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What Is Socialism?
The German socialist Karl Marx was once asked what his
favorite maxim was. He replied with a line by the Roman playwright
Terence: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man, is a matter
of indifference to me."
If for the moment we ignore the use of sexist language in this ancient
quotation, we get a feel for the profoundly humanitarian spirit of Marx
and socialists since him.
Indeed, socialists are very concerned about the injustice and social ills
in the world today—hunger, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, disease,
war, the exploitation of workers, the oppression of nations, races,
women, and gays, the destruction of the environment, and the threat of
nuclear annihilation.
Socialists obviously don't have a monopoly on compassion, however. What
distinguishes socialists from other socially concerned people is that we
do not view these problems as normal, natural, eternal, or an inherent
feature of the human condition. We believe that these problems are
historically and socially created and that they can be solved by human
beings through conscious, organized political struggle and change.
Socialist Action argues that the wealth and other advances produced by
industry, technology, and science have made it possible to eliminate
these problems but that these problems continue because of the dominant
economic and political interests and values of society. We assert that
capitalism is ultimately the main source of these problems in the United
States and the world today.
Capitalism and the exploitation of workers
Under capitalism, the chief means of production—the factories, the
railroads, the mines, the banks, the public utilities, the offices, and
all of the related technology—are privately owned by a super-rich
minority, the capitalist class. The capitalists then compete with each
other in the marketplace and run production on the basis of what will
bring them the biggest profit.
This drive to successfully compete and to maximize profit leads big
business to exploit workers, to pay their employees as little as
possible, a mere fraction of the actual value that they produce. It also
leads big business to resist the efforts of workers to unionize and to
obtain increased pay, reduced working hours, and improved working
conditions.
This exploitation of workers results in a gross concentration of wealth,
to the benefit of the capitalists and at the expense of working people.
Even in the United States, the richest country in the world, where
workers admittedly have one of the highest living standards, there is
nonetheless a gross concentration of wealth. According to the Federal
Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the top 1% of American families
(834,000 households) own more than the bottom 90% (84 million
households).
This social inequality is aggravated by mass unemployment, which is
endemic to capitalism. Because the means of production is divided up
among the individual capitalists competing with each other, there is no
overall coordination or planning of the economy and consequently no
consideration to provide jobs to everybody who is able and willing to
work.
This anarchy of production for private profit also fuels the erratic
boom-and-bust cycle of the capitalist economy. Periodically, the economy
experiences crises of overproduction when the capitalists inadvertently
glut the market with products that they cannot sell at a profit. The result
is recessions and massive layoffs of workers, which ruin lives, idle
factories, and deprive society of the benefits of production.
The basic irrationality of capitalism is highlighted by the glaring gap
between unmet human needs on one hand and the untapped potential of the
existing human and material resources to fulfill these needs on the
other. For example, when inventors or scientists or technicians develop
new, advanced labor-saving technology, this should be a cause for
celebration for workers because it means that the work week could be cut
with no cut in weekly pay. Workers could enjoy greater leisure time
without a drop in income. Instead, the capitalists use labor-saving
technology to lay off workers because, of course, it only makes good sense
from the business point of view to cut labor costs in order to increase
profits.
In the United States, there is a great need for a massive construction of
more schools, hospitals, child-care centers, and recreation centers.
There is also a great need to repair the nation's deteriorating
infrastructure, including its roads, bridges, mass transit, and water
systems. The capital, raw materials, and labor for such development
exists, but the corporate rich do not invest in such projects because
they correctly judge that it would not be profitable for them to do so.
The potential, overwhelmingly working-class consumers of such services
simply would not be able to afford the prices that big business would
have to charge in order to make a profit.
Nor does the capitalist government finance such a massive expansion as
part of a public works program, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it
would raise the public's expectation, which is basically at odds with
capitalist ideology, that society should be responsible to provide for
its members. And secondly, it would raise the possibility that the public
would force the government to tax the rich to fund such an expensive
program.
The oppression of African-Americans and Hispanics
In addition to exploiting workers, capitalism contributes to the
oppression of other groups in society. White racism and the oppression of
African-Americans arose with the European slave trade, but they have been
perpetuated under capitalism.
After the slaves were freed during the Civil War, the capitalists used
racism to justify paying less to Black employees. The capitalists also
used racism to pit white workers against Black workers in order to divide
the working class and weaken the organized labor movement. Despite the
gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, white racist
discrimination in employment and in other areas of life persists.
