquake, whichleft 200,000 homeless, destroyedmore than 22,000 homes and cost 38,000 jobs, no response was forthcoming from the Duarte government; ....whole families are huddled under plastic and stick shacks, the water system is contaminated, people are sick and unemployed....[Alert!, April 1987] People in the slums of San Salvador are living on the sides of ravines or near sewage lines; there is 71 per cent unemployment; people are forced to dig up garbage from the wholesale market, "pull up rotting fruit, bring it home and put it on their families' tables," according to Leonardo Hidalgo, president of the Council of Marginalized Communities (CCM) in San Salvador. [Central America Reporter, May 1989]
6.4.5 Back to "Necessary Genocide"
ARENA, despite its recent facelift, stands poised to carry out or sanction a second "period of necessary genocide,"4 which involves piling up corpses on the order of a hundred thousand and "remaking S alvadoran society in the next five years"— preferably along the lines of the "Guatemalan solution."5 "Freddy" Cristiani, El Salvador's smooth-talking new millionaire president, is a Reagan rerun: long on will and short on options, the party wants both to reline its members' pockets with their rightful loot (by slicing revenues off the national budget) and pay the army to fund an unprecedented increase in butchery, regimentation and terrorism—getting money from Washington to carry out similar aims that have made Guatemala virtually a pariah state (in terms of arms sales, at least).
The FMLN, for its part, talks a lot about adopting "a model that responds to the specific characteristics of our country" [Central America Reporter, December 1988], calling for the "participation of all social forces." Opinion is nearly unanimous that the Center has collapsed; and even the FMLN'S enemies concede that the Front has become a formidable opponent. They now have "much greater influence and support" among the population6 and have carried the war into the central parts of the country. A dramatic increase in repression now will have effects opposite to those ithad at the end of the 70s, when no guerrilla movement existed, swelling its ranks with desperate workers persuaded that they have only poverty, torture and death to lose. The army's resources have been stretched thin, and both recruits and morale are problem-
But, as we said above, no one in El Salvador—from ARENA to the FMLN—is promising the workers a world to win. Radical social changes and "socialist ideals" are on the opposition agenda; and these are seemingly outweighed, for "centrist forces or small business," by the looming threat to their interests posed by an oligarchy mounted on the back of a death-squad government. Few of the regime's opponents in organized labor (urban or rural) are interested in something so sweeping as the total elimination of money from the spheres of production and consumption—the savagery of the repression keeps them too occupied with immediate survival.
The closest thing to a glimmer of insight that there are "broader problems" behind the burning questions was a statement by CCM 's Leonardo Hidalgo: "We're the labor force that builds beautiful houses, but we don't get to live in those houses.... We produce El Salvador's wealth, but we don't have access to it."7 This is at least a healthy step in the right direction, but the country still lacks a movement to abolish production for profit. The basic issues of free access to necessary goods and services, common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production, still remain under ice in tropical El Salvador.
—A.D.
1. The Politics of Intervention: The United States in Central America, edited by Roger Burbach and Patricia Flynn, Monthly Review Press,
New York, 1984.
2. Working Against Us (The American Institute for Free Labor Development [AIFLD] and the International Policy of the AFL-CIO), Robert Armstrong, Hank Frundt, Hobart Spalding and Sean Sweeney. (NACLA pamphlet, 1987)
3. Nominally the "foreign policy arm of the AFL-CIO, AIFLD currently receives some 95 per cent of its funding from government sources and sees the struggle of classes through capital-colored spectacles. (Working Against Us )
9.Joann Wypijewski, "El Salvador: Voices on the Winds of Fury," Zeta Magazine, April 1989. (Interview with two representatives of the Salva-doran student movement, Salomon Alfaro Estrada and Rene Hernandez.)
10."In Salvador Time Waits for No One," Ruben Zamora, The Nation, February 27, 1989.
11.Ibid.
1. "Organizing in the slums of San Salvador," Mike Prokosch.Cen/ra/ America Reporter, May
1989.

6.5 I Media and consciousness
THE ILLUSION OF HISTORY
YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING, the
center of innumerable impulses, desires and thoughts. What if you could find yourself in your own presence, witness yourself as a object acting independently of yourself as an observer? The strangeness of the effect would be astounding, as though in a dream: you would encounter yourself—turned into an inaccessible stranger, unable to affect or influence the behavior of this second you. Since the divorce would only be occurring between two phases of you, this image of yourself would seem disturbingly alien; in real life you would never regard yourself in such a split-apart fashion.
This very encounter actually does take place every day, at a collective social level, in a multitude of ways. The mass media engage in just such a daily exercise of presenting society with a reproduction of itself as a finished object "That's the way it is," Walter Cronkite used to intone at the end of evening news broadcasts back in the 60s.
Cronkite's "it" referred to a thin slice of actions and events chosen very carefully and deliberately from among the vast mass of social processes going on continuously and interactively. All those processes were the outcome of impulses, feelings and thoughts of a whole world of people converted into the observable form of events, all of them interdependent and some of them being considered unusually important
6.5.1 Relationships with others
You, on the other hand, are an individual (physically speaking) whose whole life is made up of these contacts with others. Not all of these contacts are personal: many of them are with institutions, other bundles of feelings and thoughts concentrated together from uncountable individual lives and given an official name. Some of these institutions are so important to the daily mobilization of your connections with others that they are considered to have general interest by those who make a business or profession of reporting on them; and they report to the large, anonymous collection of unknown, mutually estranged individuals like yourself, who receive the collective name of "the audience" or "the public."
The picture of yourself that the mass media, day in and day out, invent for you (not as an individual with aspirations, fears, needs and ideas, but as an invisible, unacknowledged part of the same events being presented to you in the form of a picture of something inaccessible and external to yourself) is essentially this dreamlike image of you that we referred to above. In reality, you are watching yourself—mirrored in the actions of others,—but it is as though you could be emotionally disconnected from the others. The picture of reality excludes you as a (passive) onlooker. It is a you which you cannot touch or speak to—a reality to which you can relate either distantly or not at all: a reality you could not have made. It is an image of you which seems to have gotten outofyourreach. (Oddly enough, it is also an image which you must buy.)
Reality thus becomes transformed into an alien "something" to which experts and professionals allow you partial.occasionalandprivileged access. You have no control over it (or them). You have been successfully "atomized": your emotional and intellectual contacts have been reduced to minuscule fractions of what perhaps you and certainly your great grandparents used to experience in direct relation to others every day.
6.5.2 The ruling class
The unreal atmosphere of a mental institution grips capitalist society. Within it, only the teased-up (often psychopathic) fantasies of the ruling elite are accorded the status of reality; everything else is either officially ignored or is integrated into these ruling fantasies andis used to corroborate them.
"Outside" this media-wall are the horrors of a world (of yourself), the expression of whose needs is systemati-callyoverriddenandsuppressed because they cannot be fitted in to the narrow space of the profit system, either ideologically or economically, of which the mass media form a part. People are starving, for example, not because capitalism has made such a terrible mess of human existence: on the contrary, the mass media show capital-induced poverty as a natural condition from which capital (and only capital!) can rescue the world. The fact that not so long ago, before capitalist development arrived to "rescue" them, the parents and grandparents of these people were feeding themselves but were subsequently dispossessed of their lands so that new owners could have some of them plant and harvest crops for export has unaccountably been dropped from the record.
