Towards a Co-operative Commonwealth

It is always the disappointments of capitalism that renews interest in socialist ideas and right now people are understanding that capitalism is failing them yet again and socialism is once more attracting attention and gaining traction. Socialism has long carried a negative stigma in America, one calling to mind bread-line rations and totalitarian rule of the Cold War-era Soviet Union. However, socialism has once more re-entered the public discourse. Americans' views of socialism have broadened.

In September of 2018, Gallup asked Americans for their “understanding of the term ‘socialism.’” One-third—33 percent—answered that it meant a society with equal standing for everybody, in which benefits and services were free for all. When Gallup had asked Americans the same question in September of 1949, at the height of the Cold War, just 14 percent gave that answer, while 34 percent answered that it meant government ownership of all business and control of society. Half that total—17 percent—gave that answer in 2018.

A 2017 YouGov poll of millennials (people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s, so who are now young adults) found that 44 percent of them said they’d prefer to live in a socialist nation, while 42 percent preferred one that was capitalist, and 7 percent one that was communist.

Another poll states half of Millennials and Gen Z said they would rather live in a socialist country.

But the question we must ask is what was meant by “socialism”?

 23% American’s understood socialism as referring to some form of equality. 17% say socialism means government control of business and the economy. (In 1949, 34% defined socialism as government control of business.) 19% of all mentions which are focused on a "gentler, lighter" view of socialism -- government provision of benefits and services, liberal government or some type of cooperative plan.

Names and terms have frequently given rise to bitter and sometimes to vehement disagreements. The drawback to the term socialist is that it is not sufficiently definite. It is now a description embraced by practically all those discontented with the present state of society and are anxious to re-organise it on a more social basis. Socialist has become a general, vague term used to cover too many schools of thought and a multitude of sins. 

Yet, the word socialism has been substituted in the past by other terms. "Industrial" or "economic democracy" was commonly applied to future society by members of the Industrial Workers of the World. Americans should also be well-acquainted with "cooperative commonwealth" as "commonwealth" is the official name given to the description of four states : Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Puerto Rico is also formally a commonwealth. It is a term for a community founded for the common good

Socialist ideas first came to the United States early in the 19th century in the form of communitarianism as espoused by the British and French utopians, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Cabet. The efforts of these men and their disciples were directed toward building communal settlements which they hoped would serve as models of the perfect society. The United States was largely an agrarian nation at the time, with much available land, and this condition made the new nation an attractive area as a laboratory for utopian experiments. All the utopians recognized that something was basically wrong with the society of their day; and some of them had penetrating insights into the primacy of the economic element in social evolution. They all, however, had totally unrealistic solutions for solving social ills, for they failed to discern that a basic reorganization of the overall structure of society could not be effected by withdrawal from that society and the establishment of isolated, artificial communities. These experiments were destined to fail for material, economic reasons. 

They did not have the same access to capital, to developed means of production, that the capitalist firms and fledgling corporations had, nor could they accumulate capital at the same pace as businesses that exploited workers to the hilt. Thus, while workers in the utopian communities may have been better off than their peers elsewhere initially, their condition worsened in the same measure that the community became uncompetitive with private capitalist production and remained mired in outmoded and more labor-intensive production methods. The idealism of the utopians appealed to the egalitarian impulse that has been a basic undercurrent in American culture, and this communitarian tendency still surfaces from time to time.

The lesson was that efforts to build islands of socialism in a hostile sea of competitive capitalism can not succeed. Rather than build from scratch, the workers must organize to gain ownership and control of the means of production that they have already built under capitalist rule. 

Perhaps we should now define what is meant by the word socialist.

1. Who recognizes the class war between the property-less and the possessing class as the inevitable historic outcome of the capitalist system’s economic and social antagonisms which it has engendered and fostered.
2. Who sees that those class conflicts can only be resolved by the complete control over all the means of production and distribution by the whole people, thus abolishing the class-rule, the State and the wages system, and constituting an economic democracy.
3. Who use political institutions and processes to educate the people and to prepare, as far as possible, peacefully for the social revolution which must result world socialist cooperative commonwealth

Our aim in the World Socialist Party of the United States is to help build a democratic world community without frontiers—in which the natural and industrial resources of the world have become the common heritage of all humanity, and are used in co-operation to produce wealth directly for needs, with free access for all to the available goods and services, according to their own self-defined needs. A class-free, state-free world commonwealth is the only framework within which current social problems can be

permanently solved, since it is only on this basis that production can be oriented towards satisfying human needs. This social revolution can only be carried out when once a majority of wage workers throughout the world want it, fully understand its implications, and organize democratically and politically to achieve it. One for all, all for one, all for all.