Newsletter of the Socialist Party of Canada and World Socialist Party (US) No. 609
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
F
ew socialists are rash
enough to attempt to describe with
any precision what socialist society
will look like, since it is the demo-
cratic decisions of the members of
each community that will ultimately
give it shape. But we can infer from
what exists in the world today, what
will at least be possible in the future
based on basic socialist tenets.
For one thing, technology has
advanced over the last century or so
to the point that far less human labor
is required to produce food and
material goods. When electronics,
computers and robotics first came on
the scene, everyone heard a great
deal about how these new labor
saving devices would result in a sharp
increase in leisure time. And in a way
they have, but not for many working
people. They have simply resulted in
an increase in productivity. Once
socialism is established all of the
boring, repetitive jobs as well as the
unpleasant and dangerous ones will
be done with automation. To some
extent, this is already happening, but
mainly as a cost cutting measure to
increase the profitability (and lower
the liability) of industrial and business
concerns. Fewer workers are em-
ployed in automated plants and
computerized offices, but they work
just as hard and as long as they did
before automation was introduced.
Workers displaced by automation are
simply unemployed until they acquire
new skills or find a job similar to the
one they lost that has not yet been
automated. In a society where no
one is forced to work in order to live,
everyone will enjoy the leisure time
afforded by labor saving automation.
As William Morris said more than a
century ago:
At present you must note that all
the amazing machinery which we
have invented has served only to
increase the amount of profit-
bearing wares; in other words, to
increase the amount of profit
pouched by individuals for their
own advantage, part of which
profit they use as capital for the
production of more profit, with
ever the same waste attached to
it; and part as private riches or
means for luxurious living, which
again is sheer waste —is in fact
to be looked on as a kind of
bonfire in which rich men burn up
the product of the labour they
have fleeced from the workers
beyond what they themselves
can use. So I say that, in spite of
our inventions, no worker works
under the present system an
hour the less on account of
those labor-saving machines, so
called. But under a happier state
of things they would be used
simply for saving labor, with the
result of a vast amount of leisure
gained for the community to be
added to that gained by the
avoidance of the waste of
useless luxury, and the abolition
of the service of commercial war.
(How We Live and How We Might
Live, William Morris, 1884)
Planned obsolescence and
product life cycles will be a thing of
the past. Their only reason for
existence is to maximize profits and
force us to periodically replace our
goods. Making products that don't
last, especially disposables, ac-
counts for a substantial portion of
the 2 to 3 billion tons of municipal
waste that has gone into American
landfills since 1990. Even though
recycling has risen from 8% to 30%
since then, annual per capita waste
disposal has only dropped from
about one ton to about nine tenths
of a ton per person per year. We
want the best quality products we
can afford, right. Now take “we can
afford” out of the equation. In a
socialist world, all products will be
made to last as long as possible
using the only the best materials,
designs and workmanship. Products
subject to real obsolescence can be
collected at the distribution points
of the new model and 100% of them
recycled. In many cases, with
modular design and standardization,
obsolete products will be easily
upgraded requiring only the obso-
lete part to be recycled. Elimination
of competing producers that de-
velop proprietary technologies,
parts and sizes in an effort to
garner and maintain market share
will make this possible.
Without the constraints on
development imposed by the
requirement for profitability, and
with the abundance of time, man-
power and materials freed from
capitalist waste that socialism
implies, new technologies will come
to fruition much more quickly. The
futurists popular in the 1960's had
the technological vision to see what
would be possible by the year 2000
but they lacked the economic vision
to realize that only those things
would come to pass that could be
made to yield a profit. Once innova-
tion is no longer shackled to
