Amanda Levi of the Polish organization Akcja Socjalistyczna and Jan Żelazny put forward their conception of a socialist society.
If you ask the average disengaged person what they associate politics with, they will often mention television, comedy, or something similarly mundane. It is hardly surprising when the politics of so many liberal “democracies”, standing on the shoulders of Fukuyama’s end of history, are limited to an incredibly intense spectacle unfolding in an equally intensely limited field of discussion. Liberal “democracy”, which is in actuality a representative oligarchy, arm-in-arm with capitalism “won” history in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, no “serious” person considers alternatives to the global economic system we live in – as one dead witch from the British Isles used to say, “There Is No Alternative”. We are forced to stand at the end of history and watch helplessly as the escalating contradictions of capitalism lead more and more people to live on the very brink of biological survival; meanwhile, we are deluged with the unending messaging about how we live in an “era of continuous progress”, where “never before have so many people had it so good.”
Today’s conception of politics is about managing the system, which is often treated as final and ideal, with no prospects for fundamental changes ever to take place. Hence, regardless of which party is in power, all the basic problems and contradictions of the existing society remain unresolved – forever treated as a “fact of nature”. This absolute lack of critical engagement with capitalism serves only those in whose interest it is to maintain this system.
Simultaneously, all these political groups, a large part of which openly and fiercely defend the existing social order (or disorder) face accusations that their public views are just a “cover” for their real agenda… The Communist Agenda! In 1848, Marx and Engels began the Communist Manifesto by pointing out that all political camps in Europe were already accusing each other of “communism”. It was important at that moment to clarify what communists themselves meant by this term. Nothing has changed in this regard – even today, we see similar accusations of “communism” or “socialism” thrown at even the most conservative parties. This clarification is still sorely needed.
As socialists, it is obvious for us that we are striving for a concrete goal. However, we see that in today’s socialist movement, this goal is often treated superficially, as a vacuous dogma. There is no shortage of activists who define socialism simply as “the real movement”. To quote the infamous Bernstein: “The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing”. But, as in physics, movement is impossible without direction. So what is our direction? Our final goal? To be a comprehensible and conscious movement, we need to define this goal and agree on a theoretical vision of a desirable and achievable society, diametrically different from the currently existing one.
However, this vision cannot simply be based on pure speculation. For our goal to be realistic, we need to ground it in reality: starting with an analysis of the current society, we must consider its instabilities, what changes are possible, and what existing historical processes affect this system. This is necessary because, after all, we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the so-called utopian socialists of the 19th century, who, instead of looking at “how society is”, began by drawing grand, exceptionally detailed plans for “how society ought to be”.
In order for us to have any meaningful discussion about the methods we should use, the actions we should participate in, or the legitimacy of transitional stages, we need to free ourselves from “the tradition of all dead generations that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. If we are to come to some common understanding, we need to question and analyze the basics. Conversations between the different sections of the socialist movement all too often begin with outlining some very specific or petty issues on which these sections disagree, rather than with the issues that unite us. When people who don’t share a common language try to communicate for the first time, they don’t start with complex sentences and complicated linguistic constructions – instead, they point to objects around them and establish certain points of reference that are mutually understandable. One such reference point that is shared by every human being is the ground. It is precisely this common ground, of socialism as a movement, that we want to address in this article.
Transitional Stages and The Goal
The history of socialist thought is full of futile discussions about transitional stages, about socialism and communism, and about lower and higher communism. Many leftists nowadays simply repeat the arguments of yesteryear ad nauseam, without any consideration over why these discussions actually took place. That is the realm of dogmatists. We are not interested in these discussions since they lead to nothing constructive for a socialist movement which hasn’t first come to a common understanding of the basics of theory. Seeing some theoretical value in these concepts and their relevance to some models, in the following text we reject the distinction of stages, focusing on the ultimate socialist mode of production. To define ourselves, we use the label “socialists” – which does not mean that we identify with people who, under the aegis of “socialism”, present glorified charity programs improvised on the fly and presented as a lofty, revolutionary change, envisioned by all those old farts whose aesthetics these charitable “comrades” propagate on any given evening.
