A famous thinker once wrote that in modern industrial society, individuals are more than ever dependent upon society for their "food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought". Far from being at home in this society of mutually interdependent individuals, however, we do not experience this interdependence "as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force".
On the contrary, we are deeply alienated from the society in which we live: we experience our interdependence with others as a threat to our rights, or to our very existence. Far from promoting our social drives, our position in society accentuates our egotistical drives. We feel "insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life".
Our thinker is clear about the cause of this malaise: "The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil." He notes that what workers receive in capitalist society falls far short of the real value of what they produce and argues that "private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands partly because of the competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones".
Since these very capitalists "inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education)", it is extremely difficult — perhaps impossible — "for individual citizens to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of their political rights".
Under capitalism, production is driven by the profit motive, not by human need. Workers are constantly in fear of losing their jobs and becoming members of the "army of unemployed". There is a huge waste of human labour and the economy is prone to "increasingly severe depressions" that cripple the social consciousness of individuals.
The famous thinker in question is not Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky, but Albert Einstein, widely regarded as the most important scientist of the 20th century, perhaps of all time. In his article "Why Socialism?", written in 1949 for the Monthly Review, Einstein expressed the conviction that "there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely, through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals".
In a socialist economy, rational planning would take the place of anarchy, and "the education of individuals, in addition to promoting their own innate abilities, would develop in them a sense of responsibility for their fellow humans in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society".
The Socialist Alliance shares Einstein's vision of a socialist world ruled not by the greed of private capital but by reason and human need. Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly, two of the few publications that are not slaves of the rich and powerful, support Socialist Alliance. GLW runs our weekly column, "Our Common Cause". GLW seeks to provide individual citizens with a means, in Einstein's words, "to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of their political rights".
In the introduction to his new book, Tell Me No Lies, John Pilger provides us with one of his favourite quotations, by American journalist T.D. Allman: "Genuinely objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right." The same can be said of "Our Common Cause".
The aim of this column, like that of Socialist Alliance itself, is to provide a vehicle for building and displaying broad left unity. With the reelection of the Coalition government, the need for such unity is now even greater than ever. Socialist Alliance appeals to all its members to contribute to the process of furthering broad left unity by submitting columns to "Our Common Cause". Columns can reflect any aspect of socialist struggle, including our struggles against war, poverty, privatisation, and racism, or our defence of democracy, workers' rights, the environment, and refugees.
Alex Miller
[All previous columns in Our Common Cause are available at <http://www.socialist-alliance.org>. Einstein's article can be read in full at <http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm>. Submissions to "Our Common Cause" by Socialist Alliance members wishing to promote broad left unity are very welcome and can be emailed to <glw@greenleft.org.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 17, 2004.
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