Rev Left Radio - Challenging Capitalism: Envisioning a Socialist Workplace

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

This episode is a collaboration between Radical Reflections and Rev Left Radio. David from RR and Breht from RLR join forces once again; this time to discuss how the workplace operates under capitalism, and what it could be under socialism.  Check out more from Radical Reflections HERE Join the Radical Reflections Patreon HERE Outro Music: 'Get Up' by The Coup (feat. Dead Prez) LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. This is Dave, just popping in to let you know this episode is a collaboration between RevLeft Radio and Radical Reflections. In it, Brett is technically getting interviewed about the workplace under capitalism and socialism, but it plays out more like a conversation than a strict interview. We hope people enjoy the content, and if you haven't already, check out the Radical Reflections podcast, which we will link to in the show notes. enjoy

Okay, Brett, it's an absolute pleasure to have you back on radical reflections and although you're somebody who doesn't really need an introduction for a whole host of reasons, do you want to just give yourself a quick background check so people know who we're listening to today? Sure, yeah, my name is Brett O'Shea. I'm the host of Revolutionary Left Radio and the co-host of Red Menace podcast, which the former is interviews, stuff very much like radical reflections. I think we really dovetail on our projects. And Red Menace is more of a theory and current events show where every other month

we either tackle a work of political theory or we tackle current events. And that's sort of an interesting dialectical way to understand theory and then apply it to what's going on and then go back to theory and come back to current events. So, yeah, that's basically what we're doing. And then just for my personal experience with relevance to what we're going to going to be talking about today always been working class my entire life grew up in a in a low income working class home um have been working shitty jobs since i was 15 um pretty much most of the shitty jobs that that people can imagine dishwashing fast food retail i've worked them all a gas station

clerk all all of the above so uh i have lots of experience working in the capitalist workplace yeah really second review and i'm sure all that experience will become very useful in episodes such like this, so thank you for that. And look, just off the back of your initial introduction there, I think it is worth giving a plug to Revolutionary Left Radio and Red Menace. If you haven't listened to these podcasts networks already, you definitely should. They're two of the best out there. And if you're understanding in terms of classic text, historical issues and contemporary issues, the world over, these are great resources and really should be given your time if you haven't done already. But look, coming back to today, subject matter,

I think it'd be really good to build the foundations of this episode by explaining what do we mean by a socialist workplace and sort of build the episode from the ground up in that respect if you've got anything you want to initially add here sure yeah i think a helpful way would just be to think about the capitalist workplace and then provide just a general overview of what an alternative could look like now many of us listening are familiar with the capitalist workplace right it's a it's a strict hierarchy with the owner or the boss at the very top our job as workers is to rent out our bodies and our labor and our time to people with a lot more money than us and it's a exchange for an hourly wage. Capitalist workplaces can sort of differ widely depending on what

country they're in, what the regulations are, what industry they're in, et cetera, but it's always a strict sort of hierarchy with the lowest wage workers at the bottom and the richest owners of capital at the very top, often with a middle layer of managers and whatnot to sort of act as an in-between between the workers and capital, i.e. the boss, the owner, etc. And so a socialist vision of an alternative workplace is really what we're going to be talking about today in juxtaposition to the capitalist workplace that most of us are very familiar with and just some opening sort of salvos with regards to what a socialist alternative might look like one major component or a few major components would be a democratic say in everything about the business so

the capitalist workplace is a top-down dictatorship bourgeois democracy doesn't extend into the economy and into the workplace, which I'm sure we'll talk more about as we go through this conversation. But a vision for a socialist workplace would be the workers having a democratic say in the structure of the day, a democratic say in how to go about organizing production, a democratic say in what the goals of production are, and a democratic say in how to distribute the revenue that the workplace brings in. This is all in clear juxtaposition to the capitalist workplace where there is no democratic say the worker is fully subordinated to the wishes of management and the owner and basically have to do what they say

that could be you know normal stuff like you know when you're allowed to take a lunch and it can also be you know more degrading shit like what uniform you have to wear how you have to talk to people um the the agony of trying to upsell somebody right where basically you're told what to do and if you don't do it to the liking of the owner the capitalist the body the manager, you'll be let go. And it's always, in a capitalist workplace, always premised on the fear and pain of losing your income and thus your ability to have housing, food, education, health care, et cetera. And then the last thing I would say, because again, this is just a broad overview. We're going to get much more into the details here. But with the socialist workplace,

it's not just an atomized sort of island in the middle of an ocean, right? It's connected to a broader society in socialist transition and socialism will mean and will require, especially when you think about climate chaos and pandemics like the one we're going through right now, it will require planning. And so the socialist workplace, the individual socialist workplace would also be linked up in some way to broader society, to the government, to a vanguard party, to sort of the coordinating locus for the rest of society. because the goal in a planned society would be to make production work for the overall good of society completely

and not just the sort of short-term hyper-atomized individualistic competition for profits at all cost. And so that's a bird's eye view and we'll get more into the details, but that's probably a good way to open and orient yourself to this discussion. Yeah, such a good overview, such a brilliant bird's-eye views you say there, to really cover the basic premises of this episode in comparison. with the capitalist workplace that we see right now and the socialist workplace that we're all striving for in our own contemporary material conditions.

And if you think back to the debunking communist myth episode that Brett and I did together before, if you've listened to that, this episode is going to take a somewhat similar structure and take many of those issues that Brett's discussing there in singular form and methodically analyze them in terms of what we see right now compared to what socialism could offer working people as an alternative.

So with that, I guess, I'll jump right into it with the almost obvious first question, which is a bit of a million dollar question, both physically and figuratively. In that, as you mentioned, this is a real top-down hierarchy in the capitalist workplace, with a boss sitting at the top of a hierarchical structure who really directs all avenues of the means of production within a capitalist workplace. So would a socialist workplace differ from that, and how would it be so? Well, when we're talking about debunking or challenging the traditional view that this sort of top-down capitalist mode of production and the capitalist structure of the workplace is necessary and unavoidable,

there's many different sort of arguments that you can make, and I'll just toss out a few here and then get your thoughts as well. But one, you know, the capitalist mode of production and the way that the workplace is structured is historically contingent. It didn't arise out of some ineffable human nature. It arose as a sort of outgrowth of a prior mode of production, the feudalist monarchic sort of society. And so to understand capital,

and why it is shaped the way it is, going back and understanding the feudal environment out of which it grew in the mercantilist early days of capitalism is helpful not only in understanding it, but also in understanding it's contingency, right? Because if something is contingent, that means it's not necessarily unavoidable or inevitable. It was really a product of historical processes

and not some outgrowth of just the way things are or nature or human nature, whatever argument they want to vomit up at us. And then the second thing is, that humans have, and they continue to, you know, organize production in non-capitalist ways. Obviously, capitalism can't have that, and a big part of capitalism's global domination is really, you know, taking over any non-capitalist way of organizing production and society, dominating it and forcing it into the capitalist box. But, you know, capitalism's only been around for a few hundred years.