The media-wall is bounded by the marketplace, and what lies within it is limited to what the market can provide (to customers with money). "Outside" the wall nothing is guaranteed survival. The humanity that cannot fit into the narrow mold of the customer is "surplus" to reality.
6.5.3 Exactly how real are you?
The abridged and stilted reality of a world you only "watch" in passive mode and to which you cannot relate is thus a reality you did not make yourself. It is a reality devoid of communication between yourself and others, restrained instead to a thin and pale marketplace image of "it," provided anonymously by individuals whom you can never really know or influence. And it is a reality which blocks and retards your satisfaction, your ability to enjoy life.
It is, in short, not your reality at all. It is a reality of profit As a human being, you owe it to yourself to replace it with a reality made by human beings for their own satisfaction: withamoney-less, marketless form of production— common ownership or socialism—that people can actually exercise full control over democratically. Not at all like the reality that has been made for us, by the decree of a few.
—A.R.

6.6 Labor Theory of Value
The Rich Get Richer...
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE RICH and other people poor?
This is a question which any child could ask and one with which the finest minds of human society have grappled. Why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? We could get a clearer idea of how to look at the problem if we started by asking, what does "beingrich"(or"beingpoor")mean? "Being rich" is ordinarily used to mean possessing much more wealth than is required to survive from day to day, whereas "being poor" means not possessing enough wealth for the same purpose. What is wealth? Wealth is anything human beings can make or find and can use to further the survival of their species; wealth is anything people find useful.
However, the bulk of society's wealth must be produced. And a certain amount of it must be produced to satisfy survival requirements (to meet human needs). Not only that, but the bulk of wealth production is not only a social but a community effort, which means that it usually takes a good many people working together (all at once or in sequence) to produce it. Once they have produced it, the question arises, how to distribute theproduct? If no specialrules are in effect, the way a community distributes the wealth it has produced is to share it— even with individuals living in some other community.
When people share the products of their labor with each other, it is fairly obvious that they can be neither rich nor poor. Thus, Ihe immediate answer to the first question is that we have the poor (and the rich) always with us because special rules have been adopted for distributing the wealth that we all produce as members of society. (Yes, these are bad rules.) And what are these special rules?
6.6.1 Two types of "special rules"
They can be grouped in two categories: 1) individuals may withhold the wealth they cause to be produced from consumption by thecommunity; and 2) individuals may deny other individuals access to the things they need to stay alive. The first set of special rules, if observed by enough people, has the effect of converting society into a marketplace, in which strangers approach each other and exchange their goods provided what they exchange is equivalent. (The goods are called commodities.)
shelter. This privilege is by no means always granted. We call this condition "being employed," "having a job" or a number of other things.
To be without employment in today's world is risky indeed. An employee or worker has only one commodity to offer in the marketplace: an ability to do work. An employer has the absolute right to distribute the privilege of survival to individual workers based on a commonly accepted estimate of how much it cost to shape or develop this working ability (or labor power). Unemployment is a state of existence (growing out of the special rules mentioned above) located somewhere between life and death— and not infrequently, it is closer to the latter.
Of all the workers there are, only a portion (possibly a very large portion, even amajority) actually concern themselves with producing wealth for their masters. Under capitalism, it is these workers whose privileges of survival determine the standard for the rest. Survival privileges go by the name of "wages" or "salaries," and each wage or salary is pegged to the "basket" of commodities (goods and services) required by different tiers of workers to continue being employed.
The power of life and death is transferred up the chain of command on a daily basis through the mobilization of the workers ' various abilities to do work; this transfer of power is measured with a brutal but grandiose simplicity as the wealth that is left over after subtracting the workers' living requirements from the product of their labor. This excess amount of wealth is called profit, and anyone who produces it—or transfers it laterally to another lord and master— is "exploited."
6.6.2 Profit, wages and income
The concentration of wealth in commodity form is what we know as "income." Profit is the source of income of the rich, whether they receive the transfer directly through production or indirectly through their competitive power struggles in the marketplace with the employers of productive wage labor. Wages (salaries) are the source of income of the poor.
Although income is really only an exchange of commodities (labor power for other survival goods), the spokesmen for the rich and powerful prefer to dress it up in the beautiful gown of money when they talk about it. Thus, both wages and profits are usually described in terms of the prices of goods and services, as though money had a life of its own.
One of money's interesting paradoxes is that if there is too much of it around, the prices of goods and services all go up. How do we know when there is too much money? When the total amount circulating exceeds the amount required for the exchange of goods and services. Since you need something to exchange for something else, if you have no money you can expect nothing for it. And so it happens that we certainly will continue having the poor with us, because their problem is precisely that they are unable to obtain the money they need to access these goods and services.
Under capitalism, the majority of the world's population lives in poverty, and (of course) as this population of wage slaves increases, so does the total poverty. No one can take pity on them and flood the market with spending money, because that would only drive price levels up, leaving them as poor as or poorer than before.
Another name for community sharing of wealth without power is communism; or if you like, socialism or common ownership of the means of production. It is moneyless. It is done on a worldwide basis. There are no special rules for producing and distributing wealth; there is only one general rule (the primitive one)—each person contributes (produces wealth or does something useful) according to their abilities; and each person receives (consumes wealth) according to their needs.
Everyone is unemployed, and no one can become an employer. No one can get rich, because everyone is wealthy. Everyone works for nothing, and no one lacks for necessities. How do we get back to the garden? Like losing weight, it starts with our thought processes: if enough people get together and decide to make it happen, the whole immense superstructure of exploitation will simply vanish like smoke. In that sense, the power of capital over society is the power of an illusion. 0 [EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was Inspired by a suggestion from Comrade Len Fenton; and some of the material In the box was contributed by Comrade W.L.]
6.7 Wages, Profits and the "Income Gap"
After some decline in the late 1960s, poverty is as high today as it was before Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty began.
In 1960, black men earned about 31 per cent as much as whites, but by 1986 this ratio had increased to 73 per cent, according to Professor Haveman [director of the University of Wisconsin's La Follett Institute of Public Affairs].
Yet by other measures, the income gap has expanded in the last decade, in a recent report, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group, found that the median family income of blacks declined in the last decade from 59 per cent of that or whites to 56 per cent.
The Center estimated that female-headed black families had an average income of only $9,710 in 1987, compared with $17,018 for white families headed by a woman.
In the mid-1960s, poverty among children was no worse than for the population as a whole; today, one child out of four is poor, and children are 50 per cent more likely to be living in poverty (defined by the Government as an income of $11,204 or less for a family of four) than is the population as a whole.

...the income gap between the richest and the poorest families in this country is greater today than at any time since the federal government began keeping statistics. One of the most troubling revelations is that the share of total personal income received by the most affluent one-fifth of all households rose to 46.1 per cent in 1986 from 433 per cent in 1970. At the same time, the share obtained by the poorest one-fifth declined to 3.8 per cent from 4.1 per cent in 1970. In that same period the middle class watched its own share dip to 50.1 per cent of total personal income in 1986 from 52.6 per cent, reports the US Census Bureau.
Since 1975, unions have lost four million members. Between 1981 and 1986, half of all unionized workers were forced to take wage cuts, accept two-tiered pay agreements, and/or make employee-benefit concessions. In the long term, the share of union workers in the non-farm workforce fell from 30.2 per cent in 1955 to 15.9 per cent in 1986.
