Some discussions prompted by Einstein's 1949 essay "Why Socialism?"

My translators' discussion list is grappling with some fundamentals of social development and history at the moment. The perspective is lost in a fog of confusion - appalled at the lies and brutality of power in general, especially in the overt cruelty of authoritarian regimes in the small hangers-on of imperialism (like Eritrea, for instance), but unable to differentiate between societies in different stages of historical development (the US versus China versus Cuba, for instance), and totally unwilling to look beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy for a way forward. Totally unwilling to see any difference between the valuable aspects of bourgeois democracy (due process and freedom of association and expression, for instance) and the criminal abuse of power by bourgeois democratic governments who would dearly love to do away with due process and freedom of expression.

PF posted Albert Einstein's excellent essay  Why Socialism? Monthly Review 1, May 1949  to stir the flames a bit. He introduced it with some remarks that reappear later in this post.

The article is quite stunning in its historical context of postwar US paranoia and disbelief in relation to the growth and to the bourgeoisie inexplicable resilience and strength of the non-capitalist world. Written in the year of the victory of the Chinese Revolution in Asia and just a few months before the outbreak of McCarthyism in the USA, it is very simple, very clear, and very restrained. 

I made the following comment. 

The beauty of this beautiful essay is that Einstein starts from first principles. He doesn't argue from authority. He tries to describe the way human society works in terms of things we can see if we look where he points. He mentions one name - Veblen - to emphasize that humanity is still in a "predatory phase" of development. Wealth - in land or goods - goes to those who own the means of producing it, and that ownership is gained and maintained by conquest and coercion, not free voluntary informed consent. 

His goal is a society run by mutually consenting human beings, consciously planned for the benefit of all. 

To achieve this he wants a "free and unhindered discussion of these problems", which was (and still is to a huge extent) "under a powerful taboo". Which is why he agreed to write this essay for the first issue of the Monthly Review.

P, we should note that he doesn't discuss socialism in the terms you start off with - "never been realized", "never been given a chance", "a de facto failure". He discusses it in the terms of how society works when it produces wealth and in its political management of this wealth. He points to factors here that should be redressed if commonly celebrated human and social values are to be upheld. Part of the free and unhindered discussion involves describing the way different societies and mass movements and parties work in relation to these factors. Basically, is a society good, and how? If not, why not and to what degree? If something needs changing, how can this be done? Notice that Einstein doesn't ask if the predatory aspects of society should be changed. He takes that for granted as a matter of first principle - unlike the man he quotes who is indifferent to the well-being and even survival of humanity.

I've got a question. What actual impact can an essay like this have in changing the world (human society) for the better?

 DV raised the issue of central planning. I decided to whack this bogey on the nose, even if it's more of a conditioned reflex than a reasoned objection (or perhaps - given the character of the discussion and its context - precisely because it's a thoughtless automatic defence response). I wrote: 

Central planning is what every capitalist applies with extreme rigour within his own sphere of control. Ever heard of "synergy"? That's benefits of central planning. 

If central planning is applied to a whole society, we get the ultimate in synergy. There are no "externalities" distorting social costs in relation to company costs. All the life-cycle and indirect costs of say the automobile or nuclear industries are computed directly within this sphere of production. It makes a big difference to the calculations, and the kind of decisions taken. (This is not quite true, actually, unless "whole society" is the world economy - until we get there, there will be some externalities between different societies.)

Rejecting "central planning" as a communist evil is pure shibboleth. Utterly meaningless. If a single mother refuses to "centrally plan" her resources, she will not only suffer and watch her kids starve, but she'll be attacked viciously by the goons who police the behaviour and morals of poor people.

A central plan decided by free universal participatory democratic means is a good idea.

It should also be obvious by now to everybody that capitalist anarchy (ideologically rigid adherence to NO rational democratic central planning) is a catastrophic failure, that not even capitalists believe in any longer. They all scream out for planning (except the Economist which believes in Adam Smith's hidden hand the way the Archbishop of Canterbury believes in Jesus) - but it's always planning that serves their interests. And as we see in the EU, this is a ludicrous delusion.

Einstein is worth taking seriously.