Humans, in our current form, have been around for probably something like 200,000 years. And so to know that humans have only lived in this precise way and organized their society and their productive capacities in this specific way, it's new. It's not something rooted in human nature, anything like that. In a lot of ways, it's, and I think we've talked about this on our last episode, it's antithetical to our evolutionary past, which is really premised on cooperation, on working together for the betterment of the tribe or the social unit or the village or whatever it. may have been. This idea that in a small human band trying to fight for survival, that there would be competition or that there would be one person who would profit off of the labor and work of everybody else is just inconceivable to human beings for most of our evolutionary history. And it's certainly the capitalist way of living and organizing our lives is certainly not

natural. In fact, in a lot of ways it's sort of antithetical to our basic human impulses and certainly to our mental and emotional well-being. And one thing to understand when we're talking about this way of organizing the workplace is, you know, Angles talks about this in socialism, scientific, and utopian, where the capitalist workplace is a situation in which production is socialized, right? So a lot of people are needed to make production happen. Society needs to be, you know, in on it. I mean, with infrastructure, with roads, communications.

not to mention the army of workers and consumers that any capitalist firm needs to be able to grow and to flourish, right? So that's what we mean by socialized sort of production. Capitalism socializes production at the same time that it privatizes the appropriation of surplus value, right? So all of society has to come together in order for production and distribution to work. but the actual value created or the profit, the extra revenue generated through that socialized production is privatized. It's funneled into one or a small group of hands and not shared equally with the people that actually make that possible. And Engels talks about that contradiction between socialized production and privatized appropriation as being a core

contradiction within capitalism and, you know, at the root of a lot of class struggle, etc. And so, you know, when we think about the traditional view and whether or not it's necessary for all these reasons, and I'm sure many more, we can obviously discard that argument and move forward. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, they're very similar to your own. You've done a really good way of explaining it there. I would like to second and elaborate a little bit in what you're talking about there and says we're often told that capitalism is this product of human nature or the manifestation of just the way things are, etc. It really negates and under-emphasizes is that material conditions, society's conditions all around that shape human consciousness accordingly.

So what a socialist workplace will do to bring it right back to the context of this episode when we're talking about a boss in production and the capitalist mode of production that we know right now? The socialist workplace will almost flip that on its head. Through various means of collective stake all the way from controlling, working hours, to guiding the mode of production itself, whatever it is you're making in the workplace, will gradually accentuate this collective consciousness to the point where the role of the boss in production is actually no longer needed. with material conditions themselves, accentuating that flourishing of humanity in a way that we can never hope to achieve right now because of the way society is structured and indeed the workplace itself. And look, a lot of that actually segues very nicely into the next question.

I mean, we have a traditional idea in the capitalist world in the capitalist workplace that the boss, the CEO, the shareholder creates the value in every workplace and not the workers themselves. So how would a socialist workplace differ and indeed you want to debunk that idea as we go along? Yeah. So, you know, to understand why we get these ideas handed down to us of job creators and, you know, rugged individual entrepreneurial and financial investments being the backbone of economic growth and prosperity is precisely because the idea that value is created from the top down is synonymous with bourgeois rule. And in so far as they can, you know, give that idea to us and make us internalize those ideas, which is in various forms. their forms of trickle-down economics just given different sheens and different emphasizes. But the idea is that, you know, all of the good stuff of our economy comes from the

top down in one form or another. And it's really the people at the top, which we should be thankful for, we should look up to. We should see them as sort of renegade job creators and wealth creators and they should be, you know, sort of honored in our society. But of course, that has to be the rhetoric coming out of a system premised on those ideas, ideological justifications will arise out of the mode of production itself, right? This is a Marxist understanding of ideology, where the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. So under capitalism, we are constantly force-fred from day one, bourgeois ideology, justifications for how this system is created and why it is the best and why it should continue to, to, to

go on. And so any sort of society, any mode of production is going to generate automatically and without any need for conspiracy thinking, it will generate a sort of ideological justifications that will trickle down to the culture at large. But from a socialist perspective, we know and we firmly are committed to the idea that value is created through labor, through toil, through work. You might have a rich guy that can open up a factory, but if there's no workers to make that factory run, you know, that factory is utterly meaningless. And in fact, we're learning that lesson pretty clearly during this global pandemic where workers who are otherwise paid like shit, treated like shit, you know, that work jobs like fast food or grocery shelf stocking, which would in many

situations be seen as, you know, sort of a low wage job and not worth any honor or, you know, any praise. Those are precisely the workers that we need to keep society functioning. And it's the hedge fund managers and the CEOs and the, you know, the investing class and the stock market completely divorced from real material needs and the real economy that we see as superfluous and none necessary. And so the idea that that value is created by labor and not from entrepreneurs and financial investment is really being shown to be true during this pandemic. And it's interesting when capitalism hits a crisis like this, that it really reveals a lot of these false arguments for what they are. And I think we're seeing that. And then, you know,

socialist workplaces would really be a manifestation of that reality that value is created through labor, right? We talked earlier about socialized production and individual appropriation. Well, a socialist workplace would operate on the resolving of that contradiction, which would give you socialized production and socialized appropriation. If all of society comes together to make an economy work, then all of society should benefit from the goodness and the material goods and services that that economy produces. And that's something that's not true under capitalism, but would be true under socialism and socialist workplaces would be sort of the units that build on that idea and make a society that's overcome that contradiction of socialized production

and individual appropriation. And then finally, just the idea that I want to drive home and that hopefully this pandemic has also helped highlighting is that capitalists need labor just like I talked about the idea of somebody with enough money to start a factory but no workers to run it you know that's a meaningless factory that's meaningless capital is not being put towards anything but the flip is not true right labor doesn't need capitalists labor can operate without the capitalist mode of production without the hierarchy in the workplace and in fact in many co-ops throughout the world, many very successful ones, that's exactly what happened. So it's not even an abstract point that I'm making. It's actually been proven over and over again that workplaces can be organized

in democratic ways akin to socialist ideals that don't have capitalists as the ultimate boss at the top of the hierarchy that still function incredibly effective within the confines of a broader capitalist economy. So if those confines were weakened, if you had a broader social economy and this form of democratic workplace organization was the norm we could see just we could get the idea of what the outlines and the implications would be for all of society so just want to end on that point that capitalists desperately need labor in order for their entire system to work but labor doesn't need capitalist capitalist class is a parasitic and ultimately superfluous class that actually holds back society holds back workers exploits dominance

and oppresses people and, you know, going forward into the future as a species, we would do well to buck off that parasitic class and have a society of equals in cooperation, not a society of unequals competing mercilessly for scraps off the tables of the rich. Yeah, again, it's beautifully explaining there's so much to be taken from that, and I really appreciate your input. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is just another example to exemplify a lot of these bourgeois myths and capitalist values within workplace. are indeed extremely flawed and wrong to the broadest extent. While we're told to value the hedge fund, the CEO, the boss, the banker, etc.,

we're also noticing the really quick transition from low-skilled to essential work, or indeed the rush to get us all back to work as quickly as possible, because as you quite rightly say, capital needs labour, but labour does not need capital. And as you quite rightly say, the socialist workplace will take that manifestation of labour creates our wealth and put it to its fullest extent. The socialist states of history and in contemporary times have really done this to great effect. There are so many examples of national planned economies throughout history who really give workers that democratic say in the mode of production in the economy itself. I particularly like the old German Democratic Republic's ethos of workers being able to vote out their boss democratically if they don't meet the standards of valuing their workforces.

So in short, the socialist workpiece will really flip that paradigm on its head. Heads fund managers, CEOs, bankers do not create wealth. we the working class will create wealth and we deserve a democratic say in our workplaces as a result does that make a bit of sense is there anything else you want to add there before we move on no i mean yeah no i think it was well said i agree completely and there's that line i think it was from thatcher

i believe and correct me if i'm wrong but the idea that there is no such thing as society right there are only individuals and again this gets back to this idea of bourgeois ideology serving as the the upholder and the maintenance of the overall system And insofar as those ideas can be forced to be internalized by the population at large, that is actually a main mechanism by which capitalism continues to dominate and perpetuates its system is the ideological conditioning of everybody in the population. And that's one obvious example and a well-known example at that.

But yeah, definitely worth thinking about when we think about not only how the economy actually works, but the ideas that we're told about that economy from our rulers. Yeah, it's a really good example. action really demonstrates how capitalism has moved towards that neoliberal late-stage degeneracy and actually that mode of thought and manifestation into production has really done a lot of damage particularly in that British sphere of national relations that I and I have a real experience in now I live in Scotland. The individualisation of everything has done so much harm not just for mental health but also political thought as a result they're elements of the left

even they get really sucked into this individual neoliberal consciousness which really goes back to Thatcher in the 1970s and it's something we should be really aware of going into the future in context of the workplace and indeed everything in society, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And look, I guess somewhat linked to that, but certainly the last purely economic method of discussion in the context of this episode is, what could workers expect in terms of income inequality

that ravages capitalist workplaces right now and indeed capital society? How would that differ in a socialist workplace? And I guess more broadly, because it's all connected to social society as a result. So when it comes to like sort of income inequality in a socialist workplace, the first thing, especially from a Marxist perspective, that we have to keep in our mind, is that socialism is the transition period between capitalism and communism.

