Further to the meeting of why people leave the party
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Perhaps you might want to hear from someone who left the party.
Note, though, that I still have access to the members’ area. Access really ought to be removed for people who are no longer members.
I have been a socialist for as long as I remember, and I still am. I am in accord with the DoP. But I think that, with respect, the party is not fit for purpose. Why? I think it’s because so little thought is given to a socialist society. Yes, Socialism will be unutterably better than capitalism, but this isn’t often put in the Standard.
But equally important, socialism will have consequences. One thing (I would hope) is that the immediate post-capitalist task will be to ensure that all comrades (i.e. the entire world) will be fed and housed, etc. One example of a consequence of this: farmers in Kenya, who hitherto lived in near-starvation because they are forced to grow coffee, will be able to grow food. And as a consequence of that, people in the once-rich parts of the world will have to get used to less coffee. And something similar – there will be, in socialism, throughout the world, high quality tools kept in local free-access repositories as opposed to the situation now where people – only in the once-rich countries of course – all have the same mediocre tools kept in their sheds mostly rusting away, mostly unused (and the people in the former poor parts of the world do without). This to me seems obvious. Capitalism = companies competing to sell the most products at as low a quality as can be by workers having to spend their day in as bad an environment as the bosses can get away with. Socialism = designers focusing on making the best quality tools, produced in factories where there is only a need to make the number that is needed so that everyone has access.
I mentioned this one Friday night and was told that I am someone who thinks socialism is about wearing a hair shirt This from a member who then brandished a tool he happened to have with him as a wonderful demonstration of his allegiance to commodity fetishism.
Another example of how there’s very little thought on the post-capitalist future is when Adam and others talk about the possibility of nuclear power. But this is only possible in capitalism because a large number of people, having no other choice, have to do extremely dangerous, life-shortening work. Surely no one is going to do this in socialism, and if there are, then comrades should talk them out of it. To me, it is obvious that in socialism, by necessity, dangerous work that can be avoided will be, but it’s not something that seems to occur to members.
The meeting to me, gave the impression, a little bit, of arrogance, that only the party carries the true banner of socialism, so people who leave surely don’t understand socialism. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. There are people who hold similar beliefs, but dislike the history of infighting in the party and/or bemoan its lack of imagination.
The party is top heavy on the present, but without enough thought/imagination about the future: what socialism will be. Like a lot of people, I was inspired by William Morris. I’m sure that there are party members who would dismiss as feeble romanticism, but I disagree. It puts the whole point of the movement nearer the centre of the argument. Imagination and serious thought about a socialist future should be a regular feature in the Standard: articles on ideas of the practical ways of getting food, medicines, water, shelter to parts of the world where capitalism had demanded there should be a lack of these things; how to generate communications in a world where, under capitalism, one half of the world has never seen a telephone; how to run organisations to ensure the continuation of expertise, say, surgery or psychiatry, in a society where hierarchies as we know them no longer exist.
Until an organisation with this focus emerges, or the party changes its ways of communicating, socialism gets further from us.
“I have been a socialist for as long as I remember, and I still am. I am in accord with the DoP. But I think that, with respect, the party is not fit for purpose. Why? I think it’s because so little thought is given to a socialist society. Yes, Socialism will be unutterably better than capitalism, but this isn’t often put in the Standard”
I strongly endorse this sentiment that there should be much more focus on the nature of a socialist society in our literature. Although, comrade, having said that, I don´t quite know why you felt the need to leave the Party for that reason. I hope you reconsider and rejoin. There are others within the Party who share precisely the same opinion as you.
The problem is that any such shift in focus has to come from members themselves. We are not a top-down organisation. Stuff that gets to be published in the Standard is freely written by members, for the most part, without direction as to content – commissioned material. That doesn’t mean that branches cannot put forward a view on the matter and urge that more material of this nature be published, From a writer’s point of view it would be good to know what kind of material would be of interest not only to members but to the general public.
I think you are right in emphasising a need for a shift of focus. I get the impression that in the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the concept of a post-capitalist society – on internet forums (such as the large “Moneyless Society FB group with 24K members and many other such groups) and in the publication of more and more books on this very topic. A case in point is the buzzword “de-growth communism” which has recently come into circulation and takes on board the notion of ecological limits to production. In a way, it contrasts sharply with another trendy buzzword “fully automated luxury communism” (FALC) But note that in both perspectives the basic focus is a non-market alternative to capitalism.
