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What Socialists Stand For
The German socialist Karl Marx was once asked what his
favorite maxim was. He replied with a line by the Roman
playwright Terence: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns a
man, is a matter of indifference to me."
If for the moment we ignore the use of sexist language in
this ancient quotation, we get a feel for the profoundly
humanitarian spirit of Marx and socialists since him.
Indeed, socialists are very concerned about the injustice
and social ills in the world today—hunger, poverty,
unemployment, illiteracy, disease, war, the exploitation of
workers, the oppression of nations, races, women, and gays, the
destruction of the environment, and the threat of nuclear
annihilation.
Socialists obviously don't have a monopoly on compassion,
however. What distinguishes socialists from other socially
concerned people is that we do not view these problems as
normal, natural, eternal, or an inherent feature of the human
condition. We believe that these problems are historically and
socially created and that they can be solved by human beings
through conscious, organized political struggle and change.
Socialist Action argues that the wealth and other advances
produced by industry, technology, and science have made it
possible to eliminate these problems but that these problems
continue because of the dominant economic and political
interests and values of society. We assert that capitalism is ultimately the main source of these problems in the United States and the world today.
Capitalism and the exploitation of workers
Under capitalism, the chief means of production—the
factories, the railroads, the mines, the banks, the public
utilities, the offices, and all of the related technology—are
privately owned by a super-rich minority, the capitalist class.
The capitalists then compete with each other in the marketplace
and run production on the basis of what will bring them the
biggest profit.
This drive to successfully compete and to maximize profit
leads big business to exploit workers, to pay their employees as
little as possible, a mere fraction of the actual value that
they produce. It also leads big business to resist the efforts
of workers to unionize and to obtain increased pay, reduced
working hours, and improved working conditions.
This exploitation of workers results in a gross
concentration of wealth, to the benefit of the capitalists and
at the expense of working people. Even in the United States,
the richest country in the world, where workers admittedly have
one of the highest living standards, there is nonetheless a
gross concentration of wealth. According to the Federal Reserve
Survey of Consumer Finances, the top 1% of American families
(834,000 households) own more than the bottom 90% (84 million
households).
This social inequality is aggravated by mass unemployment,
which is endemic to capitalism. Because the means of production is divided up among the individual capitalists competing with each other, there is no overall coordination or planning of the
economy and consequently no consideration to provide jobs to
everybody who is able and willing to work.
This anarchy of production for private profit also fuels
the erratic boom-and-bust cycle of the capitalist economy.
Periodically, the economy experiences crises of overproduction
when the capitalists inadvertently glut the market with products
that they cannot sell at a profit. The result is recessions and
massive layoffs of workers, which ruin lives, idle factories,
and deprive society of the benefits of production.
The basic irrationality of capitalism is highlighted by the
glaring gap between unmet human needs on one hand and the
untapped potential of the existing human and material resources
to fulfill these needs on the other. For example, when
inventors or scientists or technicians develop new, advanced
labor-saving technology, this should be a cause for celebration
for workers because it means that the work week could be cut
with no cut in weekly pay. Workers could enjoy greater leisure
time without a drop in income. Instead, the capitalists use
labor-saving technology to lay off workers because, of course,
it only makes good sense from the business point of view to cut
labor costs in order to increase profits.
In the United States, there is a great need for a massive
construction of more schools, hospitals, child-care centers, and
recreation centers. There is also a great need to repair the
nation's deteriorating infrastructure, including its roads,
bridges, mass transit, and water systems. The capital, raw materials, and labor for such development exists, but the corporate rich do not invest in such projects because they correctly judge that it would not be profitable for them to do so. The potential, overwhelmingly working-class consumers of
such services simply would not be able to afford the prices that
big business would have to charge in order to make a profit.
Nor does the capitalist government finance such a massive
expansion as part of a public works program, for a couple of
reasons. First of all, it would raise the public's expectation,
which is basically at odds with capitalist ideology, that
society should be responsible to provide for its members. And
secondly, it would raise the possibility that the public would
force the government to tax the rich to fund such an expensive program.
The oppression of African-Americans and Hispanics
In addition to exploiting workers, capitalism contributes
to the oppression of other groups in society. White racism and
the oppression of African-Americans arose with the European
slave trade, but they have been perpetuated under capitalism.
After the slaves were freed during the Civil War, the
capitalists used racism to justify paying less to Black
employees. The capitalists also used racism to pit white
workers against Black workers in order to divide the working
class and weaken the organized labor movement. Despite the
gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, white
racist discrimination in employment and in other areas of life
persists.