It is important for us to pay more attention to the terminology we use, not only for aesthetic reasons, but also to avoid misunderstandings and further mystification of issues that ought to be formulated intelligibly even for an uninvolved reader. Today, there are some people who call themselves socialists with their only consideration being that the common, everyday person should have it a little easier than they have it now. We call ourselves socialists because we firmly pursue one goal, which is the abolition of capitalism in favor of a socialist mode of production and with it the abolition of social classes. If we can’t agree with them in this pursuit, we can’t agree on the basics, we see that we are fundamentally not a part of the same movement and trying to establish a common political strategy and long-term cooperation is impossible. Sooner or later, we will come to an elementary disagreement.
If the socialist movement is to be an effective movement, it must function as one organism; there can be no situation where one organism is controlled by two brains with divergent or even contradictory goals, because any activity begins with goals.
What Are The Classes Under Capitalism?
“Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” wrote Karl Marx.1 But let’s leave Marx’s slogans to the dogmatists, since they have little else left – we will focus on his theory. Capitalism, simply put, is a system in which human labor is organized to maximize profits (that is, returns on capital investment), as opposed to directly satisfying human needs. It is dominated by two class camps – the owning camp and the working camp.
In Marxist theory, class has a different meaning from the common understanding. Colloquially, class is a term for position in society, similar to rank or status. For Marx, classes arise in the divisions within people’s relationship with the process of production and with the means of production. The means of production are, in the simplest terms, all those technical and material objects necessary for the reproduction of the whole of the social life. Significantly for this definition, they are not objects of reproduction of personal life; in other words, we’re not talking about toothbrushes. Nobody aims to collectivize them. Classes are also defined by their relationship to other classes.
Nowadays, it is useful to talk about two classes – the working class and the owning class. Then, there are also terms such as “precariat”, “ruling” class, managerial class, middle class, lower and upper middle class – it’s not easy to get the hang of it all. Historically, it wasn’t easier – already under Marx, in addition to the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie”, there was a whole spectrum of other groups classified in various ways, such as the lumpenproletariat, petty bourgeoisie, manufacturers, landowners. We could even go back to the times of Ancient Rome and the first proletariat standing in opposition to the patricians, though it makes no sense to do so here.
For our purposes, and for the application of Marxist analysis, we can operate on the following basis. A class, as we have established, is defined by its relation to other classes and by its relation to the means of production. These relationships are often expressed in a legalistic way, for example, through the ownership of the means of production: the latifundia were controlled by the patricians, the feudal lords held the land which they then gave as fiefs to their vassals (along with the people living there), and the capitalists possess ownership deeds of factories and other workplaces, for which they choose the workforce through the mechanisms of the market which provides them with workers at their doorstep.
At present, we would not make a mistake in describing the existing class relations as follows – as a result of the phenomena described below, two significant classes remain on the battlefield: the working class and the owning class. Any terminology referring to historical traditions, such as “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie”, or other terrifyingly antiquated labels such as “labouring class” etc. usually do not carry much substantive semantic load other than giving a wink to the people already up to their ears in the topic. We are consciously giving this wink, while also ensuring the precision of our terminology.
Belonging to the owning or working class depends on the relationship with the means of production – under capitalism, this means relationship with capital. It is by using the means of production that the owning class derives its profits. It is in their interest to squeeze as much profit as possible at the lowest cost. The working class, having no “passive” source of income, must rely on selling their lives, their labor power, to the market. It is in the interest of the working class to use as little of their labor power as possible to meet their necessities of life. It is here that we see a basic contradiction of this system. On one hand, the working class has in its interest to strive towards further shortening the working day and increasing their salaries, thus saving more of their labor for their own personal advancement. On the other hand, the owning class will organize, lobby and legislate for quite the opposite thing – furthering the means by which they extract labor power from the workers, or minimizing the costs of purchase of this precious commodity. As technology progresses and human labor becomes more and more productive thanks to the advancements in science and new methods/means of work organization, those two camps will inevitably be at odds – owners will try to profit more from the increase in productivity, and workers will try to simply have more free time to pursue their own devices.