Whether we want it done or not, our sights ARE being lowered for us. The remnants of the bluecollar class now form the "new collar" workers, an emerging lower middle class whose expectations and earnings have been eroded in the last 15 years.
—"The End of the American Dream?" Mark L Goldstein,
Industry Week, 4/4/88.
Percentage of productive hours worked by w
...10
Percentage, in 1976, of the nation's wealth owned by America's richest 1%: .
Minimum cost to feed a family of four for a month in Bolivia:..
—"The Economic Facts," Greenpeace, January/February 1989.

6.8 NEWS FROM THE NEW WORLD
Imagine no possessions
6.8.1 IS SOCIALISM PRACTICAL?
IF YOU ARE READING THIS at all, you probably already realize that our present system of society needs some major changes to make it work. Chances are you are aware of hunger, homeless-ness, unemployment, threats to the environment, and so forth, and would like to find a way to eliminate these problems. Most of us would like to leave the world a little better than we found it, to leave our children an inheritance of a society a little kinder than the dog-eat-dog competition of American capitalism.
The trouble is, we have only so much energy. After working eight hours a day, five days a week, plus a few extra hours in the commute, there's not a whole lot of time left to spend on "world improvement". So the tendency is either to give up on it altogether, Yuppie-style, and focus on -improvement (sometimes rationalizing that this is the first step in making the world better), or else to focus on some short-term objective that looks as though it will make areal difference—if not in changing the whole structure of society, then at least in changing some particularly troublesome aspect of it
The reason most people who hear the socialist case do not respond by joining forces with the world socialist movement is that working for socialism just doesn't seem very practical. It doesn't appear to produce results. The World Socialist Party has been at it since 1916, and capitalism is still going strong. So, from a practical standpoint, isn't it a waste of time to put what little energy we have left, after earning a
living, into "an impossible dream"? But—
6.8.2 IS CAPITALISM PRACTICAL?
There are a lot of things that can never be accomplished within the framework of society as it is presently constituted.
For example, under capitalism it will never be "practical" to clean up the environment To do so would be very difficult to finance, and would not make a profit for anyone. Money and profits are the prime motives of accomplishment in capitalist society.
As this article is being written (April, 1989), an Alaskan oil spill is killing wildlife and wreaking havoc on the ocean as a habitat, while the United States government and Exxon argue about who's going to pay for the cleanup. Media coverage is focusing on the guilt of individuals in causing the spill, rather than on the profit orientation of an economy willing to take the known risk in the first place. Is this practical? Is it practical to take chances with the only planet we have?
In a socialist society, money would be no object. (In fact, money would not exist at all.) The motive for accomplishing things would not be money and profits, but rather the satisfaction of human wants and needs. Clearly, preserving a healthy environment is an overwhelmingly important need we all have in common, one which in a sane society would take precedence over almost everything else. So it would be eminently "practical" in socialism to keep the oceans safe for marine life, whereas it obviously is not today. Only by eliminating profit as a motive and money as a means of exchange can we solve the problems of our polluted environment
It is important to understand that money is no longer socially necessary. There is no need for a medium of exchange inaworldlikeoursof the 1980's, where the technology to produce abundance already exists. Money is only useful when there is a need to limit access to things because of scarcity. The contribution of capitalism is that it has solved enough problems of production so that scarcity no longer has to exist. We live in a world of potential abundance, even though that potential cannot be realized without eliminating the profit motive. The reason things are scarce today is not that we working people can't produce enough. It's that if things became too abundantly available, they could no longer be sold for enough for anyone to make a profit— and, after all, profits are what capitalism is all about That's why Exxon and others are willing to take such risks. (It's also why farmers are paid not to produce food, in spite of the fact that there are hungry people in our country.)
6.8.3 MONEY vs FREE ACCESS
The irony is that with society set up so that limiting access is what keeps things going, the system itself inevitably resists eliminating the ways by which it Umits access—namely, the wages system and money to buy things.
Capitalsm needs money to limit access to goods and services. It tends to make everything into a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. One of the main characteristics of our society is that access to what we need is kept limited, so that a few people will be able to make a profit.
The kind of thinking that sees tuna fish as a commodity is not likely to preserve the oceans as an environment for dolphins to play in.
Nor is the system that has transformed our energy into a commodity called labor power likely to preserve the earth as an environment for our grandchildren to play in.
But once money is no object, many "impractical dreams" become child's play. Keeping our waters clean is not technologicaUy impossible, or even difficult; it's just expensive. The hardest task of most environmental programs is to obtain funding.
What I would like to suggest here is that it's easier in the long run to eliminate the need for funding, than to fight the losing battle of trying to find it for each individual situation that demands change. Given the Umited amount of energy any of us has left at the end of a day of capitalism (as noted above), the most efficient and significant way to spend that energy is on making a real revolution in society.
We act in our own self-interest, not by finding ways to get more money, but by eliminating the basis for money— and thereby creating a society of free access. Then, anything we want to do will be within our power and practical.
—Karla Ellenbogen

6.9 Capitalism vs. Community
Twin Oaks (near Louisa, Virginia) is one of the more successful communes to emerge out of the 60s and survive into the 80s. In the Whole Earth Review for Summer 1986, Kathleen Kinkade ("Kat")—the only founding member of the commune continuing to live there—wrote an article ("A commune that works, so faT) which cautiously evaluated the pros and the cons of TO's approach to communal living. A WSP member ("Aaron") who also belongs to the Twin Oaks commune took issue with a number of statements she made in her article and initiated a written exchange of ideas among the other Twin Oakers on the subject—a paper entitled, "Is Twin Oaks Really Communal?" What follows is a series of ideas excerpted from that paper arranged in the form of a roundtable discussion; participants include Aaron, Brenda, Kai and Ross, with some help from Allen and Bob (whose contributions are not recorded here—and many others also shared their ideas). Kat speaks from her 1986 article; Aaron's remarks are in italics.
6.9.1 A. Security: The Satisfaction of Needs
Kat: Our social security is total, cradle to grave.
Aaron: Provided the community remains solvent and in existence for the length of each member's life should they remain. If the community is ever dissolved, each member gets $2,000 upon the dissolution of the property and the bulk of what remains goes back into the federation. That small amount is hardly worthy compensation for a lifetime of wealth production here. It's certainly not enough to enable one to start over again in life, particularly if one is elderly. I would hardly call that cradle to grave social security.
"Why do people leave?" For many reasons. Oneofwhich....is because people realize that they are making an enormous investment of their lives in something which will yield no return if they don't remain locked into it for their lifetime or if it should fail along the way. If you want to point out the worst case scenarios as examples, you may do so. However, most people (ifyou look at the average) do far better for themselves and gain better financial security (and that's a relative condition withincapitalism, granted) than they do by investing their energies here.
[Speaking to Bob]: Most of us are single and without dependents and are able to start over on scratch fairly well, but.... several former members, particularly those with children to support or with few employable skills, havehadavery rough time of it and have had to enter public assistance programs in order to make ends meet. How is it that you believe that the community really takes care of its inhabitants when this is so? I'm sure that you must have some concerns that later in your life, perhaps when you're a man in his sixties or seventies, you may decide that you wish to live elsewhere besides T.O.but of course will have no financial means to make that possible.
