Marxism

Economic crises do not automatically undermine capitalist power and lead to working class victories. Chris Walsh looks at Antonio Gramsci’s theories about capitalism, hegemony, and an effective working class strategy.

By Chris Walsh
International Socialist Group
Aug 37, 2011

Capitalism is currently experiencing the worst crisis in living memory.  Austerity packages across the Western world are the deepest and most savage for generations.  Millions are being thrown out of work; working conditions are constantly under attack; wages have stagnated (in real terms) for years; the cost of living continues to soar.  Surely the economic conditions are ripe for a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system? Yet seizing the assets of the rich is only on the agenda for a minority of the working class. Why is this?

Consent and Class Leadership

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci noted that since the dawn of capitalism there had been many crises, but very few had resulted in any serious attempt by the workers to overthrow capitalism.  Economic crises, on their own, were not enough to lead to a workers revolution.  Gramsci states that in a class-based society, the dominant class maintains its authority through a combination (to varying degrees) of force and ideological persuasion.  He called this two-pronged approach ‘authoritarian-populist hegemony’.

On the one hand there is the systematic use of force or coercion by the state, what Lenin described as "special bodies of armed men, prisons etc." In this way, the state ensures its domination over the workers.  Even in advanced capitalism, the infliction of violence, or the even the ambient threat of violence, are a continued reality as a means of exerting mastery, e.g. the imprisonment of political activists or the deployment of the police or army to break up strikes.  However the threat of violence is often concealed and social order is maintained through leadership in the field of ideas.

Thus, the dominant class rules by inflicting force where necessary, but winning consent where possible.  Consent is negotiated by convincing the workers that the demands of the present order are ‘natural’ or at least the best case scenario for all.  The ruling class competes, for instance in the sphere of parliamentary politics or journalism, to prove themselves worthy of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’.  This is not the function of the state proper, but of ‘civil society’, the institutions of cultural and ideological production (schools, universities, the media, the family etc.).  Since the ruling class largely controls the institutions of learning, media etc, it is able to win the consent of the subordinate classes and thus maintain the system in its present form.  By these means it is able to ride through economic crises and protect its position as the dominant class in society.

Consent is only achieved by a day-to-day negotiation between the immediate aims of the workers and the ideological leadership of elements of the dominant class.  Gramsci repeatedly emphasizes that the masses are not intellectually passive:

There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens. Each man, finally, outside his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher’, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.

The aim of the ruling class is to persuade the masses that their agenda represents ‘common sense’.  They can achieve this by making analogies – often spurious analogies – between policies and the daily experience of ordinary people.  For instance, British politicians and pundits have successfully convinced some workers that cutting the deficit is the most immediate and urgent problem for any government (e.g. because sovereign debt is "like a credit card").  Actually, this is nonsense.  Sovereign debt is not directly comparable with any form of private debt, least of all credit card debts.  Furthermore, the idea that unleashing harsh austerity upon the working class will directly cut the deficit is highly contestable.  Even many ruling class economists now reject this argument and predict that austerity will only stunt economic growth and produce ‘blowback’ in terms of a double-dip recession.  Thus, the ruling class is perpetually divided between competing strategies: an all out ideological offensive to put a populist spin on austerity; and the incorporation of elements of dissent on particular issues, e.g. new taxes on the bankers and the billionaires.  Ideological leadership thus involves negotiation and brinksmanship, between competing capitalist interests on the one hand, and the workers’ material needs and common sense ideas of ‘fairness’ on the other.

Dominance and Incorporation

We are surrounded by a system of indoctrination that serves to legitimize the backward institutions of the capitalist order, like private property, the family, and wage labour.  From birth, almost everything that a member of the working class is exposed to, from nursery rhymes to school textbooks to newspapers, reinforces either subtly or explicitly the validity and superiority of the current system.  The oppressed masses accept their lot consensually because of the success of capitalist hegemony.  This explains why the majority of people in 21st century Britain do not want, nor recognize the necessity for, a revolution that will overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with a workers’ state.  Capitalist ideology is inescapable.

However, it would be crude to suggest that hegemony is simply ruling class ideology enforced upon the workers in order to make us think the way they do.  It’s more nuanced than that.  Hegemony is a set of contested ideas, constantly in flux, striving for the continued acquiescence of the workers through demonstration of the ruler’s right and ability to rule.  The ideas within ruling class hegemony have to change in order to maintain the popular support of the masses.  This is done by making concessions to the workers and addressing, or at least seeming to address, some of their needs and wants.

Historically, the ruling class have kept workers’ revolts at bay by allowing economic concessions to their needs or popular desires (wage increases, welfare provision etc.) but such allowances have to be made in terms of culture and ideology also.  For instance, the media will play on the concerns or fears of elements of the working class by including them in the cultural output of the ruling class. 

Consider crime.  Many workers have a ‘common sense’ fear of crime, and bourgeois hegemony mutates to reflect and also to lead these concerns.  There are a whole host of television programmes about the tackling of crime and the restoration of law and order: Cops, Crimewatch, Police, Camera, Action, Night Cops, Cops With Cameras, the list goes on, seemingly, ad infinitum.  In showing programmes like these, the ruling class simultaneously stoke the fears of a layer of the working class whilst attempting to resolve these fears by visualizing the victorious reconciliation of social order.  In this way, they can make political capital and solidify their competence as society’s ‘intellectual and moral’ leaders.

If we consider the recent riots in London and other parts of the country, the backlash from the government and the media is a classic case of authoritarian-populist hegemony.  The response of the State can only be described as brutal.  Incredibly harsh sentences were dealt out to anyone having anything to do with the riots, including 2 young men who were sentenced to 4 years imprisonment for suggesting on Facebook that people in their own towns should emulate the uprisings in London.  Had the unrest gone on any longer; the government was prepared to use rubber bullets and water cannons on our streets.  Coupled with the State’s draconian backlash was a hysterical outcry by civil society, particularly the media.  It was almost impossible to find any voice in the media addressing the real causes of the events.  Instead we were subjected to newsreel after newsreel, article after article decrying the moral decay of certain parts of the country and in particular the young people of today’s Britain.

The perpetrators of this particular challenge to the status quo were immediately locked up, preventing them from creating any more trouble for the ruling class and also sending a message to anyone who might consider doing something similar in the future.  As well as being imprisoned, the rioters have undergone a mass character assassination from both the State and civil society.  Cameron has described the communities that rioted as "broken" and "sick", whilst elements of the media have painted anyone involved as simply criminals who took to the streets because they enjoy behaving badly.  It was not uncommon to hear broadcasters suggest that the army be deployed on the streets.

The real issue of the economic crisis and the harsh austerity that has destroyed the communities that most of the rioters came from and robbed them of any real opportunities in life, is deflected.  The uprisings in London should have been a series of events that working class people across the country could sympathize with and rally around; but instead, bourgeois hegemony has allowed for a mass condemnation of those involved and an opportunity for the State to prove its ability to rule because it is "tough on crime" and can keep people safe from such disturbances in their own areas.

Strategy and Power

Having considered the role of both the State and civil society in keeping the workers subordinate to the bosses, it is now useful to consider Gramsci’s military strategy.  Gramsci stated that in any attempt to win state power there are two forms of struggle that revolutionaries can engage in: a War of Movement and a War of Position.  The former is a swift attack, directly upon the seat of state power, with the objective of immediate overthrowing the government and replacing it with a workers’ state.  This strategy is clearly inapplicable to the conditions of Britain or any form of ‘advanced capitalism’ today.  A War of Movement can only be launched if civil society is weak and there is thus popular support from workers for an insurrection.

But a War of Position is a feasible strategy.  This is a revolutionary struggle within and against (and perhaps, to an extent, for) civil society, set over a longer period of time, against the hegemony of the ruling class.  (As long as this hegemony remains stable, a workers revolution cannot even be considered).  In a War of Position, we must recognize that set-backs and retreats are inevitable.  If the War of Movement is a sprint, the War of Position is a marathon; not simply an event, but a process.  It is through this protracted struggle that we aim to create working class hegemony.  We must aim to undermine ruling class hegemony and garner mass support and subscription to working class ideology.

It would be naïve to think that the best strategy for revolutionaries to gain influence and bolster working class hegemony today is to depose the ruling class from the institutions of civil society.  The links between the State and civil society are far too deep and intricate for this to be a realistic possibility.  The heads of the capitalist institutions of hegemony (schools, universities, television stations, newspapers, news websites etc.) are, for the vast majority, of the same class background as the heads of State. 

Such positions are nearly always filled by people coming from a private school background, very often from Oxford and Cambridge, the same as most of the millionaires in the current cabinet.  These positions are rarely open to anyone from a working class background. The recent Newscorp scandal proves just how deeply the connections between the State and civil society run.  To try and fight the establishment to take control of civil society as it stands would be to fight the ruling class on its own terms and its own soil.  This is not a viable strategy to break bourgeois hegemony.  Instead, we must create our own working class institutions, in the workplace and beyond and demonstrate our own abilities as a class and present an alternative to subversion to greedy managers and politicians. In attempting to hegemonize society with working class ideas we must cast the net wide and draw in as many working class people as possible to the struggles that concern or affect them.  By increasing workers’ participation in political struggles, we can promote, and prove in practice, the possibility of working class self-organization and self-determination.  In this way we can prove that, as a class, we are capable of running society and that the bosses are superfluous to our needs.

United Front

As a means of drawing workers into struggles, Gramsci, like Lenin and Trotsky, was a great exponent of the united front.  By drawing working class people together around one particular issue or campaign, revolutionaries are able to have a far greater influence on society than if they only relate to ‘card-carrying’ Marxists.  In terms of today’s struggle: millions of people in Britain are opposed to the cuts but only a handful would describe themselves as Marxists or revolutionaries; they may hold very different beliefs, on any number of issues, to a revolutionary socialist but this is of no importance.  If these people can come together and form a united front around the one issue of opposition to the cuts, then we have a far larger and more powerful oppositional force to the ruling class than if we squabble over whatever petty differences we may have.  Gramsci recognized the centrality of the united front to revolutionary organization.  He believed that the united front was not just a tactic to be utilized in one particular campaign and then jettisoned, but an on-going strategy to constantly draw more and more working people into struggles against the ruling class.  Only through the continuation of this strategy can we hope to build serious influence in society and seek to undermine ruling class hegemony.

We must also seek to spread our ideas to as wide an audience as possible through the media.  The function of propaganda cannot be underestimated.  We have already noted that the mass media is almost exclusively a platform for ruling class ideas to be broadcast.  However, with the recent exposure of corruption and malpractice within news outlets; the constantly growing new forms of media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, live blogs etc.); and the realisation by more and more people that institutions like the BBC are far from impartial (note the reportage on Palestine and the recent public sector strikes to name but a few), we have a terrific opportunity to promote our own ideas to a mass audience.  The news outlets of the establishment are losing credibility rapidly and people, in growing numbers, are looking to alternative ways of following the news.  Videos on Youtube can ‘go viral’ in a matter of hours and Twitter is growing at a spectacular rate.  These are just two examples of ways in which radical ideas can be broadcast to the masses and working class perspectives can penetrate a massive audience like never before.