Furthermore, the second-class status of African-Americans
has been deepened by color-blind free market forces, specifically by the recent movement of industry out of the cities, where the Black community is concentrated. The resulting loss of decent-paying working-class jobs has increased Black poverty and devastated Black neighborhoods and families,
fueling crime, drug addiction, and hopelessness.
The oppression of Hispanics in the United states is similar
to that of African-Americans in that it is based on widespread
racist discrimination, combined with a decline in the number of
available decent-paying jobs. The Anglo suppression of various
aspects of Latin culture and identity worsens the plight of
Hispanics in this country.
The oppression of women and gays
While the oppression of women predated the establishment of
capitalism, the private profit system has perpetuated their
subordination to men. The main basis of women's oppression in
capitalist society is the segregation of women in lower paying
jobs in the labor market and the relegation of women to
unequally shared child care and housework in the family.
These two spheres of women's oppression—the labor market
and the family—are mutually reinforcing. So long as women are
unduly burdened by child care and housework, they will not be
able to gain equality with men in employment. So long as women
bring home a smaller paycheck, they will not be able to get
their male partners to share domestic responsibilities equally.
These unequal labor relations between men and women sustain
the sexist ideology that justifies different and unequal gender
roles and the rigid, polarized norms for males and females in all aspects of life.
The oppression of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is largely
derived from this sexist ideology. Gays, lesbians, and
bisexuals are stigmatized because they defy the norm of
exclusive heterosexuality and because they do not conform to
conventional standards of masculinity and femininity.
Imperialism and U.S. foreign policy
On an international level, capitalism has led to the
development of imperialism. Since the nineteenth century, the
corporate rich of the advanced industrialized capitalist nations
of Western Europe, the United States, and Japan have invested
capital and exploited cheap labor and natural resources in the
colonial world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The economic domination of the imperialist nations has
distorted the development of the Third World nations, condemning
the masses of their populations to poverty and misery. The
rivalry between the imperialist nations has also led to military
conflicts, including two world wars, as they competed for new
world markets and carved up the world. Since the Second World
War, the imperialist nations have been forced to grant most of
their former colonies formal political independence, but their
economic domination continues.
Since its victory in World War II, the United States has
been the leading imperialist power. At various points over the
past fifty years, the U.S. government has defended American
corporate interests abroad by supporting such repressive,
undemocratic governments as the fascist dictatorship of General
Francisco Franco in Spain, the apartheid regime in South Africa, the shah of Iran, the Marcos dictatorship of the Philippines,
and the recently deposed Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.
The U.S. government has also gone to war or used other
forms of military intervention to defend big business interests,
such as in Korea in the '50s, Cuba in the '60s, Vietnam in the
'60s and '70s, Nicaragua in the '80s, and Iraq in the '90s. The
U.S. imperialists have also overthrown democratically elected
reform governments that encroached on U.S. corporate privilege,
such as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican
Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973.
Additionally, the United States dropped the atom bomb in
World War II and launched the arms race with the Soviet
Union—all to intimidate the Soviet Union and to deter the
people of the colonial world from challenging imperialist
domination and going the route of socialist revolution.
The socialist solution
Socialist Action argues that the problems of exploitation
and oppression in the world today can ultimately be solved by
first replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system.
The chief means of production should be socialized, that is,
taken out of the private hands of the capitalists and put under
public ownership, that is, government ownership.
The economy should then be run by councils of
democratically elected representatives of workers and consumers
at all levels of the economy. Instead of being run on the basis
of what will maximize profit for a super-rich minority, the
economy should be planned to meet the needs of the people—in employment, education, nutrition, health care, housing, transportation, leisure, and cultural development.
A socialist government could raise the minimum wage to
union levels, cut the work week with no cut in weekly pay, and
spread around the newly available work to the unemployed. A
public works program, such as the one mentioned earlier, could
be launched to provide yet more jobs and offer sorely needed
social services. The government could provide free health care,
from cradle to grave, and free education, from nursery school to
graduate school.
A socialist government could also address the special needs
and interests of the oppressed. Existing anti-discrimination
legislation in employment could be strongly enforced, and pay
equity and affirmative action for women and racial minorities
could be expanded. Blacks and Hispanics could be granted
community control of their respective communities. The racist,
class-biased death penalty could be abolished.
The establishment of flexible working hours, paid parental
leave, and child-care facilities, as well as the defense of
safe, legal and accessible abortion, would provide women with
alternatives to sacrificing work for the sake of their children
and because of unwanted pregnancies, respectively. Same-sex
marriage could be legalized, and a massive program, like the
space program or the Manhattan Project, could be financed to
find a vaccine and a cure for AIDS.
