6/22/2014 Spirit of 56

http://spiritof56.blogspot.ca/ 1/2

Spirit of 56

S a t u r d a y , N o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 3

what is socialism?

Why talk about the question of what socialism is? Isn't this a sort of dead topic thatto much time and energy has been wasted on, because after all socialism died in'91 right? Well since I've spent the time to write this I figure you can guess that myanswer to that question is no. The question of Socialism matters a great deal, butnot in the way you might imagine, for me socialism matters in so far as certainsegments of the "left" still think of it as a way to escape capitalism. This conceptionis wrong and holding it will lead to the wrong kinds of political conclusions which Ihope to show by this short piece.

Socialism is not itself a separate kind of economic system, but rather socialism isidentical to the communization process, that is to say socialism is the period of timewhen we are turning capitalist socio-economic relations into communist ones.

Now this needs some unpacking. The first step in that is to understand whatcapitalism is and is not. Capitalism is not democracy, or free markets, or evensimply private property, in fact capitalism can survive just fine without any of these.Instead it is a system of social production in which wage-labor and commodityproduction predominate. Now what I mean here by wage labor is the kind of systemwhere someone enters into a labor market in order to exchange their labor formoney. This is a very different type of economic relationship than what existed in thepast under either slavery or feudalism. Under both of these systems people laboredbut they did not labor for wages. They either labored because they were forced to orthey labored some part of the year for the landlord and the rest for themselveswithout money coming into consideration for their labor, in both of these casesalthough labor took place the exchange of money for that labor did not and as such itwas not waged labor. Now yes people did engage in wage-labor under both of thesesystems, but what differentiates them is that wage labor did not predominate on asocial scale.

Capitals second aspect, commodity production, also needs some explanation.Under capitalism when a capitalist wants to enter into enterprise, what they do istake some prior set of money (either saved or borrowed it doesn't really matter) andtrades that money for commodities. They then take those commodities and placethem through a labor process, and sell the result. This type of production cycle iscalled the money-commodity-money prime cycle, and is usually abbreviated as theM-C-M' cycle. Much like wage-labor, commodity production existed before the rise ofcapital, but it did not constitute the predominant form of production. Under earliermodes of production, things were mostly created for direct use rather than to betraded on the market, and its the element of being created for trade on the marketthat is one of the defining characteristics of the commodity..

Capitalism also has a third aspect, private property. I wanted to talk about this partlast because compared to the other two aspects this one is the most overlystressed and sometimes is mistaken for being the primary defect of capitalism by itopponents. What most people mean by private property here mostly has to do withwhat is called the "means of production" which is things like heavy machinery,factories, etc. Basically the set of objects that are used in conjunction with the laborprocess to create more value as opposed to things might be called personalpossessions, things like your personal dwelling place, car, TV. etc.).

Now I'm no fan of private property but where people get confused sometimes is inthinking that its simply a matter of taking away property from capitalists and putting iteither in the hands of the state or in some form of collectivity. If all you were to do istake property away from the individual owners – which function as the lieutenants ofcapital – and put it into a collectivity without destroying commodity production andwage labor, then what you end up with is a collectively managed capital instead of aprivately managed one.

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Posted by Spiritof56 at 12:37 PM No comments:

Now the thing about Capitalism is that compared to slavery or feudalism it hashistorically been progressive. This era of progressive Capitalism fueled the industrialrevolution and we reaped its benefits. However starting with the first world war, itbecame what we could call decadent, that is to say Capitalism can no longer providehumanity the benefits it once could. The reason for this has to do with the waycapital must always expand. What I mean here is that Capital must always beseeking growth, profit and expansion into new markets. The nature of capitalistcompetition leads to a grow or stagnate and die cycle of business. So as capitalexpands in an area (commodity, market, location, country etc.) it gets oversaturated, to the point that it can not expand any more. It then has two choices expand to anew market or destroy the value in that area , either through war or economic crisis,or just plain self-destruction of commodities. Either way it doesn’t matter to capital.This cycle became more vicious and more widespread the more Capital expandedto encompass the whole world. Capital became a world system and when it did itbecame decadent and unable to provide for humanity the material benefits it oncecould.

So all of this was to say that basically socialism is the process of undoing thecurrent state of things – commodity-production, wage-labor and private property –and replacing it with a world in which "the free development of each is theprecondition for the free development of all".

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