We must have socialism!

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 132, August/September 1996

In 1989, when one by one the East European communist states began to collapse in disorder and to be replaced by ‘free enterprise’ societies, we were told that communism/socialism had finally failed, and that capitalism was the way forward. This message, eagerly taken up by the popular press, seemed perfectly reasonable to many ordinary people at the time. After all, the old Soviet Union had been associated with totalitarianism, secret police, informers, labour camps etc – all of which seemed a rather telling argument against communism. PROFESSOR THEODORE MACDONALD, a noted educationalist, argues that socialism is now more relevant than ever.

The collapse of communism

Some readers may have been so young in 1989 that they don’t remember how much wild talk the ‘collapse of communism’ caused. For instance, one fairy tale that quickly grabbed the popular imagination was, now communism was gone, there was no more threat to world peace — the ‘baddies’ had vanished and only the ‘goodies’ (especially the mighty US) were left. Therefore, we could cut way down on defence expenditure and pour all the money saved into the education and health services! In fact, freedom from the tyranny of inefficiently-run communism did not turn out to be an unmixed blessing for the people of Eastern Europe. Since it happened, they have had to get used to such capitalist glories as restricted social services, mass unemployment etc.

What has to be realised is that people who tried to establish their societies according to the theories of Karl Marx were not being frivolous. They attempted it in order to solve certain large-scale social problems which had arisen under capitalism. And, moreover, many of these problems were largely overcome in the communist states — problems like unemployment, under-education, lack of access to cultural facilities etc — and have returned to those countries in which communism has ‘collapsed’.

Thus, while some of the more fortunate people in Britain still think that the demise of the USSR and its satellites was a good thing, many from the societies concerned no longer think so! One of the most ardent anti-communists I’ve ever met escaped to West Germany in 1989 and now lives in Koblenz. At first Dieter, a music teacher, revelled in the apparent ‘freedom’ — the availability of consumer goods on every side, the better quality of cars etc. But by the time he had lived there unemployed for two years or so, his tune began to change. Sure, the cars were better in the West and more people had them, but public transport barely existed. Good facilities for music existed but they had to be paid for. In the German Democratic Republic (DDR), the rich musical life had been regarded as a legitimate state expense. The East had been characterised by a dullness that almost defeats description and by massively unimaginative propaganda, but there had been security and a guarantee of healthcare, education and other social services.

Dieter’s story can be multiplied millions of times over. A sober assessment of what life is really like for an increasing number of people in the ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ West shows that — while communism was far from perfect — it did solve many of the problems created by free enterprise. Surely that means that we need to re-establish it, hopefully without so much of the bureaucratic stuffiness of the previous model. At the same time, it is not hard to see that capitalism requires these self-same problems to maintain itself. The free enterprise system above all depends on the wit and intelligence of more favourably placed people, institutions and societies, taking advantage of the weakness of the less favourably placed. This is the ethic of individual acquisitiveness, of corporate greed and of economic imperialism. Such a social philosophy must, by the sheer logic of it, create and then sustain increasing levels of inequality and conflict.

Britain in 1976 and in 1996

To see that this is true you just have to look at how Britain has changed in the last 20 years. In 1976, at least a bit of lip-service was paid to the idea of everyone’s right to human dignity and a reasonable network of social services. The idea of trying to run education as a cost-effective enterprise was not seriously considered by government. Likewise, the NHS had its faults, but the concept of a state-run ‘socialistic’ health service was rarely questioned. There was some unemployment, but you did not see masses of people sleeping rough.

What has happened between then and now? Have we suffered a serious economic collapse? A war, perhaps, or a plague? No, of course not. Indeed, all of the indicators show that Britain, on the whole, is more fortunate economically than it was 20 years ago. Our productivity and efficiency have improved. We can do lots of things now better, faster and more cheaply than we could in 1976 — from setting up hospitals, to building schools and houses. How come, then, more of us are under the stresses of insecurity and unemployment? Where has all the improvement gone?

What has happened is that, under the Tories, capitalism in the UK has become even more efficient than it was under Labour. With communism momentarily in worldwide retreat (except in a few places like Cuba and Vietnam), it has been even easier to set up exploitative labour and trading relations that favour the already strong and weaken further the already weak. In Britain we see this graphically. On the one hand, we are being assured that there really is no more class system, while on the other we now have 35 per cent of the country’s children living below the poverty line. The restructuring of social policy to make it increasingly responsive only to market forces has made some people very wealthy, but has made life much worse for most. It has introduced a level of fear and ‘brittleness’ into social relations, characterised by people watching their backs at work (if they are lucky enough to be employed) and being more ready to do the dirty on someone else to hold onto what little security they have.

