The philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed three questions as constitutive of the philosophical enterprise: What can we know? How should we act? In what may we hope
[David Schweickart, http://www.chicagodsa.org/hope.html]
Is a better world possible? What would it look like? What can we do to help advance towards it?
Socialism in a past age believed it held the answer to those questions. But since the collapse of the USSR such belief has been fatally undermined.
Yet peoples lives are sadly limited by the twin evils of:
- lack of freedom in our working hours – which is most of our productive time. We work for others, not for ourselves, and are subject to the direction of the bosses appointed over us.
- inequality, unemployment and poverty.
Which is not the best imaginable state of affairs for us all. What better system is possible? What would it look like?
Imagine a world where we did not work for the profit of others, but for our own benefit.
Imagine we kept whatever profits our work produced, rather than giving it away to absentee owners.
Imagine the management of our firms was elected by us, not appointed by strangers.
Imagine a world where our government was local and accountable, where democracy was direct and real and responded to our needs.
Imagine there was full employment – that large numbers of people were not kept semi-permanently unemployed, and wasted to society. Imagine there was no more poverty.
In such a world, we would live lives as full human beings, not as waged workers under the control of an outside agency, and not as consumers passively consuming from what we are offered by other external actors. Our cities, which would become, as they should, our political entities, would be communities of neighbours, and our lives would be more appopriately balanced between life and work.
All this is possible in the immediate future, easily so, given the great technological advances the human race has made over the last hundred years – provided though that people want it enough: “If you will it – it is no dream” [Thedore Herzl]
How though – especially in light of the decline of socialism since the fall of the USSR – do we advance towards such a happy situation?
I will outline the steps simply in the rest of this post, and develop them further in future postings:
1) First, the long term programme:
1) Remove the right of shareholders to elect corporate boards of management or receive dividends: instead transfer those rights to the workers in each corporation, one worker, one vote (and one share of profits).
2) Absolve borrowers of any requirement to repay loan principal or interest to private banks or other creditors: that is, write off all debt.
3) Absolve tenants of any requirement to pay rent, and remove the right of landowners to evict.
4) Create public banks (possibly using some of the structure of the old private banks, which will have just been bankrupted by the above reforms) and give them a mandate to issue unsecured loans to worker owned businesses as required to ensure full employment.
5) Implement democratising/‘anarchist’ reforms to political structures: decentralise as much as possible to community neighbourhood councils, replace elected ‘representatives’ with instantly recallable mandated delegates, have jury run courts, and so on.
And that’s it – those reforms constitute the revolution. Actually, for completeness, a change to property law would also be required – occupier-owners of land would no longer have the right of alienation, and nor would worker-owners of businesses (any capital gains or land value increase would be retained by the community), and anyone hired as a wage-labourer could (and would) ask a court to grant him full worker-owner rights, and similarly anyone taken on as a tenant could demand full occupier-owner rights. Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, elimination of the gigantic wealth/wage differences between 1st and 3rd world would be required at the worldwide level.
But not, you will notice, an unimaginable set of reforms, not a utopian system. Everything, economically as well as politically, goes on after the revolution much as it did before – the same corporations produce the same goods, market them through the same networks, in the same political jurisdictions – it is just that capitalist tyranny has vanished. There are no capitalists, financiers, landlords, or bosses; and no profit, interest, rent, or wage labour. People go about their daily business as free people, exploited by no one.
Also, notice all these reforms are potentially popular, right now.
[above from http://afraser.com/beyond_an_ideal.htm]
2) The extra-long term programme:
Let’s say the above doesn’t go far enough for you, that you want complete marketless, moneyless, communism. That is, I think, much too great a change to be included in any programme to address the everyday concerns of the great mass of people, but still you would want to be sure that the everyday programme was compatible with communism in the longer term.
A great many economic functions – housing, healthcare provision, education, services, retailing – can be, even should be, provided at a very local level, by neighbourhood community councils. These councils can organise those functions in a communist fashion, at least some functions should be organised in that way – education is already provided that way in developed countries, and so, outside the US and to a lesser extent Ireland, is healthcare. It would be easy to see at least basic housing, food, clothing needs also being met by neighbourhood communities, without charging money at point of provision, and that being preferable to the means tested bureaucratic benefit systems of today.
That is a substantial step towards communism, could it serve as the first in a series of steps? The neighbourhood community councils would be in a position, if their citizens wished it, to gradually extend the extent of communism, limiting the use of money to an ever shortening list of luxuries. Worker owned firms would be able to eliminate internal wage differentials. Federations of communities would be able to co-ordinate these actions, and first encourage, and later enforce, acts of co-operation and solidarity between their member firms and communities. Eventually the market and money are of so little importance they can be phased out altogether. Substantial problems in running a complex economy without money trading would remain, but at any rate this a more reasonable scenario than some big bang replacement of capitalism with communism overnight.
Anarchist FAQ wrote:
Anarchists do not pretend that an anarchist society will be “perfect.” Hence there may be periods, particularly just after capitalism has been replaced by self-management, when differences in skill, etc., leads to a few people exploiting their fellow workers and getting more wages, better hours and conditions, and so forth. This problem existed in the industrial collectives in the Spanish Revolution. As Kropotkin pointed out, “but, when all is said and done, some inequalities, some inevitable injustice, undoubtedly will remain. There are individuals in our societies whom no great crisis can lift out of the deep mire of egoism in which they are sunk. The question, however, is not whether there will be injustices or no, but rather how to limit the number of them.” [The Conquest of Bread, p. 94]
[http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secI3.html#seci36]
3) The medium term programme:
The long term programme in (1) above is unachievable without the support of a mass popular movement, and such things do not appear overnight or without the prospect of tactical achievements in the short-medium term.
1) Establish Workers co-operatives and community owned businesses, encourage custom of those firms before capitalist firms.
2) Extend rights of workers within existing corporations – require worker elected representatives on boards of management as in Germany, require consultation with workers, restrict dismissals, require profit sharing, encourage unions, and so on. Require that workers have the right of participation (consultation and veto power) in significant corporate decisions such as takeovers and relocations. These would all, it is hoped, pave the way for ultimate worker takeover.
3) Create public banks for the purpose of financing worker owned firms, especially startup firms (lack of access to capital is the main factor preventing worker owned startups). Seek provision of state funds (perhaps from central bank loan guarantees more than from grants from taxation revenue) to start the process off.
4) Require that central banks pursue a policy of full employment – even if at the expense of inflation (unemployment is largely a deliberate creation of government and central bank policy). (For Europeans, this means initially just bringing ourselves up to the same level as the US, where the Federal Reserve Bank is still mandated to consider unemployment as well as inflation when making its decisions, unlike the European Central Bank or the Bank of England.)
5) Establish community land trusts and housing co-ops, as opposed to both private alienable ownership of land and to undemocratic housing authorities. Extend rights of tenants within existing rented housing – rent control, secure tenancy, heritability of tenure, restrictions on right of eviction for non payment of rent – hopefully paving the way for eventual tenant takeover.
6) Decentralise political power to the lowest level possible, to neighbourhood community councils, with as much direct democracy as possible – mass citizen meetings, mandatable and recallable delegates, rotation, selection by lot, referenda. Have self-policing communities.
Socialism for the 21st Century 