And many of you know that, but it's worth repeating because nothing can change, you can't change everything overnight, right? And so as much as we'd want to snap our fingers, wake up tomorrow, and have a world that is classless, moneyless, and stateless, that's actually not possible. And there has to be a transition. There has to be a political fight. And there has to be a shifting of where society is now to the new society. We look back over the evolution of feudalism into capitalism, and we see the very same thing, multiple hundreds of years of a process slowly occurring at different levels and in different parts of the world, moving away from feudalism and towards capitalism. And so we have to be very clear-minded about the fact that a transition

period will also need to exist between capitalism and socialism. And given that, there will still be, you know, after the revolution or whatever, there will still be initial differentials and income. And we've seen that throughout socialist history, whether you're talking anarchist or more vanguardist and Leninist approaches to revolution, you know, everything can't change overnight.

And triage exists during transition. And what I mean by that is that once a revolution topples the powers that be and wants to take society in a new direction, you can't just do everything at once. You only have so much resources, so much time, so much energy. And so triage is picking what do we focus on first. And given different historical and cultural realities on the ground for different movements and different revolutions, that triage can take very different forms and different things can be prioritized over other things.

But we're not going to be able to move directly into communism out of capitalism. And that's something that you should think about rationally and reasonably when we look at socialist movements historically and presently. But having said that, thinking about what income inequality would look like during this transition, you know, what would it be like without, I would say I would put it this way, without private appropriation of surplus value, right, with democratic control over how to distribute revenue, with profit accumulation and endless growth, no longer being the ultimate goals of society, with markets, whatever's left of them subordinated to social good, and with a robust social safety net that guarantees every. food, health care, education, housing, and employment, and with reparations paid to colonized people, inequality would start disappearing pretty quickly. You know, as much as we like to say that it won't happen overnight and it won't, there's big steps that we can take that would immediately start reducing the amount of inequality in society. And all of those are ways that we would go about doing that. And so during that socialist transition, although inequality

would still exist on some level right away, there would be these steps that we can take very quickly that would begin decreasing it and bringing people into the fold. And just the idea of no matter what job I have, I know that I have health care, I know that I have food, I know that I have housing, education. You know, that will put a lot of power in the hands of workers

and it will immediately start to decrease overall inequality. And when it comes to wealth inequality also, this is sort of an aside, but worth mentioning, when it comes to income inequality, we must always make the argument to people who fancy themselves, you know, defenders of democracy and freedom, that wherever there's income inequality, there will always and necessarily be political inequality. And so if you believe that capitalism is democratic and you believe in the democratic or representative republic form of government, then, you know, we could actually use the battering ram of income inequality to highlight the cognitive dissidents within that framework. Because when some people have way more than they need and some people are sleeping under bridges, you can't even begin to talk about democracy in the political sphere because we know that wealth is immediately weaponized to get those with money, more power, more influence, and more say in the political system, why those that have no money or little money get virtually no say at all or maybe get one vote every four, six, eight years as if that matters at all. So that wasn't a side, but it's worth noting. Now back to the ultimate point of this question.

the goal of a communist society is, and I think this is really important to say, is to ensure the highest quality of life for all of Earth's inhabitants. So during a socialist transition and in a communist society, the goals of our species of human civilization would be how can we ensure the highest quality of life for all of Earth's inhabitants? And that extends to animals and to the natural environment, not just human beings, right? And that is antithetical to the very presence of wealth and equality for the reasons I mentioned and for a million other reasons. Wealth inequality is not cohesive with ensuring everybody the highest quality of life because in order for everybody to have the highest quality of life, there has to be egalitarianism.

There has to be a society of equals. Nobody is dominating anybody else. Nobody has more leverage and money and wealth through which to dominate everybody else. And I think that's the ultimate goal of a communist society and thus of a socialist transition so a socialist transition would always require taking steps in that general direction which means almost synonymous with the decreasing of all forms of inequality but especially income inequality and so that that would be that would be my sort of answer to that question do you have any thoughts on that yeah it's another really principal answer brett and i really appreciate your input into this question which is a difficult one of course Firstly, I would really like to second and elaborate on your point there.

It's worth mentioning again that the socialist state, the proletarian state in its newly flourishing form, class contradictions actually become more acute in that scenario. Stalin would talk about a lot at in his work, but that's very much accentuated and elaborated on in Mao Zedong's work. So it's well worth looking at that to understand how a socialist state itself functions. And how a lot of this stuff cannot be done overnight, not necessarily because the will and desire is not there, but you're actually fighting against the class enemy on a more heightened phrase than you will. were before because you've given workers the stake to run society in the Borges. He will never accept that. But more practically and more acutely in terms of the context of this

answer, I think the way you start to address in income inequality and indeed inequality throughout society, you kind of touched upon it there in your own answer, is through democracy. Contrary to bourgeois notions, indeed bourgeois propaganda the world over about actually existing socialist states and historical examples, democracy is heightened under socialism for working people. I used the old GDR example earlier on there, but there are plenty of manifestations that from Cuba to Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere, where this is the case. And by doing this, along with all the other economic initiatives that you talked about there into as reparations and everything else, you're preparing the ground for the future

communist society, the moneyless class, the stateless society that we all want to see, and addressing all these inequalities as a result. So in a word, it's proletarian democracy that will really lay the ground to eradicate income and indeed all inequalities and it's something we should keep note of, if only to restore a little bit of human dignity to this world, you know? yeah yeah no i think that was incredibly well said and just focusing on the the you know you're talking about dignity the dehumanizing aspect of the capitalist workplace if you've ever worked a job you know how this is i mean it's premised first of all on you needing to go and beg for a job filling out applications

hoping to god some somebody has a job for you and then when you when you have the job you have to make sure that you're doing everything so that your boss doesn't get mad at you right you you're always looking over your shoulder um you're always worried about you pissing the wrong person off. We've all had the experience of, like, calling in sick, whether you're sick or not, how weird it feels to, like, how weirdly anxious you get before you pick up that phone to call your boss, because your boss might be in a bad mood and tell you, you know, if you don't come in, you're fired or even just, which happens a lot with me, they'll begrudgingly agree for you to stay home, but you can tell their voice is just sort of disgusted and they're annoyed that you're

calling in and you have to stay home sick. And, you know, when you get in trouble and you have to you get called into the office like you're a little fucking kid and you got to be talked down to and chastised and patronized and you know we really want you to work on this you know brett you know last quarter you weren't really um great with the customer service surveys and so you really need to keep that smile along and you got to you know blah blah blah blah and all of that serves to to reduce you to a child to make you feel less than that even in my adult life you know i have to go up and hear other talking fucking monkeys right because we're all we're all we're all of evolved from the same ancestry. We're all, you know, glorified apes. I have to listen to some other

asshole who was just born into wealth or through luck or whatever got to a position higher than me and I get to be told when I can shit, what I have to wear, whether or not I can stay home sick with my family, you know, all of this shit is so degrading and it really does, and it's one of the most disgusting aspects of the capitalist workplace. It makes people infantile, right? It's like an infantilizing process and you know school really teaches you to do this when you're a kid and the teacher calls you in and the principal calls you in and you get in trouble or whatever your kid and they're adults so it's okay but it's really getting you ready and priming the pump for you to have that same sort of child and adult relationship when you grow up and enter the workplace as a laborer