6.9.2 B. Ownership
Kaf Twin Oaks' day-to-day labor demands aren't too bad these days, because we have fewer than 20 children, so the people who aren't bringing in money can be doing the other necessary tasks. Besides, the sales efforts are behind us now. At this point, we can afford to keep only a third of our labor force in moneymaking activities. I don'tby any means think Twin Oaks is amodel to follow for income production. We did the best we could, and we are economically secure enough, but there are probably better ways for other groups. What we did right, though, was to resist the impulse to try to live off the land (penicillin doesn't grow on trees; neither does gasoline) and faced the necessity of making money in the nation's marketplace. Another feasible way is to work at jobs in cities (we did that for a few years as a stopgap, and we sure don't recommend it if there is any alternative.)
We maintained a communal economy. The essence of the benefit of pooled resources is that once you have spent what you need to for the basic maintenance of the group, what you have left over is a big enough lump of money to do something significant with. If you divide up the money and distribute it to the workers, each worker's ambitions are limited by the small amount of the resources. In such an economy there are lots of tape players and bicycles. But in a communal economy, the "surplus" money pile is big enough for something that serves the whole community. Such a community has sidewalks and sewage treatment. Eventually it gets tape players and bicycles, too, but not until the group feels that it has luxury money. One might think it could work just as well the other way—first buying the individual luxuries, then taxing for the big-ticket items. One reason it doesn't is that when members leave, they can take their small purchases with them, but the sidewalks stay put
We held the line on consumption. Twin Oaks' early leaders were very stingy with consumer goodies. Most of the surplus cash, when we had any, went into buildings, tools, and business investment. That same conservatism, though loosening somewhat in recentyears, is still basic to our financial thinking. Weproducemore than we consume, and we put large chunks of the surplus production into permanent improvements. If we didn't have a common purse, we wouldn't be able to do that, because there wouldn't be enough cash to do it with. The lack of basic facilities, like utilities and public buildings, would in turn discourage serious communards from choosing our way of life.
Aaron: Of greater importance than tape players and bicycles is the question of larger personal assets and who really owns the wealth of Twin Oaks, a question which is usually brushed aside by most of us here. Both Twin Oaks' capital assets—money in the bank and other investments—and fixed assets—sidewalks, sewage treatment plant as Kat mentions, buildings, vehicles, etc are not actually owned by the commune's inhabitants, but rather by Twin Oaks as an institutional corporate trust. Despite Kat's glowing description of Twin Oaks (which is more or less accurate in terms of its description ofTwin Oaks' social amenities) let us not be mistaken, this is not socialism, it's a cooperative financial arrangement within capitalism. One must ask, however, what are we in cooperation to achieve? After having produced surplus value (profit) for the community for one, twenty, or fifty years, if one then decides to leave they walkaway with thirty-five dollars per month allowance in savings plus, at best, an extra one hundred dollars thrown in. Not much in personal assets to show for after putting in all that work. This sort of arrangement in the workplace of society at large would be a capitalist's dream come true!
Brenda: We have achieved the Marxist dream—atT.O. the workers own the means of production, and they have control over the conditions of their work.
Ross: Twin Oaks has accomplished a necessary trade-off that enables us to live our special lifestyle within US capitalist society. No, we're not socialist or completely communal, because we need to earn money and there is no more efficient way to make money than by capitalist organization (accounting system)—that is the one very short-term job capitalism does too well, at the expense of human needs and life-support systems. We do operate our businesses for profit, but we distribute most of it to each other in social services and allowance— equally, yet keeping a substantial portion in reserve for appropriate investment This means that, as Aaron suggests, Twin Oaks, as an institution, does not share out 100 percent of its assets and therefore is not really "owned" by the members. Ideally we should be able to increase allowances and leaving funds to equal our total output of value in profits. But if we did, we'd be bankrupt in a short time, and people would have a further incentive to leave, in fact a reward for leaving. Because we operate profit-making businesses we must keep a reserve of "working capital" or the businesses will fail. We must keep a reserve in appropriate investments to insure our financial survival in the volatile, boom-and-bust world of business. To do otherwise would, in my opinion, encourage members to "take their money and run" before the financial roof fell in. If the United States were a socialist economy there might be no boom-and-bust syndrome and everyone could relax and share everything without fear of bankruptcy and seizure of land and buildings. But the United States is what it is, and
we have little choice but to struggle for financial survival within that context
Aaron [speaking to Bob]: In a property-based society, such as the bulk of the globe is, all property is owned in some way or another. In an entity such as Twin Oaks property can be owned in essentially two ways. Either all of the assets can be owned by the institution as a corporate trust, or individuals who inhabit it can own shares which are issued. At Twin Oaks it is of course the former which we find and the members which make up this entity do not own it despite the fact that they run it.
Towards the end of your comments you state: "Having the use of assets without owning them (in the sense of being responsible for them as an individual) is the way the very well-to-do live." This simply is not so, and if you'd think about it for a moment you'd realize this. Although some capitalists choose to hold management positions in the corporations to which they own stock, management positions are not where they derive their wealth. They derive their wealth and indeed their power over the company and the economy at large through large numbers of shares which they do own and which pay them enormous dividends. Most of the truly wealthy in fact don't work at management but in fact hire professional executives to manage their wealth for them.
The so-called "Socialist or Communist Nations" ....which are misrepresented as socialist are infact economically state-capitalist—in other words, wealth is owned by the state rather than by individuals as in the West (or, by society in common)—much like Twin Oaks is in miniature, and politically these places are governed by brutal dictatorships.
6.9.3 C. Wealth: Market vs. Community
Kot: One major way that Twin Oaks has not succeeded is that we have not figured out a way to keep the same people here for their whole lives..
Aaron: I would suggest that a major contributing reasonfor this is that members in the main show up here young and full of idealism, after some time—perhaps several years here—figure out the above which I have described, realize that.it is too great a gamble/rip off despite Twin Oaks' social advantages, and thus leave so that they may get on with their lives and perhaps greater financial security.
Twin Oaks thus remains a school of living for predominantly young people to spend a few years of their lives at, and a home to a smaller number who remain idealistically committed and do not realize the above, or who do but continue to choose to rationalizeitfromtheirthoughtssothatthey can continue to live here with some peace of mind.
Kat: True, we have to fill out and turn in a labor credit sheet that tells what work we did each week. But in exchange for that five-minute-a-day job, we have flexibility in our work schedules unmatched by any
lifestylel've everheardof.. .in exchange for these nuisances, we are able to make multiple use of our vehicles and living spaces and get a lot of amenities on an income which technically registers at $6,800 a year
Kai: We say Twin Oaks "works." Economically that's true. But if we're so wonderful, how come all but a handful of the people who have come here over the past 20 years have gone back "out there"? Maybe if we as a group were to begin to put more time/energy/resources into meeting individual needs, we would get smaller and have $ and luxuries. But maybe the people who stayed would stay for forty years instead of four. I think that is something we as a community need to recognize and come to a decision on. Do we want to be an institution or a family? Size and numbers, or lifetime commitments?