The Party has itself made contributions towards firming up or consolidating the idea of a post-capitalist society – putting more flesh on the basic bones of the idea. I don’t know if you were a member back in the 1980s or thereabouts but there were various initiatives going on then which culminated in the formation of a “Production for Use” committee. The late Comrade Pieter Lawrence wrote up a very lengthy report which later bore fruit in the publication of a pamphlet called “Socialism as a Practical Alternative” which you can access on this site
I am very sympathetic to your anti-consumerist stance which in my case is partly driven by an interest in environmental issues and the anthropology of writers like Marshall Sahlins, author of “Stone Age Economics; The Original Affluent Society”. However, there is a need to strike a balance between the kind of stoicism advocated by de-growth communists and the technological fantasies of FALC enthusiasts. We are indeed going to have to reconsider some of our lifestyle choices come a socialist society if only because there is this enormous deadweight of actual material poverty to deal with that exists most particularly in the global South. Tackling that is unavoidably going to entail a massive readjustment in the way we allocate resources
However, we have to also take into account the enormous productive advantages that a socialist society will have – above all, the elimination of capitalism´s massive structural waste in the form of socially useless work – that will allow us to tackle this problem much more effectively without adversely impacting too much on material standard of living of workers elsewhere in the world (the capitalists are another matter, of course). I think there will be some negative impacts, as you suggest, but this will be vastly compensated for by the big improvement in the quality of life. For most workers in the West, this is the real issue – the quality of life and the drip effect of chronic insecurity, not so much the lack of material goods. This obsession with consumerism is just a pain in the backside and a bore.
A scarcity mentality that feeds a competitive outlook on life (and consumerism itself) will die out anyway, and all the more rapidly once the material conditions of many workers in what is currently the Global South, improve. There has of course been some improvement in this part of the world already, however, and one only has to consider places like China where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of absolute poverty. So to an extent, capitalism is preparing the ground for us and making our task easier to accomplish in a socialist society.
Anyway, this is just my tuppence worth…
Believe it or not, but I have met people who say the reason they do not join the party is because it places *too much* emphasis on what the future society would be like.
I think the concerns raised in the original post above are good and valid ones. I’ll write more later when time permits.
It is good to imagine what life in socialism will be like, but it’s also very hard because life in a socialist society will be so different than a capitalist society.
When it comes to planning how we’re going to solve problems, such as lifting people in the Global South out of extreme poverty as quickly as possible, I believe we should wait until the World Socialist Movement starts to really take-off before doing that (for example, when the SPGB has at least 100,000 members).
When it comes to planning how we’re going to solve problems, such as lifting people in the Global South out of extreme poverty as quickly as possible, I believe we should wait until the World Socialist Movement starts to really take-off before doing that (for example, when the SPGB has at least 100,000 members).
The problem is, Moo, that if you do that then the effect is make it sound like socialism is just some vague abstract formula disconnected from the world we live in. This is what is so offputting for many people coming into contact with the Party. It conveys the idea that we are not really serious about establishing socialism
While we are not in the business of writing detailed “recipes for the cook shops of the future” as Marx put it, there is surely a sensible middle path between this and a formulaic abstract approach which consists in just providing the sketchiest definition of socialism imaginable and leaving it at that. People will just dismiss the idea as airey fairey if you are not prepared to go into more depth about what what socialism would entail.
There are a lot of things we can say about socialism that logically stem, or can be inferred from, the basic definition itself. There is even more we can say about socialism that stems from current developments and technological possibilities. We should not refrain from, or be scared about, saying these things. They need to be said if we are to come across as minimally credible.
I remember Pieter Lawrence used a wonderful turn of phrase to explain this point of view. He said something along the lines that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be “hostages to the future”. If we want to make a socialist future then we have to imagine it in considerably more depth than we currently do
Thinking again about the point Moo makes about leaving off “planning how we’re going to solve problems, such as lifting people in the Global South out of extreme poverty as quickly as possible” till we are a much larger movement – perhaps a clarification would be in order…
Moo, if you are talking about detailed planning then you are probably right. We cannot predict when, or if, we are ever going to be a mass movement – not to mention the circumstances prevailing at the time that would affect the details of such planning anyway.
Perhaps “planning” is the wrong word here. But we do need a theoretical approach or perspective informed by the data that is already available to us now as to how we might broadly go about tackling this issue. We can’t just say “The problem is capitalism and the solution is Socialism” and leave it at that. We have to explain and justify to the outsider why we consider socialism to be the solution and in a way that is convincing and persuasive. That unavoidably means getting into the nitty gritty- outlining some of the mechanisms, institutions or procedures that might be brought into play – even if we preface or qualify what we say by pointing out that it is provisional.
We cannot NOT do this. If we do not do this then what we have to say about socialism will come across as utterly vague, utopian and too abstract to convince anyone.
Of course, in practice members do have a lot more to say about socialism than simply that it is “moneyless wageless classless and stateless based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production”. Nevertheless, we should be saying much more than we do and out in the open for all to see.
We should be actually encouraging debate within the Party and perhaps also in the Socialist Standard itself (a debate forum as a regular feature, perhaps?). I know members have different views on matters such as the role of nuclear power in a socialist society or whether people should turn to vegetarianism and abandon a meat-based diet. I don’t see a problem at all with having these kinds of debates and we shouldn’t try to pretend we are, or should be, a monolithic entity
Maybe this is partly what lies behind the idea that we shouldn’t get too much into the details of a socialist society – namely the fear that talking about it will have a divisive effect on what is after all a small organisation, maybe causing some to leave and thus making the organisation even smaller. So we clam up to retain a sense of unity.