Furthermore, the second-class status of African-Americans has been
deepened by color-blind free market forces, specifically by the recent
movement of industry out of the cities, where the Black community is
concentrated. The resulting loss of decent-paying working-class jobs has
increased Black poverty and devastated Black neighborhoods and families,
fueling crime, drug addiction, and hopelessness.
The oppression of Hispanics in the United states is similar to that of
African-Americans in that it is based on widespread racist
discrimination, combined with a decline in the number of available
decent-paying jobs. The Anglo suppression of various aspects of Latin
culture and identity worsens the plight of Hispanics in this country.
The oppression of women and gays
While the oppression of women predated the establishment of capitalism,
the private profit system has perpetuated their subordination to men. The
main basis of women's oppression in capitalist society is the segregation
of women in lower paying jobs in the labor market and the relegation of
women to unequally shared child care and housework in the family.
These two spheres of women's oppression—the labor market and the
family—are mutually reinforcing. So long as women are unduly burdened by
child care and housework, they will not be able to gain equality with men
in employment. So long as women bring home a smaller paycheck, they will
not be able to get their male partners to share domestic responsibilities
equally.
These unequal labor relations between men and women sustain the sexist
ideology that justifies different and unequal gender roles and the rigid,
polarized norms for males and females in all aspects of life.
The oppression of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is largely derived from
this sexist ideology. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are stigmatized
because they defy the norm of exclusive heterosexuality and because they
do not conform to conventional standards of masculinity and femininity.
Imperialism and U.S. foreign policy
On an international level, capitalism has led to the development of
imperialism. Since the nineteenth century, the corporate rich of the
advanced industrialized capitalist nations of Western Europe, the United
States, and Japan have invested capital and exploited cheap labor and
natural resources in the colonial world of Africa, Asia, and Latin
America.
The economic domination of the imperialist nations has distorted the
development of the Third World nations, condemning the masses of their
populations to poverty and misery. The rivalry between the imperialist
nations has also led to military conflicts, including two world wars, as
they competed for new world markets and carved up the world. Since the
Second World War, the imperialist nations have been forced to grant most
of their former colonies formal political independence, but their
economic domination continues.
Since its victory in World War II, the United States has been the leading
imperialist power. At various points over the past fifty years, the U.S.
government has defended American corporate interests abroad by supporting
such repressive, undemocratic governments as the fascist dictatorship of
General Francisco Franco in Spain, the apartheid regime in South Africa,
the shah of Iran, the Marcos dictatorship of the Philippines, and the
recently deposed Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.
The U.S. government has also gone to war or used other forms of military
intervention to defend big business interests, such as in Korea in the
'50s, Cuba in the '60s, Vietnam in the '60s and '70s, Nicaragua in the
'80s, and Iraq in the '90s. The U.S. imperialists have also overthrown
democratically elected reform governments that encroached on U.S.
corporate privilege, such as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the
Dominican Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973.
Additionally, the United States dropped the atom bomb in World War II and
launched the arms race with the Soviet Union—all to intimidate the Soviet
Union and to deter the people of the colonial world from challenging
imperialist domination and going the route of socialist revolution.
The socialist solution
Socialist Action argues that the problems of exploitation and oppression
in the world today can ultimately be solved by first replacing the
capitalist system with a socialist system. The chief means of production
should be socialized, that is, taken out of the private hands of the
capitalists and put under public ownership, that is, government
ownership.
The economy should then be run by councils of democratically elected
representatives of workers and consumers at all levels of the economy.
Instead of being run on the basis of what will maximize profit for a
super-rich minority, the economy should be planned to meet the needs of
the people—in employment, education, nutrition, health care, housing,
transportation, leisure, and cultural development.
A socialist government could raise the minimum wage to union levels, cut
the work week with no cut in weekly pay, and spread around the newly
available work to the unemployed. A public works program, such as the one
mentioned earlier, could be launched to provide yet more jobs and offer
sorely needed social services. The government could provide free health
care, from cradle to grave, and free education, from nursery school to
graduate school.
A socialist government could also address the special needs and interests
of the oppressed. Existing anti-discrimination legislation in employment
could be strongly enforced, and pay equity and affirmative action for
women and racial minorities could be expanded. Blacks and Hispanics could
be granted community control of their respective communities. The racist,
class-biased death penalty could be abolished.
The establishment of flexible working hours, paid parental leave, and
child-care facilities, as well as the defense of safe, legal and
accessible abortion, would provide women with alternatives to sacrificing
work for the sake of their children and because of unwanted pregnancies,
respectively. Same-sex marriage could be legalized, and a massive
program, like the space program or the Manhattan Project, could be
financed to find a vaccine and a cure for AIDS.
