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 mb 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 that
to 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 my
answer to that question is no. The question of Socialism matters a great deal, but
not in the way you might imagine, for me socialism matters in so far as certain
segments of the "left" still think of it as a way to escape capitalism. This conception
is wrong and holding it will lead to the wrong kinds of political conclusions which I
hope to show by this short piece.
Socialism is not itself a separate kind of economic system, but rather socialism is
identical to the communization process, that is to say socialism is the period of time
when we are turning capitalist socio-economic relations into communist ones.
Now this needs some unpacking. The first step in that is to understand what
capitalism is and is not. Capitalism is not democracy, or free markets, or even
simply 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 commodity
production predominate. Now what I mean here by wage labor is the kind of system
where someone enters into a labor market in order to exchange their labor for
money. This is a very different type of economic relationship than what existed in the
past under either slavery or feudalism. Under both of these systems people labored
but they did not labor for wages. They either labored because they were forced to or
they labored some part of the year for the landlord and the rest for themselves
without money coming into consideration for their labor, in both of these cases
although labor took place the exchange of money for that labor did not and as such it
was not waged labor. Now yes people did engage in wage-labor under both of these
systems, but what differentiates them is that wage labor did not predominate on a
social scale.
Capitals second aspect, commodity production, also needs some explanation.
Under capitalism when a capitalist wants to enter into enterprise, what they do is
take some prior set of money (either saved or borrowed it doesn't really matter) and
trades that money for commodities. They then take those commodities and place
them through a labor process, and sell the result. This type of production cycle is
called the money-commodity-money prime cycle, and is usually abbreviated as the
M-C-M' cycle. Much like wage-labor, commodity production existed before the rise of
capital, but it did not constitute the predominant form of production. Under earlier
modes of production, things were mostly created for direct use rather than to be
traded on the market, and its the element of being created for trade on the market
that is one of the defining characteristics of the commodity..
Capitalism also has a third aspect, private property. I wanted to talk about this part
last because compared to the other two aspects this one is the most overly
stressed and sometimes is mistaken for being the primary defect of capitalism by it
opponents. What most people mean by private property here mostly has to do with
what 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 labor
process to create more value as opposed to things might be called personal
possessions, things like your personal dwelling place, car, TV. etc.).
Now I'm no fan of private property but where people get confused sometimes is in
thinking that its simply a matter of taking away property from capitalists and putting it
either in the hands of the state or in some form of collectivity. If all you were to do is
take property away from the individual owners which function as the lieutenants of
capital and put it into a collectivity without destroying commodity production and
wage labor, then what you end up with is a collectively managed capital instead of a
privately managed one.
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6/22/2014 Spirit of 56
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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 has
historically been progressive. This era of progressive Capitalism fueled the industrial
revolution and we reaped its benefits. However starting with the first world war, it
became what we could call decadent, that is to say Capitalism can no longer provide
humanity the benefits it once could. The reason for this has to do with the way
capital must always expand. What I mean here is that Capital must always be
seeking growth, profit and expansion into new markets. The nature of capitalist
competition leads to a grow or stagnate and die cycle of business. So as capital
expands 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 a
new market or destroy the value in that area , either through war or economic crisis,
or just plain self-destruction of commodities. Either way it doesnt matter to capital.
This cycle became more vicious and more widespread the more Capital expanded
to encompass the whole world. Capital became a world system and when it did it
became decadent and unable to provide for humanity the material benefits it once
could.
So all of this was to say that basically socialism is the process of undoing the
current state of things commodity-production, wage-labor and private property
and replacing it with a world in which "the free development of each is the
precondition for the free development of all".
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