 D insisted: 

So how to go about centrally planning, to use one specific example, home washing machines?

Or do we centrally decide no one needs their own washing machine, a horrible waste of resources?

Or do we centrally plan creating thousands of competing models?

Or a Ford-style, East German-style, you can have any color you want, as long as it is black?

What centralized democratic process can make this specific decision?

How much does my washing machine cost me? How do you determine the price? (You could measure in worker hours, but the number of unit-hours will depend on centrally-planned quantity.)

I think you'll probably steer me towards some vague everything-will-work-out-after-the-revolution answer. I don't need "the" answer. But I would like some idea of how this central planning "could" work in a very specific case.

I responded:

First you see how urgent various things are. Once you've decided priorities together, you get down to tackling them.

And you don't look at the techniques or machines before you look at the problems you have to solve. If you have a big problem (a priority) then you throw it out to be debated and sorted out at meetings, conferences etc at all levels, from street to neighbourhood to workplace to city, region, etc. 

Washing clothes might be such a problem. Brainstorming will have produced preliminary approaches and proposals and perspectives. Water usage, energy consumption, chemicals, health issues, location issues etc will have been considered, and will be thrashed out further.

Assuming a residential area with largish households (4+) and small dwellings it's very likely that a system of communal laundry facilities would be alternative number one. In Rinkeby in Stockholm there's a world-famous laundry facility with dozens of excellent modern machines for fast, efficient washing and drying, generous booking parameters, a cafe, a shop, several attendants, etc. It replaced a system of smaller, reasonably efficient but not very pleasant or friendly laundry rooms, that could get run down and messy and cause conflicts. In addition to such facilities, some heavy-duty washing (sports, work) could be managed by providing on-site laundries.

Assuming there's a case to be made for individual machines (convenience, space, plenty of water and energy) then the task would be designing a range of machines to a range of specifications. For this committees consisting of producers, consumers, etc would thrash out some alternatives. There would quite likely be several machines ready for production - by different producers, in different regions, say - so these could be thrown on a market and consumer choice deployed to whittle things down to a manageable selection. 

It's likely that a lot of consumer requirements could be met by just varying colours on offer for one type of machine. Or variable spin speeds in one machine.

The big thing will be that the process is far less blind than it is today. And since today is secretly socialist under the scabby capitalist skin anyhow, what with planning and consumer/stakeholder consultation in many cases, then the cultural dislocation won't break anyone's neck (еxcept the profiteer's). 

But we really don't have to give orders to freely cooperating people as to how they settle on solutions or decide things. We know how we would like to do it, and our job is to ensure it happens the way we think is best.

Whenever people have been liberated from traditional oppressive constraints regarding how to improve living conditions and make a neighbourhood better to live in, however, the results have always been above expectations - inspirational. Examples like improving the slums in Santiago de Chile under the short-lived Allende regime, for instance, which wasn't even socialist, but liberated an awful lot of creativity and constructive activity on the part of young people. Public hygiene, elementary sewage facilities, literacy campaigns, schooling, public murals...

What far too many "non-political" people worry about as consequences of socialism are as often as not consequences of capitalism. We project our own nightmares on to others - this is the basic situation of US culture today as seen in horror movies, dystopias and the kind of behaviour the films make the bad guys do but that the writers have learnt all about here at home. 

They're also the consequences of the rule of counter-revolutionary thugs who have usurped non-capitalist systems - the Stalinist and Maoist bureaucracies, for instance. Nothing to do with socialism.

Or the antics of bourgeois union leaders (Jimmy Hoffa or whoever) who use classical authoritarian domination strategies to strangle democracy and socialism.

Given the difficulties of preparing for freedom in advance (most people are very empirical and will dismiss the possibility of freedom as utopian until it bites them in the arse) then David's "everything-will-work-out-after-the-revolution" answer is quite likely the most adequate one. I mean, I could carve what I've just written in gilded letters on tablets of stone and insist that everyone obeys me after the revolution, couldn't I? And they all would, wouldn't they :-D

 P returned to his introductory remarks: 

If Einstein is worth taking seriously, then the questions he chooses
to end his essay with are worth taking seriously: "how is it possible, in view 

of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to

prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How
can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a
democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"

Your response to this essay passes over these key questions. And from
an empirical point of view, the issues I introduced the essay with,
namely that some argue that socialism has never been practiced and
others that wherever and whenever it has been practiced it has proven
to be a failure are of crucial importance. The question of central
planning is closely related to that of the "centralization of
political and economic power" mentioned by Einstein and also to the
danger of an "all-powerful and overweening" bureaucracy that tramples
the "rights of the individual" also mentioned by Einstein at the close
of his essay.