It may seem that we have a considerable way to go before working class counter-hegemony can begin to rival that of the capitalist class, but class struggle develops unevenly.  As Lenin said, "Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen".

The capitalist class is in deep crisis.  Ruling class ideology is being questioned by greater numbers of people every day; the bourgeois media is increasingly being seen as the propaganda machine that it truly is; and people are genuinely looking for an alternative to the crisis-ridden capitalism that drives them increasingly deeper and deeper into poverty.  Now is the time to organize and build within workplaces and communities and not allow the capitalists to ride through yet another crisis unscathed.  The ground is fertile for revolutionaries to engage the masses in class struggle against our oppressors, and this is what we must do. The united front must be utilized in a serious and genuine way in the months and years ahead.  It is our only hope for victory.

Michael Lebowitz: Socialism for the 21st Century — Re-inventing and Renewing the Struggle

[The following presentation was delivered to launch La Alternativa Socialista, the Chilean edition of The Socialist Alternative, in Concepcion, Santiago and Valparaiso, November 2012.]

By Michael A. Lebowitz
SolidarityEconomy.net via Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Jan 9, 2013 – Every socialist in the 21st century should try to answer two questions.

First, why don’t workers put an end to capitalism – given its destruction of human beings and the environment (something Marx was so conscious of). In particular, given the declining standards of life for decades in the United States, the economic disaster in Europe and the current crises, how is it that the system is reproduced without a significant challenge by the working class?

Second, why did the working class within what has become known as “real socialism” [the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe] allow those systems to revert to capitalism without resistance from the working classes, who were presumably its beneficiaries?

These two questions are interrelated both in practice and theory. In terms of practice, the failure within capitalism certainly had its impact upon the shaping of “real socialism”. And, in turn, the character of “real socialism” contributed to the view of workers in capitalism that socialism was not a desirable alternative. I can recall many arguments about socialism with my father, who was a machinist, and I remember in particular his comment, “Why would I want a bigger, stronger boss?”

On the theoretical level, the two questions are linked because we rarely explore the question of what kinds of people are produced under particular relations of production. There is no lack of discussion, for example, among Marxists about the rate of profit in capitalism, economic crisis, the intricacies of the so-called transformation problem, and indeed the process of exploitation itself. But there’s little examination of the working class as subject and how that subject is shaped within capitalist relations of production.

Capitalism cripples workers

Marx certainly didn’t make that mistake. In his book, Capital, he explained what capital is — that it is the result of the exploitation of workers. But, in addition to demonstrating that we are dominated by our own products, he also described at length what happens to workers within capitalist relations of production. Workers dominated by the logic of capital are merely the means to capital’s goal, the goal of profits. And in the process, they are crippled. The capitalist division of labour under the system of manufacture deformed workers. Did the introduction of machinery, though, change the one-sidedness that this division of labour produced? Marx answered: no, it perfected it. It completed the division between thinking and doing; it completed that deformation of workers.

This was the source of Marx’s passion. This was the source of his hatred for capitalism. Not simply the exploitation that creates capital but the deformation and destruction of human beings who are merely means for capital. Our products are a power over us — but not simply because they are a power. It is also because we are not. Capitalism does not simply impoverish us because it extracts from us the things we produce. It impoverishes us because of the people it produces.

And, Marx looked to an alternative – an alternative which he articulates in Capital. Indeed, that alternative is the premise of his book. He evokes there a society characterised not by the capitalists’ impulse to increase the value of their capital but by “the inverse situation in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development”. This “inverse situation” is the perspective from which Marx persistently critiques capitalism. He talks about capitalist production and how the means of production employ workers as “this inversion, indeed this distortion, which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production”.

The spectre haunting Marx’s Capital is the vision of a society oriented to “the worker’s own need for development”, the inverse situation. It is a call to invert the capitalist inversion, a call to build a society oriented toward human development, one which recognises the necessity for the workers’ own needs for development.

Marx pointed to the need to create new relations that end the division between thinking and doing, the need to develop what he called “rich human beings”, that rich individuality that is all sided in needs and capacities. Very simply, it is the call to build a society of associated producers, a socialist society with productive relations through which people are able to develop. But that’s not so easy. If it were only a matter of calling for the negation of capital, capitalism would have ended long ago.

Marx grasped something that so many have failed to see since — that capital has the tendency to produce a working class that views the existence of capital as necessary. “The advance of capitalist production”, he stressed, “develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of this mode of production as self-evident natural laws”.

Here is the crux of the problem: capital tends to produce the workers it needs, workers who look upon capitalism as common sense. Given the mystification of capital (arising from the sale of labour-power), which makes productivity, profits and progress appear as the result of the capitalist’s contribution, Marx argued that “the organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance”. That is strong and unequivocal language; and Marx added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker”. Accordingly, he proposed that the capitalist can rely upon the workers’ “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them”.

Of course, we often struggle. Workers struggle over wages, working conditions and the defence of past gains. But as long as workers look upon the requirements of capital as “self-evident natural laws”, those struggles occur within the bounds of the capitalist relation. Subordination to the logic of capital means that, faced with capitalism’s crises, workers sooner or later act to ensure the conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital. And that’s why capitalism keeps going. It keeps going because we are convinced that there is no alternative — no alternative to barbarism. As a result, the “realistic” left, the so-called good left of social democracy, tells us that the best we can get is barbarism with a human face.

Alternative common sense

To go beyond capitalism, we need a vision that can appear to workers as an alternative common sense, as their common sense. To struggle against a situation in which workers “by education, tradition and habit” look upon capital’s needs “as self-evident natural laws”, we must struggle for an alternative common sense. But what is the vision of a new society whose requirements workers may look upon as “self-evident natural laws’? Clearly, it won’t be found in the results of 20th century attempts to build socialism, which, to use Marx’s phrase, ended “in a miserable fit of the blues”.

“We have to reinvent socialism”. With this statement, Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, electrified activists in his closing speech at the January 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. “It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union”, he stressed, “but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition”. If we are ever going to end the poverty of the majority of the world, capitalism must be transcended, Chavez argued. “But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything.”

There, at its core, is the vision of socialism for the 21st century. Rather than expansion of the means of production or direction by the state, human beings must be at the centre of the new socialist society. This is a return to Marx’s vision of the “inverse situation” oriented to the worker’s own need for development, a return to the vision of a society which would allow for “the all-round development of the individual”, the “complete working out of the human content”, the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself”, a society of associated producers in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.

But the focus upon full development of human potential was only one side of Marx’s perspective. What Marx added to this emphasis upon human development was his understanding of how that development of human capacities occurs. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx was quite clear that it is not by giving people gifts, not by changing circumstances for them, not by populism nor by those at the top deciding for us. Rather, we change only through real practice, by changing circumstances ourselves. Marx’s concept of “revolutionary practice”, that concept of “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change’, is the red thread that runs throughout his work.

One aspect of this, certainly, was his explicit recognition of how the struggles of workers against capital transform “circumstances and men”, expanding their capabilities and making them fit to create a new world. But there was more. In the very act of producing, Marx indicated, “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language”. And, of course, the relations within which workers produce affect the nature of the workers produced. After all, that was Marx’s point about how capitalist productive relations “distort the worker into a fragment of a man” and degrade her/him and “alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process”.

Indeed, every human activity has two products; every human activity has as its result joint products — both the change in the object of labour and the change in the labourer themselves. In my book, The Socialist Alternative, I identify this combination of human development and practice as Marx’s key link. And, if we grasp that key link, we can see its obvious implications for building socialism. What are the circumstances that have as their joint product “the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn’? To develop the capacities of people, the producers must put an end to what Marx called, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, “the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour”.

For the development of rich human beings, the worker must be able to call “his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain”. And, not by themselves but through a democratic, protagonistic process. When workers act in workplaces and communities in conscious cooperation with others, they produce themselves as people conscious of their interdependence and of their own collective power. The joint product of their activity is the development of the capacities of the producers — precisely Marx’s point when he says that “when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species”. Here, then, is the way to ensure that “the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’.

Creating the conditions in workplaces and communities by which people can develop their capacities is an essential aspect of the concept of socialism for the 21st century. But it is only one element. How can the workers’ own need for development be realised if capital owns our social heritage — the products of the social brain and the social hand? And, how can we develop our own potential if we look upon other producers as enemies or as our markets — i.e., if individual material self-interest is our motivation?

Capitalism is an organic system, one which has the tendency to reproduce the conditions of its existence (including a working class that looks upon its requirements as “self-evident natural laws”). That is its strength. To counter that and to satisfy “the worker’s own need for development”, the socialist alternative we envision also must be an organic system, a particular combination of production, distribution and consumption, a system of reproduction. What Chavez named in January 2007 as “the elementary triangle of socialism” (social property, social production and satisfaction of social needs) is a step forward toward a conception of such a system.

Consider the logic of this socialist combination, this conception of socialism for the 21st century:

1. Social ownership of the means of production is critical within this structure because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of producers or state bureaucrats. But, this concerns more than our current activity. Social ownership of our social heritage, the results of past social labour, is an assertion that all living human beings have the right to the full development of their potential — to real wealth, the development of human capacity. It is the recognition that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.

2. Social production organised by workers builds new relations among producers — relations of cooperation and solidarity. It allows workers to end “the crippling of body and mind” and the loss of “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” that comes from the separation of head and hand. Organisation of production in all spheres by workers, thus, is a condition for the full development of the producers, for the development of their capabilities — a condition for the production of rich human beings.

3. Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes as the goal of productive activity means that, instead of interacting as separate and indifferent individuals, we function as members of a community. Rather than looking upon our own capacity as our property and as a means of securing as much as possible in an exchange, we start from the recognition of our common humanity and, thus, of the importance of conditions in which everyone is able to develop her full potential. When our productive activity is oriented to the needs of others, it both builds solidarity among people and produces socialist human beings.

There’s an old saying that if you don’t know where you want to go, then any road will take you there. I disagree. If you don’t know where you want to go, then no road will take you there. A vision of a socialist alternative such as that organic system summarised by the socialist triangle is essential if we are put an end to capitalism. Of course, knowing where you want to go is not the same as getting there. But, it is essential for indicating where you don’t want to go. And one place we don’t want to go is to a 21st century version of “real socialism”.

‘Real socialism’

To explain the nature of “real socialism” from the 1950s through the 1980s, I introduced (in my new book, Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’) the concept of vanguard relations of production — a particular set of productive relations characterised by a vanguard whose logic was to deliver socialism to the masses from above and to do so without permitting that underlying population to develop its own capacities through practice and protagonism. There were definite benefits for workers. In particular, there was a social contract whereby the vanguard promised, among other things, full employment, job security, subsidised necessities and rising income over time — as long as the working class accepted its lack of power and the opportunity to develop its capabilities in the workplace and society.