and that for me was one of the absolute hardest things to deal with not because i think that I'm above everybody and nobody has the right to tell me shit, but because I'm a human fucking being and the person across the desk is a human being no better or no worse than I, but yet I have to subordinate myself to their every whim. And especially when you add on layers of being a woman in a workplace with sexual harassment and all these other, you know, me too aspects or racialized components of the workplace. And you really start to see just how denigrating and infantilizing and patronizing the capitalist workplace is and that does a number on the human psyche and we'll get into alienation in a bit but

it's really worth thinking about just how brutally condescending and patronizing the capitalist workplaces and look you touch upon a really good point there before we move on i mean this is now no longer an industrializing world we do not longer go to work and see children's fingers and adults hands get cut off with the dangers of machinery as the industrial process raised to its level you talk about the long 19th century and everything else accustomed and associated with that, but degradation, deterioration and indeed humiliation still occurs. You talk specifically there about what capitalism has done to degrade women and indeed people of colour throughout the world, which adds a whole sub-layer of inequality where inequality already exists in something we should also be mindful of in the contemporary age

as we strive for working class unity and the assault of the capitalist mode of production itself. But mental degradation because of the capitalist template still exists for working people, The trade union movement has done wonders to bring the working day down, to create safe working conditions, and indeed, economicistic and social gains as a result. But it's worth reminding that even with all those gains, you can never be the truest form of yourself under capitalism, and that is why we need to be striving for socialism in the contemporary age. For all the examples you've mentioned, and I hope to accentuate a little bit as well. And look, a lot of that moves very nicely into the social sphere of the episode. the first question which is a real brilliant capitalist trope which is leveled the world over is socialism creates a dictatorial regime and indeed a dictatorial workplace as a result in which workers

can most certainly never flourish on in the way that they can under capitalism the classic bourgeois line so if there's anything you want to do there to not only debunk that but really address it in a methodical way that'll be really useful in episodes like this for comparison purposes you know yeah and again this this gets into the capitalist ideology right it's a hell of a drug and it really is internalized even by people who don't benefit from it. But this whole idea that socialism creates a dictatorial working environment, it's debunked by all of socialist history. If anything, the opposite problems were there, right, with a big bureaucracy.

There was too little oversight and sometimes workers would take advantage that of like thinking the old Soviet Union, etc. But it's precisely the other way around, right? Capitalist workplaces are strict dictatorial hierarchies. where workers, as I said, beg for jobs. They have no input over any aspect of their employment. The unemployment line is always there in the back of their mind, keeping them in line. And most accept the bosses dictates on fear of losing that job, losing that income,

the ability to house, clothe, and feed themselves. And especially as a father of two, this comes in hugely when it's not just about me because, you know, maybe me, I could, I'm not somebody who's hypermaterialistic in the capitalist consumerist way. you know, I could live in very reduced circumstances if need be and focus on free time and maybe live a little happier. But when I have kids and a family to provide for, you know, you really, it's not about you and what you're okay with. It's about being able to take care of your family and your kids. And so the capitalist workplace and the entire capitalist economy really weaponizes the need to provide for your family against you, right? You can think in all these movies where some bad guy has a good guy and a gun to his head and the good guy doesn't care about himself done.

or herself dying, but thinks about their family. And it's like, I have to provide for them. And so I'm willing to do whatever it is to get out of this situation so that I can go home and protect and provide for my family. And it's very similar in the capitalist world. Our families and their futures and their well-being is premised on us as the parent going out and having a good job that can take care of them. So it's not even just about yourself becoming homeless or starving or whatever

or being kicked into the unemployment lines. It's also about being able to provide for your family. And in a society which says you're only as good as you are productive, that you know you're only a good father or mother if you can provide for your children. Having that weaponized against you is very psychologically destructive. And so when you hear this bullshit about socialism creating a dictatorial working environment, it's capitalism projecting, you know, the Freudian psychoanalytic term of projection.

It's projecting its own inherent failings onto rival systems. And this has a two-pronged effect. it one serves to obscure the truth of capitalism and thus it sort of protects it right while saying socialism is terrible it's dictatorial meanwhile keep your eyes over on how bad socialism is because we're actually doing the exact same shit here in capitalism and then the second thing it does is it's it lays its worst failures at the feet of its rivals so it literally blames an alternative system for the things that it itself does and this not only applies to the workplace it applies to many aspects of our lives that we're all you know more or less familiar with. But in truth, socialist workplaces in the most condensed, easiest to say way, socialist workplace literally means the expansion of democracy into the workplace and into the broader economy. So why liberals and capitalist apologist, they love to think of themselves as defenders of democracy and freedom. But in reality, capitalism keeps any semblance of democracy really, really confined to a sham of a political system, right, voting every few years or whatever.

But real true democracy, if you really believe in democracy, then why would you not also believe in expanding democracy into the workplace, into the place where most human beings on this earth spend the majority of their waking life? When democracy is absent from that place, you know, what does democracy even mean? And then not only into the individual workplaces, but into the broader economy. When we have no control over our workplace and we have no control over our economy, we really are, you know, serving something that will never serve us. And so we believe in democracy more than capitalists. We believe in democracy more than liberals because we believe democracy should not only be present in some, you know, vague outlines of some fucking bullshit political system, but we believe democracy should be expanded into the places of our lives that affect us most, the workplace and the economy of. overall. And that really is a huge distinction between what we're proposing and what the capitalist

world is and what it proposes. Yeah, there's a lot to be taken from that answer. I'd like to really follow up in what you're saying there in terms of capitalism will project its own feelings onto rivaling systems throughout the world, i.e. the socialist system in any manner of fact to distract away from the problems at home. I mean, let's take any example from history in contemporary times. I mean, it could be anything from the collectivization of agriculture and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, or indeed much more recent anti-China propaganda in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic right now. As you quite rightly say, it serves as a distraction from domestic material conditions at home, which are rather despotic to say the least.

I mean, just to use a current contemporary example from my own material conditions, six people are now allowed to stand on a collective picket for industrial strike action in Britain, in an attempt to further negate that push for labourers to have own bartering power over their own wages rather than go with the whims of the neoliberal market. And indeed more broadly in capital society, the highest stages of every capitalist society are unelected. Those who head the banks, the financial markets, those who head the multinational corporations which reside on these shores and abroad and elsewhere. So to flip all that on its head, what a socialist workplace will do rather than being dictatorial will become the most

democratic institution on earth, giving workers a collective stake into that broader economy, as you say, and make the management of capital all the wealth that is created accordingly subservient to the state so it can be distributed on a more egalitarian basis throughout society based on human need rather than private profit. And I guess very much connected to that and maybe the obvious segue after what I've been talking about is

how could a socialist workplace deliver on working ours in the interest of the labour in a way that capitalist society simply cannot at this stage or simply does not want to. It's probably more accurate. Yeah and so I think this gets down to the incentive systems of the two competing systems of capitalism

and socialism. You know, in a society like a socialist society that is no longer premised on profit accumulation, on endless growth for its own sake, and on the privatized sort of shareholder investor paradigm, working hours could easily be reduced, right? Because as I said earlier, the goal of a communist society and of a socialist transition is increasing the quality of life for all of earth's inhabitants, for all people. And if the goal of is increasing the quality of life, well, that's synonymous with decreasing the amount of hours every day that we must toil in order to meet our needs.

You know, working eight to ten hours a day, five to seven days a week is really an invention of capitalism and is a reflection of its underlying incentive structure. But for tens of thousands of years, humans would work, and I even actually look this up, humans worked, you know, an average of two to four hours a day, hunting, foraging, securing basic sustenance. And then the rest of that time was involved in social groupings of, you know, social life, basically, just being a human being. And so when we're thinking about less hours, in an entire economic system that is no longer premised on how much profit we can squeeze out on growing the economy for its own sake, et cetera, the amount of work hours that each individual would have to put in would go down. And this isn't hard to understand.

in a capitalist context, if you own a big business, you need to, especially if you have shareholders, you need to return high profit margins to give those shareholders a return on their investment. And that means, you know, pumping out as much basically value as you can and usurping as much as you can to pass onto your shareholders. And so that means no matter what technological innovations or automations that we can come up with, you're still going to want to squeeze as much as you can out of any individual worker. and, you know, give them as little as you can in return. And so that is literally a reflection of the basic incentive structure of capitalism itself.