Actually, this strikes me as a very misguided way of looking at this matter. A certain degree of divisiveness (beyond the basic agreement over the fundamentals, of course), is something to be welcomed and encouraged. Ironically, this is probably much more likely to draw in the outsider and encourage him or her to join the Party – knowing we are not a monolith.
The Party needs to develop a culture of feeling relaxed and comfortable with the idea that we are not ever going to see eye to eye on everything. Nor should we
Another example of how there’s very little thought on the post-capitalist future is when Adam and others talk about the possibility of nuclear power.
To put this in context, if socialism were to be established now or in the coming decades there would still be nuclear power stations. They can’t simply be turned off and will continue to give off heat. Socialist society might as well use this to generate electricity even if it is decided to eventually close them all down.
There is another aspect too. If socialism inherits from capitalism the problem of global warming (as it would) and decides to stop burning fossil fuels altogether nuclear power may have to be resorted to instead until the situation is under control.
Yes, socialism is not established with the click of a switch, and there will be (I think an interesting) period of change. But resorting to nuclear power means resorting to uranium mining, a job that shortens lives painfully (not to mention the environmental consequences, which also put at risk nearby communities). Capitalism sets vulnerable people to work in such jobs, or convinces them that talk of such risks is scare-mongering, but why would a socialist colleague even consider it? Would you volunteer? Now that would be putting on a hair shirt, and besides which, socialism, in my view, is not about sacrifice. Instead of nuclear power, future comrades would need to consider/develop alternatives. This is what I mean about the need for the party to spend time thinking about what society will be like once we emerge from these prehistoric times.
This is just another version of the ‘who would do the dirty work?’ question.
If a job needs doing and it’s too dangerous for people to do then it wouldn’t get done or technical solutions would have to be found so that it could be done.
With regards to the specific issue of nuclear power, I don’t think the party currently possesses any technical experts in this field. We shouldn’t be pretending that we are, and prescribe how people in an imagined future should act.
All we can do is outline how such a decision could be made and carried through in the absence of market mechanisms.
In a socialist society we are going to inherit many things from the capitalist society, it is not going to be a perfect society but it will be much better than the capitalist society.
In regard to atomic power plant, the problem is not the atomic energy per se, the problem is the production of profits, and the capitalist do not care about contamination as long as their are able to produce profits,
In a socialist society we are going to have the choice to eliminate it or to continue using it under better conditions by the decision made by the whole world working class
I do not think that peoples leave because they have disagreement with the principles of the socialist party, many who have left continue supporting the socialist party, the problem is that they have had differences with others members, specially with members of the so called organizing committee, and we are following the same path of the socialist labor party of America
You made some great points, Robbo. I love the phrase “hostages to the future”.
(. . .)
When it comes to nuclear power, PJS should be included in the debate because he seems quite knowledgeable on that subject.
It’s not at all a version of “who does the dirty work”. It’s “who will do the work that will shorten your life in a painful way”. And this is by no means restricted to the nuclear power industry. There are many other industries, lithium mining, for example, which rely on such work. This is the specific point, with the nuclear industry as an example. As for technical expertise, do we need to be pulmonary surgeons to be qualified to speak about the hazards of smoking? As it happens, I have worked on epidemiological studies on stage 4 cancer of workers in dangerous jobs, including uranium mining (which may be why it’s an important point to me) but I don’t think that gives me more right to discuss these matters.
But I’m getting away from the point of my original post, that I thought might be of help to the SPGB. Where I think the party fails is that there is no serious examination of problems that will be encountered under socialism, particularly in the short term, such as getting resources to poor countries, and how to create alternatives in areas where dangerous work will no longer be done. Which, for what it is worth, is one of the reasons why I left the party.
In a socialist world, people will either figure out how to do dangerous work safely or they won’t do the work.
Smokers will still be allowed to smoke after the revolution, however, society will probably slowly ween itself off smoking (not by force, but by choice).
“Where I think the party fails is that there is no serious examination of problems that will be encountered under socialism, particularly in the short term, such as getting resources to poor countries, and how to create alternatives in areas where dangerous work will no longer be done. Which, for what it is worth, is one of the reasons why I left the party.”
Strangest reason for leaving the Party I’ve heard. If that’s the only problem, why not rejoin?
Perhaps we should ask why some people join the party and never leave? For me it’s because every major problem in the world is caused by capitalism and all of the reforms that have been tried, in my lifetime, have failed. You just have to ask yourself if a democratically arrived at answer to any problem by the working people involved is preferable to ideologically driven careerists who have no other interest than to please their parasitic masters? It’s what young people call ‘a no brainer’ and if you want blueprints for how problems are caused and overcome usually you can turn to those working in the industry concerned. They are usually rightly cynical that these answers will be ignored by their employers but if we can destroy that political cynicism most of the answers already exist.
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