Precisely because of the nature of vanguard relations, though, the workers produced were not subjects able to build a new society nor, indeed, able to respond as the system ran into problems. But, there were further implications of this crippling of workers. In The Socialist Alternative, I noted that if workers don’t manage, someone else does; and, if workers don’t develop their capabilities through their practice, someone else does.

In ‘real socialism’, it was the enterprise managers who developed capabilities, and they emerged as an incipient capitalist class – a class oriented to the logic of capital but constrained by the logic of the vanguard. Their ultimate victory brought with it a very significant loss for the working class — the jettisoning of the social contract, i.e., the ending of job security, full employment, subsidisation of necessities, etc. — the loss of all the benefits that workers obtained within vanguard relations in this period. That loss was significant, and there is much nostalgia among workers about that period. But the point is not to return to it. “Real socialism” was never the alternative to which Marx looked — that “inverse situation in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development”.

We need to be explicit that “real socialism” is not where we want to go in the 21st century. We need to identify what we do want — we need the vision of a socialist alternative. Like the worst architect, for the revolutionary labour process we must build the goal in our minds before we can construct it in reality. But that is not enough — knowing where you want to go is not at all the same as getting there. Indeed, how is it possible to get there given that capital has the tendency to produce a working class that by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of capital as “self-evident natural laws”?

Struggle

The answer, I suggest, is that people do struggle even though mystified by the nature of capital. They struggle for what they see as fair, and they struggle against violations of their conception of fairness. This moral economy of the working class points to possibilities. Even though their goals in these struggles may be limited to ending the immediate violations of norms of fairness and justice and may be aimed, for example, at achieving no more than “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”, people change in the course of struggle. Despite the limited goals involved in wage struggles, Marx argued that they were essential for preventing workers “from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production”; without such struggles, workers “would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation”.

People, in short, struggle over their conceptions of right and wrong, and what Marx attempted to do was to explain the underlying basis for those struggles. By itself, the moral economy of the working class can never explain its basis — why those particular beliefs as to what is fair are present — and thus why those norms can change. Accordingly, it is essential to recognise the importance of the moral economy of the working class but also to go beyond it. To grasp the conditions which underlie concepts of fairness at a given moment, it is necessary to move from the moral economy of the working class to the political economy of the working class.

In short, the starting point should be real people with particular ideas and concepts. To articulate what is implicit in their concepts and struggles and to show how these contain within them the elements of a new society is essential. To see the future in the present is what is needed if we are to build that future.

In The Socialist Alternative, I propose the importance of linking existing struggles to a focus upon the right of everyone to full development of their potential. I am convinced that this focus allows us to link separate struggles and to demonstrate the importance of a socialist alternative.

Accordingly, I introduced there the idea of a Charter for Human Development. The goal of such a charter is to try to redefine the concept of fairness. To stress that it is unfair that some people monopolise the social heritage of all human beings, that it is unfair that some people are able to develop their capacities through their activities while others are crippled and deformed, and that it is unfair that we are forced into structures in which we view others as competitors and enemies.

Is it possible to redefine the concept of fairness and to build a new moral economy of the working class? Certainly, it is not inevitable. But in this period of economic and ecological crisis, there is no alternative but to try. We are at the point when Marx’s statement that capitalism destroys human beings and nature has taken on a new urgency.

The choice before us has been noted often: socialism or barbarism.

Science fiction is full of critical charge for socialists and radicals

By Benjamin Silverman
Red Wedge Magazine

Sept 4, 2012 – Sometimes, it’s good to just dream. The system is brutal, everyday brings new news of some great outrage — a Republicans makes an idiotically misogynistic statement, striking miners are butchered by the police — it’s easy for it to get you down. So we seek out escapes. But there is escapism and then there is escapism. There is the escapism of the Kardashians, reality TV, Twilight and the like, that dulls the mind while it dulls the pain. But then there is the escapism that allows us to go off on flights on fantasy, to dream for a moment about what could be, not just self-flagellate ourselves over the horror of what is.

In literature and film, science-fiction as a genre has that potential, which is sadly not often enough fulfilled, to be a true playground for hypotheticals. Peoples, societies, civilizations, species can be thrown up into the air in great “what if?” experiments. What would human society’s reaction be towards alien life, immortality, space travel, artificial intelligence, an end to want, the apocalypse? What would certain historical events and processes look like in totally different scenarios — the fall of the Roman Empire becomes Asimov’s “Foundation Series,” the American Revolution becomes Heinlein’s The Moon Is the Harsh Mistress, and the post-Civil War American experience for Confederate soldiers becomes the TV show Firefly.

This inherent potential of sci-fi to act as a canvas for societal “what ifs” has also a tradition within the broader socialist movement. Some might be quick to accuse such writings as “utopian,” that is, in Marxist terminology, ideas that are separated from the real living situation of now, with no idea of how to get from here to there or who are the actors that can carry that change about. And those accusations would be largely correct. But that’s not the point. These ‘utopian’ dreams have had a massive effect in popularizing and giving some flesh and bones to socialist ideas. continue

From Bbs.people.com.cn
May 6, 2008

Today China’ s statesmen use slogans like ‘One World, One Dream’, ‘Harmonious Society’ and ‘Scientific Development Concept.’. And yet all these terms were used in Kang Youwei’s utopian blueprint ‘Da Tongshua’. To westerners it might seem strange that the same men who in the 1920s embraced the radical ideas of Marxism, in the 1980s led China through pragmatic market reforms. And yet if one understands the mindset of their predecessor Kang Youwei, the seeming contradiction will not seem so strange. Kang laid out a vision of a world socialist republic, in which boundaries of class, race, nation, sex, family, and language were entirely abolished. A futuristic direct democracy in which virtue was the only competition. And yet the same visionary utopian, let the incredibly pragmatic 100 Days Reform. The pragmatic Mao Zedong of the 1930s, spoke of the same three staged Great Harmony, while pursuing moderate polices and alliances with the Kuomintang. If the theoretical foundations and historical experiences of Marxism-Leninism are seriously examined, it becomes clear that the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping and his successors to not represent a radical break with the vision lay out by Mao Zedong.

To observers ignorant of the basic fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist theory, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, appears as a major break with Marxist principles, however scientific study of the historical experiences and theories of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao reveal that there is in fact much continuity between Chinese Socialism and the historical legacy of Marxism. Despite antagonisms with Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, Mao Zedong’s development of Leninist theory actually laid the groundwork for market reforms. Marx and Lenin had both seen capitalism as a necessary stage of development, and had condemned any attempt to leap from feudalism into socialism. Lenin has seized power in 1917 when Russia was still a semi-feudal nation; nonetheless he saw the role of the proletarian as one of leadership in the bourgeois democratic revolution. In the 1920s Lenin established the New Economic Policy which was very similar to the Chinese economy of the 1980s, and allowed market forces to regulate areas of the economy. Mao Zedong followed the model of the New Economic policy during the Yanan period. Having learned from the Soviet experience, Mao never launched a vigorous campaign to wipe out capitalism like Russia had during the ‘War Communism’ era. In his development of the theory of New Democracy, Mao recognized that the national bourgeoisie would have a major role to play for many years after the revolution. During the First Five Year Plan, Liu Shaoqi ensured that the state cooperated with the national capitalists. No attempt was made to wipe out private industry only to ensure that there was no exploitation. Stalin had recognized in his theory of socialist economics that the law of commodity and value still applied to socialist nations.[1] Socialist nations were not free from the objective laws of economics, instead it was their responsibility to study those laws and harness them.

Xue Muqia belonged to the generation of Chinese radicals who idealistically joined the Party in the 1920s and yet saw the need for market reform in the 1980s, while little known in the west his textbook on political economy laid the theoretical foundations for Deng Xiaoping’s epic reforms. Xue was a leader of several major workers movements in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1940s he governed the economic policies of large provinces. A supreme pragmatist, Xue admitted that he had not read ‘Das Kapital’ until the 1960s. Like Deng Xiaoping, Xue used his exile during the disaster of the Cultural Revolution to return to the Marxist classics, and find a way to save China from the brink of collapse. Immersing himself in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Xue saw how the feudal-fascist reign of terror by the Lin Biao-Gang of Four clique stood against Marxist ideas. With the victory of genuine Marxists over the ultra-equalitarianism, Xue proceeded to complete his masterpiece on political economy. Marx and Engels had laid out the need for a lower and higher stage of communism. Xue pointed out that during the lower stage of communism, the law of supply and demand, and commodity relations still governed.

Mao had recognized in his ‘Critique of Soviet Economics’, and ‘On The Ten Major Relationships’, that Stalinist over-centralization would be harmful to the economy. The lessons from 10 Major Relationships bear a striking resemblance to the Four Modernizations of Zhou Enlai, and the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Mao recognized that contradiction was the key to expanding the economy. To increase military power, it was necessary to cut back on military spending and put resources in the civil economy. To increase heavy industry it was necessary to invest in light industry and agriculture to build foundations. To expand the communes it was necessary initially to make the districts smaller. All of these brilliant insights were abandoned during the Great Leap Forward and the feudal-fascist rule of Lin Biao.[2] Marx had pointed out that just as reactionary social relations could harm production so could over-futuristic social relations. The Gang of Four had attempted to impose radical equalitarianism while China was still emerging out of feudalism. This allowed various bad elements to take advantage. In addition the productive areas were punished and the wasteful areas rewarded. No incentive existed to expand the economy, and an anti-democratic bureaucracy dictated to the economy. Xue saw that overambitious goals would be ‘punished’ by the objective laws of value.

Upon taking power Mao’s chosen successor Hua Guofeng attempted to find a balance between reform and opening up and the First Five Year Plan, while this was a progressive step it failed to create the economic dynamism needed to compete with the imperialist west and social imperialist Soviet Union. After the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, many in the party idolized the First Five Year Plan period. However Deng recognized that a 1950s style economy could not compete in the 1980s. Deng returned to the scientific ideas laid out by Mao, and followed Mao’s command to ‘seek truth from facts’. Deng initiated radical reforms in both industry and agriculture. Just as Mao had recognized the peasants would play a decisive role in political revolution, Deng recognized their supreme role in economic revolution. Deng created a more democratic collectivist system. Because of China’s low level of development, it was not yet possible to create an ‘ownership of the whole people’. Instead collectives would be democratically owned by those who worked. [3]Collectives were separate from the state economy and were responsible for their own profits and losses. The trend towards smaller collectives had been taking place since the Great Leap Forward. Deng legalized and expanded this trend by creating the household responsibility system. [4]The system made local households responsible for their own profits, and gave them the option of farming for private surplus profit. Instead of rigid plans, Deng created more indirect planning through guidelines. Another imposition was the creation of a dual pricing system that recognized supply and demand. [5]

Marx had stated that during socialist development ‘to each according to his work’ was the principle that governed not ‘to each according to his needs’. Mao had stated that the only criterion for correct theory was practice. That was exactly what Deng Xiaoping did with the Special economic Zones. The SEZs were essentially scientific experiments that sought to test the merits of opening up and reform. The spectacular success of the early SEZs convinced even conservative party members to continue Deng’s policies.[6] The rapid growth of foreign trade and rural development helped China’s productive forces grow at an incredibly rapid rate. Despite difficulties and inequalities the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in lifting more people out of poverty than any organization or government in human history.