But in a mid-to-late socialist transition, after we get over that initial hump, right, and even in early socialist transition, we could approach this reality, where use value is more important than exchange value, work hours would be reduced as much as possible. This is in line with the socialist incentive system of creating, the highest quality of life for the most amount of people. And we all know that the highest quality of life is not constantly being marketed to and constantly having to work as much as you can to buy more and more shit that you really don't need. A high quality of life would mean more time with your family, more time with your friends, more opportunities to develop

your creative intellectual capacities. You know, Marx talks about it in a communist society, I'd be able to fish in the morning and hunt in the afternoon and be a critic after dinner. I'm somebody who hunts and fishes and likes to criticize shit. So that's always sort of spoke to me. But he really is gesturing towards this idea that in a different system with different incentive structures, we would not have to constantly have our nose to the grindstone to produce growth and profit for other people. But that work could come to play a more rational, reasonable role in our lives.

And that means a less dominant one because we don't want to spend all of our hours. hours toiling away. We want to spend time being a human being and living our lives. And that may require some caps on growth, right? We might not need to have an ever-expanding economy for its own sake. And that may mean we have less shiny gadgets and stuff to play with. But the overall quality of life and putting value on what really matters in life would I think go a long way in making people happier and reducing the amount of hours of toil every week would be just part and parcel with that overall project. And then you add on top of all of that technological automation no longer being used as something that workers have to compete with, right? Under capitalism,

technological advancements and automations can be used to kick workers into the unemployment line so you reduce labor costs. And also workers have to compete with new technologies for their jobs. and one easy example is like self-driving cars. If you're a delivery truck driver and you're staring down the barrel of self-driving automation technology, that automation technology is not going to enhance your life and the profit generated from those technologies are not going to go to you and your family and your community. They're still going to be siphon to the capitalist and to the ruling class. You'll just be out of a job.

So under capitalism, workers have to compete with technology and automation, but under socialism, technology and automation with the ultimate goal of increasing, increasing the quality of life would be used to take away the amount of hours every individual has to work. And we could even possibly in the future, depending on how much technological advancement we could come up with, we could approach or begin to approach post-scarcity realities at some point, driving working hours even lower and maybe in the long run obliterating the need to toil at all. At the very least, communism and socialism open up that path to humanity whereas under capitalism that path will forever be blocked off again because of the basic

incentive structure of the capitalist mode of production overall yeah there's a lot to come out of that answer which actually speaks to a little bit of what we were talking about earlier on in terms of capitalism is only a tiny portion of the development of humanity as a species in terms of economic and indeed social relations i particularly liked your statistic there when you're talking about the very origins of humanity the tribal being and a sort of collective approach to life that is really earmarked by that primitive communism era, as Marx calls it, and how that collective approach towards all kinds of gathering basic necessities really only took a small portion of the day.

And Karl Marx goes on to discussing his writings, and people like Eric Hobbesbaum and A.L. Morton have really accentuated and elaborated on that in contemporary times, that primitive communism, however tentatively and however adapted to modern material conditions, is a template for the future. And how, as you quite really mention, socialism opens the pathway to that future, that transitional process to that future and really places that society

that runs on material need, material human need, rather than just overt greed and private profit. And so to put that right back to the context of this episode, the socialist workplace opens the door to that path. It lays the first seeds towards collective participation, democratic management, and indeed both of

those things intersecting into the broader economy more broadly on a national and eventually international scale. It both encourages and heightens humans flourishing as a species by providing the material conditions to allow that collective spirit to thrive and develop. And look, another really common trope level

that socialists when discussing the capitalist mode of production and its failures is the idea that capitalism delivers on innovation in a way that socialism cannot. It breeds and produces innovation accordingly. So when we're looking at the socialist workplace and everything that entails, how can that deliver in a way that the capitalist mode of production cannot? So I'll take a little nuanced of an answer on this

and I'll say yes and no, right? The question does capitalism deliver on innovation? On some level, it does because, you know, even though as we are anti-capitalist and Marx himself was an anti-capitalist, Marx himself knew to be aware of the advantages that capitalism has, and one of those is that capitalism is an extremely dynamic system with an incentive structure that does often lead to innovation, right? If you do come up with some really good product that a lot of people like, you can have way to earn a lot and a lot of money. And for some people, that is a sort of incentive structure

that leads them on to trying to innovate. But the answer is also no, because capitalism also has a tendency to concentrate wealth at the very top, to lock most of its creative minds up in endless toil, to devastate small businesses and boom and bus cycles, to form monopolies that really prevent competition and the arising of new ideas and new ways of doing things, and to gear innovations toward profit, which can often exclude innovations that aren't immediately marketable and profitable. So even with the dynamism of capitalism and the sort of undeniable fact that it can lead to really tremendous amounts of innovation, at the same time it does all of that, it also precludes so much possible innovation. And just to focus on one of the things

I said, locking up the most creative minds and endless toil. So actually it's a quote from Stephen J. Gould, and the quote is, I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. And that really gets at this point of locking creative minds up and endless toil. If you don't have the privileges of wealth, of connections, of really family wealth in a lot of instances, there are so many brilliant, creative, wonderful, human beings that just because of where they were born and who they were born to can never either develop their capacities or express them in meaningful ways because they're locked up

in the precarity of day-to-day work. And you really can't underestimate how big of a hit that wields against the ability to innovate when only a very small percentage of people in a capitalist society really have the ability and the opportunity to develop those capacities to their highest level and then express them in society more broadly. And so for a million different reasons, even despite capitalism's dynamism, there is a ceiling, a cap on the creative energies and resources of the population that really is put on top of society by splitting society up into classes. And that really can't be overstated.

So a socialist or communist society, just by its very nature, would liberate countless of those minds from endless toil. It would incentivize innovation that helps society, and it would be able to think and plan over the long term as opposed to the merely short-term profiteering that is so fundamental to capitalism. And then just the idea, which I think you touched on a few questions back, of precarity.

People, especially in the U.S. society, when you are constantly having to work one, two, three jobs, when you are never catching up on sleep, when you're always worried about your next paycheck, when you're always one or two paychecks away from sleeping under a bridge and not being able to pay your rent, you are not allowed. You're really literally not allowed to have the freedom to develop yourself, to work toward self-actualization. And so in a socialist society, going back to when we're talking about even just reducing the number of hours of work every week, you would be freeing people up to develop themselves, to find,

find out. And in a lot of instances, it's not even like people know what they're good at but can't pursue it because of capitalism. They're not even given the time to find out what they're interested and what they're good at because of the dictates of class society. And so transcending class society overall and moving meaningfully in that direction would do so much for opening up and freeing people to develop their capacities that could then be put towards the betterment of society as a whole. And so again, I really don't think that we can underestimate just how important that one element is in this broader question. Yeah, I felt this was a question which was really worth pondering and discussing and you've got a really great take on it and you're really great with

words and it really comes across well in the episode. But this is the first question which really initially started to take me leftwards way back in the day and I've developed a lot since then. But it is one that is still very close to my heart. And the quote that you use within your answer really demonstrates this fact is that the next Leonardo da Vinci is locked with within a zero hours contract and can't look up from the groundstone. The next wonderful musical talent is locked into unemployment benefits and is too worried about the material surroundings to really develop their passion for music. And even those who have the means or the skill to obtain a bank loan to set up their own small business, that business can only remain open so long as the

repayments can be made to the large financial companies. Placing ownership into the hands of the large financial capitalists and allowing the dream of the little man to make it big, the classic American dream, which is applied across the world in various ways. For me, innovation can only grow and develop when the material circumstances of life, stable income, a roof over your head, basic necessities of life are secure. And there is only one type of workplace and indeed material society that can truly deliver on that. And that is socialism, which puts people before private profit at every entity and delivers a truly meaningful ideological commitment towards delivering for all its citizens

