DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

The abolition of capitalist state power and the expropriation of capitalist ownership of the means of production does not immediately lead to the disappearance of privileges in the field of personal wealth or cultural heritage, not to speak of the disappearance of all elements of commodity production. Long after the capitalist state has been overthrown and capitalist property abolished, remnants of commodity production and survival of elements of a money economy will continue to create a framework in which primitive accumulation of capital can still reappear. This is especially true if the level of development of the productive forces is still insufficient to guarantee the appearance and consolidation of genuine socialist relations of production (collective ownership and control of the means of production and the social surplus product by the associated producers, distribution of products according to need).

State power of the working class is indispensable in order to prevent these ``islands of capitalist influence'' from becoming bases for the restoration of capitalism. The constitution and penal code of a socialist state (i.e., of a workers' state that has expropriated capitalist property in industry, banking and wholesale trade, introduced a state monopoly of foreign trade and a planned economy) will severely limit, if not totally outlaw, private appropriation of means of production and the private hiring of labour.

Well after the capitalist class has lost its positions as a ruling class politically and economically, the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas, customs, habits, and cultural values will linger on in relatively large spheres of social life and among a considerable section of the population. But it is completely wrong to draw the conclusion that administrative repression of bourgeois concepts or values is a necessary condition for building a socialist society. On the contrary, historical experience confirms the counterproductive character of administrative attempts to suppress reactionary bourgeois ideas. Suppression merely drives those who hold such ideas underground and prevents the leadership of the socialist state from gaining an accurate picture of the real level of consciousness and understanding of the masses. In the long run, such methods even strengthen the hold of reactionary ideas and place the great majority of workers in the position of being ideologically disarmed before them, because of lack of experience with genuine political struggle and ideological debates.

The only effective way to eliminate the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the working class lies in:

1. The creation of objective conditions under which these ideas lose the material roots of their attraction and the basis upon which they reproduce themselves, i.e., the eradication of money-commodity relations and capitalist norms of distribution of consumer goods and services.

2. The waging of a relentless struggle against these reactionary conceptions in the field of ideology and politics itself, which can only be successful under conditions of open debate.

3. The utilisation by the socialist state of an education policy based on teaching the new generation a scientific, materialist approach to life. At the same time, freedom of religious observance creates the best circumstances to gradually overcome obscurantist ideas in the course of free and open confrontation with scientific ideas.

Only those who have no confidence in the correctness of the materialist world outlook or in the capacity of the working class to understand its own social interests can shrink from open ideological conflict with those who hold procapitalist ideas. In fact, it is only through an open confrontation of ideas that the working class can educate and free itself from the influence of alien class ideas.

Building a socialist society involves a gigantic remoulding of all aspects of social life. It involves a revolutionary transformation in the relations of production, in the mode of distribution of products, in the work process, in the forms of administration of the economy and society, and in the customs, habits and ways of thinking of the great majority of people. It involves the fundamental reconstruction of all living conditions: reconstruction of cities, development of social services that will end the domestic servitude of women, complete revolutionising of the education system, restoration and protection of a habitable natural environment, technological innovations to conserve natural resources and eliminate pollution. All these endeavours, for which humanity has no blueprints, will give rise to momentous debates and conflicting proposals. Any restriction of these debates can only hinder the emergence of majority agreement around the most effective steps toward the construction of socialism.

Such debates will continue throughout the period of transition to socialism. They also concern the eradication of social evils that are deeply rooted in class society and that will not disappear immediately with the elimination of capitalist exploitation — the results of alienation and of the oppression of women, of national and racial minorities, and of other specially oppressed social groups. The eradication of these crippling legacies of class society necessitates freedom of organisation and action for independent movements of these oppressed social layers.

Under capitalism and even pre-capitalist forms of commodity production, it is the law of value — an objective economic law, operating beyond conscious social control — that regulates economic life, that determines the social allocation of labour, raw materials, and producer goods. The socialist revolution represents a giant leap toward the conscious regulation of humanity's economic and social destiny. While this process comes to a completion only with the emergence of a worldwide socialist society, it begins with the expropriation of capitalist property by the workers' state and the conscious planning of the nationalised economy. While the law of value cannot be completely eliminated during the transition period between capitalism and socialism, its domination must be overcome or the economy cannot be planned.

Planning means allocation of economic resources according to socially established priorities rather than according to blind market forces and the rule of private profit. But who will establish these priorities, which involve the well-being of tens and hundreds of millions of human beings?

Experience in the USSR and the other socialist states has conclusively shown that bureaucratic planning, that is, planning without the democratic participation of the working people, is extremely wasteful and inefficient. This is true not only because of the waste of material resources and productive capacities and great dislocations in the plan, but — most damaging of all — because of the systematic stifling of the creative and productive potential of the workers. Workers' democracy greatly reduces these shortcomings by placing the system of planning under the control of the producers/consumers.

While democratic planning does not guarantee that the majority will not make mistakes in the allocation of social resources, it provides the working people — the ones who will suffer the consequences of these mistakes — with the power to correct their errors.

Nationalised property in a socialist state, established by expropriating the capitalist class, has no automatic bias toward socialism. The expropriation of capitalist property is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for advancing to socialism. It opens the road to the working class taking the productive apparatus of society into its own hands and beginning the conscious advance toward socialism, but the creation of a nationalised, planned economy does not guarantee this advance. The construction of socialism is not an administrative task of managing state property and planning, regardless of how committed and socialist-minded the administrators may be. The construction of socialism depends fundamentally on the increasing involvement of the workers themselves in the administration of all aspects of social life, on the deepening of their socialist consciousness, and on the international extension of the socialist revolution.