Author: alanjjohnstone
WSM V. Anarchism
The political position of the World Socialist Movement (WSM) is frequently misrepresented by mistruths or misunderstandings.There are common parodies of the WSM presented rather than the genuine discussions on the disagreements which critics hold (particularly on Parliament and trade unions.) First; lets begin with the structure and organisation of the WSM. In keeping with the tenet that working class emancipation…
Socialist Decision Making 7/7
Rosa Luxemburg wrote that democracy is indispensable to the working-class “because it creates the political forms which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society.” But democracy in itself cannot solve a single problem of the working class. Democracy for the working class can only be consolidated and extended to the extent that…
Socialist Decision Making 6/7
When describing the new society we are working for, socialists frequently encounter the question of “how will it work?” There is a danger that plans produced today describing a socialist society will only bear the hall mark of the author’s own preference rather than how future socialists will democratically organise themselves. While it is of interest…
Socialist Decision Making 5/7
Socialism is a decentralised or polycentric society that is self-regulating, self-adjusting and self-correcting, from below and not from the top. It is not a command economy but a responsive one. Planning in socialism is essentially a question of industrial organisation, of organising productive units into a productive system functioning smoothly to supply the useful things…
Socialist Decision Making 4/7
While work-place democracy is unquestioningly a pre-requisite for socialist administration, it seems many have never taken the issue to its logical end. The real democratic safeguard is when no-one can deprive another of the means for life – food, health and shelter – through sectional ownership of them, regardless of how internally democratic their enterprise might be. This was…
Socialist Decision Making 3/7
There will be situations when people simply cannot agree and there are no compromises everyone can live with. There is put bluntly no consensus. What happens in these situations, depending on the situation is either A) The suggestion is blocked or B) The group does nothing faced with a situation. The idea is that if…
Socialist Decision Making 2/7
The simplest definition of democracy is that it is decision-making by the whole people involving procedures such as free and open debate, free access to information, one person one vote, and the accountability of public officials and elected representatives. Such a decision-making system can be regarded as desirable because one key aspect of the nature…
Socialist Decision Making 1/7
A major part of the role of the World Socialist Movement (WSM) is to help elucidate just how simple and straightforward the revolutionary transformation can be so we need to take positive steps to convince sympathisers. First of all, we must take care to distinguish between the democratic structures for getting rid of capitalism and those needed…
A Wolff in Sheep’s Clothing?
Since they evolved, cooperatives can arise in four sorts of situation: [1] Isolated individual enterprises, such coffee shops or book stores As part of a wider social movement. For instance, the Catalonia collectives during the Spanish civil war or the kibbutzim in the early settler phase of Israel. When the owners abandon their factories as they did in Russia in February Revolution of…
Battle of Ideas 3/3
The World Socialist Movement cannot control whether or not workers become socialists. What we can provide, and what we have continuously provided, is a theory of revolution which, if had been taken up by workers, would have prevented incalculable misery to millions. Over the years, the WSM’s theory has led to the formation of a…