rather than just a privileged view. Yeah, incredibly well said. I completely agree. And I don't think that gets talked about enough, you know? Yeah, I completely agree. I guess to some extent, that's why mediums like radical reflections and revolutionary affidavradiol and Red Menace exist

to really tackle a lot of these common tropes and really debunk them methodically one by one. So it's a real pleasure to do this with you. But look, somewhat connected to that in the previous issue we were just talking about, particularly in the late capitalist neoliberal form of economic relations that we know day to day, now in the contemporary world. Atomization and individualization of human life is ever present,

not only in the capitalist society, which disconnects us from the rest of the societal functions, but particularly in that workplace where we're told to treat each other as rivals and go against each other for promotion and whatever else. So what would a socialist workplace do to counteract that and how would it be more beneficial for human life as a result? Sure. So, you know, market competition, whether it's firms competing on the market, or workers competing in the labor market is premised on liberal individualism and private property. So much of what we're talking about is premised on private property. Marx makes it very clear in his economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 that private property

is the foundation of alienation. We were talking earlier about inequality, private property, owning land and the means of production, et cetera, is the foundation of so much of that inequality. And so competition broadly is really rooted and tied to these. other aspects of bourgeois society and liberal philosophy. This individualism means that any responsibility towards the collective or towards other people is either subordinated to or rejected in favor of self-enrichment. This eats away at and erodes social cohesion over time.

It creates economic and political inequality and instability, perpetuates the anarchy of production, which creates environmental degradation among so many other things. things. It also serves as the basis for, as I said, alienation and poverty, right? I just talked about private property being the basis of alienation and inequality. So, you know, it serves as the basis for that because it turns and inflames crime and drug addiction and suicide and broader social breakdown. And we're really seeing that in Western capitalist country specifically and especially the UK and the US, where society itself doesn't really have any cohesion. It's fragmented. It's becoming increasingly balkanized. The narratives that we listen to are different.

The visions for our future are different. You know, people are, we're getting closer and closer to social breakdown. Lots of talk recently about, you know, civil war in the U.S., etc. Hyper-polarization. There is no common good. There's no vision of a common future. It's every man for themselves. And that creates an untenable situation in society at large. So in this way, competitive individualism tends to undermine itself over the long term. It eats away at the foundations of society overall. And when we're talking about ideas like there is no society, well, how can that not have a corrosive effect over time on the ability for society overall to function. And so when I'm looking at the U.S. and projecting forward,

I don't see either a left-wing takeover of the state, nor do I see a really fortification or increased belief in the legitimacy of the state. What I see in the U.S. at least, and this is just for the U.S. because it's where I'm from, is more balkanization, more fracturing, more breaking down. And even in this pandemic, we get little hints of that because the federal government is really nowhere to be found. And so what happens when the federal government in the U.S. is really, you know, missing in action is that individual states have to take the lead and they have to decide what's good. And so what you get is this patchwork all across the country of different responses. And that is exactly what can't happen in a pandemic. If you want to have a meaningful

response to a pandemic, much less climate change, it needs to be uniform, consistent. It needs to have national and global leadership. So already under the pressure of this pandemic, we're seeing a breaking down and a going down to the state level. And so some states, like in Florida or Georgia, they're reopening. People are having spring break on the beaches. Coronavirus is just plowing through those communities

in other places like California led by, you know, more democratic liberal governors. You have complete lockdowns. And so that's just not a basis on which to move forward as a unified society. And so the individualism inherent in competition and in the prem and premised on private property really eats away at itself and undermines itself over time. And I think that's what we're seeing. But cooperation as opposed to competition, right?

Cooperation in the name of safety, security, health and happiness for all promotes the sort of social cohesion and sense of duty and obligation towards one another that can really fuel a more stable, sustainable society where everyone genuinely feels. that they're playing a role in something greater than themselves and whose success is premised not on the devastation and defeat of its competitors, but on the well-being and success of everyone around them. And this is where the collectivity and the sort of egalitarian nature of socialism really comes in is like, you know, I want to live in a society where my neighbors are happy, where my neighbors are healthy, where they're taking care of, where people aren't reduced to. robbing an acts of violence out of economic desperation where every major city doesn't have block

after block filled with homeless people in tents sleeping on the concrete where people with untreated mental illness are kicked out to live under bridges and in gutters instead of being taken care of right hyper individualism undermines itself and corrods the society at large and we're exactly seeing that in u.s and other societies just like it and that whole that whole paradigm is premised on individual competition in a marketplace and we have to transcend that we have to get beyond that and we have to realize that we really are all in this together whether you like it or not and it can't be every man or woman for themselves it has to be one for all and all for one um i have your back you have mine i care about you and your family you care about me and

mine and that is the the ultimate vision that we're offering as communists in the 21st century a world radically centered around different incentives, different ideas about what makes a healthy society. And we're committed to the idea that cooperation, not competition, not ruthless market competition is the way towards a better society that doesn't constantly undermine itself in every situation and especially during pandemics and crises like this. So yeah, those are sort of my thoughts on that general question. Yeah, that's a brilliant answer again. You've really touched upon a really good point which really addresses a lot of the things we've been touching upon in this episode at length at various points in that as human beings developed they were initially

cooperative very much a collective being towards all social tasks going into the immediate future and it is the building of class society as a template that has really broken that cooperative spirit and all of that is premised upon private property which has taken many different forms across the ages but has been really rubber-stamped in the modern contemporary bourgeois capitalist mode of production era and is the main social premise of all bourgeois societies. And look, that has really increased individualisation and atomisation as we degenerate into this neoliberal form that we know all around us. And it's really produced this fragmentation of societal and state structures

that you mentioned there in your answer in the context of the US, very prevalent in the UK and even more so prevalent in the Irish free state. With the anarchic whims of free market production, only really increasing and further encouraging the material basis for that individualisation and selfish to take place within the workplace, with the basis of individual property relations really taking that to a societal basis under a capital estate. So what a socialist workplace will do to sort of flip that on its head is almost join up the dots again where everything has become fragmented. Encouraging

collective unity first within the workplace in terms of guiding production, but linking it to a much higher purpose, much bigger than itself, really putting the societal function of working together back on the table again in a really visible way. And indeed, as a point in passing, really break that connection with private property expropriate it so that property can serve only social purposes going into the future. Yeah, absolutely. And I was flying 30,000 feet and talking about society as a whole. So to just take one aspect and bring it back down to the socialist workplace itself, you know, sort of a side question somewhat related to that one would be like, you know, what do you do about laziness and motivation, you know, in a capitalist workplace, you know, you can be fired,

you can be yelled at by your boss and that keeps people in line. In a socialist workplace, you wouldn't have that disciplinary mechanism. So what would stop people from just doing the least work they could possibly do, being super lazy, et cetera? And I have an answer to that, which is that under the capitalist workplace, you actually get more laziness and less sense of motivation. And you always see, and I've always done this, and all my coworkers have done this, you cut corners, you take two-hour ship breaks, you know, you extend your lunch break. You don't work your hardest. Anytime you can hide away from your bosses and not be seen doing nothing you do. And that's because, in a context of coercion, you are not motivated to actually work hard. You're just motivated not to

get fired and to continue building a check. You're not working for yourself. You're alienated from the product of your labor. You're alienated from your coworkers. You're alienated in a lot of ways from yourself. You're just trying to get the fuck by without having a terrible day. And that leads, I think, to more sort of doing the minimal amount of work possible to get by. When on the flip side, in a socialist workplace, you're no longer being coerced by your. boss or coerced by the fear of homelessness or starvation, but the only person you have to answer to is your co-workers, right? And even in a capitalist society, like multiple times in my life where I've been sick or even though I wasn't sick, I just wanted to take a sick day because I didn't fucking

feel like going into work. You know, you'd call up your boss or whatever, but the only thing that would stop me from doing that is thinking like, oh, actually we're understaffed. And if I call in, then my co-worker is going to have to pick up the slack. And, you know, I like them. I don't want them to have to suffer. So I will come in and have their back so that they don't have to suffer. But fuck my boss. Fuck my company. I don't give a shit if they lose profits or whatever, but I do care about my fellow co-workers. And so even in a capitalist context, you're really already thinking about your coworkers. You don't want to fuck them over or give them too much work. And that really keeps you from being super lazy or whatever. But in a socialist workplace, that would just be expanded.

