By Allen Myers
What's in a number? Nothing, really: 2000 (or 2001 by some calculations) is no more or less significant than 1997 or 2016. But as the new year approaches, the media are overflowing with stories on the biggest/best/shortest/most memorable/worst event/people/discovery of the century or the millennium. Anyone can compile their own list: your standpoint, what you value, of course determines what you regard as "best".
For socialists, what matters is the ability of society to take conscious, collective control of its functioning and its interaction with its environment, and therefore of its evolution. From that standpoint, how should we evaluate the century that is coming to a close, and what, if anything, does it indicate about the new century?
The most striking feature of the century is the huge contrast between scientific/technological progress and social regression.
However you choose to measure it, technological progress has increased at a phenomenal rate. At the beginning of the century, "horseless carriages" were a novelty; the first heavier than air flight was still to come. Today we are almost blasé about remote-control machines exploring other planets, and it is possible to circle the Earth in a matter of hours.
Such changes are merely the most dramatic and visible examples of technological change. There are countless other technical developments that have had an equal or greater impact on human life: in production of food, clothing and housing, in medicine, in communications, and in every branch of industry and employment.
One measure of this technological progress is the fact that in 1900 the population of the world was about 1.6 billion; it has now passed 6 billion. There are four times as many human beings alive today only because human productive technology allows us to produce (at least) four times as much food and other necessities.
Yet it is also the case that a sizeable majority of those 6 billion people live in poverty, many of them in the most extreme deprivation. "Progress" for much of the Third World is measured by an increase in misery.
The contrast between technological advance and social decline is also evident in war. More than any previous period in human history, the 20th century has been dominated by war and preparations for war: two world wars and countless, virtually continuous, smaller wars. The United States, which for most of the century has led all other countries in the scientific and technical development of means of production, has used those productive powers to assemble a constantly "improving" arsenal of destruction.
Equally absurd, we now know that much of the technological progress which holds such potential for the improvement of human life has in fact been undermining the natural basis of human existence. The myriad forms of pollution of the environment degrade not only the quality of human life; by exterminating whole species and bio-systems, they threaten to bring about a catastrophic collapse in human numbers as well.
This deadly contradiction between progress and regression is a contradiction between what is possible and what is. It has its basis in the economic-social system, capitalism, which pretends to serve the general welfare by encouraging every individual to pursue their own advantage at the expense of everyone else.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, when division of labour in pin-making was the height of technological progress, and most capitalists were little richer than their employees, there was an element of truth in the idea that pursuit of individual self-interest could increase social wellbeing. Today, when technology misused could wipe out all human life, and individual capitalists control more wealth than millions of their fellow human beings, it is a guarantee of disaster. Democratic, planned organisation of production — socialism — has become a matter of survival.
This need, to make human solidarity rather than greed the motive force of society, impresses itself on our consciousness the more forcefully as the contradiction sharpens between progress and decline. That is the bright side of social development in the 20th century: the growth of organisation to fight to make our world what it can and must be.
It is why the 20th century has been not merely an era of wars but of wars and revolution. At the end of the century, the revolutionary wave has receded. But it will return, with redoubled force, because the contradictions that produced it are intensifying. It will go further also because we will know how to learn from the experiences of the 20th century — both the successes and the failures.
When it will happen, no-one can know for sure, because it depends upon the decisions of billions of individuals. But it will happen, and sooner rather than later, because the alternative is too terrible for too many.
The new millennium isn't determined by the calendar. It begins when we make it begin. Join the struggle and make it happen sooner.