It is important to note that this isn’t simply a moralistic division. We are not concerned with the ethical quality of the members of the owning class. They simply respond to their class interests – if they didn’t, the market would quickly adjust their class and material conditions.
The division into these two camps is, in historic terms, a relative novelty. Prior to today’s global domination of capitalism, there were many different classes operating in different modes of production. In Europe, there were classes of aristocracy, which mainly sought to accumulate land and people attached to this land, which constituted the second class – peasants (this can be called geopolitical/spatial accumulation) who, like today’s working class, sought to use as little of their labor power as possible, but in contrast were not subjected to the chaos of the market and did not have the option of any social advancement, and thus, compared to the proletariat, they were usually not as reliably politically progressive.
The domination of the two camps presented above does not mean that they are the only existing classes in society. The usefulness of class analysis in determining the political goals of socialist groups does not equal to the ease of inscribing real flesh and blood people into this division. We deal with classes, not individuals. It is possible to determine with a high degree of certainty what political actions and related economic effects would be desired by the working class in the long term. In turn, an attempt to fully denote what the interests of distinct individuals should be, in isolation from the class, is a task bordering on utopian social engineering. An attempt to decipher the possible political preferences of your mother’s sympathetic friend, who has been running a local mom-and-pop store for the last 30 years, is as doomed to failure as an attempt to understand the roots of the political inclinations of a programmer earning 10 grand a month, who regularly votes for successive iterations of libertarian pseudo-parties proclaiming freedom from public roads, the age of consent and alimony.
Why is Capitalism Unsustainable?
Capitalist society can only be sustained through the accumulation of capital. This fact is a very powerful propeller for the expansion of the forces of production, and no socialist would deny that. However, this leads to such absurdity where, for the first time in history, overproduction becomes a real and existential problem for society. If a capitalist society does not produce profit, it goes through crises. The growing concentration of investments, driven by various phenomena such as class conflict, monopolization and competition between enterprises, causes the scale of investments to grow in relation to profits. This drift, spread over the entire capitalist economy, has a tendency to drive the overall ratio between profit and investment (the rate of profit) downwards. This phenomenon, which can only be arrested temporarily by some countervailing measures, causes a general tendency towards crisis, breakdown and collapse.
As the world rate of profit declines, capitalism has steadily exhausted its capacities to restore them.2 Entire continents have been subjugated by capital, in search of raw materials to exploit to slow down this tendency. Capital absorbs everything it encounters. This also includes human resources, because that is in essence how capitalism treats our species. Globally, because of this drive, pre-capitalist communities have been “proletarianized” in the process of imperialism, creating an almost universal working class.
All manner of technocratic and financial sorcery is deployed with ever-increasing futility to arrest the falling rate of profit, which ultimately always ends up on the necks of workers. The cyclical boom-and-bust crises give way to a generalized crisis of capitalism itself. Capitalism only works in theory, because to counteract this dilemma it has to assume an infinite earth with infinite resources for growth. In reality, Earth is already exploited to an unimaginable scale, as it steadily ceases to accommodate this. This is the source of the calamitous situation, where despite many decades of scientific consensus on the danger posed by the excess of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, world governments are not willing to hamper their emission effectively. The crisis of capitalism is therefore also a climate crisis of the entire planet.
What is Capitalism Not?
One can occasionally find a tendency inside the socialist movement to simplify certain topics – usually with agitation in mind, in a way that ultimately causes more problems than it solves. An example of such a simplification is found in a famous article by Albert Einstein with a title similar to ours:
Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the ‘free labour contract’ for certain categories of workers.
This fragment uses terminology which, on the surface, may well capture some of the substance of the problem. However, for Marxist analysis (which is the most useful analysis for our movement), it causes unnecessary confusion and additional misunderstandings. We quote it to show that the power relation between one class and another does not, according to our analysis, determine the mode of production. They are simply two different aspects of society that influence each other but are nevertheless separate.