And so it's not like you have anybody to answer to other than your comrade, your coworkers, the people that stand next to you. You know that lady over there and that guy over there. You know they have families and you know that them being able to feed their families and provide for their families is also tied up with your ability to do the same for yours. And so you're not under anybody. There's no hierarchy that you're answering to, but it's a it's a sort of group of equals all working together for the greater good and for the benefit of not just me and mine, but for you and yours as well. And so even on that level of motivation and laziness, socialist workplaces are much more conducive to getting the best out of people than a capitalist workplace is. Yeah, that's a really good practical point, actually.

I mean, strip away all the theory and all the other things which are important in a context of an episode such like this, but every human just wants to feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves and are delivering something accordingly. And to sum all that up at a really broad sentence, the socialist workplace will not only guarantee an end to the alien issues of labor, is present in nearly every capitalist workplace the world over, but also the chance to shape your national circumstances and the broader economy that goes with that. Giving you stake in building a society that runs in your interest, the interests of the working class who create all the labour and all the wealth

the world has to offer. This is what socialism can, has and will deliver into the future and should give us all kinds of motivations as we continue to organise in our local, national and international sphere of relations. Yeah, well said. Absolutely. And I guess moving on to the real practical application of labor unity in a socialist state, it would be really good to get your thoughts on a question, which I ponder often, if I'm really honest, is what do you see is the role of trade unions in a socialist society, and how would that impact on a socialist workplace more broadly? Yeah, so this is a really good question. I don't have all the answers, but I have perhaps some thoughts that could be useful here. Unions really are a product of class struggle. They are a product of class society. They arise in a capital. context as one of the only effective tools that working people have in their fight against

the property classes. Unions, at least in the way they exist today, right, are in a lot of ways a product of capitalism. And as such, I think that they would become, at least in the way that they're currently structured in the role they currently serve, they would become increasingly unnecessary or altered as a socialist transition intensified, and they would probably disappear completely under the final stage of communism. You know, all of society would be operating in the service of protecting people, protecting workers, et cetera. There would be no owning class to combat and fight with over wages and conditions, et cetera. Democracy in the workplace would be the ultimate fulfillment of the union idea. It would really be taking the logic of a union and

taking it to its fullest conclusion, which is just to have the workplace itself under the control of the democratic workers, right? Having said all of that, I think there would probably still be something like unions that would be necessary, particularly in a socialist transition. So perhaps unions would exist as grassroots formations in certain trades and industries, in dialogue with other industries and society at large, in a sort of collective effort to plan an economy. And so you could see like even in a socialist transition, there may be different interests between different industries. And that will have to be solved some way. And the most democratic and grassroots way to solve that would we have representation for those different industries in dialogue with one another talking about their interests, also in dialogue with a third party, perhaps the government, whatever ruling structure or coordinating structure there is in society.

And so you could have unions be really fundamentally altered in what they do, but still existing in a socialist transition to advocate for the interest of a given trade and industry, which, as I said, could, you know, genuinely come into conflict with other interests and other trades and industries. And so on that level, having representation in the form of something like unions could still be useful, you know, but they would be no longer needed as the sole vehicles through which workers can fight their bosses as they're, at least in the deeper stages of a transition. And certainly when we get to communism, there wouldn't be any bosses anymore to fight, right? So I don't see them completely going away. I see them no longer having to function in the way they currently have to function under capitalism and would be

altered and manifest in slightly different ways to exist in a socialist transition, which could still be incredibly useful and necessary. But again, I just want to emphasize this idea that democracy in the workplace, a socialized workplace, is the ultimate fulfillment of the union idea and the union vision of workers coming together to fight for one another and for a better life for themselves. Once the boss is gone, you know, democracy and the workplace would take over and that is the fulfillment of unionism broadly. But again, I still think that they would exist in some form. It would just take on a radically different sort of structure and need and focus than they currently do underclass

society. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely it makes sense. I mean, I could never claim to be an expert on this question, but my thoughts on this are rather similar to your own, in that if we consider that the role of the union in capital society is not only to represent the worker, but also give them a stake in the collective empowerment of their own class. Then for that reason, they also have a really direct role, not in confrontation, but with collaboration with the vanguard party that will come to power within the proletarian state. And there are many examples of this throughout history with the unions had a real direct role in the five-year plan or various five-year plans in the Soviet Union, the 10-year harvest in Cuba, and other

manifestations around the world. So while the party structure itself would take on the basic questions of foreign policy, international policy and those kind of questions, the role of unions in a socialist society would have a real direct link into that sort of planned economy that we've been talking about throughout this episode. Taking all the nurturing

and experience that has been gained through that conflict with the capitalist class in a capitalist state and applying it to really positive use in how to guide a planned economy going into the future in a socialist state.

Which means in the context of an individual socialist workplace the union presence very much remains as a direct link between party and worker but also, in my own humble opinion, should become mandatory practice in a socialist state to really guide that echelon of democracy that we've been talking about

throughout the context of this episode? I might be rambling a little bit here, so hope all that makes a bit of sense. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think we're in complete agreement on that. And it's important to note and sort of reiterate what we were sort of saying is like even in a socialist transition, where the entire incentive structure is really being altered toward the betterment of human good, there still will be conflicting interests. There still will be a need to to organize society at national and global levels, as well as a need to organize society on the basis of a community, a trade, an individual workplace, et cetera, right? The fact that different human beings will have certainly different sort of interests

or at least different visions of how to do things will still be present because that's just product of getting a bunch of human beings into the same civilization and trying to make it work. And so unions can serve as that role to help, as you say, plan to work out. differences between different trades to coordinate with the broader society at large who you know might um not know the the specificities of this or that workplace or this or that industry and so yeah the transformation of unions to these units of grassroots um democracy for for workers in different areas i think is really really um interesting and important and would certainly be the direction

i think unions would go under a socialist transition for sure yeah absolutely i mean the role grassroots democracy in a newly flourishing proletarian state alongside the governing vanguard party cannot be understated. It's why documents and platform a lot of trade union members on radical reflections to really give their voices as to how that would progress into the future, you know?

And look, all of that leading quite nicely into the final question of the episode, which came from the Patreon form, I think this is a really good question for us all to ponder is, if we look at the capitalist workplace right now, which ones are best positions to make that transition into the social state. I mean, I think this is a really good one to ponder even if it is only theoretical and

hypothetical, you know? Difficult question. And perhaps coming from the U.S., we'd have different answers compared to somebody in Ireland or the U.K. or whatever. You know, I don't really have an exact answer here, partly because in the U.S., at least, unions have been decimated since the Reaganite 80s. I think only something like 7% of workers in the private sector are members of unions, right? And so that makes it very difficult when you start thinking of which workplaces are the most suitable for socialism right now because you'd think that the most highly unionized workplaces would be the obvious sort of answers to places that can be turned to socialism

quicker than non-unionized places and perhaps that true. But just sort of zooming out a little bit and I'd love to hear your opinion on this as well because I certainly don't have all the answers. Some things came to mind. Um, huge retailers with robust infrastructure like Walmart and Amazon could be ripe for nationalizing in a socialist transition. And you could quickly sort of discard the, um, the capitalist owning classes of those businesses, take them over in a nationalizing project and then give the workers of those of those companies much more say in, in how their daily lives are structured and patterned. Um, another example would be there's lots of gig economy work. that could be socialized, as a lot of gig economy work already often exists in a sort of wild west of very little oversight. There's lots of day-to-day autonomy, right? If you're an Uber driver, you have the app, you know, you have to continually touch base with your bosses or