Are we really communal? Depends on how you define it. We use things communally, that's for sure. Butwedon'town things communally—Twin Oaks Inc. does. And we're not shareholders in Twin Oaks the corporation, we're employees of it. We don't decide things communally—we have an entire bureaucracy to handle that end of things. (Although I guess the argument could be made that we communally decided to not decide things communally. But since only one of the persons here when that decision was made is still here, feels more like we inherited the decision instead of made it.) Personally I have to agree with Aaron's analysis—"T.O. is a cooperative financial arrangement within capitalism." The very moves we've made to ensure the survival of Twin Oaks as an institution have progressively made us less and less financially communal. So while we are definitely an intentional community, we may be a commune, I don't think we are "communal." (Aren't semantics wonderful?)
Aaron: I find myself in the rather odi-ouspositionofhaving togiveadviceonwhat one could or should do in order to survive in life under capitalism.. .[butJI'mmore interested in getting beyond this mess to a world of genuine communal possibilities. We should all be working toward that socialist future, yet in the meantime we must recognize the existing reality of the nuts and bolts of the capitalist economy and do what we can for ourselves and our dependents in order to survive and hopefully remain true to our principles.
Ross: If Twin Oaks' money was di-v ided into shares owned by the membership, the reality of turnover would bankrupt us in a couple of years. Twin Oaks takes good care of its members. You don't dispute that We can do that because we've survived for 20 years. We cannot possibly take good care of ex-members. You are comparing Twin Oaks unfavorably to the capital assets of corporate society, as if we are somehow required to emulate and surpass the capitalist madhouse we moved here to get away from.... J don't envy any of them [the ex-members], regardless of whatever yearly income they may have struggled for. They pay it right out again in rent and mortgages, high prices and taxes, plus the gross distortions of life they have to live with in corporate America. Money is not the measure. Lifestyle is.
Kai: I think if we started listening to the reasons people leave, tried to do something about it, gave people here more of a feeling of empowerment, the discontent that causes turnover would be on the road to being dealt with.
Ross: Any community that is self-sufficient could survive economically because it would be independent of the market forces, the boom-and-bust syndrome, the rip-off nature of capitalist society. If a community grew 95 percent of its own food and supplied its own electricity, heated itself in winter with its own wood, etc, etc,—such a community could feed itself during "hard times.'7Sic7 To be able to build Twin Oaks into the fairly comfortable community it is, earning a lot of money was unavoidable.... Do we have to go on earning more and more money to continue being successful? I think that would entrap us into the mainstream system of always having to expand so as not to collapse.
Aaron: There is no escape [from the "capitalist madhouse"]. Perhaps someday we'll consign it to the scrap heap of history but for now T.O. is very much apart of this society. T.O. is a corporation, and as I've pointed out, it provides even less of a return to the workers who run it than do corporations which have to negotiate with workers organized into trade unions. It can get away with it because its membership mistakenly believes that because they live here and because they can see no visible owner, then they must be the owners.
If a community is composed of the lives of the people who make it up, then in a sense for the overwhelming majority of people who have lived here over the years Twin Oaks did not last, and its members overall did not prosper for their participation in it.. ..We who live here now enjoy the fruits of profit created by all those who came before us just as a different group of new people will inherit the profits of those of us who labor here now.
6.9.4 D. Community
Kat: Twin Oaks really is fully commu-
Aaron: Indeed it is not. Inshort.Twin Oaks is not owned by the people who inhabit it. They live here for a time, produce wealth for the community, consume a small portion of the wealth they've produced, and in time usually leave, leaving within the community the bulk of the profits—capital, inventory of commodities, fixed assets--which they produced during their time here.
[Speaking to Bob]: You state, "What would make me feel insecure would be an organizationwhere ex-members could walk off with our assets." How quickly we the group becomes them those ex-members as soon as one decides to leave. What sort of partnership does that make this? Let's look at some examples: Gerri lived here for 16 years. She arrived as a 19 year-old college student and left, a woman in her mid-thirties. . .Gerri and Will [her husband], as with all others who have lived and worked here for any length of time were cheated out of their investment of years of labor because neither they nor any of us are partners in this enterprise. This is the lot of workers in all jobs to varying degrees, but the level of exploitation by this institution of the people who run it is such that to believe it is communal is at best amusing andatworst foolhardy indeed.
[Speaking to Allen:] ...Twin Oaks is not a "socialist or communal lifestyle." Socialism means a worldwide system of common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources as a whole. It would mean a worldwide system of society just as capitalism currently is and not simply a few examples of people who are quite rightly repulsed by the inhuman conditions of the competitive society in which we live and have embarked on sincere efforts to interact in ways which are more cooperative than that which society as it is constituted currently allows.
EDITOR'S COMMENTS: "In general," says Alan Drengson in an article entitled "Nature, Community and Self" (Communities, No. 75, Summer 1988), "if a society provides inadequate forms of community to encourage and aid in the development of mature, integrated persons, it generates a whole series of problems which it then tries to solve by means of greaterexternal
controls in the form of laws and enforcements." But this only winds up increasing the need for social control. A society divided into wage-earners and capitalists is by its very nature authoritarian, because it depends on excluding rather than including its members. Given that capitalism, in other words, cannot satisfy the social needs of the world's people, there must be an alternative system that can. The discussion centers around four assertions made by Kat about how living on a commune like Twin Oaks addresses this problem.
The market system, Drengson points out, can never provide an adequate basis for a community of human beings: "The self develops in a wholesome way by learning to care for, and by being cared for by others. In a context that lacks community all relationships are formalized and contractual; people are together only because they are producers and consumers, rather than to cooperate and develop friendships." The market expresses people's social nature denuded of its natural medium, the community: "Community as an organizing concept stresses reciprocal and shared values, not just mechanical interactions." It is in this gap between the market as a form of distributing wealth and the commune as an effort to subvert it in various experimental ways that the need for replacing production for profit becomes evident; for any institution that accepts the terms of survival imposed by the market must sooner or later act as an agent for it, even against the interests of its own members.
Thus, while it is nice to think of capitalism as place you can get away from, its character as a system of wealth production makes it an all-pervasive system which we carry with us even in our most isolated moments. It has engulfed the whole world, and now only the world as a whole can replace it with a system that satisfies people's needs—needs as only people can experience them: For a child at a certain age, and for some isolated communities, the community in its natural setting is the world. For us today, however, "world" means the planet Earth, not just our immediate locale. The root of the word "planet" means wanderer, and the root of Earth means ground. Thus we could say the Earth as community is our common ground. And to planetize the concept of community is to allow it to wander over the Earth (the ground) to become global. Thus...the planetization of the concept of community involves seeing the Earth as a whole community, that is, as a community of communities, our shared home and place in the galaxy. [Alan Drengson, "Nature, Community and Self'] It takes more than a single local community existing at the margins of the capitalist system (or, as in the case of Twin Oaks, partially integrated into it) to approach this scale of living and working together. Even a multitude of isolated communities does not in itself make a system of production on a world scale. There is a world of problem-solving that lies in between. Unless the world as a whole is actually at the point of going beyond the market system, individual communities will unavoidably remain imprisoned within the marketplace.

6.10 ON SECOND THOUGHTS
From the Western Socialist
Gabriel Kolko tells us that the Bureau of Labor Statistics family budgets for cities based upon the former studies made by WPA in 1935 and a subsequent National Resources Committee investigation. The WPA survey of 59 cities included in their "decency" standard a four- or five- house or apartment with private toilet facilities in fair repair, gas, electricity, a radio, a daily paper, a movie once a week, minimum medical care, clothing and furniture, no car, an adequate minimum cost diet and slight incidentals. There were no savings except for a small insurance policy. To maintain this level in 1935 required $1261. To maintain the "minimum decency" standard set by the BLS on the other hand required an average of $1367 in 1941; in 1947 an average of $3300; in 1950 an average of $3717; and in 1951 an average of $4166. How much more would it be in 1957!
