On the Transition to Socialism

(Letter)

5 December 2011

Dear Workers Vanguard,

I appreciated your article in WV No. 989, “Economics of a Workers State in Transition to Socialism” [Young Spartacus pages]. This article helped me understand that communism cannot be achieved in a short time although we must be prepared for a revolution which can strike rather quickly. It also made clear that deformed workers states such as China do not represent the kind of revolution that Trotsky and Lenin had envisioned when leading the first successful workers revolution in 1917. “Market Socialism”, as comrade Seymour points out, is an economic system that still leads to unemployment, shortages of items and overall economic waste. These deformities are birthed by the bureaucracy that does not have a program for international class struggle and revolution that is paramount in achieving communism.

Many left organizations argue that socialism means a fair share for every individual but this article rightly focuses on the maximization of production. In “Critique of the Gotha Programme” Karl Marx makes the point that because communism will come out of the womb of capitalism there will still be people who make more wages and have a higher standard of living than others. This is because it will take generations of people working communally under a society in which capitalism is no longer the system in place, for society to achieve the maximization of production required to achieve communism in which Marx says, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”.

Paul