We can imagine an abstracted society that, in the same way as ours, is driven by the pursuit of profits, but that is managed solely by the workers themselves in various forms of social cooperatives and democratic state institutions. In Einstein’s terms, the working class would have gained full control of the free labor contract. In this case, we’re still talking about a capitalist society because we haven’t solved the central dilemma of the reasoning behind the organization of production; the only thing that has changed is the ruling class. This is a very significant change – one might even say that it is politically revolutionary, and of course it brings us closer to our goals, but we must not fall into the trap of calling anything we like socialism, as previous iterations of the labor movement sometimes did. We, as socialists, besides a political revolution, want a fundamental transformation of society. Control over the “free labour contract” is not enough – we want direct social control over labor and the rooting out of the interests of capital from the foundations of society.
Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamed that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad ‘welfare’ or ‘workers’’ state.
Capitalism is not simply the rule of the owner class; it is not simply the absence of state interference in the relationship between workers and proprietors – to the same extent that socialism is not simply when the state does stuff.
Moreover, contrary to what some abstract economic models may present, it is capitalism that requires the state. Capitalism in the idealized form postulated by the self-proclaimed libertarians, without a state and with perfect competition, is simply a utopian dream. These models do not take into account the existence of time as a factor at all. In the real world, when one company competes against another, one wins and the other goes bankrupt. It follows that the natural result of competition is monopoly. Capitalism is thus essentially monopolistic.
It is there that the capitalist state comes in to defend the property of the class which achieved the monopoly over the means of production. The state is not merely a neutral entity sitting out there without any historical reasons for its existence; it is itself a product of class society, as it arises from those class tensions to regulate the politics of the class society.
What is Socialism?
Having behind us the most important issues, the analysis of which allows us to indicate what are the most fundamental problems of today’s society, we can move on to formulating a simple vision of the future in which these problems would be solved.
An attempt to describe concretely and accurately, in detail, what the future would be like under socialism would be tainted with wishful thinking and would probably never come true exactly as prognosed. However, we can already, with certainty, tell which elements of this future society will be necessary, and those aspects of the present system which we will definitely have to get rid of.
In negative terms, socialism can be defined as a classless society. The class division is the basic contradiction of capitalism and leads to the creation and reproduction of the rest of the key problems with this system, such as the existence of the state (as an apparatus of class power) or the very way in which society decides what is valuable and what is not – value form that causes the whole of the people to pursue profits. Solving this question is the paramount mission of the socialist movement. A world without classes is a world in which work is not allotted by economic domination but by the needs of the whole society. It is not assigned to people based on their social (or financial) status but rather based on whether they can perform a certain activity that is considered necessary. Considered necessary by whom? As we are talking about a truly classless society, we are naturally talking about the whole of society deciding on those matters – that is, according to a social plan.
In fact, the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labour under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required.3
In positive terms, socialism requires the establishment of a centrally planned economy, aimed at meeting the needs of society rather than generating profit for a small minority of people. Anticipating the obvious objections, it should be remembered here that just as socialism presupposes a centrally planned economy, a centrally planned economy does not equal socialism.
Consider, now, the concept of freedom. Freedom, for the socialist, is a positive concept. It is not simply a radical form of individualism free of all interference – a form of life that exists wholly in the ideological fancies spurred by property and colonialism. Rather, freedom is a meaningful way of life. It means the abolition of the domination of class by class, of the domination of men over women, of the domination of industrial society over the earth. It is a concrete form of activity, founded firstly in solidarity and non-domination, and secondly in the realization of each member of society as the precondition for the realization of the whole of society, and vice versa. This is not the hallucinatory freedom promised by the liberals and libertarians: freedom from humanity, freedom from society. That form of “freedom” is in fact an expression of a society organized around principles of domination. No, it is a genuine realization of the free association of humanity. Socialism, then, is ultimately a doctrine of the emancipation of humanity from tyranny, domination, boredom, and want.
We are painfully aware that the issues we deal with in this article are considered taboo by vast sections of the public; that the terms we use may evoke in the imagination of readers terrible images from the collective consciousness shaped by real experiences and ideological phantasms. This is why it is so important for us to present our basic demands in a clear, comprehensive and concise way. We want to resurrect free and uninhibited discussion, and this requires meeting and tackling the taboo that covers every conversation about socialism – in Poland and in the world.