Now the really interesting disclosures that are brought out in his Tables 7 and 8 should once and for ail silence those effusive propagandists of a mythical American working-class prosperity. Table 7 demonstrates that in 1935-36 there was a total of 48.8 per cent of "National Consumer Unite" earning less than the WPA maintenance standard, a total of 28 per cent earning less than the WPA "emergency level." But that was back In 1935 and 1936. Ah yes! but table 8 sets forth the amazing (to anyone who wants to be satisfied with fancies rather than facts) figures that show a total of 48.6 per cent of "national consumer units" earning less than the BLS maintenance level in 1947 and a total of 513 per cent below the standard in 1950. Furthermore, there was a total in 1947 of 30.3 per cent of these "consumer units" living below the BLS "emergency" level and in 1950 the figure was 32 per cent In other words there is a larger percentage of workers "in the soup" today than there were in 1935 and 1936.
—HARMO, "No Place to Go," March-April 1957.

6.11 YOU SAID IT
Our Masters' Voice
6.11.1 WHEN IN BUSINESS, DO AS THE BUSINESSMEN DO....
Perestroika is beginning to look like big bucks to the Masters of the Permanent War Economy in the traditional capitalist countries. This is of course no secret to anyone. What raises one's eyebrows is the disarming candor with which the business press views the process. AccoTdingtoBusinessMagazine (Bay State edition), May 1988, The staunchest anti-capitalist country in the world—the Soviet Union—could just hold the key to future growth for your
Subscribers to the Evil Empire theory are about to execute (if we may believe one Alexander Russinov, a consultant who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 70s) an ideological zigzag that would excite the envy of Joseph Stalin himself. In Russinov's words, Soviet partners are considered excellent partners. The Irving Trust Company and Chase Manhattan Bank have been doing business with Russia for 70 years. (That's 1918, in case you can't count) Endowed (by history if not by nature) with an "unbelievably huge market," Leninist Russia, you will recall, for many decades smugly claimed that the Communist Party was the Vanguard of the Proletariat and as such was entitled to act as the guide of the working class in leading it through the protracted transition period to "the higher stage of communism." Russinov is probably blissfully unaware of this, despite his having lived there most of his life; in a charmingly businesslike way, his partner, Veronika No-vodvorsky, gets directly to the point: Korea and Taiwan are part of the free market economy, and there is no assurance that their low labor costs will remain so. In fact, history has shown a doubling of costs in such free market economies every 25 years – that could not happen in Russia with its state run economy.
What we get from this is that an exploiting class of capitalists will cheerfully resort to any pretext, no matter how ideologically repugnant, to keep workers from succumbing to the "trade union mentality," which instigates them to organize and so cut into the rate of profit. Leninist state capitalism has proved to be no exception.
6.11.2 A LABOUR OF LOVE OF VOTES
Should we be shocked to discover that everything which negotiates with capital sooner or later becomes capitalist? Such is the (long -predicted) fate of Britain's Labour Party: Only a few days after Labor bemoaned the 10th anniversary of Mrs. Thatcher's accession, the party's national executive met to begin a segue back toward the center. It rejected a series of hard-left ideas, a process that reached an extraordinary epiphany when party leader Neil Kinnock announced he was abandoning Labor's support for unilateral disarmament (The Wall Street Journal, 5/1/89)
The Labour Party was always Marx's Bad Boy anyhow; "the despair of socialists," as the Social Democrats of Europe used to say. Now it has figured out that all that talk about expropriating the capitalist class was, ahem, undisciplined:
Mr. Kinnock is quoted as saying that capitalism is "the system we live In, and we've got to make it work moie efficiently, more fairly and - - -
CTWSJ, 5/1/89)
But The Wall Street JournaTs editorial writer wants us to know mere is a trend going on here. Lest mere be any doubt about in our minds, we are informed that another Labor Party has experienced the same change of heart— Such talk echoes the kinds of things we heard in a recent conversation with the leader of Israel's Labor Party, Shimon Peres, at his office in the Finance Ministry, which he heads in Israel's coalition money like socialists,'' Mr. Peres told us, "we have to make money like capitalists.'' The economy, he said, is international, and the free market in the world decides economies in every country.'' There are, he said, "rules to the game, and you cannot turn your back on It."
If we overlook the fact that socialists don't distribute money (they abolish the need for it), having to "make money like capitalists" means paying workers (exploiting them), usually as little as you can get away with (exploiting them ruthlessly) and finding it good when profits are up (which normally means wages are down). People who have attained this frame of mind are not very likely to give money away C'distribute money like socialists"); but you can trust them to mean what they say about making it like capitalists.
As to "rules," who (to paraphrase the old Roman aphorism) shall prosecute Capital? The rules followed by capital are easy to learn: (1) no ticket, no laundry; and (2) no profit, no production. Those who are busy making money like capitalists (regardless of whether they intend later to distribute it like socialists) have no trouble following these rules. The rules also don't forbid selling weapons to be used against workers in other countries* or going out partying with worker-mutilating dictators—who haven't got the least intention of ever "distributing money like socialists" (and who also don't give a damn whether the system works more fairly, so long as it works successfully at squeezing efficiency out of exploited workers). Nor do the rules frown on playing at thermonuclear chicken with "kill ratios" 30 to 40 times in excess of what would be needed to wipe out every worker on the faceofthe earth. Nordothey stick at causing the destruction of our one and only environment by chemical and other means.
But rules are rules, and all of the above is anyhow just a game (if you make money like a capitalist). Marx quotes a pamphleteer (T J.—or P J.?—Dunning) who had some interesting things to say about the "rules of the game": Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said With adequate profit, capital Is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent, positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. (Capital, Vol. 1, Ch XXXI.)
The only reason capitalism is (still) the system we live in is that we haven't decided (yet) to live in another one; i.e., it must be tolerable, if not acceptable, because otherwise we wouldn't have to admit we were stuck with it. Of course, "we" happen to be making money like capitalists, that is, of f the labor of someone eke to whom "we" pay a wage—rather than (for example) dying slowly of malnutrition or running out of firewood and thus contributing to a global deforestation trend. The (larger) question is, do the rest of us really want to continue living by rules like these?
—Ron Elbert
* Israel, according to NACLA Report on the Americas (March/April 1987) was the "only country that gave [the Guatemalan generals] military support in [their] battle against the guerrillas" (p 31).
6.12 Socialist Scholars Conference
Held at the City University of New York at the beginning of April (which this writer attended), it was impressive enough in terms of ths range of subjects it covered, the number of persons attending it and the breadth of representation of ths sponsors and participants. The closest thing to it I can think of (and which I have never been to) is an annual event in France sponsored by the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere (Workers' Struggle), in which everyone who's anyone on the left shows up.
It was, on ths face of it, a welcome opportunity to discuss ideas and events in a relatively open atmosphere, though in practice, it frequently turned into a war of fixed positions between competing points of view. It also represented an occasion for networking (establishing contacts with other organizations) and generally a pretty good place to find source materials.
