International Socialists

"Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage
Of statesmen, the tyrant's dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer's mad
Inflated currency."

 

C. Day-Lewis' stirring poem "The Nabara" rings as true today as it did in the 1930s. Yet one of the insults apologists for liberal democracy habitually fling at socialism is that it is "against human freedom and creativity." In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

 

For the great majority, life under capitalism is a profoundly alienating experience. Work for most people in our society is filled with repetitive boring tasks, is undrewarding and disempowering. The supervisor's schedule or the bosses' whim control the patterns and routines of life, and, for most of us, work is a chore, a place where we feel out of control and as much a part of a process as the tills we operate, the groceries we pack or the tables we clean. Home life is invaded by this pervasive sense of hopelessness and diconnection from any sort of community. Drug abuse, domestic violence and depression statistics show that "playing happy families" is not the normal New Zealand experience.

 

Those people trying to live their lives as artists, as poets and as writers experience poverty, no recognition of their efforts and a constant struggle to balance earning with creation. Commercial success often involves compromises of integrity. Even those with well paid jobs they find in some aspects rewarding - lecturers, researchers, teachers and so on - find themselves alienated by capitalism. Researchers are hampered in their efforts by government and industrial funding mood-swings, lecturers and teachers are impared by the needs of an education system to conform to capitalist expectations before the needs of those wanting to learn. In short, apart from the tiny minority who control the wealth, all of us are alienated and hampered creatively by the system - from abjectly impoverished unemployed to reasonably affluent professors.

 

So where is this freedom and creativity the supporters of liberal democracy champion as an answer to the challenge of socialism? Is it the freedom to choose from a vast array of toothpaste brands? Or the creativity of an architect following  exact specifications to produce yet another mansion for Kerry Packer? Or is creativity to be found flourishing where painters and poets try to live off the dole as they make works which most of society has neither the money nor the time to produce? Or is it the "lonelieness which you call freedom," to borrow Billy Bragg's beautiful phrase, to be found in doing the same tasks, day after day, for most of your life?

 

Socialists are unashamed in admitting that they don't value the current choice in toothpastes. Nor do we feel particularly creative and liberated because the rich choose occasionally to "patronise," in every sense of that word, the arts. Capitalism suffocates the human spirit, and atrophies the artist. But we think it can, and must, be changed.

 

By arranging the way we work democratically, we have the power to end alienation and boredom in the workforce. By controlling what we do (in socialist-speak we call this "controlling the means of production"), workers are involved in what they are doing - not just being cogs in a capitalist's grand machinery. More than this, if we organise economic life democratically, we don't need to do most of the exploitative tasks running people's lives at the moment. If the driving force behind our decisions is human need, and not the profit of the bosses' which we toil towards at the moment, then time free for leisure and human development increases enormously. Instead of being a way of reaching the weekend, work will become something which extends and develops our creativity.

 

This probably sounds like utopian dreaming to most people. But the fact remains that there examples in history where we have had brief glimpses of this very way of running things occuring. In Paris in 1871 and 1968, in Poland in 1980 and Portugal in 1974-75 and Russia in 1917, workers and students have seized control and have run their lives along democratic lines. And, far from being the drab and dull experience bourgeois theorists of democracy claim socialism will produce, these have been some of the most exciting times for ordinary people.

 

Lenin called revolutions "festivals of the oppressed." During the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, a revolution in the arts occured, with poets like Mayakovsky and the Soviet futurists completely revitalising European literature, and the Formalists challenging the very foundations of literary criticism. Ordinary workers in factories across the country painted murals on previously sparse walls. In Paris in 1968 strikers adopted the slogan "All Power to the Imagination," and engaged in similar revolutionary artistic projects.

 

For us, specialisation is one of the stifling effects of capitalism. Where nowadays "amateurs" and "beginners" are dismissed scornfully by a system which views things only in terms of profit and production, socialists see the vision of a world where everyone is free to unselfconciously experiment with dance, painting or whatever both within and outside of the workplace as an exciting one. Most of the important artistic figures of the 20th Century - from Brecht to Frieda Kahlo, from Billy Bragg to Frank Sargeson - have found this Marxist vision inspiring, too.

 

The liberal democrat may want to apologise for capitalism, and wax lyrical about its "rights" and "freedoms" and denounce socialism lack of "creativity." The right to miss out on the wonderous choice at the local supermarket due to a tight budget is one few people would miss. The freedom to be enslaved by the meaningless tasks assigned you completely undemocratically by some supervisor is one most people would willingly concede.

 

The vast creativity unleashed by waiting on idiots at the flash restaurant which charges enormous prices and pays pitiful wages is hard to recognise because it simply does not exist. But the idea of a society where we arrange our own way of working, for need instead of someone else's profit, where we value each other's efforts to increase the community of art and pleasure, stands in stark contrast to the misery of the everyday. It's something we'll fight to "keep the dream floating." Workers have gained this in the past. We can again. Alone, capitalist society can seem depressing and overwhelming. Together we can change it. It's an unfashionable optimism, but one played out in the past: Together we can change the world.