Hu Jintao has greatly expanded on the principles of the Three Represents, and applied it in a manner to create a more just society. The theorists of Deng Xiaoping theory recognized that reform and opening-up would necessarily create dangerous social divisions. Nevertheless they foresaw that the danger of China falling even further behind the imperialist nations, was a far greater threat. While inequality has grown at an appalling rate, the rise in productive forces has given the state the power to deal with inequality. As of 2008 only 60% of China’s population remains rural and state-owned industries account for less than 40% of the economy.[7] Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents did not mean abandoning the plight of the peasants and workers. Jiang simply recognized that in line with Deng Xiaoping Theory, the best way to help the poor was to increase productivity. Hu Jintao’s concept of a Harmonious Society called for a more even development of China’s produce. Hu Jintao has also devised plans to revive China’s fledging state owned industries. By introducing more democratic management structure, and modernizing to compete in the market, state owned companies may suceed in securing their permanent role in China’s ecnonmy.

The achievement of the Chinese Communist Party is of epic proportions. If the CPC succeeds industrializing and modernizing a nation of 1.4 billion people, it will be a feat without parallel in history. Despite constant demonization from the imperialist west, China has become a model to many developing nations. The last task remaining for the CPC is the creation of democracy. The CPC has already granted the left-Kuomintang 30% of the seats in the People’s Congress, and allowed rival parties to hold high government office. [8]As social productive forces increase China will strive towards democracy. However China cannot and does not seek to build an inequitable bourgeoisie democracy, instead China seeks to construct a shining Socialist Democracy in which the voices of all people are expressed, and which at last allows the Chinese people to reach their full human potential. The achievement of a Harmonious Society will be the realization of Kang Youwei’s dream of the Great Harmony. The construction of Socialist Democracy will prove to be an even great challenge, and even greater source of inspiration than that of the socialist economy.

Andors, Stephen. 1977. China’s industrial revolution: politics, planning, and management, 1949 to the present. New York: Pantheon Books.

Borthwick, Mark. 1992. Pacific century: the emergence of modern Pacific Asia. Boulder: Westview Press.

Eckstein, Alexander. 1977. China’s economic revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hsu?eh, Mu-ch?iao. 1981. China’s Socialist economy. China knowledge series. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Lardy, Nicholas R. 1978. Economic growth and distribution in China. Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press.

Lippit, Victor D. 1987. The economic development of China. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

McNally, Christopher A. 2008. China’s emergent political economy: capitalism in the dragon’s lair. Routledge studies in the growth economies of Asia, 75. London: Routledge.

Prybyla, Jan S. 1978. The Chinese economy: problems and policies. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Riskin, Carl. 1987. China’s political economy: the quest for development since 1949. Economies of the world. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press.

Wei, Lin, and Arnold Chao. 1982. China’s economic reforms. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Xue, Muqiao. 1960. The Socialist transformation of the national economy in China. Peking: Foreign Language Press.

[1] Xue 16

[2] Xue 87

[3] Wei 49

[4] Lippit 24

[5] Ibid 68

[6] Riskin 135

[7] McNally 12

[8] McNally 45 “

by Keith Joseph

I think that capitalism is a perfectly adequate term to describe the international system and I think that Marx’s critique of political economy provides the conceptual apparatus that we need to apprehend the world system. Lenin’s theory doesn’t add anything useful and in fact adds a great deal of confusion. I have made this comment before. Lenin’s theory is usually dogmatically defended (I define “dogma” as assertion without evidence), but here is my critique in a nutshell.

The four main features of Lenin’s theory are:

1. The combination of industrial capital with bank capital, creating a new form of capital called “Finance Capital.”

2.The move from competition among many capitalist concerns to huge transnational monopolies.

3.The move from mere export of products to export of capital; i.e. capital moving all over the globe in search of maximum profits.

4. Competition and wars between rival capitalist powers.

Each is wrong. Let’s take these one at a time:

1. The combination of industrial capital with finance capital.

Lenin gets this idea from the Rudolph Hilferding who elaborated it at great length in his text: “Finance Capital.” The problem is that this is not a theoretical discovery. It is a empirical observation. And Marx’s theory was/is adequate to deal with it. In the second volume of Das Kapital Marx explains that circuit of industrial capital has three moments: money capital, productive capital, and merchant capital. Collectively these three moments make up the circuit of “industrial capital.” In other words, money capital, be it institutionally controlled by a bank or not, is already a part of the circuit of industrial capital. The relationship between productive capital and banks can certainly be one of struggle and banks can dominate productive capitals but so can merchant capitals. Wal-Mart’s domination of productive capitalists – in mainstream literature productive capitals are referred to as wal-marts “suppliers”—is legendary. In any event, the idea that “Finance capital” is a merger of bank and industrial capital is redundant. It freezes a momentary empirical observation into a universal theory and only adds confusion.

Here is a quote from Marx making the point:
“The real circuit of industrial capital in its continuity is therefore not only a unified process of circulation and production, but also a unity of all its three circuits” The three circuits are money, production, circulation. (that is on page185 of volume 2 penguin edition)

What we need is a class analysis of the corporation. “Wall Street” is the colloquial term for financial capital. Investors, i.e., finance capitals, own shares of the corporation and some of those share holders elect a board of directors. The board of directors main jobs are hiring top managers and appropriating and distributing the surplus value pump out of labor. Top management takes on many of the same duties as the capitalist entrepreneur of smaller enterprises, namely overseeing the production process and seeing the commodity to market for the realization of value. All three of these moments, financing, production, selling could be accomplished by one capitalist, usually in a smaller enterprise, or they could be separated: a shoe making enterprise finance itself and markets its products in branded retail shops (For example, I just bought a pair of red wing work boots at a store that only sells red wing work boots. I didnt look that deeply into the companies operations but I assume the retail store is owned by the productive capital). Or the enterprise borrows money from the bank, produces shoes and delivers them to Footlocker (a separate retail store with wares from many different productive capitals) for realization of the value. In any case it is an empirical difference that we grasp with the same theoretical apparatus. In this case the theoretical apparatus developed by Marx. Hilferding and Lenin add nothing here but confusion.

2. the theory of monopoly capitalism
This is Lenin’s most egregious error and, in my view, his most pernicious. Have you ever wondered why so few Marxists read Marx? The theory of monopoly capitalism is the answer.

Everyone familiar Lenin ‘s theory, and the history of the communist movement, knows the following catechism:
Marx studied 19th century competitive capitalism. But in the 20th century a new and higher monopoly stage of capitalism emerged, analyzed by Lenin.

This, of course, renders Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital and his labor theory of value to the dustbin of academia, and thus Lenin’s short propaganda pamphlet displaces Marx’s critique of political economy (competition between capitals is the mechanism that enforces what Marx called “the law of value” without competition there is no labor theory of value). Why bother reading Marx. The capitalism Marx talks about no longer exists. Or so 20th century communists believed. But they were: WRONG!

But just because it displaces Marx does not make it wrong. Let’s see how Lenin’s theory is wrong.

The theory of monopoly capitalism posits two stages of capitalism: a nineteenth century competitive stage, and a twentieth century monopoly stage. This dichotomy, the very notion of a “competitive stage,” and a “monopoly stage” is incontrovertible evidence that Lenin is working with a different theoretical paradigm then Marx. In other words, Lenin and Marx have very different theories of competition and monopoly. In Lenin monopoly negates competition (if this weren’t the case there would be no need to identify a “new stage”), and thus the law of value is negated. In Marx monopoly intensifies competition.

The idea that there are stages of capitalism with different laws is a radical error. Lenin’s theory is linear. Marx’s is dialectical. In Marx competition leads to monopoly and monopoly leads to competition. The laws of capitalism do not change. There are not new “stages” of capitalism. The application of capitalism’s “laws of motion” first analyzed by Marx are intensified and more perfectly applied over more and more geographic space as capitalism develops. They are not negated as in Lenin’s theory.
Indeed, the world of globalization is not one of monopoly. Quite the opposite, it is one of HYPER-COMPETITION. This is obvious, no?

Global capitalism is the law of value enforced ruthlessly across the face of the entire planet. Everyday more people enter into capitalist social relations. Globalization is capitalism perfecting itself and creating the conditions for its transcendence.

Jonas Zonninsein has a somewhat obscure text entitled “Monopoly Capital Theory” which offers a rigorous critique of Lenin and Hilferding’s theory. I highly recommend it.

3. Export of Capital
The United States, as in “U.S. led imperialism.” is a net importer of capital, not an exporter. Capital is imported and exported regardless of the countries status in the system. Lenin is empirically wrong. Again a momentarily correct empirical observation is transformed into an incorrect theory.

4. Competition between rival capitalist powers
On this point Lenin’s theory has more in common with bourgeois international relations theory than with Marx. And this is the reason why communist analysis is pre-occupied with the nation state and power relations and when it comes to the international arena and has precious little to say about class. We should leave the analysis of power relations to Kissinger.

What we need is a global class analysis.
To just hint at such an analysis: the uprisings in the middle east are uprisings against LANDLORD States. The Gaddaffi regime, for instance, did not tax the Libyan people. The state collected rents on its oil field. The state was a landlord. Indeed, the OPEC countries are all landlord states. Landed Property is a one of the main classes of the capitalist epoch even though it is a feudal class (Marx has a lot to say about landed property in the Eighteenth Brumaire and in the third volume of Capital). The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wars of industrial capital against landed property.

There is a collection entitled “The Rentier State in Africa” that develops the idea of the state as owner of landed property collecting rent. Cyrus Bina’s text: “Economics of the Oil Crisis” uses Marx’s theory of rent as do some essays in Peter Norre’s edited volume “Oil and Class Struggle” Also Fernando Coronil’s book “The Magical State” – a study of Venezuela– has a very good analysis of the landlord state in the introduction and first chapter.

Once we grasp that Lenins’ 4 central theses are wrong we realize that the whole theory of imperialism is wrong. We dont need a theory of imperialism. The uselessness of the theory is painstakingly obvious whenever anyone tries to use it to analyze contemporary events (the statement above is a good example). Especially the events it is supposed to explain: wars, global inequality, poverty. We need a theory of capitalism. Because capitalism is war, poverty, inequality, among other things. Do you know the best theory of capitalism? Marx’s value theory elaborated in the three volumes of “Das Kapital” and his “Theories of Surplus Value.”

We need a global class analysis. Our global class analysis must include: financial capital, productive capital, merchant capital, landed property, the working class (stratified across nationally boundaries, by race, by gender, by differential wages and skills, by rates of exploitation etc.)

These are obviously immensely complicated questions. Unfortunately, Lenin’s theory is not a help, it is in the way.

