How we live and how we might live (part 5)
Previously we looked at how we live under capitalism. It’s now time to change tack and consider how we might live in a socialist future. This does two jobs: it clarifies many confused issues about what socialists are proposing. It also provides a useful platform from which we can look back at our current capitalist society with greater objectivity, highlighting its many antisocial characteristics.
Human societies, like individuals, are adaptive. They are not completely uniform. So along with a rich legacy of cultural differences, socialist communities are likely to organise themselves differently from region to region. We are a practical species, and we develop our institutions to take advantage of local features like resources, topography, climate, etc. And societies don’t stand still. Regional variations will themselves evolve over time as communities try out new solutions to emerging problems. In a world of variety and change it is impossible to be specific about the detailed institutions a future society would develop. We are free to speculate on them, of course, but we should not become too wedded to our conjectures.
Peering into the future
We also need to remember that purely speculative conceptions of a post-capitalist world will always be influenced by our own perspectives. They will include elements of wish-fulfilment, or assumptions derived from our lives within capitalism. No one, no matter how creative or perceptive, can stand outside their own society any more than they can stand outside their own skin. As is often observed of speculative fiction, our projections of the future are often no more than elaborations of the present. Our imaginations, it seems, do not stretch far beyond what will comfortably fit into our familiar framework of ideas. One of the biggest difficulties many people have when first approaching the idea of socialism is that they try to imagine a post-capitalist society through capitalist spectacles. Inevitably they end up constructing impossible hybrids in their minds, like Dr Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu animal with a head at each end, one peering forward, the other, back. So, it is worth reflecting on the fact that any society built on a rejection of capitalism’s defining features would necessarily appear unfamiliar to us, so unfamiliar, in fact, that it might even strike us as incomprehensible or self-contradictory, just as traditional, non-western societies appeared to the first anthropologists.
Peering into the future is a tricky business. Certainly, there are trends and regularities we can extrapolate from, a few things we can infer and some others that we can guess at, but none of us has a crystal ball. To some extent we all go into the future blindly. And that’s particularly true when it comes to predicting the course of events. We know from the science of complex systems that detailed historical movements cannot be known in advance. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can say nothing at all about the future. Far from it. Socialists like William Morris living in the Victorian era admittedly had no ability to predict the path that capitalism would travel over the next 150 years, and they may well have been astonished at the legal forms and institutions it developed along the way. It is extremely unlikely, however, that they would have been surprised to learn that 20th century capitalism has been marked by poverty, war and even the threat of human-induced climate change, or that economic booms and slumps, unemployment, waste, homelessness, corruption, and much else has marked its progress. The historical details may elude us, but once we have an understanding of a society’s foundational structure then its general features become relatively easy to predict.
So, if we are to draw confident conclusions we must dive deep beneath the superficial features of a society. And that seems possible. Societies are not random assemblages of people living arbitrary lives. Each one is built on definite foundations which determine much about its general character, and influence the kind of institutions and practices it can sustain and develop. A society’s foundations set the conditions that motivate people and give meaning to their lives. They determine that some behaviours and choices are socially possible while others are not. They determine how individuals relate to each other, the values they hold, and the kind and extent of freedoms available to them.
Earlier in this series we showed how a society’s foundations are grounded in our biological nature, which requires that we must actively produce the things we need to survive. All human societies, past or present, have had to organise themselves in some way to produce for their collective needs. We saw, for instance, that capitalism organises production upon the basis of the employer/employee property relationship. We saw that this relationship has definite consequences for those living under it. It ensures that we relate to one another as isolated property owners; that we experience competition and conflict at every level of society; that the majority live with personal insecurity; that they spend much of their time acting under the direction of others with little say in how their work or communities are organised; that a significant proportion of them live in poverty, unable to participate fully in their communities; and that all are in danger of suffering intermittently from the many horrors of national and international conflict.
We can predict with considerable confidence that while capitalism persists these miseries will continue into the future without relief. The only way to rid ourselves of them, therefore, is to replace capitalism with something else. But how? And by what means? And how can we ensure that what replaces capitalism will provide a better life for us in the future?