Money currently spent on the military could be spent instead on cleaning
up the country's air and waterways and developing environmentally safe
technology. A socialist government of the United States would end this
country's oppression of Third World nations because it would not be
defending corporate profit there but would be encouraging the workers and
peasants of those countries to follow suit and make their own socialist
revolutions.
The socialist system that Socialist Action advocates would be a multiparty
system, with all of the democratic rights won and enjoyed in the most
democratic capitalist nations, including freedom of speech, freedom of
the press, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and freedom of
religion. A genuinely socialist system would be far more democratic than
the most democratic capitalist system because in a socialist economy the
common working people would democratically decide what should be produced
and how it should be produced.
Social democracy and Stalinism
Many people often ask Socialist Action if we support the model of
socialism offered by the social democratic parties and government
administrations in Western European nations. We say "no."
In those countries, the Labor, Social Democratic, and Socialist parties
have helped their working-class constituencies to win important
progressive reforms, such as universal suffrage, the eight-hour day,
old-age pensions, free health care and education, and social services
more extensive than those here in the United States. However, these
parties and the trade unions affiliated with them have secured these
reforms within the capitalist framework, which they have never
fundamentally challenged or sought to replace with socialism. Therefore,
the capitalists' rule of the economy, their exploitation of the working
class, and the resulting concentration of wealth continue.
People also ask us if the so-called Communist countries of the former
Soviet bloc represented the model of socialism that we support. Again, as
with the Social Democrats, our answer is "no."
In the former Soviet bloc, the capitalist class was expropriated, and the
economies were socialized. These socialized economies made possible great
progress in raising the living standards of the masses of workers and
peasants in the areas of employment, health care, education, and
nutrition, and in upgrading the status of women. However, these countries
were ruled through the Communist parties by privileged bureaucratic
elites that denied socialist democracy and imposed repressive,
totalitarian political systems on the people. These dictatorial
governments not only violated basic democratic and human rights but
mismanaged the planned economies, being responsible for inefficiency,
waste, corruption, and stagnation.
The origins of these dictatorial bureaucratic regimes lie with the
degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the
two leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky, argued that the
Bolshevik model of socialist democracy was never fully implemented and
then was completely destroyed under the Stalin dictatorship because of a
combination of factors. These factors included the failure of the
socialist revolutions to triumph in Europe after the First World War, the
resulting isolation of the Russian Revolution, the military attacks on
the young Soviet republic by the imperialist nations, the devastation
caused by the First World War and the Civil War that followed the
revolution, the lack of democratic traditions in czarist Russia, and the
general low educational and cultural levels of the masses of workers and
peasants.
Currently, in the former Soviet bloc nations, the ruling Stalinist
bureaucracies, allied with the Western imperialists and native capitalist
"wannabes," are trying to restore capitalism. So far, the
introduction of the free market into the Soviet bloc has resulted in a
gigantic drop in productivity and in the living standards of common
working people, with increasing unemployment, poverty, and social
inequality.
This right-wing attempt to restore capitalism and the corresponding
attacks on social services and entitlements, such as free health care and
full employment, in the former Soviet bloc have also made it easier for
the capitalist governments of Western Europe to attack the various
reforms and social services that the labor movements and social
democratic parties of those countries have won over the past decades.
Socialist Action hailed the collapse of the repressive Communist Party
regimes of the Soviet bloc, but we oppose the restoration of capitalism
there. Instead, we call for a defense of the socialized economies and for
the workers and their allies to overthrow the ruling Stalinist
bureaucracies and establish socialist democracy in their place.
Socialism and human nature
Many critics say that socialism is a great idea in theory but that it is
completely unrealistic and utopian because it goes against basic human
nature. The critics claim that human beings are just too selfish, too
greedy, too competitive, and too aggressive to create and sustain a
cooperative and egalitarian society.
Socialists recognize that individual self-interest has always existed and
will always exist in human beings. We also acknowledge that there will
never be a perfect harmony between the individual and society.
But we argue that individual self-interest need not be the ruling
principle of society. History and cross-cultural research suggest that
basic human nature consists of many different, divergent, but co-existing
capacities, and that human personality and behavior are largely shaped by
the social institutions, practices, and ruling ideology of the given
society.