It is time to put away the meager gruel of Lenin’s “Imperialism” pamphlet and get to the feast that is the inheritance of the working class: Marx’s “Das Kapital.” We have good tools, we just have to learn to use them.

Conquering a New Popular Hegemony: Harnecker on 21st Century Socialism

“In recent years, and in increasingly more countries, growing multitudes have rebelled against the existing order and without a defined leadership have taken over plazas, streets, highways, towns, parliament, but, despite having mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, neither the magnitude of its size nor its combativeness have enabled these multitudes to go beyond simple popular revolts. They have brought down presidents, but they have not been capable of conquering power in order to begin a process of deep social transformation.” — Marta Harnecker.

By Marta Harnecker
Translated by Federico Fuentes, via LINKS

This article seeks to reflect on the issues raised during the roundtable discussion, “State, revolution and the construction of hegemony”, that occurred at the VI International Forum on Philosophy, held between November 28 and December 2, 2011, in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Logically, here I once again repeat some ideas that I have expressed in other writings, but have ordered them differently, while further refining some of them. It was written in July 2012 and first published in English at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission. Now available HERE in a PDF file set up from printing as an 11 x 17 fold-over, doubled sided, collated booklet, in easy-to-read type. Click HERE for a straight-though 36-page PDF document.

* * *

Index

1. Our goal: a different socialism

1) A new socialism, far removed from the Soviet model

2) Returning to the original socialist ideas.

3) Participatory planning: a fundamental characteristic of socialism..

4) Socialism, direct democracy and delegated democracy.

a) Decentralization: essential for real participation.

b) Direct democracy and delegated democracy.

5) A new society that is not decreed from above.

2. Transition to socialism using the government as a lever

1) Neoliberalism bred 21st-century socialism in Latin America.

2) A dilemma: how to advance having only conquered governmental power

a) Using the inherited state to promote the creation of a new state built from below.

b) Transforming the armed forces.

c) A development model that respects nature.

d) Other challenges.

3) The need for a pedagogy of limitations.

3. Constructing a new hegemony.

1) Defining hegemony.

a) Bourgeoisie achieves popular approval for capitalist order

b) Bourgeois hegemony begins to break down.

2) The need for a political instrument and a new culture within the left

3) Political strategy for current situation: a broad front

a) Winning the hearts and minds of the immense majority

b) A new culture of the left

Our goal: a different socialism[1]

1) A new socialism, far removed from the soviet model

1. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, Latin American and world leftist intellectuals fell into a state of confusion. We knew more about what we didn’t want in socialism than what we did want. We rejected the lack of democracy, totalitarianism, state capitalism, bureaucratic central planning, collectivism that sought to standardize without respect for differences, productivism that emphasized the expansion of productive forces without taking into account the need to preserve nature, dogmatism, intolerance towards legitimate opposition, the attempt to impose atheism by persecuting believers, the need for a single party to lead the process of transition.

2. So, why talk about socialism at all, if that word carried and continues to carry such a heavy burden of negative connotations?

3. To answer this question, we need to consider some important issues. On the one hand, just as Soviet socialism was collapsing, democratic and participatory processes in local governments began to emerge in Latin America, foreshadowing the “kind of alternative to capitalism that people wanted to build.”[2] On the other, by demonstrating in practice that people could govern in a transparent, non-corrupt, democratic and participatory manner, the political conditions in several Latin American countries were thus prepared to make possible the coming to power of the left through democratic elections.

4. These beacons that began to radiate throughout our continent were aided by the resounding failure of neoliberalism during the 1980s and 1990s and, more recently, by the global crisis of capitalism. An alternative to capitalism is more necessary than ever. But what should it be called?

5. It was President Chávez who had the audacity to point to socialism as the alternative to capitalism He called it “21st-century socialism,” reclaiming the values associated with the word socialism: “love, solidarity, equality between men and women and equity among all,”[3] while added the adjective “21st century” to differentiate this new socialism from the errors and deviations present in the model of socialism that was implemented during the 20th century in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

6. Aware of the negative connotation associated with this word, Chavez dedicated himself to explaining to his people, through numerous public speeches and interventions, all the benefits that this new society would bring with it, in contrast to the situation created by capitalism. His interventions have been so successful that, according to various polls, more than half of Venezuela’s population prefers socialism over capitalism.

7. However, it is worth remembering that 35 years earlier in Chile, the victory of President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, with the support of the leftist Popular Unity coalition, marked the beginning of the world’s first experiment in a peaceful transition to socialism. Although it was defeated by a military coup three years later, the experience left us with some important lessons. If our generation learned anything from that defeat, it was that peaceful progress towards our goal required us to rethink the socialist project applied until then in the world, and that it was therefore necessary to develop a project that was more in tune with the reality of Chile and the peaceful path towards socialism. Allende’s folkloric expression, “socialism with red wine and empanadas,”[4] seemed to capture this idea, pointing towards the building of a democratic socialist society rooted in national popular traditions.[5] So I believe that the Chilean experience should be considered the first practical experience that attempted to move away from the Soviet model of socialism and towards what we now call 21st-century socialism. continue

By David Laibman

SCIENCE & SOCIETY 76

The Occupy Wall Street movement that began last fall at Zuccotti Park in New York City, and then spread across the country, has rekindled, with some urgency, the debate about left strategy, and about the direction the movement should take.

By the time this text appears in print, the discussion will have become fused with the political debate that always surfaces in the United States in a Presidential election year.

Let’s start with two affirmations: first, everyone who lives in the shadow of today’s world capitalist crisis has a right to give “advice” to Occupy. In my own conversations with activists (mainly in New York), I have found very little of the old “hey, we are the movement” attitude: everyone understands now that people with varying experiences and different degrees and styles of participation have a right to speak in the “general assemblies” of our time; that youth is not a guarantee of creativity and freshness of vision, any more than age is a guarantee of wisdom and experience. Second, yes, many of the things we will be saying, and hearing, have been said and heard before. That, too, is good, not bad. If some of us are reminded of debates on the left in earlier times — the 1960s, say, or even the 1930s — that does not mean that we are necessarily spinning (or reinventing) our wheels.

With this in tow, I want to consider the range of positions that are circulating within today’s activist movement. Without attempting anything like a systematic survey, I want to suggest that there are essentially three positions in play — three models of the society that oppresses us, and against which we are organizing. I will call this society “capitalist,” recognizing that that term means different things to different people, and that one of the three models (described below) may not even use it. Each of the models, in turn, has its own unique brand of proposals concerning how the movement should proceed: the relation between electoral and extra-electoral forms of struggle, for instance, or between long-range and short-range goals. Each of the models, of course, has numerous variations within it. Listening to the discussions, the first impression received is one of immense and random variety. The most common view, I believe, uses a two-model approach to organizing the cloud of ideas: these are the first two, of the three enumerated just below. My contribution is to add a third model to the toolbox. It should go without saying that more than one of these models can coexist within a single consciousness.

The three models may be labeled 1) Reformist; 2) External/Revolutionary; 3) Internal/Revolutionary.

The Reformist model sees contemporary capitalist society as having gone off the rails in crucial respects. Its description of the crisis, and the forces leading up to it, relies on metaphors and concepts such as “feeding frenzy,” “excessive polarization,” “loss of equilibrium between public and private,” and so on. We need impassioned and energetic forces, such as Occupy, to drive a new political momentum for balance, for reining in excesses, eliminating harmful externalities, generating the “shared prosperity” that is the “foundation for political democracy.” The movement should focus on reforms: fair taxation, government (public) responsibility for job creation in the last instance, full funding for health care, education, child and elder care, ecological sustainability. Issues concerning systems — of property, wealth, power — take back seat to the task of achieving measurable goals. The practical consequences of this model are fairly straightforward: pursue specific reforms, in concert with established forces (trade unions, reform movements, community organizations, the activist base of the Democratic Party). continue

By Richard D Wolff
Online University of the Left via Truthout | Op-Ed

Sept 3, 2012 – Capitalism’s crises have always threatened it. True, capitalism’s defenders could fairly easily dismiss crises when they were shallow and short with limited suffering for the unemployed, bankrupt and their dependents and communities. Some said they were merely “bumps in the capitalist road” to growth and prosperity. Others saw crises as capitalism’s way to “clean out inefficient firms” and thus prepare its next upswing. Such interpretations of capitalism – ideologies – have long served to counter criticisms of its instability, recurring cycles and the suffering they impose.

However, such ideologies arouse many more than the usual skeptics when – as in the 1930s and again since 2007 – capitalism’s downturns cut deep and persist. Then capitalism’s stark inefficiencies become too glaring as millions of unemployed workers alongside idled productive capacity yield massive waste and long-lasting social costs. Bailouts of large financial capitalists by the governments they control turn skeptics into critics. The critics then become mobilized into a real political opposition when subsequent government “austerity” policies shift the costs of crisis and bailouts onto the mass of people.

Capitalists and the rich remain determined now NOT to bear the costs of the bailouts or the crisis. Unlike in the 1930s, they don’t see organized, determined and militant workers’ movements to worry about today – nor any USSR positioned as an alternative to modern capitalism. So, they push austerity policies for governments everywhere. To sustain governments’ austerity policies, capitalists and the rich lean on their ideological crutches to try to thwart political opposition.

The mainstream ideology that works best as capitalism’s crutch is blame the government. This interpretation of modern society insists that the ultimate root and cause of economic problems is the government, not capitalism nor capitalists. If you are unemployed, foreclosed, or underpaid, the problem is not the capitalist who refuses to employ you, evicts you, or pays you poorly. It is instead partly your own fault, but mostly that of the government: the politicians and the bureaucrats.

Blame-the-government ideology serves capitalists and the rich executives, managers, professionals and advisers who depend on them. They can boost their profits and wealth by cutting wages, jobs and benefits, using toxic technologies, relocating businesses overseas, jacking up prices, foreclosing, evicting, and so on. They can provoke global crises and take massive bailouts with public money. To cover all that, business and political leaders, media spokespersons and academics compose a chorus that endlessly repeats, “blame the government.” They seek to transform that idea into “common sense” so victims of capitalists’ actions will automatically not blame them, but instead get angry at politicians.

The blame-the-government ideological crutch aims to stop, deflect and demoralize political coalitions of those hurt and outraged by capitalist crises. Consciously or unconsciously, capitalism’s ideologues want to prevent any repeat of what happened in the 1930s. Then, a coalition of workers, farmers, intellectuals, and others forced President Roosevelt to do the opposite of austerity. He raised taxes on corporations and the rich to pay for creating Social Security, unemployment insurance and a massive federal jobs program. A similar coalition today could return taxes on corporations and the rich back to those much higher Roosevelt-era rates. That could fund a government jobs program now like Roosevelt’s, reducing unemployment now without any deficit and thus no additional national debt. It could, of course, go further and question capitalism itself.

Blame-the-government ideology aims to prevent workers’ angers and resentments about their deprivations under capitalism from building effective, organized political power. That ideological crutch seeks to assure that what capitalism does to the people economically will not be undone by the people politically.

