Our age is one of continuous discoveries in science and technology yet the problems of humanity seem to be unmanageable. Despite global communications men and women are still divided by nationalism and racial prejudice. Science serves the ends of the capitalist system. It serves the military might of nations. It serves industrial efficiency not by satisfying community’s needs, other than by intensifying the exploitation of the working class. The tremendous development of the means of mass communication has made the world smaller. The worker is forced to widen his perspective. For the first time, it becomes possible for him to communicate intelligibly with workers throughout the world. The socialist aspiration for “one world, one people” becomes supported by the development of the productive forces of capitalism itself.
There was a time when the British factory worker, the Chinese peasant farmer and the African cattle herder were living in different worlds. Today, they live very similar lives. The same social problems are increasingly conditioning them. They are all cogs in the machinery of capitalism and are exploited in the same way. Their diet and their language may be different but the workers day-to-day material problems are essentially the same.
If science fiction is anything to go by, most people expect world government to come sooner or later. The terms globalization and globalist have entered our lexicon. People expect world organisations to take the form either of a world dictatorship or of a free federation of national governments they are still thinking of the world as one unit. This is a way of thought the World Socialist Movement (WSM) wishes to encourage even though it does not stand for world government (we are opposed in principle governments everywhere). We would rather express our goal as a world administration of things — the planned production and distribution of wealth on a world scale to meet human needs. In a socialist society, for the first time ever, the globe-spanning communications networks – which capitalism itself has built up and which socialism will develop even further – will be used to ensure that everyone can have an input into the decisions which affect their lives on a global, regional and local basis. A united humanity, sharing a world of common interests, would also share world administration. This is the socialist alternative to the way that capitalism divides the planet into rival states and sets people against each other.
The WSM has always understood the change-over from a capitalist government to a socialist administration to involve the capture by a socialist-minded working class of the various national governments of the world to be followed by the dismantling of the coercive features of the old state machines but the retention, in new forms, of some of the non-coercive technical functions.
This will also be done on an international scale. There is not as yet (if ever there is, which is unlikely) a world government but there is the United Nations, a body which has rudimentary features of this that can be developed further. Just as on the national scale some of the departments of the capitalist government machine could be adapted and used as part of the new socialist administration, so globally could some of the institutions of the UN.
However, the UN is more than the Security Council, its talking-shop General Assembly and its blue-helmet UN troops. It also has economic and social specialized bodies. Most people are familiar with some of these UNESCO, the FAO, WHO, and ILO, to name a few. These agencies are concerned with gathering information and giving advice in their respective fields, though some of them play a vital regulatory role as well.
Other agencies could be adapted to play a part in the socialist administration of the world. They fall into two categories: those needed even in a capitalist world to regulate international communications and those which are essentially world advisory and statistical services in various fields.
Into the first category come:
- The International Telecommunications Union, was originally set up in 1865 to ensure an orderly telecommunications network.
- The Universal Postal Union (1874), was set up to ensure the orderly distribution throughout the world of letters and parcels.
- The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) regulates international air traffic allowing regular safe flights; it also promotes standardised technical equipment.
- The Inter-governmental Maritime Consultative Organisation (IMCO) plays a similar role with regard to ocean shipping.
- The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) gathers and disseminates information on the world’s weather.
These organisations could play a basically similar role in a world socialist society. Their significance for socialists today is that they show that capitalism itself is already a world system and that it has to set up certain world organisations to deal with matters that can only be dealt with on a world scale.
The other bodies, besides collecting and disseminating information, are also involved in the economic development (albeit under capitalist conditions) of the so-called backward parts of the world:
- The International Labour Organisation (1LO) deals with working conditions and training.
7. The United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) deals mainly with education and eradicating illiteracy.
8. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
9. The World Health Organisation (WHO) deals mainly with health hazards.
10. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). concerned with the peaceful uses of atomic energy
In the UN, then, there are ten bodies concerned with postal services, communications, air transport, ocean shipping, the weather, labour, education, agriculture and health which could form the basis of institutions for controlling these matters on a world scale in socialist society. Planning in a socialist society, remember, will be essentially a statistical exercise, correlating estimated human needs with known world resources.
In the UN (plus the administrative networks of the growing number of transnational corporations) the basic framework for a world administration already exists. It only remains for the workers of the world to realise this and to organise to take it over for the benefit of all mankind.
It is essential that we should understand that capitalism is a world system, a world problem to which a world solution is required. Wealth today is produced by social labour from the resources of the world and the abundant evidence of those countries that have attempted to counter the effects of world capitalism by tampering with the economy at the national level has demonstrated the truth of the World Socialist Movement’s contention that only the total abolition of capitalism as a world system can end the problems of society in general and the working class in particular. Socialists intend to build a world in which there will be neither exploiters nor exploited. We are interested in the resources of the whole world but we want them to be used for the benefit of all humankind.