The critics of socialism correctly perceive the hyper-individualism of
people in capitalist society, but then they incorrectly generalize this
historically specific characteristic to human beings across time and
place. They cannot imagine or understand that a reorganization of society
along socialist lines would elicit, facilitate, and reinforce the basic
human capacities for cooperation and solidarity.
The revolutionary potential of workers & the
oppressed
Still, the point about self-interest as a motivating factor for human
behavior is an important one. Socialists believe that many people of
conscience from different classes and backgrounds can be won to a
socialist perspective through appeals to reason, morality, and political
idealism. However, we believe that the main impetus for a socialist
movement to sustain itself and successfully transform society must be
collective self-interest and power.
We believe that the working class is the only social force that has both
the necessary self-interest and power to lead the struggle for socialism.
Socialism is in the interests of the working class because it will allow
the workers to reclaim the wealth that they produced but which the
capitalists appropriated from them through exploitation. The working
class also has the power to overturn capitalism because of its strategic
location at the point of production and its corresponding ability to shut
down production by simply withdrawing its labor. Thus, a mass socialist
movement can only grow out of a revitalized and radicalized labor
movement, based on the trade unions and other organizations of the
working class.
Similarly, we believe that only the oppressed possess sufficient
self-interest to lead the struggles for their own liberation. Therefore,
we support the autonomous movements of the oppressed--the Black movement,
the Hispanic movement, the women's movement, and the gay and lesbian movement--to
insure that their respective needs and demands are met.
However, we do not believe that the oppressed by themselves possess
sufficient power to fully achieve their liberation since their oppression
is at least partly rooted in the capitalist system. Because only the
organized working class possesses sufficient power to abolish capitalism
and its concomitant forms of oppression, the oppressed must win the
organized working class to support their respective struggles, as well as
ultimately ally themselves with the working class in the struggle for
socialism.
Independent mass action
Socialist Action does not believe that socialism can be voted into power
through free elections. History has repeatedly shown that when workers
and their allies try to use the existing democratic process to advance
their interests and replace capitalism with a socialist system, the
capitalist class and the armed forces of the capitalist state will smash
democracy to save capitalism, as happened, for example, in Chile twenty-five
years ago this month.
Socialist Action points out that progressive social change has been made
in this country through mass action, not by voting in certain politicians
or by working within the system.
American independence from England was gained through a revolution. The
passage of the Bill of Rights was prompted by a rebellion of poor
farmers. The abolition of slavery and the extension of suffrage to Black
men was accomplished through a second revolution, the Civil War. Women
won the vote through the women's suffrage movement.
The labor movement won the twelve-hour day, then the eight-hour day, the
right to strike, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the
minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker's disability. Social Security,
welfare, and increased wages and benefits for union members.
The civil rights movement overthrew the segregationist "Jim
Crow" laws of the South and forced the government to outlaw racist
discrimination in employment and housing and to implement affirmative
action.
The anti-war movement helped force the U.S. to end its imperialist war
against the Vietnamese in their just struggle for self-determination.
The feminist movement won anti-discrimination legislation, affirmative
action, pay equity in some public institutions, and the legalization of
abortion.
The gay and lesbian movement, too, has secured anti-discrimination
legislation and greater funding of AIDS research and patient care.
Additionally, the environmental and consumer protection movements have
won important reforms that moderate big business's destruction of the
planet and manufacture of unsafe commodities in its relentless pursuit of
profits.
Socialist Action advocates the independent political action of the
workers and the oppressed to bring about further progressive change. We
call for and build mass demonstrations, rallies, pickets, and strikes.
We counter-pose such mass action to reliance on the American two-party
system, electoral campaigns, and behind-the scenes lobbying of capitalist
politicians. The logic of working within the two-party system of the
capitalist political establishment is to subordinate the needs, demands,
and priorities of the workers and the oppressed to what is acceptable to
the rulers of this country. The inevitable result is the demobilization
and cooptation of the struggle for change.
We point out that the impetus for progressive social change has never
come from the Democratic and Republican parties but that they can be
forced by mass action to implement progressive policies and reforms, at
least up to certain limits. However, we argue that socialism can only be
achieved by a revolutionary culmination of mass action of the workers and
their allies in opposition to the capitalist state and capitalist political
parties.
Socialist Action aspires to play a leading role in building a popular
mass socialist movement in this country. Our members have participated in
the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War
movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the
environmental movement, the Central America solidarity movement, and the
movement against the Gulf War, among others.
If you want to fight for a society and a world free of all forms of
exploitation, oppression, and social injustice, join
us!
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