Waking up
One of the common jibes directed at the Socialist Party is that, though we have been in existence well over 100 years, we have made little or no progress in garnering support for the system we advocate to replace capitalism. We’re talking here about a stateless, moneyless, marketless society of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – one that will be organised democratically on the basis of from each according to ability to each according to need. Our response to the jibe has always been that what we are at least doing is keeping the idea of that society alive and it will be there for the majority to establish once social consciousness has developed sufficiently for them to see the necessity of it.
Positive signs?
And we do see some positive moves in that direction, evidenced by the idea of a moneyless, borderless world society being advocated from a variety of quarters, often quite independent of any contact with or knowledge of the Socialist Party. In recent times, for example, we have reviewed books such as Beyond Money: A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson from Australia and Description of the World of Tomorrow: A World Without Money or Barter or Exchange: a Civilisation of Free Access by Jean-Francois Aupetitgendre and Marc Chinal from France. A couple of years ago, in the United States, we had Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution from Matthew Holton, founder of the ‘Moneyless Society’ Facebook site, which boasts 20,000 members. Earlier this year, Justin Fairchild, also from the US, brought out Unchained: Living Without Money, advocating a society in which ‘cooperation replaces competition, access replaces ownership, purpose replaces profit’. And now, from Harald Neslein Sandø, a Norwegian living in Spain and writing in English, we have Waking Up. A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, whose subject of exploration is unmistakeably the kind of society we have always advocated, even though he does not call it, as we do, ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’.
Exploring possibilities
Sandø ‘s book also differs from the others in that it is a work of fiction, science fiction in fact. In his introductory note, the author describes science fiction as ‘a canvas for exploring possibilities’ and his book as ‘an invitation to imagine, question and reflect’. It chooses, in fact, to tell the wholly imaginary story of an individual, Benjamin, who, having been cryogenically frozen when about to die from cancer in 2015, is brought back to life 100 years later after a new society has been established. This is a society based no longer on money but on ‘community effort’, where, as Benjamin is told by one of the first characters he meets, there is ‘shared stewardship’ of the planet and ‘no one owns it – we belong to it’, and there is ‘no money, no ownership, no competition’.
We get little explanation of how this new state of things was brought about, apart from asides such as ‘the planet was about to collapse due to climate change and pollution’, ‘the need for a completely different system became clear’, ‘the monetary system was killing the planet as it demanded a constant overconsumption of resources’, ‘it was a global, democratic decision’, and ‘this transformation has been made possible through a new mindset – a mindset of trust and respect’. We are, however, supplied with intricate details about how the society operates via Benjamin’s discovery of the new way of living people have and the unimaginably advanced forms of technology that challenge everything he once knew. He finds a sustainable world in which human beings collaborate with one another, innovation thrives, mutual support has taken the place of conflict, and there are ‘no supervisors, no bosses, no payroll, no urgency’. And he is told: ‘For the first time in the written history of mankind … we have evolved to a stage where we can look at this planet as a whole, see humanity as one family, and live without borders. This is a world where we all coexist peacefully, without war.’ He also learns that ‘through the efficient management of resources, we have achieved a relative abundance that allows everyone to live comfortably in their own way, regardless of where they are in the world’. It has also become a world of regenerative agriculture where ‘rewilded landscapes flourished’ and which ‘thrived not on domination but on unity’. One of the characters Benjamin meets tells him: ‘We take care of each other, and in doing that, we take care of ourselves. There’s no struggle, no scarcity. Just collaboration.’ The same character goes on: ‘Human nature turned out to be not only selfish and violent. You can choose and, you choose friendliness, which I’m very happy for’.
Human interest
A bit of a fairy tale, a pipe dream, some might say. But it is made less of one – and given a certain plausibility – by the author’s continual explanation of how it works in practice, how the highly advanced technology used to make it operate has been developed and keeps developing. This plausibility is enhanced – and the reader is drawn into the narrative – by the ‘human’ story it tells of how the individual who has been brought back to life adapts to the new world he finds. The book had begun by painting a picture of Benjamin’s former existence when he was a billionaire capitalist driven entirely by the need he felt to accumulate wealth. Now on waking up to find that money plays no part in anyone’s existence, he first feels out of place, ‘obsolete’, ‘not knowing where he belongs’, as he puts it, and he (and we) wonder whether he will cope mentally, how he will accept and adjust to the completely new system and mindset he finds all around him..
As a way of trying to comfort Benjamin and ease his integration into the new world, the guide assigned to him puts an ingenious twist into what he is finding by saying ‘We are all capitalists, as we are living off the shared capital of the planet and universe’. He is then pulled into the drama of a small group of ‘renegades’ who seek (unsuccessfully) to sabotage things and return the world to its old competitive ways, but he comes out the other side in clear opposition to this and in support of a ‘borderless globe’, where, in words that he himself now utters, there is ‘seamless harmony between humans and nature’, where everyone leads ‘their own versions of a good life, respecting each other and the planet’. All this lends some genuine ‘human interest’ to what might otherwise be an accumulation of dry technological detail and, in fact, manages to make the book something of a page turner, its 200-odd pages having been devoured by the current writer in a single sitting.
How do we get there?
There is clearly some comparison to be made here with other attempts at depicting life and organisation in a future non-market society of voluntary cooperation and free access. For many it will bring to mind, for example, William Morris’s late 19th century News from Nowhere, Robert Llewellyn’s News from Gardenia from 2012, and, in particular, the very recent attempt by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass (Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics) to provide a kind of day-to-day outline of what a future society ‘without money or a market’ might be like, something they call ‘a total alternative to capitalism’ and offering, as the authors put it, ‘everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like’. The main difference between this book and Sandø’s, however, is that, while Vettese and Pendergrass’s depiction is founded on profound knowledge of and reflection on the scientific and technological problems that a marketless society would need to deal with and overcome, Sandø’s vision, while also technological, is far more ‘imaginative’, fantasy-laden one might say. At the same time, it must be said, this is a factor that contributes to its readability.
From a socialist point of view, the main problem that arises from Sandø’s book – and indeed the others mentioned here, including William Morris’s classic – is that none of them deal effectively with the ‘how’, ie, how we get there. None of them specify the spreading of consciousness by the vast majority of workers as the prime condition – the sole condition – under which a socially conscious working class can, by democratic use of the vote, take the power necessary to abolish capitalism and set about organising a genuine socialist society of the kind looked forward to by all these sources – even if they do not all necessarily use the term ‘socialism’ to describe it.
HKM