Blame-the-government ideology supports capitalism also in another way. By portraying government as wasteful, incompetent, corrupt, power mad and oppressive, it strives to establish another “common sense” idea. Government should be kept economically weak: Keep its spending down, its budget balanced, or else in debt to capitalists and the rich (main government creditors). Limit the taxes it can levy, the regulations it can impose, and so on. Hobble the government while painting it as a negative social force, not to be trusted. Corrupt the politicians with the resources only corporations and the rich have and spend for such purposes and then denounce that corruption as the government’s fault. Turn workers away from engagement, respect for, or even interest in politics. Disgusted and alienated, many workers withdraw, leaving the political arena to the capitalists and the rich to buy and shape. US mainstream politics thus serves and never challenges capitalism.

Blame the government, like all ideologies, has contradictions and blind spots. When war is on the agenda, politicians get quick makeovers from “crooks” into “commander in chief” and “national leaders.” When workers strike and otherwise resist employers, capitalism’s ideologues want to unleash government on those workers. In such conditions, ideology waffles from blame and reduce to celebrate and strengthen government. Similarly, when politicians get caught working for and being paid by capitalists and the rich, a troubling question invades public discussion. Who really is to blame: the politicians who serve, the capitalists who pay and get served, or the system they built and maintain together?

Mainstream blame-the-government ideology is a fig leaf that hides (and thereby protects and supports) how capitalism works. In crisis times, it intensifies (e.g., Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan and Rush Limbaugh) to shift public attention away from capitalism’s breakdown and gross injustice. Its ideologues then urgently ratchet up blame on the government for taxing us, limiting guns, attacking marriage, religion and heterosexuality, mandating health insurance, imposing regulations etc. Their mission: redirect mass hurt, fear, anxiety and resentment about the effects of capitalist crisis into rituals of resisting the evil politicians and bureaucrats who want to control us.

Capitalism’s ideological crutches do not necessarily or always stress blame the government. In Germany (1930s) and Italy (1920s), for example, deep crises saw capitalists embrace instead fascist ideologies and political parties that exalted extremely powerful government. Hitler and Mussolini merged powerful government with major capitalist enterprises. They used state power directly to subordinate labor to capital and to destroy capitalism’s major critics: labor unions, socialist and communist parties.

Capitalists in the US, increasingly since 1945, have preferred a blame-the-government ideology that best reflects their thinking and advances their interests. They used it to help eradicate the socialist and communist parties that had been crucial to the powerful union (CIO)-based workers’ coalition of the 1930s. It helped likewise to weaken decisively the main labor movement (AFL-CIO) across the last half century. Workers persuaded that it is “common sense” to blame their economic conditions on government rather than their employers undermine union solidarity and militancy. Finally, blame-the-government ideology helped to roll back the New Deal as workers were invited to identify with corporations fighting against an evil government seeking to control them. Thus corporations could, for example, win public support for cuts in taxes on their profits even when those cuts threatened government programs workers wanted.

To expose and challenge capitalism’s blame-the-government ideological crutch does not mean reversing its one-sidedness. We need not and should not celebrate governments and their policies just because capitalism’s ideologues blame them. Governments are creatures of their societies. In capitalist societies, corporations and the rich use their resources and power to shape government to their advantages. They also lean on ideological crutches to win enough public support to keep control of the government and society. Workers have been and will continue to be victimized by capitalist controls of economy and politics. To change government policies they need to see through capitalism’s ideological crutches. More than that, they will have to organize politically as they did briefly in the 1930s. Yet that, too, was not enough. The New Deal struck by Roosevelt, the CIO and the socialists and communists in the 1930s was a change in government policy, but one that did not change the underlying capitalist economic system. It left the tiny minority of capitalists (major shareholders and boards of directors) in charge of the corporations and they used that position over the last half-century to negate and reverse what happened in the 1930s.

A different economic system would have prevented that outcome. A different economic system would shape and sustain altogether different government policies.

A different economic system from the ground up means reorganizing enterprises to put democratic majorities (of employees and of residents of communities that interact with the enterprise) in charge of all the basic decisions: what, how and where to produce and what to do with the profits. With the people in charge of enterprises – instead of tiny groups of capitalists – the economic resources they send to the government (e.g., taxes) will require it finally to serve the people in return. Just as capitalist enterprises always made sure to shape government to work primarily for them, so a social transition to workers’ self-directed cooperative enterprises would make sure that government, for the first time, genuinely works for the majority. Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission. Richard D Wolff

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne).

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By Sidney Gluck
Political Affairs

August 18 2012 – The 21st century is witnessing an epochal change, something to be noted in the emergence of two economic poles-one dominated by Western capitalism and the other in the process of forming an association of former colonial countries in various levels and forms of economic development. Socio-economic changes have taken place in history similarly, but not with such an explosive and defining character. As an exception, capitalist colonial domination was part of its industrialization impinging on resources and cheap labor for greater personal gain.

There are now three forms of capital accumulation: privately owned industry, stocks, enterprises and financial capital; socially owned government accumulation utilized for industrial development, infrastructure, and forms of social obligations; and, social security wealth belonging to retired workers. Economic growth differs under the control of private and social forms of capital. The former is concerned with private individual accumulation. The latter is concerned with economic growth and improvement of the conditions of the working population, which creates the wealth in industrialized society.

The social security form of capital belongs to the people who have paid in during their productive years to support retirement and is a form of accumulation from their earnings placed in trust with the government for administration. For the past few years, this capital has been used and safely invested in the country and the proceeds added to the accumulation of the retirees.

The emergence of social capital reflects a major change in society, just as the emergence of private capital posited the change from feudalism to capitalism as an economic system and basis of social relations. The growth of social capital is inevitable as private capital ceases to expand domestic growth and job creation in developed Western countries, which comprise one third of the world’s population and where labor has succeeded through historic struggles to increase wages and living standards. Hence, industrial growth in developed countries has diminished or ceased. Investments have shifted to former colonial countries, including China, for the past thirty years, with incredible rates of accumulation reflected in the highest earnings of Wall Street despite the 2008 economic crisis, which ended for private capital in mid-2009 but persists in its fourth year with fifteen million still jobless and 17% poverty stricken.

At the turn of the century an organization was formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, under the name BRIC and renamed BRICS after South Africa joined in 2005, with the intention of economic development without foreign private capital controls to counteract the negative effect of the Western capital invasion. This is indicative of the creation of a bipolar economic world. BRIC has now called a meeting in 2012 to organize trade and investment stimulating national economic growth with little emphasis on the military other than defense.

The epochal change we now witness diminishes the domination of private capital and opens the road to structuring harmonious societies that combine private and social capital to maintain and accelerate industrial development destined to create social security and sustain the working population, which, in any event, is the prime source of national wealth.

Wealth itself was generated by labor time in all forms of industrial production of commodities and salable structures, which ultimately exchange into the money form of accumulation in the marketplace leaving it to private finance to determine the direction of economic growth and avoid the consequences of economic crisis. A number of instances of government use of social capital in China are: loans to private corporations for the development of high-tech, the direct financing of necessary industries with low capital gains that assist major industrial and human needs such as energy, increased food production at affordable prices, increased minimum wages at a rate of 10% per annum until 2015 aimed at enhancing consumption to rebalance the loss of foreign markets to balance consumption at home to balance the loss of foreign exports, the enlargement of infrastructure and social services in the fields of education, health, etcetera and other social necessities.

One must acknowledge the fact that it is capitalism that developed industrial production, which is the basis for creating a society of plenty that could take care of all its population and eliminate exploitation. Long before capitalism under tribal communal society there was no exploitation of man by man. Elders ran a collective society, which lived off nature’s own production with little input of human labor other than gathering. That changed when some clever individuals learned how to use the forces of nature itself to increase nature’s own production. They ultimately enslaved others, creating class-dominated society. This continued for centuries, developing into control of extended agriculture terrain and animal husbandry which became the main means for human sustenance and growth-this, under feudal serfdom.

During the feudal era, private ownership in many forms developed in early stages where individuals produced desirable items as commodities and ultimately exchanged them for money. Individual production flourished and created a mass market. Some clever individuals set up facilities inviting producers into a “factory” where they sold their products to the owners devoting sales time to additional production for mass marketing. This relationship between owner and producers changed into another form of remuneration-that is, wages based on the total labor-time in the production process. This was the beginning of the capitalist wage-labor industrial system, which then went through a number of changes ultimately culminating in mass production and monopolization. Today the further development of high-tech, which reduces the direct labor time content, is taking place in undeveloped countries with cheap labor to the neglect of increasing production in the home countries where their capital base had originated. Thus, the wage-labor form of exploitation became the basis of industrialization and economic growth.

Adam Smith, in his “Wealth of Nations” did not deal with the exploitation developed with factory industrial production nor did he recognize the danger of economic crisis resulting from relative overproduction affecting market conditions. Troubled by the tendency towards crisis, he wrote a second book in which he expressed the feeling that “an invisible hand” corrects the economic crises in the system with no indication of relative overproduction and market disruption. The quantification of labor-time is basically the value of a commodity because the monetary payment to the laborer is only a part of the values created. The total labor-time is realized in the market in the form of money, and that is where the accumulation of wealth begins, since the money becomes a form of capital and can be re-injected into a growing economy and can increase financial private wealth accumulation in the market place. It was not until 1857 when Karl Marx published his first volume of Capital establishing classical economics which clearly indicated the source of wealth in labor time and the tendency of interruption of the process in periodic overproduction relieved by a shutdowns and economic crisis. Thirty years later, British economists supplanted this with neo-Classical Economics, which posited the market exchange as the source of wealth. The market is merely the area into which the inherent wealth in the commodity is exchanged for its value in money resulting in capital accumulation.

Capitalists compete but also monopolize, circumvent competition, control prices and wage-labor relationships. Monopolization leads to a higher level of capital investment magnifying exploitation. Ultimately, financial capital dominates the system and withdraws support for industrial capital in countries with high labor costs. The USA is an example for the last 30 years. Today there is not enough industry to absorb the available work force without expansion, which might have to take place with government assistance. Finance capital investment in low labor cost countries generally includes high tech which adds profit because it requires a small labor force further increasing profits.

The present economic crisis in the USA is an excellent example of the fact that the capitalist class itself has split into two functions-financial and industrial-with finance, the dominant factor, resulting in a cessation of industrial growth, neglect of existing industries and the continuation of an economic crisis for workers and the middle class. Investments overseas have created more profits in 2010 than in the history of Capitalism. True, industrial capital seeks a profit and wealth accumulation, but at least jobs are created contributing to national economic development and adding to the level of consumption.

