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When America Goes Socialist
by Lee Smith
*The article above was written by Lee Smith of the
Young Socialist Alliance. It
first appeared in the November 1969 issue of Young Socialist magazine.
“In place of the old bourgeois society, with
its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which
the free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all.” - Marx &
Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Revolutionary socialists in the YSA foresee and understand the developing
stages of the struggle for socialism, and, on the basis of a program
embodying their understanding, they intervene to consciously organize
each of these succeeding stages. Because capitalism, suffering from
prolonged crisis on a world scale, cannot grant to working people many
concessions they consider legitimate and even essential, the program of
revolutionary socialism generally is a program for struggle around
demands for these kinds of concessions – “transitional demands” which
capitalism cannot satisfy, and which require, therefore, the taking of
power by the working class in order to be realized.
While the formal program of revolutionary socialism does not embody a
picture of what the future socialist society will look like,
revolutionary socialists share a vision of that society, if only in its
broad outlines. There is no reason to be concerned about the absence of
precision on this question. We cannot know what the socialist generations
will decide to do, but the general lines of development we are able to
forecast give us confidence in the wisdom of these decisions.
What are these general lines of development that suggest themselves in
the reality of today?
The Uprooting of Race Discrimination
In the immediate aftermath of the conquest of power, while the material
basis for racism will have been smashed, and while we can safely assume
that the heroic role played in the revolution by Afro-Americans and other
third world peoples will have deeply shaken the racist ideas of many
whites, some backward attitudes will persist for a brief time. During
this period, we can expect forthright, decisive action by the
revolutionary government to prevent the manifestation of race prejudice
in any overt act of discrimination, as well as to rapidly remove existing
inequalities in education, employment, housing and medical care. Many of
the revolutionary leaders in the new government will be third world
people. This will also be the time when Blacks, Chicanos, and other
minorities will be able to decide whether they want to partition the
socialist republic into separate states or join with whites in a singe,
multinational revolutionary state. Whatever the decision each group
makes, bonds of solidarity will displace mutual antagonisms as all
sections advance toward communism and new generations are born into
rationally and democratically planned economy of abundance.
The Family
The nuclear family will undoubtedly continue briefly after the overthrow
of capitalism on a relatively broad scale. But even in this initial
stage, we can predict drastic changes in the role of the family. Rapid
development of a household industry, communal kitchens and dining rooms,
free automated restaurants, free day care centers and free boarding
schools will liberate women from the drudgery to which they are assigned
under capitalism, allowing them to enter any field of work they choose,
and making possible their active participation in politics on an equal
footing with men. As with third world people, it is likely that many of the
revolutionary leaders will be women.
Marriage will lose its legal sanctity. It is possible that legal
(recorded) marriages and divorces could be handled by dropping a postcard
in the mailbox. The prohibition against abortions will be scrapped and
there will be free access to birth control for everyone beyond the age of
puberty.
Over time, it is reasonable to expect that monogamous marriage and the
nuclear family will wither away along with other institutions carried
over from class society. Children in a socialist society will not “belong
to” one set of biological parents, but will look upon all adults as their
mothers and fathers. In turn, adults will view them as children of the
whole community. During the years they require of extensive care, training
and affection, the children will be raised by professionals who choose to
specialize in such work.
Health and Medicine
The workers’ state established by the revolution can move immediately to
abolish on a world scale the majority of suffering caused by disease.
This is so because the problem under capitalism is not in most cases that
there is no known treatment or means of prevention, but instead that it
is not profitably to make these available to the poverty-ridden victims.
Beyond the abolition of diseases for which the cure is already known,
vast resources and energy freed by the elimination of waste and military
spending will make possible conquest of diseases for which the cure is
not yet known. The overwhelming emphasis of medicine will shift from treatment
to the prevention of disease and the maintenance of good health. The
mystique of American medicine which leads many doctors today to believe
they rank somewhere above mortals and below the angels will disappear as
more medical schools, training centers, clinics and hospitals are built,
and as tens of thousands of revolutionary youth sweep past the ruins of
arbitrary limits on the number of doctors to embark on medical careers.
Medical care will be one of the first things made free to all by the revolution.
Housing and Transportation
A major campaign of the victorious American revolution will be a crash
program to provide every member of the society with a decent place to
live. This will mean the construction of millions of light, clean, modern
apartments to replace the decaying, squalid, pest-infested living
quarters of people in cities all over the U.S. Along with housing,
socialism will provide free, safe and efficient mass transportation
systems to reduce reliance on automobiles.
Reclamation and Conservation
The garbage the capitalists have dumped into the oceans, rivers, earth
and atmosphere will pose a challenging problem to socialist science. We
may suppose that great attention will be devoted to restoring and
maintaining ecological balance. In line with this, there will undoubtedly
be imaginative experimentation designed to find the most desirable
combination of features from the rural and urban environments for human
habitation.