What choices are open to us?

When one considers all of this, it seems quite irrational to simply let the machinery of society run on the basis of the free-market model. But what choices are open to us? The various socialist regimes of Eastern Europe had much wrong with them. But were these defects a necessary part of socialism? Cuba, for instance, was quite different as a communist state in the 1970s than were the Soviet Union or East Germany. Is it not stupidly short-sighted to say: ‘I know that capitalism must ultimately end in disaster, but socialism has to involve a police state, corruption and serious restrictions on individual liberty’? If socialism in theory, is a better way of enhancing the dignity of man and of saving the world from environmental disaster, then it is surely not beyond our wit to find some way of putting it into practice. Indeed, some societies (like Cuba) have been conspicuously more successful at this than others, and it is perfectly reasonable to propose that the same can — and should — be done in Europe, America and everywhere else.

The sheer idiocy of not attempting to construct a socialist society is shown by a simple calculation: in 1989 it was worked out that the cost of providing sufficient food, water, education, health and housing for everyone in the world would come to about £15 billion a year over what was already being spent. This is a staggering sum of money. Yet defence spending was, in 1989, using up that amount every fortnight, according to journalist Brian Hicks (Observer 12 June 1989).

Capitalism throws away enormous current productive potential. The unused productive capacity of US industry, which to maintain profits often runs at only slightly more than 60 per cent, is equivalent to more than the entire productive capacity of Africa, Latin America and Asia combined. Think of the waste represented by unemployment. And yet it continues because it boosts profits.

What would happen, though, if a large number of people living in a relatively well-off society were convinced, possibly as a result of reading commentary like this, that socialism were the long-term rational choice? Can we demonstrate its capacity to achieve things that capitalism cannot?

Socialism vs capitalism

Socialism implies a need to mediate the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’. Capitalism cannot do so, not only because competition itself makes losers necessary, but because such a social philosophy guarantees inefficiencies.

Capitalists are always denouncing ‘government waste’, ‘dole dodgers’ and ‘lack of efficiency’, yet their system exudes waste from every pore. Capitalism squanders resources, material and human. For example, in 1991, New Zealand bought 200 million kilos of butter at a cost of $450m from the United States. Yet New Zealand is one of the world’s largest exporters of…butter. Nevertheless, this sum had to be spent for the sole purpose of maintaining high world prices for New Zealand’s exports.

Advertising is another example. Perhaps 10 per cent of advertising is informational. The rest serves no useful purpose. Perhaps the worst thing about advertising is that in a society where people are already frightened and frustrated by their inability to control their own lives, a billion-dollar industry is devoted to playing on people’s insecurities. Women are bombarded with ads telling them their bodies are dirty, their mouths smell foul, their skin is ugly and their natural shape is repulsive. Human emotions lose all meaning when we’re told to buy insurance because the insurance salesman ‘cares’, or borrow money because the loan company ‘is our friend’.

What could be more wasteful than the giant military budgets? Billions of dollars are employed for the production of the means of killing people. Through competition with other states, new technological break-throughs in mass murder — expensive to produce and not all that labour-intensive either! — become obsolete and have to be either scrapped or sold to some less developed country. All of this to preserve a system which not only wastes resources but wastes people as well.

But who benefits from all of this? Certainly not the people who receive it at the ends of rockets or bombs. Neither do the people in the country in which such weapons are produced benefit directly from it. Stockpiles are a constant source of potentially destructive accidents, make one’s country a target for enemy attention and create untold environmental headaches when disposal of unused supplies becomes necessary. Our taxes pay for all of this and, as indicated earlier, the costs are astronomical.

Let us, therefore, not waste time deciding the obvious. We must have socialism. The question we must now answer is ‘How?’. ■

Theodore MacDonald worked for many years as a doctor in Cuba. He is the author of Hippocrates in Havana, a highly-acclaimed analysis of the Cuban health system, published in 1995. Copies can be obtained from him for [ADVERT NO LONGER CURRENT] £9.95 + Et p&p at 300 St Margaret’s Road, Twickenham TW1 1PT or tel: 0181 891 8224