Money currently spent on the military could be spent
instead on cleaning up the country's air and waterways and developing environmentally safe technology. A socialist government of the United States would end this country's oppression of Third World nations because it would not be
defending corporate profit there but would be encouraging the
workers and peasants of those countries to follow suit and make
their own socialist revolutions.
The socialist system that Socialist Action advocates would
be a multiparty system, with all of the democratic rights won
and enjoyed in the most democratic capitalist nations, including
freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association,
freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. A genuinely
socialist system would be far more democratic than the most
democratic capitalist system because in a socialist economy the
common working people would democratically decide what should be
produced and how it should be produced.
Social democracy and Stalinism
Many people often ask Socialist Action if we support the
model of socialism offered by the social democratic parties and
government administrations in Western European nations. We say
"no."
In those countries, the Labour, Social Democratic, and
Socialist parties have helped their working-class constituencies
to win important progressive reforms, such as universal
suffrage, the eight-hour day, old-age pensions, free health care
and education, and social services more extensive than those
here in the United States. However, these parties and the trade
unions affiliated with them have secured these reforms within
the capitalist framework, which they have never fundamentally challenged or sought to replace with socialism. Therefore, the capitalists' rule of the economy, their exploitation of the
working class, and the resulting concentration of wealth
continue.
People also ask us if the so-called Communist countries of
the former Soviet bloc represented the model of socialism that
we support. Again, as with the Social Democrats, our answer is
"no."
In the former Soviet bloc, the capitalist class was
expropriated, and the economies were socialized. These
socialized economies made possible great progress in raising the
living standards of the masses of workers and peasants in the
areas of employment, health care, education, and nutrition, and
in upgrading the status of women. However, these countries were
ruled through the Communist parties by privileged bureaucratic
elites that denied socialist democracy and imposed repressive,
totalitarian political systems on the people. These dictatorial
governments not only violated basic democratic and human rights
but mismanaged the planned economies, being responsible for
inefficiency, waste, corruption, and stagnation.
The origins of these dictatorial bureaucratic regimes lie
with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s and
1930s. One of the two leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon
Trotsky, argued that the Bolshevik model of socialist democracy
was never fully implemented and then was completely destroyed
under the Stalin dictatorship because of a combination of
factors. These factors included the failure of the socialist
revolutions to triumph in Europe after the First World War, the resulting isolation of the Russian Revolution, the military attacks on the young Soviet republic by the imperialist nations, the devastation caused by the First World War and the Civil War that followed the revolution, the lack of democratic traditions
in czarist Russia, and the general low educational and cultural
levels of the masses of workers and peasants.
Currently, in the former Soviet bloc nations, the ruling
Stalinist bureaucracies, allied with the Western imperialists
and native capitalist "wannabes," are trying to restore
capitalism. So far, the introduction of the free market into
the Soviet bloc has resulted in a gigantic drop in productivity
and in the living standards of common working people, with
increasing unemployment, poverty, and social inequality.
This right-wing attempt to restore capitalism and the
corresponding attacks on social services and entitlements, such
as free health care and full employment, in the former Soviet
bloc have also made it easier for the capitalist governments of
Western Europe to attack the various reforms and social services
that the labor movements and social democratic parties
of those countries have won over the past decades.
Socialist Action hailed the collapse of the repressive
Communist Party regimes of the Soviet bloc, but we oppose the
restoration of capitalism there. Instead, we call for a defense
of the socialized economies and for the workers and their allies
to overthrow the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies and establish
socialist democracy in their place.
Socialism and human nature
Many critics say that socialism is a great idea in theory but that it is completely unrealistic and utopian because it goes against basic human nature. The critics claim that human beings are just too selfish, too greedy, too competitive, and too aggressive to create and sustain a cooperative and egalitarian society.
Socialists recognize that individual self-interest has
always existed and will always exist in human beings. We also
acknowledge that there will never be a perfect harmony between
the individual and society.
But we argue that individual self-interest need not be the
ruling principle of society. History and cross-cultural
research suggest that basic human nature consists of many
different, divergent, but co-existing capacities, and that human
personality and behavior are largely shaped by the social
institutions, practices, and ruling ideology of the given
society.
The critics of socialism correctly perceive the
hyper-individualism of people in capitalist society, but then
they incorrectly generalize this historically specific
characteristic to human beings across time and place. They
cannot imagine or understand that a reorganization of society
along socialist lines would elicit, facilitate, and reinforce
the basic human capacities for cooperation and solidarity.
