Chapter 30 Appendix Socialism: Meeting Needs or Changing Needs

The theoretical significance of the bankruptcy of "Refrigerator Socialism" lies in the fact that it once again raises the issue of what is socialism and how to build socialism in an extremely sharp form in front of contemporary socialists.It also raises the issue of whether economic development means social progress to all human beings. The theoretical essence of "refrigerator socialism" is to define socialism as—compared with capitalism—a production method and social system that more effectively and generally meet the material and cultural needs of social members.The more commonly used expression is: Socialism is a social system that meets the inherent requirements of the development of social productive forces and can better liberate and develop productive forces.The Soviet Union and the former socialist countries in Eastern Europe have always attached great importance to the development of production, which is not wrong.However, the question is: when emphasizing that socialism should meet social needs, can it be reversed that as long as production develops and the people become rich, it means the realization of socialism?Or, the essence of socialism is to develop productive forces?

Indeed, when people talked about socialism in the past, they often mentioned "full development of productive forces" and "extreme abundance of material", and took this as the material prerequisite for the realization of socialism and communism.Engels once had such an exposition in "Principles of Communism".When analyzing the limit of the development of "capital productivity" in "Economic Manuscripts (1857-1858)", Marx believed that once the direct form of labor ceased to be a great source of wealth, labor time ceased to be, and must cease to be. The measure of wealth, and therefore exchange value, is no longer the measure of use value.Production based on exchange would then collapse, and the immediate material production process would itself be freed from the forms of poverty and antagonism.That is to say, under the condition of highly developed technology, the appropriation of labor is less meaningful, or even unnecessary.Based on this, people infer that when social productive forces are highly developed, so that "matter is extremely abundant" or even "flows" fully, the possession of material wealth by members of society will become redundant, and the material prerequisites that lead to social differentiation will naturally cease to exist. up.

When imagining that possession becomes superfluous or value loses husband, one should not forget that these propositions are premised, that is: the quantity and quality of human material needs are limited.Assuming that people's material desires are unlimited, material needs tend to be infinite, and the satisfaction of needs is negligible.However, in reality, people's material desires are endless, and they are what Marcuse called "one-dimensional people".Without eliminating people's infinitely expanding material desires, trying to promote human beings close to socialism and communism by developing productive forces and increasing wealth is like reclamation by Jingwei, which is futile.If people's material needs cannot be fully met, social differentiation will continue to occur.In this way, arguments about socialism and communism will inevitably fall into paradox.

Socialism needs to be established on a certain material basis, and to consolidate and develop itself by continuously satisfying the material and cultural needs of the people.However, human needs are real.This requires us to study and understand the reality of human needs in a specific historical environment.Human needs are dual in nature: natural and social.The natural attribute of needs is human animal needs, that is, to meet human physiological needs.The nature of needs is material in nature, and the amount of material wealth determines the degree of its satisfaction.The social attributes of needs reflect the social nature of people.Human beings are the sum of social relations, and the social nature of needs has two meanings: one is that the social relations in which people exist create human needs, and the other is that social needs must be realized and satisfied in social relations.The social nature of needs is spiritual in nature, which means the realization of personal self-worth, and the possession and use of material wealth is only its form.

The duality of needs is unified in reality.Veblen, the founder of the school of institutionalism in Western economics, once deeply analyzed the problem of unity that requires duality.He pointed out: In capitalist society, "clothing is a manifestation of money culture". Clothing not only has a mechanical effect on the human body, but also meets people's spiritual needs-"newness and honor", to prove that their affordability and social status.Clothing, the most "natural" need, has also been endowed with sociality. In the history so far, human beings have shown a strong desire for material wealth, which has both natural and social reasons.Material desires are both natural and social.From the perspective of social reasons, the ways of satisfying human needs are interactive, but under the condition of private ownership, people who control each other’s needs are separated from each other in terms of property relations. But only care about the realization of their own needs.In this way, people will turn the objects of other people's needs they have mastered - means of production, products, etc., into means to satisfy their own needs.At this time, if a person cares about the needs of others unilaterally, he will immediately lose himself.The competition for existence has thus become the essence of the relationship between people under the condition of private ownership.The struggle for survival makes everyone consciously or unconsciously possess as much as possible, otherwise they will have nothing.People are not born greedy, but must be greedy.It can be seen that the infinitely expanding material desire is not a manifestation of human's natural needs, but a "socially produced need", to be precise, a need produced by the social relationship of private ownership.

In modern Western society, the alienation of human needs is pushed to the extreme.The mode of production of modern capitalism has profoundly changed the needs and behaviors of human beings. Consumption has become a means of satisfying production. People are not the masters of consumption, but the slaves of consumption.The spiritual factors in people's needs are being lost, and spiritual and cultural needs are degenerating into the form of material needs, and all its connotations can and must be measured by the "general equivalent" of money.As Marx said: "Not only the qualitative difference between commodities will be eliminated in currency; currency, as a thorough egalitarian, will also eliminate all differences." Once possession is no longer a means, but becomes The purpose itself, all spirit and value are all killed.Apart from possessing more material wealth, human activities no longer have any other meaning.In effect, "man" is dead and all that's left is a voracious consuming animal.