I wrote: 

Bureaucracies flourish in periods of decline and stagnation, politically speaking. When masses are mobilized and fighting for shared demands, bureaucrats are like fish out of water. So the best answer is to never stop fighting for shared demands. This way those best at fighting for the demands will take the lead (by example, selection, re-selection etc) and bureaucrats will organize things like printing leaflets and handing them out.

If conditions lead to an ebb in mobilization and momentum is lost, then there is a period of conflict between healthy democratic leadership and bureaucratic leadership. This is a sensitive period and we have very very little experience of dealing well with its challenges. 

A classic measure that always works, however, is to make every elected position subject to the right of instant recall. You screw up, you get replaced. An even more powerful measure is to restrict the payment made to elected officials to an average experienced worker's income. Nothing deters careerists more than an absence of privilege and the possibility of being knocked off the ladder.

However, these measures must first be put in place to work. And careerists and bureaucrats hate them, so getting them in place isn't easy. And careerists and bureaucrats work non-stop to dilute or remove them.

In bad times, bureaucrats and careerists will have been in control for ages and their privileges and routines of organizational control will be deeply entrenched. And it is very difficult to make any progress during such periods, of course. 

I did deal with the question of socialism in practice in relation to Einstein's essay. He looks at real-life, currently existing social practice and whether it's acceptable. He thinks it isn't, and needs replacing. Current practice in his essay is overwhelmingly capitalist. The world system. He sees it as systematically coercive and unjust, separating privileged individuals from human society as a whole. For him there is no alternative to abolishing capitalism if we want a just, cooperative society. And socialism is the planned, democratic alternative. Public ownership of land and production, democratic, cooperative planning and work.

We can't just sit back and let others build socialism for us, though. If we don't get stuck in, others will, and their interests will trump ours. 

Above all we can't accept imperialist capitalism as a natural and inevitable condition we have no control over. We make our own history. But not in conditions of our own choosing. Our job is to make our conditions as favourable as possible for realizing our desires. 

Bureaucratic counter-revolutionaries like Stalin and Mao didn't rise to power by magic. Every step they took resulted from a struggle between competing interests and group decisions. Their interests were narrow and not very attractive, and the decisions were all hard fought. It didn't have to happen the way it did.

Today there is a dual challenge facing humanity.

Socially the great challenge is capitalism. Remove it, and society immediately becomes viable and beneficial.

Politically the great challenge is the non-socialist leadership of the great masses of humanity - the working class especially. Remove the Social-Democrats and Stalinists (including Maoists) from the leaderships of labour parties, trade unions, and non-capitalist states, and the strength and energy of the working people will be channelled into removing capitalism.

Einstein was writing about the social challenge above all. If you don't accept the need for a socialist human society there's no point in even considering the political questions relating to bureaucracy and the trampling of human rights. You can whinge about injustice and arrogance etc, but the history of the past seventy years (say since world war 2) shows that you're pissing into the wind for all the good it does.

Next P raised the question of "free lunches" and "getting people to work and live

together without monetary incentives and private ownership".

I continued:

The strong force that binds human society together is the quid-pro-quo. When it comes to producing stuff we need to live, all day every day (and a lot else), the four fundamental formulas of Roman Law hold:

Do, ut des -- I give that you give; 

Do, ut facias -- I give, that you do; 

Facio, ut des -- I do, that you give; and 

Facio, ut facias -- I do, that you do.

If we do something and don't receive an equivalent back, we get extremely pissed off, and can kill people. If someone takes without giving back, the same goes. There is absolutely nothing wishy-washy or fluffy about human interchange when it comes to creating and exchanging wealth (necessities plus surplus). 