The revolutionary potential of the workers and the oppressed
Still, the point about self-interest as a motivating factor
for human behavior is an important one. Socialists believe that
many people of conscience from different classes and backgrounds can be won to a socialist perspective through appeals to reason, morality, and political idealism. However, we believe that the main impetus for a socialist movement to sustain itself and successfully transform society must be collective self-interest and power.
We believe that the working class is the only social force
that has both the necessary self-interest and power to lead the
struggle for socialism. Socialism is in the interests of the
working class because it will allow the workers to reclaim the
wealth that they produced but which the capitalists appropriated
from them through exploitation. The working class also has the
power to overturn capitalism because of its strategic location
at the point of production and its corresponding ability to shut
down production by simply withdrawing its labor. Thus, a mass
socialist movement can only grow out of a revitalized and
radicalized labor movement, based on the trade unions and other
organizations of the working class.
Similarly, we believe that only the oppressed possess
sufficient self-interest to lead the struggles for their own
liberation. Therefore, we support the autonomous movements of
the oppressed--the Black movement, the Hispanic movement, the
women's movement, and the gay and lesbian movement--to insure
that their respective needs and demands are met.
However, we do not believe that the oppressed by themselves
possess sufficient power to fully achieve their liberation since
their oppression is at least partly rooted in the capitalist
system. Because only the organized working class possesses
sufficient power to abolish capitalism and its concomitant forms
of oppression, the oppressed must win the organized working
class to support their respective struggles, as well as
ultimately ally themselves with the working class in the
struggle for socialism.
Independent mass action
Socialist Action does not believe that socialism can be
voted into power through free elections. History has repeatedly
shown that when workers and their allies try to use the existing
democratic process to advance their interests and replace
capitalism with a socialist system, the capitalist class and the
armed forces of the capitalist state will smash democracy to
save capitalism, as happened, for example, in Chile twenty-five
years ago this month.
Socialist Action points out that progressive social change
has been made in this country through mass action, not by voting
in certain politicians or by working within the system.
American independence from England was gained through a
revolution. The passage of the Bill of Rights was prompted by a
rebellion of poor farmers. The abolition of slavery and the
extension of suffrage to Black men was accomplished through a
second revolution, the Civil War. Women won the vote through
the women's suffrage movement.
The labor movement won the twelve-hour day, then the
eight-hour day, the right to strike, the right to form unions
and bargain collectively, the minimum wage, unemployment
compensation, worker's disability. Social Security, welfare, and
increased wages and benefits for union members.
The civil rights movement overthrew the segregationist "Jim
Crow" laws of the South and forced the government to outlaw
racist discrimination in employment and housing and to implement
affirmative action.
The anti-war movement helped force the U.S. to end its
imperialist war against the Vietnamese in their just struggle
for self-determination.
The feminist movement won anti-discrimination legislation,
affirmative action, pay equity in some public institutions, and
the legalization of abortion.
The gay and lesbian movement, too, has secured
anti-discrimination legislation and greater funding of AIDS
research and patient care.
Additionally, the environmental and consumer protection
movements have won important reforms that moderate big
business's destruction of the planet and manufacture of unsafe
commodities in its relentless pursuit of profits.
Socialist Action advocates the independent political action
of the workers and the oppressed to bring about further
progressive change. We call for and build mass demonstrations,
rallies, pickets, and strikes.
We counterpose such mass action to reliance on the American
two-party system, electoral campaigns, and behind-the scenes
lobbying of capitalist politicians. The logic of working within
the two-party system of the capitalist political establishment
is to subordinate the needs, demands, and priorities of the
workers and the oppressed to what is acceptable to the rulers of
this country. The inevitable result is the demobilization and
cooptation of the struggle for change.
We point out that the impetus for progressive social change
has never come from the Democratic and Republican parties but
that they can be forced by mass action to implement progressive
policies and reforms, at least up to certain limits. However,
we argue that socialism can only be achieved by a revolutionary
culmination of mass action of the workers and their allies in
opposition to the capitalist state and capitalist political
parties.
Socialist Action aspires to play a leading role in building
a popular mass socialist movement in this country. Our members
have participated in the labor movement, the civil rights
movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement,
the gay and lesbian movement, the environmental movement, the
Central America solidarity movement, and the movement against
the Gulf War, among others.
If you want to fight for a society and a world free of all
forms of exploitation, oppression, and social injustice, join us!
The above essay was written by Gordon Schulz.
