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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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