Each society has its own norms of value to judge equivalence by, and these norms are rooted in the economic and cultural level of development of society, and its hierarchical structure. They are stronger than most taboos. 

This is why only Marx has been able to grasp the whole process of economics as a system of organizing the production and distribution of wealth from nomadic family groups at the mercy of extreme scarcity and necessity through tribal forms to agriculture and urban civilizations, slavery, feudalism and capitalism, and projecting forwards to socialism. 

This is one of the reasons for calling Marxism scientific socialism. It sees the workings of a mode of production in precisely the most elementary fundamental terms required. Work and reward, in terms of equivalence. In bourgeois society the equivalence is measured in terms of value, more precisely exchange value - the amount of labour expended in society to produce the commodities it needs to consume in order to survive and reproduce itself, and to accumulate. You can't produce more value than the total work done by humanity in a given period of time. If you produce more goods in a given period, they have correspondingly less value each.

Basing himself on insights in Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx showed how these fundamentals gave rise to the whole system of capitalist economics - and how the process was irreversibly moving towards its own dissolution. The profit drive spurring capitalist production proved to be a more powerful stimulant to production than the various kinds of greed for power or goods under slavery and feudalism, so the capitalist system outgrew them and swept them aside. And produced productive capital on such a scale that it became impossible to employ it fully and retain a sufficiently high rate of profit to stimulate further investment. Marx knew this, and observed and described the process in the mid-1860s, writing the third volume of Capital. The greater the capital employed, the smaller the rate of profit in any surplus value generated. Remember - the value in a society (economy) is ever and always the total of useful human labour expended. In other words it's damn near constant. The capital used, however, which represents lots of old, used labour (big machines lasting many years) grows and grows. Profit is measured by surplus value in relation to capital. Profit has to shrink. Unless you reduce the capital - by destroying it - which means devaluation or war.

Now, class society has given rise to the bourgeois political set-up - society is run by the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, in its own interest (maximizing profit) against  the antagonistic interests of the proletariat, the working class (whose main interest is to own what it produces so it is no longer just dependent on selling its ability to work, its labour power, to stay alive).

And since society - always based on the exchange of equivalents - has developed to a point where the profit motive is acting against the interests of humanity as a whole - ie the production and exchange of wealth is deliberately held back by a few to the detriment of the many - a rage is rising in humanity at the violation of the taboos of equivalent exchange. Humanity wants to produce, and it finds itself frustrated - by unemployment, lack of material opportunity, etc - and it wants to exchange its produce for a variety of useful equivalents, in which it is also frustrated. 

However, the rage of the billions of producers (whose labour is being exploited or deliberately prevented) against the tiny percentage of owners of wealth (exploiters and suppressors) runs up against the resistance of these owners, who use their wealth to arm huge forces of killers and slave-drivers against their unarmed class enemy.

And this is where we're at, politically speaking, today.

The bourgeoisie looks very strong, because it is armed to the teeth and because its opponents are unarmed (just watch the news any night - from Greece, say - to see half-a-dozen heavily armed and armoured cops kicking and beating a single unarmed opponent, or in South Africa, shooting unarmed opponents down in cold blood in Marikana). It also has a virtual monopoly on public debate regarding how society works, what justice is, what history is, and so on.

If you consider how much money and how many people and how much effort is expended to keep these mind-forged manacles in place, however, or to keep the lid on the boiling pot to stop it boiling over, you'll agree that the bourgeoisie is getting a very bad deal for its money. So far it has been able to keep the lid on the pressure cooker, just about. But it's less and less a pressure cooker and more and more a huge steel boiler at a power plant that's already glowing red hot and is trembling ominously.

It's about to rupture, historically speaking. You can see the steel bulging and weakening, so to say, in North Africa and the Middle East. Ruptures have previously occurred in other parts of the plant (Russia, 1917, Yugoslavia 1945, China 1949). Cracks have appeared throughout the colonial world since world war 2 - in Africa and Asia in particular. 

Human society cannot operate on a systematic basis of non-equivalence for any great length of time. A greater degree of inequality has regularly been exchanged (after a period of violent change) for one of less apparent inequality. And when this in turn becomes intolerable it in turn is replaced. 