Organized by ths CUNY Democratic Socialists' Club and centered nominally on the theme, 'Two Centuries of Revolution: 1789-1989," the Conference was used regularly and methodically by the DSs to get in some Marx-bashing; I couldn't be sure how well attended those workshops were, since they were all the same dreary variations on the topic, Isn't Marxism dead yet?" which did not help them to seem any more interesting.
Two panels which I did attend—one called 'Is Capitalism Entering a New Stage?” sponsored by Monthly Review, featuring Paul Sweezy, Samir Amin and Beatrix Campbell, and the other on "Black Workers and Class Consciousness” were at least on more provocative subjects. (Sweezy believes the answer to the question is "no": capitalism is locked on a course of continued stagnation.) The panel on class consciousness among black workers brought forth the usual round of analyses and ended by leaving the impression that black workers are neither more nor less class conscious than any other sectors of the working class in the United States—though racism and systematic underemployment can generate extra obstacles to socialist understanding for blacks.
Had we (the Boston group) made inquiries early enough, we could at least have had adequate time to decide whether or not we wanted to pay for and man a literature booth at the Conference. We should definitely set up a booth there next year; it would give some very good exposure to socialist Ideas. If ws can demonstrate expertise In some field, It is even possible we could sponsor a panel or workshop of our own at future conferences, assuming there is a show of interest in it from comrades.
—Ron Elbert

6.13 Books of interest to socialists

6.13.1 WAGES NEED NOT BE A FACT OF LIFE

World Without Wages (Money, Poverty and War!), Samuel Leight, A Series of Tucson Radio Broadcasts Presented for the World Socialist Party of the United States, Tucson, 1980.

We are living today in a world which is radically different from anything generations in past ages have been exposed to. The world's population at the present time, for the first time in history, has come to be largely made up of individuals who live by selling their ability to do work to someone else who pays them for being who they are and in the process gets them to work for him/ her/them a while. While previous ruling classes have only claimed the power of life and death over those whom they exploited, thecapitalistclass has—more or less behind everyone's back—figured out how to make that power a reality. They have done it by making virtually the entire population of the globe dependent on them, directly or indirectly, for all the goods and services they need to stay alive.

The secret is simple: since wealth is simply the things people require to satisfy their needs, make the production of all wealth dependent on whether or not the users can pay for each item they must obtain. Wealth thus taking the form of commodities turns wealth production into the production of commodities, which can be easily monopolized. Those who monopolize wealth production are called capitalists, and in one way or another they are all merely servants of an idea: capital.
Capital is wealth used to create more wealth with a view to profit Karl Marx divided the capital used in the production process into two parts. One part comprised buildings, machinery and raw materials and is referred to as constant capital because its value undergoes no change in the production process but is transferred proportionately to the commodity being produced. The other part is called variable capital because it comprises labor power, which is the commodity owned by the workers and sold by them to the capitalist for wages. In the productive process this labor power has the unique ability to produce a greater value than that contained within Itself. [World Without Wages, p 85, "Economics"]
The concept of value only becomes separate from that of wealth when an exploiting class can enforce an arbitrary reduction in the wealth consumption of those whom they exploit. Without exploitation, there could be no objective standard of need in effect; with exploitation, the need is determined by those who can deny food, clothing and shelter to others. This determination only takes on a semblance of objectivity when it has become very widespread. Once it becomes universal, it acquires the character of natural necessity. A compendium of ideas
World Without Wages is a handy all-around compendium of socialist thinking. Its style is unpretentious and unadorned; and its content will already be familiar to any convinced socialist For this very reason, it serves as a good introduction to the case for socialism. Divided into 50 sections, the book dis-cusses questions like war, racism, vio-
lence, pollution, social security, "overpopulation" and state capitalism in a short, readable magazine format. Although it was published in 1980, most of the material deals with crises that are ongoing or recurrent and so does not risk becoming quickly dated.
6.13.2 Socialism is not complicated
Leight's analyses demonstrate, moreover, what socialists have always insisted on, which is that understanding socialism and replacing capitalism with it does not require the training of an expert or a specialist. Discussing "Wage Slavery," for example, he traces a few simple connections:
The slaves of old were owned outright— the modern "wage-slave" is paid by the hour, day, week or month at the price agreed upon for his labor power. And the "payment," in the form of wages, guarantees poverty, and is in stark contrast to the riches of the capitalist class, who in times of so-called peace exploit with finesse, while in times of war do not hesitate to call upon "their slaves" for the supreme sacrifice on their behalf, and for their properties. The size of the wage packet, always meagre and finely honed to marginal costs of living, conditions and pre-determines access to wealth; the lack of ownership rights ensures the enslavement, [p 219]
As a materialist, Leight rejects the numerous partial theories and short-range explanations that have been invented to prune away the undesirable aspects ofcapitalism while retaining its basic institutions intact (wages, prices and profit). The basic reason people are underfed, he says, is profit: "The corporations and businesses involved in food production and distribution exist, as in all other spheres of capitalist enterprise, to produce profits. The use values of the commodities concerned must be marketable in order to be profitable, but quantities and qualities are related to profits, and human benefits, while they are taken into consideration, are only evaluated as an adjunct to profits." [p 222, "Health*!
The author touches only peripherally on how a socialist society might actually be organized, given the speculative nature of the subject. We can certainly know the basic characteristics of socialism in contrast to those of capitalism; but we cannot honestly say in advance that we know what people are really capable of once their energies have been definitively released from the shackles of the wages system. On the other hand, the whole idea of eliminating production for profit rests on having a fairly definite conception of why capitalist production is not suitable as a basis for human life, why it must be replaced— and by what. Leight makes this connection with consistency and simplicity throughout World Without Wages, and it is this kind of "action" that, sooner or later, will prove to be instrumental in the spread of revolutionary socialist consciousness across the globe.

6.14 The Suicide Machine
IF THEY COULD HAVE LOOKED this far into the future, early Christian theologians would have had every right to designate the 21st century as the ideal location for Hell. Under the guiding wisdom of capitalist development, society has progressed in every major sphere to the brink of multiple catastrophes (some of which, taken in isolation, are compatible with continued "pog-ress," but most of which are systemically fatal in their own right).
Politically, war has become peace and peace has become war, to the point where going to "peace" could annihilate or cripple civilization by a factor of thirty or forty; computerization has brought this option to within a time-frame of three minutes. Economically, capital is currently engaged in a number of hair-raising projects to undermine or destroy its own physical basis, the success of any one of which will inflict profound biological or climatological ravages on human society. Some of the more nerve-wracking items from capital's Catalogue of Depression:
6.14.1 • DEFORESTATION.
"We are faced today," says Hugh H. litis in "Tropical Forests: What Will Be Their Fate?" "with the greatest biological calamity this world has ever known—the imminent decimation and extermination of the world's tropical biota [community of life forms]." This grim "realistic ecological picture," although it has its roots in attitudes and practices going back to the beginnings of capitalism, dates from only 1945. How did "we" accomplish
this miracle in so short a time?