whatever, but day-to-day, you're driving your own car, you're deciding who to pick up, etc. So that autonomy is sort of already there, which could help in the transition to a worker-controlled workplace. And then the precarity exists in the gig economy that could foster class struggle. People that are forced to work in the gig economy really are living and working in a very precarious industry. And people that have to deal with high levels of precarity every day would be more open to an explicitly class struggle approach to socializing their workplace. Another sort of sector that came to mind is fast food and grocery store workers, other essential workers that we have been shown just how important they are during this pandemic. And it's already a site of struggle for

higher wages, safer conditions, and basic human dignity. You know, the fight for 15, some of the spontaneous strikes with Instacart, Whole Foods, and Amazon, a lot of grocery workers and nurses, protesting terrible or unsafe working conditions during a pandemic. These are places where the class struggle is being inflected during this pandemic and people are really realizing not only how essential these workers are, but the workers themselves are realizing how much more they can demand because they're starting to see just how much power they have in society. And that is a site that could possibly be elevated and exacerbated and elaborated. And then there's public unions. Like here in the U.S., public unions are often an epicenter of strikes and wildcat strikes,

specifically like the teacher union strikes. We've seen a lot over the last several years. It's just another hot spot of already existing organizing with some radicals, you know, socialist and communist already in the mix that could sort of easily be expanded and, um, and fought, you know, bringing the class struggle to a higher level. Um, in general, I mean, most, if not all workplaces can certainly be socialized in the abstract and they can be improved by socialization. Co-ops already exist across the world and they're often, and this has been empirically proven, the co-ops are often more productive, they're more efficient, they're more streamlined, and even successful than traditional capitalist workplaces. So taking and expanding on those models

could also be an avenue for success. But again, a huge question, it's very hard. I'm not in every single industry on the ground, so I can't tell you which exact workplaces are most primed to which ones aren't. But from a sort of, you know, birds eye view, those are some areas at least that I think there's some promise in and the class struggle could certainly at least be increased in those sectors. What say you? Yeah, some really great examples there.

I mean, I've been pondering this question a lot since it was presented to me and I could never claim to be an expert on any of these and these are just my own thoughts but there are four really key sectors which come to mind, my end. I mean, the first example might seem a little bit too obvious and a little bit of a cheap

but the way the National Health Services structure right now in Britain would be really ripe for that transition into public ownership in the socialist sense of the word within the newly flourishing proletarian state. There would almost be no excuses, and there would be huge appetite to do that with all the financial resources at play

within a massive industrial nation like Britain. If somewhere like Cuba can do a small island in the Caribbean underneath an economic embargo, then that is really the first step you would be considering in the newly flourishing proletarian state in Britain. Secondly, transport, but particularly the railways is a really big thing I've been pondering a lot since the pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic right now.

Because of course railways and rail transport are really connected to commuting people to work more broadly, but also everything to do with the social apparatus of society. Plus the fact that the RMT in Britain are one of the most militant unions about. I think that would be a really good way for us to transport. It also takes me back to the Irish Transport General Workers Union refusing to carry colonial troops and supplies around the island and the height of the Irish independence war.

So for those two reasons, I guess, I would put transport. transport on that list, no problem whatsoever. Equally, the postal service for me would also be really ripe to taking that first step towards public ownership in a socialist state. I love reading about the old Soviet postal models back in the Soviet Union, but more broadly in Royal Mail today, although it is privatized, it's backed by it has a really good core membership base within the union, the communication workers union, which I think would also would really keen to take that step to really make sure that was a real entity and used

to its full potential in a socialist state. And finally, although you touched upon this as well, the hospitality sector from me in Britain would almost be the front vanguard towards the socialist state in terms of class contradictions and pushing towards working class ownership of society and therefore from that really take the step forward to become that democratic union that we were talking about there

in terms of how the unions would function under socialism. Unite the union represents so many hospitality workers here in Britain and would be very delighted to take that transitional step towards that democratic save for the workers and the democratic link with the party in the socialist state, I would imagine. So these are my thoughts. I mean, they are only my thoughts.

I'm sure there are endless numbers of examples that I haven't mentioned here. So it'd be good to have discussion offline if everybody wanted to talk about this, you know? Yeah, and I would add to all great answers, for sure. And I would add to that, wouldn't it be easy? This would probably be actually one of the hardest things to take over because of just how high-pitched

the class struggle would have to be in order for it to really happen. But the nationalization of banks would be absolutely crucial. The financial institutions that are, really the epicenter and the core of global capitalism being taken over by the people nationalized and then the entire apparatus of investment and finance and all of that put back into the hands of the people would be a huge, you know, sort of stepping stone on the way towards communism and certainly crucial for a socialist transition. Again, one of the harder things to grab because that is sort of the epicenter of global capitalism, the ruling class, will fight tooth and nail to ensure

that never happens. And you actually never even really hear about it, at least in the U.S. Just even the idea is sort of anathema to a lot of people. But it would absolutely be a crucial, crucial choke point for a socialist transition and for elevating and advancing the class struggle. What a great example. I mean, as you say there, if we're talking about the easiest, this would definitely be one of the hardest, but certainly if you're talking about one of the most necessary going towards that sister transition. This is nail on head. This is the epicenter of the social estate

in many instances. And there are many instances throughout history to show that the revolution will live or die by this premise. Marx, Engels, Lenin and others would really stipulate that the failure of the Paris commune really railed on the fact that they wouldn't take that extra step to nationalise the banks when they're in the height of their ascendancy.

And indeed Lenin learned from that immensely as they pushed towards that proletarian state in Russia at the time. So if we're talking about bringing anything into public membership, the banks would have to be the key point, or certainly one of the key points of that sector, of that push towards socialism. For without it, no matter how strong your base is in terms of membership, it will be overrun if you do not take the financial management of capital and use it for social gain. Learning from history is so important and so useful when put to practical

application in our own contemporary organising in the modern day. But look, just before I close off this episode and let you go, and I thank you immensely for coming on. It's been a pleasure and a privilege to work with you again. Do you want to give a shout out to where we can find your work online and anything else you want to say just before we let you go? Sure, yeah. Thank you. I always love working with you. We'll absolutely do it again. Ultimately, my final thoughts are we want to build a better world, a world centered around increasing the quality of life for all people. And, you know, the workplace is an essential sort of arena for that class struggle. And so at the very least, you know, neither of us are experts. We said we were very clear about that up front. But we want to

offer arguments and perspectives and hopefully challenge some ingrained ideas that people might have about the workplace and how it could be different because, you know, critiquing the world as it is is an important aspect of what we do, but offering a vision for how things could be is also really, really important. It can often be a lot harder and we don't want to, you know, make predictions, but at the same time offering people a different vision of how the world could be is essential to our task. And then I also wanted to say, since, you know, We have a history talking about the Irish struggle specifically. Something beautiful happened that is worth pointing out,

which is Ireland donated over $1.5 million to Navajo indigenous American tribes during their COVID-19 pandemic and the fight against it. And the reason the Irish people gave that material support and sign of solidarity to indigenous peoples here in the U.S. is precisely because during the potato famine of the Navajo sent over money to the Irish people to help them. Even though they were in the midst, I think it was just after the Trail of Tears. You know, the genocide against indigenous people on this continent was in full force. And still they set money aside to send to the Irish people in a time of Irish need. And the Irish have turned around and reciprocated that to indigenous peoples here in the U.S. And, you know, everything else aside, that's a beautiful, beautiful symbol of solidarity across space,

and time and culture and history and it's just worth pointing that out and just applauding really but having said all of that um you can find everything i do at revolutionary left radio dot com you can find our youtube channel our patreon our sister podcast and everything else so thank you so much for having me it's always an honor and a pleasure to have these conversations with you um rev left and radical reflections are you know we stand shoulder and shoulder with what we're trying to do um and you always have our love and our support and our solidarity from across The Pond. The cool system ups I die

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