A recent lengthy discussion on the worldincommon discussion forum was on the subject ‘Socialism must prove itself.’ This was my posting:

Starting with A’s point: ‘when we tried to make sense of our gut reaction that there had to be a better way to run things and provide a more decent and happy life for people, and not just those we knew, but those clearly preventable tragedies we hear about. That , imo, is where it all began with most of us, and where it will always begin with most.’ Absolutely!! (And responding to some of other threads within this below.)

‘Socialism must prove itself?’ I don’t think so. What’s needed is for socialism to be understood.

Start with what we can call ‘ideology’ – just the way people conceive and experience the world, which is a learned thing. Because of ideology, we live in two worlds and don’t know it. One world is virtual: (1) the world of money, ownership, rights, law, authority etc., and that world is currently (more now than ever before) the driver, affecting the other world. The other world is material: let’s just say people and land. What socialism means is eliminating the virtual world, so there’s no money and no ownership etc. I say ‘no ownership’ rather than ‘common ownership’ because we need to get away from the idea of ‘natural resources’, with its embedded assumption that people have rights to those. Saying ‘land’ emphasises the idea that everything we need, besides emotional and social stuff, comes from the land, somewhere, and the virtual world of money exchange and ownership alienates people from land so that we can’t appreciate or directly control our impact on distant land – or on other people who may know how to use that land in more sustainable ways.

What hinders that really simple picture being understood is the old ‘materialist conception of history’, and the notion that socialism is inevitable, the next and final stage and end of history. That follows from the notion that the technology developed under capitalism would bring about the ‘potential abundance’ which a future socialist society needs. That optimistic expectation was first mooted at the height of the industrial revolution, when it must have appeared that machines could be doing all the work, liberating people from toil. In recent years, I’ve heard comrades dreaming of using supermarket stock control and re-ordering systems to serve a free access society: whatever we take off the shelves is automatically replenished. But that just replaces one virtual world with another. People would still be alienated from the land, and affecting it in ways they wouldn’t appreciate and directly control.

As to how socialism would be organised, well, clearly, given the above, the key relationships would be between local people and local land (LPLL), with established best land use practice the foundation, and any decision-making needed would be by direct, consensus democracy, with some collaboration between clusters of LPLL nodes serving the local nodes, not in authority over them. Everything grassroots and bottom up – which is anarchism, surely: no top-down power hierarchy. Does that mean it isn’t socialism? No, because socialism means no virtual world, only the material one, with no one owning it.

So, to pick up on what’s been said in this longish chain of posts, I don’t think workers just taking over the factories would work or will happen – whatever change of consciousness took place. The idea of building on the chain of stages in the means of production is an historic one and risks perpetuating the alienation and exploitation that’s developed over the past 300 years or so. Even eliminating the harmful or useless activities: arms and finance etc. doesn’t make what’s left viable. The other idea that’s been put forward in postings is that socialism can be tried on a small scale and would provide case studies demonstrating that widespread socialism is possible. I’d give a cautious ‘yes’ to that, but these little experiments are bound to be vulnerable to the very powerful forces of capitalism, and may look pathetic to the audience we want to persuade.

1. I articulated this idea of virtual and material worlds in an earlier piece: ‘Virtuality and Ideology’, which I’ve demoted to a footnote because I wrote it whilst I was angry with someone and he is now forgiven!

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