We now have DDT and 2,4,5-T; the all-powerful (and greedy) multinational corporations with theirwoodchippers and jungle smashers (one acre an hour, as advertised by LeTourneau); the vast and hungry army of the poor and the landless; and the devastating, self-serving, post-World War II development syndrome. ["Tropical Forests"] Hugh litis is not a hate-preaching terrorist (according to the mass media stereotype); he is professor of botany and director of the herbarium at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. The assembled data are simply that horrendous. He further quotes E.O. Wilson as saying that such a massive loss of genetic diversity would be worse than "energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war or conquest by a totalitarian government...[It] will take millions of years to correct....the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats." The genetic implications of capital's profit-orgy in the rain forests are heavy indeed for future generations: "life will lose forever much of its capability for continued evolution," according to Prof. litis.
6.14.2 • THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT.
Deforestation on a global scale may be, and combustion of fossil fuels is, linked to a gradual warming of the earth. The Global 2000 Report, prepared by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State and issued in 1980, observes that "scientific opinion differs on the possible consequences of this warming trend, but a widely held view is that highly disruptive effects on world agriculture could occur before the middle of the 21st century." [Summary, Vol. I] The mechanism for this, the report says, is a rise of carbon dioxide (C02) levels to nearly a third higher than preindustrial levels by the year 2000: If the projected rates of increase in fossil fuel combustion (about two per cent per year) were to continue, a doubling of the CO, content of the atmosphere could be expected after the middle of the next century; and if deforestation substantially reduces tropical forests (as projected), a doubling of atmospheric CO, could occur sooner. The result could be significant alterations of precipitation patterns around the world, and a 2°-3°C rise in temperatures in the middle latitudes of the earth. Agriculture and other human endeavors would have great difficulty in adapting to such large, rapid changes in climate.
if this were not disturbing enough, the temperature rise in the earth's polar regions is expected to be three or four times greater than in the middle latitudes. "An increase of 5°-10°C in polar temperatures could eventually lead to the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps and a gradual rise in sea level, forcing abandonment of many coastal cities."
6.14.3 • DEPLETION OF THE OZONE LAYER.
The same report also comments on the problem of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions eating holes in the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects the earth from damaging ultraviolet light "Themostwidely discussed effect of ozone depletion and the resulting increase in ultraviolet light is an increased incidence of skin cancer, but damage to food crops would also be significant and might actually prove to be the most serious ozone related problem."
Later writers are not so sanguine. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research (Takoma Park, Maryland) is quoted in In These Times as co-author of a recent report titled "Saving Our Skins," which projects some of the possible effects of depleting the ozone layer.
The European Economic Community has issued a call to phase out CFCs by the year 2000, but Makhijani feels this may be "too late to avert catastrophe." The phrase is used advisedly:
"It is even possible that the resulting increase in UV radiation could reach levels comparable to those following an all-out nuclear war," the report said. Scientists
have already determined that there has been a 1.7 per cent to 3 per cent ozone depletion in the stratos]
racts and suppression of the immune system. In addition, crops and the tiny plankton that form the basis of the oceanic food chain could be endangered. And global wanning could lead to much greater frequency of droughts and unprecedented sea level rises. ["Here Comes the Sun,'77T, 4/5/89]
CFCs are also implicated in the global warming trend; they contribute as much as one fifth of the greenhouse effect. Should ozone depletion levels reach 20 per cent, the report says, people would start suffering "severe, blistering sunburns after one to two hours of exposure to the sun. , Outside work would become difficult £or impossible." Since without labor t there is no capital formation (no profit), \ this implies not merely declining but "plummeting profits and a virtual end to ' economic development around the world. Du Pont corporation produces 40 per t of the world's CFC output. CFCs are used in some 100 million refrigerators, 90 million cars and trucks, 40,000 supermarket display cases and 100,000 commercial building air conditioning units in the UnitedStates. ["Here Comes the Sun"] As you might have expected, the producers of CFCs want time to study the problem so they can figure out how to soften the impact on their profits. • RADIOACTIVE POLLUTION. Everyone now knows what a con-job nuclear energy was when its proponents began talking it up back in the 50s and 60s. Storage of the lethal garbage from spent fuels is not even the worst of the nukes. An explosive meltdown at a single nuclear power plant has the potential for making thousands of square miles uninhabitable for indefinite periods. The time it takes for a meltdown to get underway is measured in minutes. In 1979 the Three Mile Island reactor near Pittsburgh, came within seconds of doing in this country what the Chernobyl plant did in the Soviet Union. Chernobyl is with us still. Ernest Sternglass, professor emeritus of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh asserts that "there were at least 40,000 [more] human deaths {than normal) in the United States in the eight months after the arrival of the Chernobyl cloud." These deaths occurred "primarily through infectious diseases and a decline in the immune systems, particularly among older people, whose health simply could not withstand the weakening of their resistance due to the fallout."
Among the other consequences of the Chernobyl fallout mentioned by Wasserman are large drops in the birth rate in places the Chernobyl cloud has passed with its fallout of radioactive particles, and a heightened death rate ("a four-month-long radiation epidemic" in the U.S.). "Massive radioactive emissions from the Wind-scale weapons facility in the 1950s had caused heightened cancer rates in the nearby sheep-growing area," which was prudently concealed from the British public but shared with the CIA. ["Chernobyl's American Fallout"] While Sternglass' conclusions were (predictably) disputed by the nuclear establishment, the evidence—writes Wasserman—"would tendtopoint the other way."
6.14.4 • NUCLEAR WINTER.
Science has offered us the insight that the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war (or an accidentally triggered warlike process) would carpet earl' '
radioactive soot and ashes that not only would keep raining down on the surface of the planet, but would also prevent sunlight from entering the biosphere for several weeks. Temperatures would plunge to freezing or below, making water difficult or impossible to obtain anywhere; few or no buildings would remain standing in most regions of the (formerly) developed world Providing heat would also be precluded, and the survivors would in any case be either dying of radiation poisoning or unable safely to attempt communicating with each other. The entire infrastructure of the capitalist system would be floating at random in the atmosphere in the form of deadly radioactive particles. At the other end of the short nuclear winter, the only life forms remaining might be cockroaches, bacteria and anything else capable of adapting to such extremes of cold.
Still think capitalism is the best system "we" have been able to come up with so far? It may not be for much longer. All of these exotic, in some cases terrifying, problems stem from one source: the production of wealth based solely on the criterion of profit. The profit motive is the engine driving the insatiable expansion of markets regardless of consequence. In the absence of its mind-polluting effects, human society could at last settle down to a real symbiotic unity with the rest of nature; people could achieve the freedom to manage the satisfaction of their needs in harmony with the needs of other living things. Our developed mental powers would be able to focus on converting natural limits into a renewable abundance, once liberated from the dictatorship of the marketplace.
But it will never happen as long as we retain the rigid and unadaptable market system as our basis for producing wealth. Capital is a source of mental corruption and has no sense of reality; it is only through opposition to capitalism's normal effects that human intelligence has succeeded in regaining that sense. Let us get in touch with our instincts and get out of the system.
— A.R.
2.Environment, 25(10):55-60,1983. Reprinted in Global Ecology, edited by Charles H South-wick, Sinauer Associates Inc., Sunderland (Massachusetts), 1985.
3."A Million Species Are Endangered," an article by P. Schabecoff in the New York Times , 11/22/81.
4."Here comes the sun...and it's not all right," Dick Russell, In These Times, April 5-11,1989.
4. "Chernobyl's American Fallout," Harvey
Wasserman, Zeta Magazine, June 1989.