Dear Editors
Are business and trade inevitable?
Dear Editors
I liked the short story (Socialist Standard September) even if it was a bit contrived. What this was called in other places in the world before and the decade after the war was industrial sabotage and the offenders would be given a safe passage to a labour camp or shot as an example. Now it’s approved government policy in certain countries.
What this does is waste material and man power/labour. It is a pointless activity. What we need are businesses that produce goods to last and to sell other types of goods so that they are never short of work. Also profit by whatever support service is necessary to maintain product longevity. There is competition and there is just plain stupidity.
Business or trade will not and cannot cease whatever type of government we choose to have or win by armed force. It’s a matter of maximising trade within countries and between countries, maximising the general benefits. Business must never again run its own affairs. It should have a non-cabinet minister within the wider Trade and Industry Department. Government has a wide range of responsibilities. It isn’t only business that serves the people and country. Finance and Taxation and Regulation and everything in fact is to serve not dictate to government. Government is the servant of the whole people.
Elijah Traven, Hull
Reply: You appear to believe that business and trade are inevitable. This is a common view and understandable given that our entire experience today is one of buying and selling (trading). This assumption, however, is only true of societies which organise themselves around certain private property relations. And these private property relations are not inevitable. Given our modern technological ability to provide for the world’s needs they are not even currently necessary.
In modern capitalist societies we have to engage in buying and selling to satisfy most of our needs. This is a recent development over the last few hundred years. Not so long ago buying and selling formed only a small part of most people’s economic activity. The majority of those who lived by their work were self-sufficient, and only traded their small surpluses for a few items they did not themselves produce. Neither, at this time, did most people sell their labour power to others in return for a wage. To be sure, trading has existed in many societies since states first appeared some six millennia ago, but not in all. Many societies before and since have existed without private property relations and therefore without any buying and selling. These societies had quite different forms of organisation from those we are familiar with in our own world.
The way forward for the working class today is not private property which produces a multitude of problems for the majority, but common ownership and the free association of all people. Only in these circumstances can we eliminate the negative consequences that capitalism so reliably produces and which are so often mistakenly assigned to ‘human nature’. Without capitalism, our current experience of conflict, exploitation, economic instability, the enormous waste of both resources and human labour, the multitude of insecure, unfulfilled lives, the ever present threat and actuality of mechanised warfare and the inability to solve our common problems as one global people, could all become things of the past.
You mention labour camps and the practice of shooting people for engaging in the production of goods designed to have a restricted lifespan – planned obsolescence. You seem to be referring here to states such as the Soviet Union and China which were or are ruled by authoritarian political parties calling themselves socialist or communist. Societies of this kind, just like those in the West, are founded on private property relationships. They trade internally and on the world market. Their goal, like that of Western capitalist societies, is to accumulate capital. While it is true that countries with authoritarian governments and with state control of capital are more directly able to suppress destructive business practices such as the use of planned obsolescence, we see no evidence that this kind of society is sufficient to overcome the multitude of pressures that capitalism imposes on the working class or upon humanity. Indeed, they add problems of their own. Moreover, as the EU is currently demonstrating, Western style capitalist governments are capable of suppressing these practices, at least in part, whenever they threaten to harm the future of capitalist interests more generally.
Capitalism is capable of functioning under a variety of governmental types. Eliminate capitalism however, and government loses its primary function. There is no need for it to continue to exist. So we don’t start by asking what kind of government we want. We start by asking how we want to relate to each other as human beings, and how we want to produce the things we all need. We can then ask: given our current circumstances, what kind of society can we create to meet our needs? The answer is that we can do a lot better than what we have at present.
We are glad you liked the article. You say, though, that you found its short story form ‘a bit contrived’. We can agree. All prose forms are contrivances of one kind or another, including those of conventional articles in magazines like the Socialist Standard. In this respect, the difference between them is that we are more familiar with some written forms than others and take their contrivances for granted. The short story form of the article in question was in fact based on an incident and two conversations that took place in the real world. The article was, in fact, a slice of real life. The virtue of this kind of storytelling is that it allows us to connect the way a capitalist economy actually works with everyday life as we experience it. This is part of the Socialist Standard’s purpose: to witness and explain the often less obvious workings of a capitalist economy, its businesses and its trading economy, for those of us who currently have to sell their labour power for a wage or a salary – Editors