Financial capital has dominated the capitalist system in the United States since the election of Regan in 1980, abandoning national industrial growth. In a historical sense, it has lost its right to run society. In fact, the Glass-Steagle Act, which regulated finance capital, was eliminated before the turn of the century. It is the real enemy to change, standing in the way of mass industrial development in total disregard of human conditions. Interestingly, financial capital itself in Western Europe is in trouble. The German capitalist class is an exception in its sense of history and its adaptation to change. When it took political power in the early 1870′s, it established the Welfare State to protect itself under capitalism; it has maintained a multi-party political system, representing various economic sectors. Furthermore, sensing world changes among former under-developed countries, they have established economic relationships with emerging countries, especially with China, welcoming Chinese capital investments in their own country and establishing mutual trade relations.

The German capitalist class recognizes the development of a bipolar world and is adjusting itself to participate in the changing international economic relations. Germany recognizes the growth potential of an organization named BRICS, which is planning an international meeting of former undeveloped countries in the spring of 2012 to foster economic unity, working with each other in trade and investment and no military involvements. This is a second pole in a bipolar world that is growing, notwithstanding denigration in the Western press, with the prospect of raising material investment and trade to stimulate living standards for where two-thirds of the world population resides.

Obviously, the world is changing in a positive direction. The only thing that would stop it is a war. There is only one country conducting military maneuvers and occupations on a global scale. Sorrowfully, it is the USA, which is not being supported by Western European nations as exemplified in the so-called NATO bombing in Libya which left the USA holding 75% of the bag for an operation in this guise. The New York Times wrote about that, and they agree. Just think about how federal money (which is social capital), now spent for destruction, could be used to revive industries and create jobs, which will then reduce the denigration of life in a humanist approach to improving living standards. Such a saving of capital by the federal government, as a result of reducing the Pentagon budget and the conduct of wars, can become accumulated social capital to be deployed in high-tech as well as protecting the country, its terrain, services, and people. Private capital can still be involved profitably, along with social capital and grow the economy to take care of the whole population.

In fact, Karl Marx observed, after noting class differences in France, “the Bourgeoisie will continue for a long time after the establishment of a socialist economy”, appreciating the creativity of private capital. The Chinese put it a different way: “the creation of a Harmonious Society” combining private capital with government social capital in economic growth for the sake of improving the condition of the entire population. Hence, one might say that the continued growth of industries will depend upon national economic planning rather than individual capitalist enterprises and politics. This is an economy buttressed with government and private finance guided by a national growth plan. Furthermore, government-financed loans to private enterprises, oftentimes in joint-ventures, solidifies growth and achieves the national plan; but this could not happen with the dominance of private capital since the plan would have to be based on national requirement rather than private interests with necessary compromises but socially and financially successful.

China is on that road, though it faces many contradictions in a society still plagued by feudal relations and the contradiction of wage-labor relationships with an overall vision of building the first high-tech industrial economy in the world under national planning. Do they have problems? More contradictions than any other country ever-because their population is fraught with multiple human natures reflecting productive relationships of different eras being molded into harmony, a process which is not an easy task. We are now observing higher levels of contradiction in the development of democracy in China which ultimately, based on the majority, would be the wage working sector as it develops a massive unity supporting a government that continues to develop the country without private capital domination. We should take our hats off to the successful Chinese leadership especially under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, the former concentrating on guiding peaceful foreign relationships and the latter dealing with domestic questions, and both, leading the development of the next five-year plan which never has, nor will include the development of armed forces other than defensive necessities, because everybody knows where the threat comes from…and it is not the European countries.

By 2016 China has projected that their national production will equal that of the USA and then, surpass it. When one considers the fact that the Chinese are spending 90 billion USD per year for defensive military, one cannot help but realize how much social capital, that would be consumed in building offensive military forces, is being saved and used for socially productive purposes. This is a good example of why they were able to grow so rapidly and became the second largest economy in the world and destined to become the largest by mid-century, by tripling production to satisfy their population of 1.3 billion and growing. One must note this is the development of a harmonious society-by combining the use of private and social capital to achieve a centralized national plan.

Capital and Capitalism as categories are now historically different. “Capitalism” as a system developed capital as a form of money hoard used for continued exploitation and private accumulation. Accumulation of capital has divided in two forms with different social contents. The Chinese political system welcomes private capital investment in its multi-capital system but demands that private capital is invited to function together with social capital as part of, but not in control of, the national plan. Thus, social capital is now invested by the Chinese government as well as by Chinese individuals. That is a new production relation and historic contribution to humanity. In the last analysis, based on its ability to produce, this structure of capital investment will ultimately lead into a kind of high-level tribal existence, sans class aspects, with productive output reaching a level filling the needs of all. Let us call THAT Communism! “Socialism” is a historically necessary transitional stage to the ultimate state. To quote Karl Marx, the essence of socialism is reflected in his words: “from each according to ABILITY, to each according to CONTRIBUTION”.

This Marxist conception of economic and social development was based upon the bourgeoisie continuing and even growing, within a harmonious society and overall economic plans not in the hands of but requiring, private capitalists who must adjust to the laws of humanistic social development as the objective of industrialization. Beyond that, Marx described the ultimate productive and social relations as “from each according to ABILITY, to each according to NEED”-which might be called a humanity and planet protecting industrial system without class antagonisms.

In the turn of the 21st century we are witnessing a movement in that direction, essentially an economic development to achieve humanism and social justice-an idea first created by Jesus and followed throughout centuries of religious sentiment, which, in the latter part of the 18th century in England, saw the first expression of the idea of socialism when religious movements (not the religious institutions) demanded of the new government that they add “a bit of socialism” giving the vote to men (today we include women).

The lesson is-”capital” itself is not the enemy. Capital now exists in two forms-private and social. Private capital is welcomed since it carries with it knowledge of industrialization that is the heart of building a society under present forces of production. Therefore, the real lesson is building industries with full advantage of ability for NATIONAL development. Private accumulation is respected, provided it obeys the law and stays subordinate to a new form of democratic political structure yet in the making. Private capital accumulation must be guided and combined in a new socio-economic relationship; otherwise we will have nothing but continuing economic crisis and the kind of anti-social decline we are witnessing today.

In the vernacular -Bless Occupy Wall Street- as Jesus the humanist might have done, having given his life to eliminate man’s inhumanity to man. Historic change has created a positive direction for economic and social development, applying the humanism of religious sentiments with the addition of Marx’s economic vision so that politics will follow the social needs of humanity for true economic and political democracy and freedom.

Sidney J. Gluck can be reached at E-mail: sjgluck@aol.com

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
SolidarityEconomy.net via Freedomroad.org

This article was originally published on the website: Philosophers for Change, philosophers.posterous.com.

June 28, 2012 – A discussion of the future of socialism and social transformation must be grounded in two realities.  The first reality is the broader economic, environmental and state-legitimacy crises in which humanity finds itself.  In other words, the convergence of these three crises means that the necessity for a genuine Left capable of leading masses of people is more pressing than ever.  It means that while one cannot sit back and wait for the supposed “final” crisis of capitalism to open up doors to freedom — since capitalism is largely defined by its continual crises — it is the case that the convergence of these three crises brings with it a level of urgency unlike any that most of us have experienced.  Not only is there a need for a progressive, if not radical set of answers to these crises at the level of immediate reforms, but the deeper reality is that capitalism — as a system — is incapable of providing legitimate, sustainable answers to these crises, whether individually or collectively.

The second reality, and the central focus of this essay, is that any discussion of a progressive post-capitalist future must come to grips with the realization of the crisis of socialism in which every trend in the global Left has been encased.  This has been a crisis at the levels of vision, strategy, state power and organization. It is a crisis that cannot be avoided by either a retreat to pre-Bolshevik Marxism or slipping into the abyss of post-modernism.  The reality of the crisis of socialism can only be avoided at our own peril.

The crisis of socialism can be said to have emerged in the context of the Stalinist hegemony over the international communist movement, creating challenges for the global Left (and not just the orthodox communist movement) at multiple levels.  One level has been that of the question of the post-capitalist socialist state.  The revelations regarding the authoritarian rule of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) shattered the sense of a genuine socialist democracy, even if one applauded the social accomplishments of the Soviet Revolution and its courageous sacrifices in the struggle against fascism.

In addition to the question of the socialist state, there emerged also the question of socialist strategy.  There was the matter of strategy in what has come to be known as the “global South” and the “global North.” In the global South, the Left-led national democratic revolutions, based on the alliance of workers and peasants, represented a major breakthrough in what had been a very Eurocentric Marxism.  The impact of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, to name only three, not only reshaped Marxism, but also had an impact on other Left as well as progressive nationalist political tendencies.  Yet by the 8th decade of the 20th century, these revolutionary currents seemed to have stalled.  The Chinese Revolution, with the death of Mao, altered course and ultimately embraced what can only be described, non-rhetorically, as a capitalist road.  Movements and state systems that Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin has described as “national populist projects,” i.e., anti-imperialist projects led by elements of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie (and in some cases the national bourgeoisie) that never fully broke with capitalism, found themselves drifting either back toward the global North or following a cynical embrace of the Soviet bloc.

Strategy plagued Marxist-led movements in the global North.  Parties and movements that embraced social democracy all but abandoned anything other than the rhetoric of socialism and quite comfortably assumed the role of guardians of the welfare state under democratic capitalism.  In many cases such parties, e.g., the British Labour Party; the French Socialist Party, while championing progressive social legislation and popular rights in their respective nation-states, also advanced a rabid defense of ‘enlightened’ colonialism and imperial privilege for countries they came to govern.

Communist parties in the global North followed a different trajectory, but in general came to develop a strategy for achieving power based largely on a non-revolutionary interpretation of the theoretical approach of Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci.  This interpretation, what the Maoists considered “revisionism” and what many other revolutionary Leftists saw as simply patently reformist, involved a protracted and largely electoral route to power.  But this route, even when it involved the creation of alternative institutions, e.g., worker cooperatives, was very gradualist and rarely able to accommodate itself to sudden shifts in the mass movements.  In fact, this approach placed a premium on the control of mass movements, and in many cases, the pacification of such movements, e.g., the French Communist Party in 1968.  These parties, not always unlike those out of social democracy, while rhetorically anti-imperialist, were inconsistent in practicing anti-imperialism against their own state/empire.

Yet the radical challenges to reformist approaches to the struggle for power had their own sets of flaws.  For much of what came to be known as the radical or revolutionary Left, there was a failure to distinguish the political vs. the ideological struggle.  As a result, there was — and in many cases continues to be — a premium placed on purity.  The anti-capitalist struggle is all too often seen as the articulation of the “correct” direction and the denunciation of anything that is perceived as inconsistently revolutionary (that is, articulation by one or another super-revolutionary group-let or self-important individual).  Such an approach, even where it has gained appeal, has been temporary, grounded in subjectivism, and inevitably led to sectarianism, and ultimately marginalization.

The crisis of socialism has also played itself out at the level of Left organization.  In the social democratic tradition the tendency became clear even before World War I with the creation of mass parties that were almost alternative universes but where there was little internal democracy.  These parties were very self-contained but were not structured to even consider the possibility of a non-electoral struggle for socialism.