Life after capitalism
In his 1884 talk, ‘How we Live And How we Might Live’ William Morris explored one way of conceiving life after capitalism. He asked his audience to consider what it might mean to live in a world lacking the employer/employee relationship and therefore the vast apparatus of capitalist profit-making. He traced out a society stripped of capitalism’s multiple antagonisms, property-based hierarchies and hard-wired competition. Analyses of this kind are eye-opening and useful, but they are not in themselves sufficient. We need to go further, to analyse socialism in the same way that we previously analysed capitalism by identifying its productive relationships. The best way to do this is to consider how we can make an effective transition between the two.
Today, there is no necessary or objective reason why capitalism should continue to exist. It drags on only by the inertial agreement of the vast majority of people whom it employs. It can be terminated the moment they collectively withdraw their consent to capitalism’s employer/employee relationship. As the roles of employer and employee are mutually dependent, the withdrawal of support for one necessarily means the disappearance of the other. And because ownership of the means of production (the factories, machinery, materials, transport systems, etc) is currently invested in employers, their disappearance requires that it is transferred to new owners.
Socialists argue that ownership of these essential elements of society should fall to the community as a whole. Anything else would be to reintroduce some form of the employer/employee relationship and the capitalist market in which it is embedded. With the means of production taken into common ownership, the products society creates then need to be distributed according to some method. We argue that they, too, should be owned in common and distributed according to need. There are various ways this might be achieved. We propose that access to the products of society should be open and free to all. There are two reasons for this. First, no one is in a better position to assess an individual’s needs than that individual. Second, having open access to the means of production has enormously beneficial consequences for society which we will examine next month.
So, in place of the competitive employer/employee property relationship, socialism’s central productive relations as identified here are common ownership, free association and free access. As we will see, even before we start thinking about the decisions people need to make in a socialist society or what institutions they would need to develop to organise it, these fundamental structures will have a profound effect on how it functions. The board is now set up and we can start to see how the game proceeds.
As a first observation, we can sketch out one difference between capitalism and socialism that immediately appears. This is the amount of social control that a socialist society would have over what is produced. It reveals that there is a straightforward relationship between production and consumption, one which is obscured by capitalist relations. Given any level of production, society can, for instance, choose to produce more and therefore consume more. Or it can produce less and consume less. If we produce less then we have more time to pursue other personal and social interests. So, there is a choice to be made between consuming more and doing more. In capitalism, by contrast, the link between production and consumption is broken by the huge apparatus of profit-making which squats between them, determining and distorting both. The drive it sets up to accumulate capital for the employers of labour overrides and eradicates any preferences a community might have. In socialism this juggernaut is removed, social control is set free and social choices expand dramatically.
Unreasonable fears
But what of the reservations many people have about the whole idea of socialism? As Morris observed, a lot of us shy away from change even when our welfare depends upon it. And having an unclear conception of the future naturally raises not-unreasonable fears. We can, however, address those fears by putting them in context and considering how realistic they are in relation to a future communitarian world. Three grheat fears regularly strike people when introduced to the idea of socialism, and they are embodied in three human stereotypes which haunt our imaginations like Dickens’s three Christmas ghosts. The first two appear in the guise of the greedy person and the lazy person. The third is supposedly embodied in all of us and summed up in the question, ‘who will do the dirty work?’
These figures are raised up as convenient defeaters whenever the proposal is made that we take personal responsibility for making a real change to our world. We are quick to insist that they make a harmonious world impossible, so there is no point in even thinking about it. It’s an understandable reaction. Greedy people, for instance, are real, aren’t they? The guy in the sharp suit manipulating markets and people from behind their massive desk at company head office. The rumpled politician leaning over the members’ bar in the House of Commons, scheming to feather their own nest. The greedy person is everywhere, feeding at the trough, taking too much of everything and leaving too little for others. That’s the stereotype. But how real is it? Is greed inbred in our human personalities or is it an adaptive behaviour to the deeply competitive social world we currently inhabit? Are any of these figures really a thing?
Next month we will start to confront these three ghosts, and lay them to rest. In the process, we will dismiss a number of misconceptions about the socialist case and reveal much about the means by which it can overcome the inevitable miseries of capitalism.
HUD