Human Liberation Ought To Be The True Goal Of Socialists

I used to be a member of the SPGB. I know the SPGB case. I still agree with it in principle, but I think certain conditions have to apply for it to actually work in reality. Without acknowledgement of those conditions, we’re left with something that does not account for all the factors in human nature that affect group and individual behaviour.

Most on here may disagree, but as I see it, the SPGB is making a non-Marxist (or pre-Marxist) case for socialism (which I see no issue with by the way). It is the idea that socialism can simply be abolished, it does not have to be struggled for, and possibly it cannot be struggled for, and any such struggle is futile and always leads back to capitalism or some similar system. In other words, socialism can only be achieved by democratic means in the sense of people voting for it.

I agree with this, but I would go one step further and posit that the goal of socialists should not be socialism but the negation of socialism. This seems contradictory at first glance, so I will explain. For it to work, socialists would not only have to abolish capitalism, they would have to abolish themselves. This is really about the liberation of all Man from political authority. As I see it, it’s not ‘socialism’ at all. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that socialism itself is but one step and a necessary formality so that society can be re-set. There is a next immediate step that must be taken to complete the liberation of Man, a way of ensuring that there can be no going back to the previous system, or at least that it would be enormously difficult to do so.

I think society could work on a completely non-political basis, even anti-political, without any sort of political authority, at any level. In other words, once capitalism has been formally abolished out of existence, the various parliaments and assemblies captured by socialists would then take the final step of abolishing themselves. From that point, there would be no ‘world socialism’, as such, in the shape of a political authority. Instead, there would be a more complex post-socialist system – really a complex of systems – made up of individuals and groups making purely industrial decisions, probably at a very small scale, and mostly self-directed. In some respects, it would resemble a classical market system because production would be in response to both use/need and demand, except there would be no ‘market system’, as such. There would be capital (there has to be, otherwise industrial capacity is limited), and people would have private possessory property, including homes they live in or use, but there would be no property system, as such, in that there would be no means of enforcing property rights beyond simple force or moral pressure.

This final capping process of abolishing socialism preferably should happen immediately after socialism is achieved, which is possible if in the transition to socialism much of the repressive infrastructure of capitalism has already been dismantled and decommissioned. I call it human liberation rather than human freedom because freedom, as such, is not a concrete goal: nobody can guarantee it because freedom is a subjective concept. Liberation is achievable in the sense of formally abolishing all repressive mechanisms in society, including parliaments and assemblies and other nodes of political authority taken over by socialists, and is the final necessary step and goal.
This must include the abolition of any socialist facsimiles of capitalist institutions – for example, workers’ assemblies, formal workers’ councils and what not – where these serve no actual industrial function.

If socialists do not take these steps and instead continue with political governance under the justification that they are acting with mass democratic consent, then this will just create another system of disguised repression. The ‘democratic’ justification is grounded in belief rather than fact. Unless there is some technological process available to confirm the dynamic consent of the overwhelming majority of people from one day to the next, it is impossible to assert that workers’ delegates or representatives continue to act with consent, and all such mechanisms must eventually devolve into repression.