Someone once described Soviet citizens as ferociously egalitarian. I think this applies to the whole of humanity. Not stupidly equal as in "everyone must have one green jacket and two pairs of red jeans", but deeply equal as in "all men and women are born equal", or  "I do my bit, and it helps you. Now you do your bit, so it can help me."

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" represented a tremendous advance of egalitarianism in relation to feudal economic relations. He was part of the Enlightenment's great battle for justice and knowledge and prosperity against the aristocracy and religion. Once the aristocracy and the church were smashed as ruling forces in society, the weaknesses of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie in relation to universal equality became painfully obvious, and the bourgeoisie was no longer the leading force for progress, as became clear in the revolutions of 1848. 

So, all in all, the way to grow past the destruction and crippledom of our present bourgeois society is NOT to think up utopian enclaves of small farmers and craftsmen minding their own business far from the madding crowd. What we need to do is to break the chains binding us as a class. We are like the slaves rowing a galley for some Roman general and slave-owner. If we break our chains we can throw the slave-owner and his slave-drivers overboard (or put them to work alongside us) and take the ship where we want, to do the carrying we need. 

The capitalists have the power, and are abusing it, demeaning us and covering humanity with blood and filth. We need to take this power from them, clean away their mess, and use the power to make ourselves a world of creative abundance. 

 P insisted some more:

the question of bureaucracy and human rights is
the first to be tackled by anyone purporting to build socialism. Every
de facto attempt to build socialism has been a dismal failure

And I wrote:

Unfortunately for your perspective, Paul, these questions are not the first on the agenda of anyone involved in revolutionary upheavals. The first questions are whose side are you on, and what are you doing to defeat the enemy? 

Your questions are important, and grow in importance as the big questions of power and who holds it and for whose benefit are settled. But they are not the first. The documented history of the October Revolution shows that both Lenin and Trotsky were well aware of the dangers for socialism of bureaucratic despotism. But awareness of a problem doesn't automatically translate into capacity to implement a solution. 

The Cheka, and Kronstadt for that matter, are both red herrings in this regard. Presenting your naked throat to an enemy wanting nothing better than to slice through it is not a policy anyone in a life or death struggle will opt for. 

The forces encouraging the growth of bureaucracy and injustice in the Soviet Union after the end of the civil wars and the repulsion of the imperialist invasions were stronger than the forces operating against them. And they led to a bureaucratic victory that instituted a counter-revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union,  despite the non-capitalist economic foundations. Which in turn distorted the development of the revolutionary workers movement in the world. Leading to innumerable defeats in revolutions (China in the late 20s, Germany and Spain in the 30s, Italy, France and Greece in the 40s, Indonesia, Chile, Iran, etc etc) and in particular the distortions in the regimes running the non-capitalist states that were created in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959. 

The record of de facto non-capitalist societies so far is no indication of any necessary bureaucratic character inherent in any non-capitalist society. The very first thing to note is that none of these de facto societies represents a genuine attempt to build socialism. A non-capitalist economy, yes, a socialist society, no. 

We should at least give a new mode of production as much slack as its immediate predecessor. In the case of socialism, that means capitalism, bourgeois society. In terms of time this would mean roughly a couple of centuries if we take the late medieval city-states of southern Germany and northern Italy as early examples of bourgeois societies. A century hasn't yet passed since 1917.  

The second thing to note is that socialism by generally accepted definition is a worldwide mode of production predicated on a level of production and productivity equal to developed capitalism. We are not there yet, so all non-capitalist states so far have been based on a material foundation inadequate to to socialism. We can speak of proto-socialism, but not socialism as such. It's a bit like expecting a computer using vacuum tubes to perform as well as one using transistors. It can carry out the same operations, sure, but it is slow, inefficient, and frustrating. It doesn't show us what computers are really capable of.

Socialism is the road to the future of humanity. Not seeing this is blinding yourself to the future of humanity. Groping in the dark. And incidentally tying yourself (reluctantly or not, as the case may be) to the coat-tails of imperialist capitalism. In other words flapping around with a close-up view of the Devil's arse.