To win social foresight, end capitalism

In the Inaugural Address he wrote for the First International, the first big international workers’ movement, Karl Marx hailed the ten-hour legal limit to the working day won in Britain as a first victory in “the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class”.

Social foresight! A string of government and corporate decisions to promote and develop more and more “carbon bombs”, fossil-fuel-based developments set to worsen climate change and a cascade of environmental destruction, show us how far from that we still are. The rule of private profit makes society, not exactly stupid in general, but short-sighted.

Advances

Scientific and technical advances developed under capitalism enable us to estimate future results of choices today more than under previous modes of production.

In many modes of production, in fact, each generation’s prediction of conditions for the next generation would be dim. Children grew up into the same social category, doing the same work, with the same technology, under the same conditions, as their parents and grandparents, until wars or natural disasters supervened.

Capitalism opens out technical improvements and a widening of options for children.

Yet many surveys show that in the richest countries, countries which also have for decades been involved in wars only far away, people are more likely to expect a worse life for their children than for themselves. They have a feeling of helplessness about that.

Why? One reason will be that in those countries living standards have improved in some material dimensions — people have smartphones, flatscreen TVs, overseas holidays — but many underpinnings have worsened.

Working hours are more irregular and insecure. Housing tenancies are more insecure. Schooling has broadened, but the penalty for “failure” — for not getting through the exam mill — has sharpened.

Some medical treatments have improved, but the queues for more everyday care have worsened. More people face the prospect of many years in old age when they will live lonely, poor, disabled, and with only perfunctory care.

“Public goods”, which do not yield private profit to private individuals, have been systematically downgraded. And the flagrant preference for immediate profit over “social foresight” threatens the great “public good”, the Earth.

Marx wrote : “Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like good heads of households, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition”.

That need for social foresight, he argued, showed “private ownership of the globe by single individuals”, where each patch of land or what lies beneath is exploited according to what is most profitable for its owner, to be “absurd”.

Socialism — common ownership of productive wealth, democratic control — is the precondition for making possible any comprehensive social foresight, or any comprehensive planning to make our children’s lives freer, happier, and richer.

“Social foresight” will never be 100%. There will always be unintended consequences we failed to foresee. We can’t know what new scientific advances will give us. But we can do much, much better than capitalism.

It has to be built on the current generation of adults knowing that we have enough for immediate consumption, and can afford to give priority to improving collective conditions for our children. We also have the basis for that.

Today in Britain, on the whole, people do not have children at all unless they have decided that they are willing to forego something themselves today for the children’s tomorrow. Socialism can make that “foresight” systematic and social.