Human beings have a range of needs — some physical, the need for food and shelter and some mental, like the need for intellectual and aesthetic stimulation. Satisfaction of these is a prerequisite for leading a fulfilling life and, in the case of the basic physical needs, a prerequisite for living any kind of life at all.
The world does not hand us the means to satisfy these needs on a plate. Houses and apartments, for example, do not grow on trees: to satisfy our need for shelter, we have to make them.
This point can be generalised: the satisfaction of just about any human need requires human production. Think of all the things involved in the production of a house or an apartment complex: wood, concrete, cement, glass, machinery, tools, human labour and so on.
In a capitalist world, the means of production — the raw materials, tools, and machinery — are privately owned — and the raison d'etre of the whole process is the making of a profit for those who own these means. In a socialist world, by contrast, the means of production would be socially or collectively owned, and the raison d'etre of production would be the satisfaction of human need, not private profit.
One argument often heard against socialism is that it is a pipe dream, a utopian fantasy. How could we possibly work collectively and on the basis of social ownership towards the satisfaction of human need?
The best response to this is given to us by modern capitalism itself. In modern capitalist society, the entire process of production is socialised through and through. Just about everything we now use to satisfy our needs, whether physical or mental, is the result of a vast and complex collective effort by thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of workers.
Because the things that we use in order to satisfy our needs don't wear their provenance on their faces, it is easy to miss this.
For example, I am currently enjoying a cup of tea. All I can see in front of me is a glass cup containing a transparent dark red liquid. I can't tell just from looking whether this cup of tea is the upshot of a social process. But it is, to an incredible degree.
As Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan point out in their book Imagine, a vast effort on the part of a huge collective of workers goes into the production of my cup of tea: the plantation workers who grow and pick the tea, the lorry drivers who transport it to and from the docks, the wharfies who load it on and off ships, the seafarers who transport it across the oceans, the designers who make the boxes the tea is sold in, the printers who produce the boxes, the paper-mill workers who produce the paper the boxes are made of, the foresters who provide the trees for the paper mill, the factory workers who pack the tea into the boxes, the oil workers who produce the oil required by the factories, the petrochemical workers who convert the oil into the petrol required by the lorries and boats, the factories and workers involved in building the lorries and boats, and so on ad infinitum.
And that's just my cup of tea! What about the water I used in the tea, the glass cup, the kettle I used to boil it, the electricity I used for the kettle? What about my shoes, laces, socks, trousers, shirt, spectacles, what about the computer I'm writing on, the education that enables me to write, the building that contains my computer, the health that means I'm well enough to write, the breakfast and lunch that give me the energy to write?
Clearly, this list could go on and on, and just like the tea, each item is the upshot of a huge social effort involving literally millions of people with incredibly diverse skills working together.
What this means is that, thanks to the development of production processes under capitalism, the world's workers as a social group already have the skills and wherewithal to carry out a complex social process in pursuit of a determinate goal. Are we to believe that millions of workers can work together to produce and operate a jumbo jet capable of flying across the Pacific, but that we cannot work as a group to ensure that no-one starves in a world of material abundance?
Capitalism itself therefore furnishes us with everything required to turn socialism from a mere idea into a reality. How could we possibly work collectively towards the satisfaction of human need? We do it already, 24/7, 365 days a year. That's the hard part. Living without the capitalists would be the easy part. If you doubt this, just ask yourself: when you were doing your job today, what help did you get from them?
Alex Miller
From Green Left Weekly, August 17, 2005.
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