Lukacs calls the radical alienation of needs "reification" and sees it as a fundamental feature of modern capitalist society.In this sense, modern Western society has really been "greatly simplified". Past history shows that the unlimited pursuit of material wealth is a realistic state of existence for human beings, but the question is whether material desire is the nature of human beings?Is material desire eternal?Marx said it well: "The whole history is nothing but the constant change of human nature." Lukacs said: "The essence of history lies in this. If it is fixed, then everything will become false. History is the formation of continuous change. The history of the objective forms of human life. It is therefore impossible to understand particular forms by studying their succession in an empirical and historical way." What is considered to be absolute truth will eventually perish in another form.Socialism is a new form of society that eliminates "reification".

Socialism not only needs to meet people's needs, but its deeper essence lies in changing people's needs.In the past, when people expounded the superiority of socialism, they always emphasized that compared with capitalism, socialism can more effectively develop social productivity and satisfy the material and cultural needs of social members more fully and more equitably.However, if we do not change the needs themselves, we will never be able to talk about material abundance. Material is relatively poor, and fair distribution is difficult to achieve after all.What human needs can be adequately met?Obviously, after the greater development of social productive forces, the natural needs of human beings may be fully satisfied, while the traditional social factors in the needs will never be able to be satisfied.Therefore, the fundamental task of socialism is to eliminate materialization, liberate human beings from endless material pursuits, and restore the spiritual nature of human needs; make human beings no longer pursue material possession and To enjoy; to transform human society from focusing on material life to focusing on spiritual life; to enable human beings to realize self-worth in creative labor and aesthetics; to enable human beings to finally establish a simple way of life.

The establishment of production relations characterized by public ownership has created conditions for eliminating materialization and changing human needs.Public ownership makes it possible for people who objectively grasp the needs of others to care about the needs of others subjectively.After the cessation of survival competition, the unlimited material desire will lose the social foundation of existence.But what public ownership provides is only the possibility of eliminating materialization and changing needs, not reality.The realization of socialism is the most profound social change in human history, and political revolution and economic revolution are only the superficial level of this change.After that, it is necessary to further promote the revolution in the field of thought and culture, so as to change people's traditional concepts and create a new world of morality and aesthetics.

Of course, after so many twists and turns, our understanding of this should not and will not be simplistic.Building socialism in a backward country is faced with the arduous task of eliminating poverty and developing the economy. Concentrating on the development of social production and improving people's living standards are the tasks of socialism at the primary stage.However, satisfying needs and changing needs cannot be separated from each other. They are two aspects of a process, which are mutually conditional, causal and complementary.While transforming the objective world, people's subjective world must also be transformed, otherwise it cannot be regarded as socialism.Guevara once said: "We are not interested in economic socialism without the morality of communism. We fight against poverty and we fight against alienation."

The failure of socialism in the Soviet Union and former Eastern Europe is often seen as a failure of the "Stalinist model".But what exactly is this pattern?People often mention such as: extensive nationalization, highly centralized planned economic system, etc., are only specific forms of this model. The essence of the "Stalin model" is to use state power to mobilize society and manage social production in a highly organized manner to achieve extraordinary development of the national economy.During the climax of Soviet industrialization in the 1930s, Stalin put forward two slogans: "Technology determines everything" and "cadres determine everything".Stalin's "slogan" and Lenin's "formula" are in the same strain, and together they constitute the two basic points of the "Stalin model": expert governance and development priority. Beginnings contain consequences. The "Stalin model" made the socialist practice of the Soviet Union and the former Eastern European countries fall into the trap of "catching up" from the very beginning.If there is any dogmatism in actual socialist practice, I am afraid that the biggest dogma is that as long as there is a socialist system, a country can surpass capitalism economically, especially the developed capitalist countries.Logically speaking, socialism, public ownership, and a planned economy should be more efficient than capitalism, private ownership, and a market economy.However, logic does not equal reality.The actual factors affecting economic development go far beyond institutions.Under the specific contemporary historical conditions, the capitalist West has monopolized most of the world's resources and markets. Without fundamental changes in the existing world economic structure, it is impossible for socialist countries to fully catch up with China and other countries economically. more than that of Western developed capitalist countries.The former socialist countries put too much emphasis on institutional factors, turning the belief in socialism into a kind of "institutional fetishism", thus putting forward unrealistic goals of catching up and surpassing.In order to achieve the goal, we have to try various methods, and the policy is vacillating from side to side.In particular, due to the fact that the top-down social mobilization mechanism is difficult to last, the use of mobilizing individuals' concern for their own material interests as a supplementary mechanism for social mobilization has led to a departure from economic policy and socialist value orientation.The result is a serious internal contradiction in this model. From the perspective of absolute economic growth, since the total economic volume cannot catch up with the developed countries in the West after all, the basic social promises made by the regime will inevitably fail. In this model, the legitimacy of the regime lies precisely in ensuring the sustained and rapid economic development, so in the end They have become morally bankrupt one after another; from the perspective of relative growth, since it is not a change, but a wide range of encouragement for individuals to care about their material interests, the satisfaction of needs cannot always keep up with the formation of needs.Members of society with ever-expanding material desires get a sense of frustration instead of satisfaction, which leads to the phenomenon of socialist "relative poverty" in which the economy is actually developing, but the society is becoming more and more dissatisfied.The practice of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe actually evolved into an attempt to extend the Western-style, capitalist way of life to the whole society.Such absurd "socialism" will inevitably go bankrupt. If it is considered that the economic foundation and social system factors are not enough to realize socialism, it only provides an objective possibility, and the key to realizing socialism lies in: transforming people's subjective world while transforming the objective world, that is, The key is to transform people's thinking and concepts.Then, this involves a further question: Is it objective or subjective that determines the development of history?In other words, is social and historical development determined by matter, or is it chosen by the subject?