Police and Prisons
Capitalist police, along with the whole capitalist state apparatus, will
be smashed by the revolution. Workers’ councils will exercise police
power through a workers’ militia so long as the exercise of police power
remains necessary. Once the counterrevolution has been solidly defeated,
capital punishment will be abolished forever. The horrible prisons
existing under capitalism, while they may be used temporarily for those
who oppose the revolution by force, will begin to be replaced immediately
with rehabilitation programs that allow most law violators to remain at
home during their sentence or at pleasant reform camps staffed by skilled
psychologists and social workers. At these camps or resorts, prisoners
will have privacy in their quarters and be allowed regular visits by
their wives and husbands. They will have opportunity for education,
recreation and productive work at the going wage. All those serving time
when the revolution comes to power will have their cases reviewed and be
released or reassigned to a resort (The wardens and guards of capitalist
prisons may be among the first assigned to these reform resorts.)
The capitalist courts will be junked in favor of workers’ tribunals which
will act according to a new and simplified code of social justice.
Bourgeois law books will be sent to the museum.
Eventually, even this softened coercive apparatus will be allowed to
wither away, as the concept of crime recedes into the past.
Education
Socialist schools will be radically different from the regimented,
authoritarian schools we see in capitalist society today. Students and
faculty will jointly administer the schools, just as they will
participate in the government of society as a whole through their elected
deputies to the soviets or councils that will administer the state and
economy. Along with an immediate and continuing upgrading in the range
and quality of course material, we can project more free time for
students all the way down to elementary level for self-study of topics
they wish to pursue, more boarding schools, more freedom for students to
travel from one geographic area to another. Of course, there will be free
access to education all the way to the postgraduate level.
In addition, there will very likely be special programs conducted for
everyone – to teach languages for example, an area of backwardness in
this country that will need to be remedied in an internationalist
society.
The Military
A precondition for the victory of the revolution will be the
revolutionary temper of the men in the armed forces; the revolutionary
reorganization of the army, navy and air forces will be part of the
actual process of the revolution. Once power is secured, the new state
may want to maintain at least part of these mighty forces under arms long
enough to discourage resistance by the ruling classes in other nations to
the revolutions that will occur there in the wake of the American
success. After that the socialist societies of the world can begin
dismantling their military operations together, and begin looking for
means to dispose of the heinous chemical-biological-nuclear weapons
stockpiled by imperialism.
Production and Distribution
The revolution, in coming to power, will nationalize the major means of
production and exchange, bringing into existence a new mode of
production, based on social ownership of the means of production and
collective appropriation of the social surplus product. While workers
will continue to be paid wages in money to exchange for commodities
during a long initial period, a socialist mode of distribution will eventually
replace the old method as abundance overtakes scarcity and automation and
cybernation eliminate human labor from the sphere of production. It is
entirely realistic to speculate that, within a century after the
insurrection, money and commodity production will have withered away as
absurdities in an economy requiring no human labor and producing more
than enough to satisfy the needs of everyone.
Long before this happens, workers will have ceased to have to pay
individually for rent, food, medical care or transportation. The length
of the work week will be sharply reduced immediately and very soon after
that cut in half. The management of shops and factories will be in the
hands of those who work there. Again, more than administering their own
workplace, these workers will also participate in the administration of
the whole economy and society through their elected delegates.
Socialist Man and Socialist Woman
The kind of men and women socialized in a society free from material
scarcity and the need to labor as a condition for survival will be like
those written about by Maxim Gorky in Mother: “There will come a
time, I know, when people will take delight in one another, when each
will be a star to the other, and when each will listen to his fellow as
to music. The free men will walk upon the earth, men great in their
freedom. They will walk with open hearts, and the heart of each will be
pure of envy and greed, and therefore all mankind will be without malice,
and there will be nothing to divorce the heart from reason. Then life
will be one great service to man! His figure will be raised to lofty
heights – for to free men all heights are attainable. Then we shall live
in truth and freedom and in beauty, and those will be accounted best who
will the more widely embrace the world with their hearts, and whose love
of it will be the profoundest; those will be the best who will be the
freest; for in them is the greatest beauty. Then will life be great, and
the people will be great who live that life.”
The First Step
The kind of freedom Gorky
wrote about will only be possible in a society like the one sketched
above. It is impossible under capitalism. Freedom under capitalism
consists of consciously recognizing the necessity for socialism and
dedicating you life to its achievement. In embracing that freedom, you
help the entire family of mankind take the first step from capitalism to
communism. You can take that step yourself by joining YSA.
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