Actualizing Socialism
One of the things that I wonder whenever I hear about progress in leftist movements is how close we are to reaching our end goal. The creation of a different, freer, more equitable society, a socialist society is the end goal of leftist movements yet leftists don’t seem to be actively working toward a socialist society. They at least, have not made progress on this. This is a common frustration throughout the left, the fact that we and our planet need socialism so badly but we have yet to see it achieved. Seeing a small group of people with an advantage at birth continue to miscarry a proper future for us and our descendants and feeling unable to do anything about it is universally enraging. Every time I hear about improvements in working conditions or some sort of climate reform I feel this sense of sadness knowing that it won’t solve the problems I became a leftist hoping to solve.
In my opinion, a major contributor to this is a lack of explicitness. We should fight explicitly for socialism, embracing it as our final goal and making its benefit known to curious workers. We should not hide the fact that we want socialism we don’t just want a union or reform of some kind. There are challenges to rallying around socialism as a goal. There are two things that stop us from organizing for the sake of socialism solely, they are two sides of the same coin. On one hand the scale of the goal is too great and we have the tendency to view such large goals as unattainable. There are organizations that explicitly make socialism the main goal yet why are we no closer to living in a socialist society? The problem is a lack of process, the groups either all wait for the riots, or work in local electoral politics but none of them are working to create a different society now. They work on publications, elections, some local mutual aid, but realistically they provide a feeble path to socialism. The ones that work towards electoral politics have the greatest chance of affecting change but even they are challenged by the difficulties of actualizing such a radically different society. With climate change threatening the future of life on our planet, isn’t it about time we considered actualizing socialism?
How would we actualize socialism? Marx famously advocated for a revolution, for the working class to take control of the state by force. I think that would be well deserved but I doubt there will be any attempts. We could go about other ways of actualizing socialism, for example, we could establish food and clothing banks we could go about trying to get free or reduced cost housing. These however, don’t necessarily have the reach we would need to create an entirely new system. Revolution is a potential but we shouldn’t risk the future of our planet waiting for such an event to occur. Even if it did occur how would a revolution be planned without groups who are advocating for it? The anti terrorism laws across the world tend to stop such groups from organizing, when really revolution does not need to be violent in order to be effective. A large-scale refusal to work and a system that meets striker’s needs could be an effective method for some kind of revolution. This would only work if enough people joined the strike, if there were clear demands for a transition to socialism there could also be a demand for instead an alternative socialist system that exists alongside the capitalist one. The latter could serve as a transition into socialism later on. In order to pull something like that off we would need a dedicated and well stocked backup system, we need a network of people who can provide collective funds and other resources to people who are striking. We need to be able to support a long-term strike, one that can withstand enough time to make our demands met. We could potentially establish alternative supply chains.
There are several things that make a movement powerful, one of those things is an effective form of action, another is stamina. Most importantly, there are various reasons why we haven’t achieved socialism yet. A lack of methodology is one of them, there needs to be an effective method to achieving socialism. The second main reason as to why we haven’t been able to achieve socialism is the fact that we don’t have an entirely collective picture of what that looks like. If we gained control over the faculties of the state we may not entirely know what to do with them. But the one thing we would need to do is turn the fruits of our society into a public resource. Turning the fruits of society into a public resource is not particularly hard, it’s organizing production that is more complicated. There are some parts of running a society that people are not going to want to do and that will remain a problem for any society unless it organizes itself wisely. This means we should create some way to get people to put in the hard labor necessary to maintain our quality of life, and there is some hard labor that will be required but it isn’t necessarily that we will have a lot of labor to do that people don’t want to do. One of the reasons we have so much unpleasant labor in our current society is that our production is bloated by a multiplicity of unnecessary industries. One method to organizing labor may be to create a necessary amount of labor time that is tracked electronically, then people are given access to whatever they need when they have satisfied their hourly requirements. It could be a calculation done yearly as taxes are calculated.
We don’t need to immediately petition our governments for things even if we eventually should. We can create socialist societies from the ground up. We can work in our communities proactively, building the society we want to see. We should create avenues that allow people to exchange things free of charge and we need to make them available to our communities. We could establish underground circles that move resources around and between its members. However, there is also merit to establishing these sorts of programs on the street. We could eventually have a socialist society if enough people moved toward living based on socialist principles. Once we have created a dedicated enough system, this would have to be a network of people willing to share what they have, we could combine this with electoral politics to create a socialist society. This is like what the philosopher Murray Bookchin advocated for with dual power. In this scenario it may be necessary to create an alternative socialist society before abolishing capitalism entirely.
When putting into practice socialist methods, creating socialist resources, and following socialist principles, we could potentially create a socialist society without limiting ourselves to small scale communal living situations and reformist politics. We need to organize a method for actually achieving eco-socialism on a large scale. The fact is, we will not achieve socialism by fighting for reforms alone, we will not achieve it by writing about it either. We need to build a mass movement with the explicit goal of achieving socialism. We need to fight for a new world now if we are to ensure a habitable future on Earth.