The communist tradition, on the other hand, largely based itself on the mythology of the Bolshevik Party, as advanced by the Stalinist bloc within the CPSU.  Admittedly this conception of the party was applied differently in different settings, but these parties tended to be highly centralized and frequently resistant to organized, principled internal struggle.[i] That said, in many countries communist parties became truly mass parties with varying levels of internal participation and membership activities.  In the global North they moved away from a self-conception of being insurrectionist parties. In many countries these communist parties, particularly those influenced by Soviet Marxism, paid less and less attention to the lower strata of the working class and agricultural populations. The radical Left, in response, sought a pure form of revolutionary organization to stand in contrast to the so-called revisionist or reformist formations that they perceived were misleading the masses.  Such pure organizations were ideally suited for individuals in their teen years or twenties but not for those who had a more protracted view of struggle.  They were also not conceptualized in such a way that they could build the sorts of strategic alliances necessary in order to conduct a serious struggle for power.

Efforts at renewalThe crisis of socialism has met with various efforts at renewal since the 1950s.  Maoism, for instance, represented an effort, from the Left, to address the stagnation of Soviet-based Marxism and the bureaucratization of the Soviet state and party (and the resulting creation of a new, dominating class).[ii] And while Maoism pushed the limits on Marxist-Leninist theory, it retreated at key moments, such as on the nature of the role of the masses in a revolutionary state, and the legitimacy (or otherwise) of a multi-party socialism.  Neo-Trotskyism saw itself also as a force for renewal.  Other Left tendencies that arose in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Autonomists (in Italy and elsewhere), additionally positioned themselves as forces for socialist and/or Left renewal.

Despite the strengths of many of these tendencies, in the global South and global North, the fact remained that the radical Left failed to find a ‘remedy’ to the crisis of socialism, at least in its entirety.  Instead these political tendencies declined by the 1980s and while the case can certainly be made that there are countries where the Left movements of the 1960s have continued (and in some cases grown), as a global phenomenon there has been decline on the part of the radical Left that arose out of the 1960s/1970s, sometimes with the result that other non-left-wing, though seemingly radical currents have emerged to fill the void.

Yet a new set of Left renewal efforts began to surface beginning in the 1980s, sometimes introducing innovative theories and strategies while other times stalling (if not collapsing).  There is no consistency to such renewal efforts and they must all be understood in their particular circumstances.  That said, such efforts can be said to include but not be limited to: the rectification efforts that took place in the Communist Party of the Philippines (beginning in the early 1990s); the collapse of the Italian Communist Party followed by the emergence of the Rifondazione Communista (Communist Refoundation) tendency; the formation of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT); the rise of the Nepalese Maoists; the reformation within the South African Communist Party; liberation theology as it rose in both Latin America and, in a different variant, within the Black Freedom Movement in the USA; the emergence of Germany’s Die Linke (party of the Left); and more recently, pro-socialist movements in Latin America (advocating what they describe as being “21st Century Socialism”) as well as the construction of the Front de Gauche in France.

Regardless of the answers that they offered, what these and other efforts have shared in common has been a willingness to confront some of the major challenges in the crisis of socialism and move to articulate answers, and in some cases, new paths for exploration. This does not suggest that any of them have come up with ‘The Answer’ or that they have necessarily been correct in their analyses.  What is admirable is the courage at the level of theory to face what, to many, has been the Gorgon.  Several of these formations have been reexamining the role of electoral politics in the struggle for socialism, and more generally examining the alliances necessary in order to defeat capitalism and win a popular-democratic victory.  Some of the formations have been exploring the limits of armed struggle in the current age, particularly when contrasted with other forms of more non-violent though highly militant struggle.  And in almost every case, the limitations of the notion of a single, revolutionary party to both conduct the popular struggle but to also lead in a post-capitalist situation have been recognized, though what is left unanswered is the question of what are the real parameters that must exist for democratic, political discourse and action in a progressive, post-capitalist social formation.

These efforts at renewal have been largely within the context of the organized Left or what Chilean theoretician Marta Harnecker defines as the “party Left.” Other efforts have emerged within progressive social movements, such as Brazil’s famous Landless Workers Movement (MST) or the poor people’s movements in South Africa.  What distinguishes these efforts is that they are largely initiated or led by a core of Leftists but not necessarily individuals affiliated with an existing national Left organization or party.  The leftists in these formations did not necessarily emerge themselves from these struggles but in either case have made these struggles and movements their base.  Their framework is also not necessarily one that involves an over-arching narrative or strategic orientation, though this does not mean that they are opposed to such frameworks/orientation.  Rather, their principal ‘universe’ is that specific social movement.  In these progressive social movements, however, they tend to push for what was once termed “non-reformist reforms” (Andre Gorz) that challenges the nature of the system.  Such reforms, it should be quickly noted, are not pie-in-the-sky or ideological platitudes.  Rather they exist as visionary but eminently practical mass actions for social transformation, albeit focused in one sector.

Left renewal efforts within this sector in part reflects disenchantment and skepticism concerning the capacity of the organized Left to address the questions that have emerged from within the crisis of socialism.  In Latin America, for instance, movements among the Indigenous and the African descendant populations have frequently concluded that Left party and party-type efforts have either ignored them outright or marginalized their issues in the name of class or national sovereignty.  In many cases, the Left’s leadership has lacked real representation and a base from within the Indigenous and African descendant populations, as well as from among women.

As a result the mass formations that have emerged in these progressive social movements are very different from parties. They seek autonomy from parties and are not particularly interested in being perceived as instruments of party formations.  Many of them will coalesce, certainly in defensive battles, but also for certain offensive struggles, but this is not necessarily the same thing as the building of a national Left front fighting for power.

Harnecker has correctly argued that the future for genuine renewal rests with the unity of the organized Left/party Left and the Left that exists within the social movements.  The ultimate nature of that unity remains a question, but this writer would suggest that it would necessarily be a party-like formation or front that exists at a higher level than a confederation.

We should add that another source of renewal that has existed in relationship to the Left of the social movements has been the global justice movement.  Weakened in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks (and the repression, both physical and ideological immediately following), the global justice movement launched a serious challenge to neo-liberal globalization.  The mass demonstrations, such as in Seattle (1999) and Quebec (2001), to name just two, opened up a public discourse on the manner in which wealth and power were reshaping the planet.

The 11th September attacks took the wind out of the sails of this movement, in part by making, at least in the USA, such mass expressions of outrage appear to be “unpatriotic.” Additionally, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, increasingly repressive legislation was introduced throughout the capitalist world in order to weaken or suppress outright militant activism, all in the name of fighting alleged terrorism.  While the global justice movement was not crushed altogether, it had to shift gears.  Some elements of it made a successful transition into the global anti-war movements against US aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Some have been mobilized around Palestine and the growing Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions Movement.  But the thrust of the anti-neo-liberal globalization effort was blunted and no longer a focal point of discussion, at least until relatively recently.

The Arab democratic uprising and the rise of mass Left radicalismThe reshaping of the global Left, and quite possibly global politics, may have been found in the Arab democratic uprising (what some call the “Arab Spring” or Arab Democratic Revolution) that kicked off with the December 2010 rising in Tunisia. Though none of these uprisings can be described as “Left”, at least in traditional terms, and though in some places the Left played a role in the uprisings, e.g., Tunisia, the scale and scope of the uprisings has been so significant so as to send shockwaves around the planet that go beyond the Left.  In effect these uprisings were anti-neo-colonial and objectively anti-neo-liberal.  They were mass and were not religiously inspired (though drew upon various faiths for inspiration).[iii] And, contrary to many prior risings in the Arab World, they were not coups but rather were mass interventions that in many cases brought normal life to a halt.

The Arab democratic uprisings altered discussions about politics and resistance, much as did the Paris Commune in 1871.  The Paris Commune took the world by surprise.  It was a mass intervention rather than a coup in the middle of a crisis.  It was popular and democratic, and a rising of the urban poor and disenfranchised.  Both became major sources of inspiration.  And both raised or have raised significant questions regarding the struggle for power.  In the case of the Arab risings, the despairing populations in Europe and later the USA found encouragement in the scale of opposition to tyranny.  While the Arab risings were primarily aimed against authoritarian puppet regimes, the risings that started to spread across Europe (and later the USA in the form of both the Madison, Wisconsin demonstrations of early 2011 and later the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together Movement) were against economic tyranny.

The risings in Europe and the USA, although inspired by the Arab democratic uprising, illustrated the emergence of another, albeit complicated source of Left renewal, something we could define as mass Left radicalism.  “Mass Left radicalism” in this case refers to a phenomenon of non-specific, multi-tendencied radicalism that has a real, though somewhat amorphous popular base.  It is not glued to one or another social movement but it is also not a coherent project.  It is an expression of a progressive undercurrent of opposition to neo-liberal capitalism but it has not translated, at least so far, into a specific political party or force.  It has found expression in massive demonstrations against austerity but also challenges to gentrification in many major cities around the globe.  It has become the voice of the alienated, or at least a portion of the alienated, but is different in its fundamentals from the right-wing populism that has also arisen in the context of the crises facing the capitalist world.

The manifestations of mass Left radicalism tend to be ambivalent with regard to the objective of state power. In part influenced by both modern anarchism and Zapatatismo, the popular expressions of much of this radicalism have taken the form of open resistance to neo-liberalism and austerity rather than a concerted fight for power.  In fact, there are elements of the Left that contend that fighting for power itself is problematic and that it should not be the objective of a Left project to do so.

To use a historical reference point, the Paris Commune was an uprising of the Paris working class but it was not an uprising of the French working class.  In other words, the Communards succeeded in gaining control of Paris but they did not launch or catalyze a national revolution (national in the sense of national in scale) though they hoped that others would join their movement. But they did not see themselves as limiting their struggle to Paris alone.

Both the Zapatista uprising of 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico, but also the Occupy movement — at least in the USA — did not or have not set as objectives the winning of state power.  While one can argue that the Communards in 1871 would have eventually gone for national state power in France, in the case of the Zapatistas and much of Occupy, a conscious decision seems to have been made against such an objective.[iv] While these movements are all quite different in scale, strategy, etc., they, at least at the time of the writing of this essay, share a sense of resistance framed more in terms of building an alternative to which they wish people to rally rather than articulating an alternative vision in the context of the fight for power.  The Paris Commune, probably due to circumstances, began the creation of a new society while Paris was under siege by the Germans and later by the collaborationist forces of the newly formed Third Republic.  In Chiapas the Zapatistas made the strategic decision to not make a move toward national state power, though they exist in a dual power situation in that state.  The Occupy Movement represented a statement against the toxicity of neo-liberalism.  Its leaders chose to stay away from proclamations and program.

The difficulty with all efforts that shy away from platforms and the fight for state power is that they actually misdiagnose the nature and objectives of the capitalist ruling bloc and, in so doing, create problems for any Left renewal effort.  The capitalist ruling bloc has no interest in a dual power situation or a situation of gross instability.  If a progressive social movement is not advancing, it will find itself retreating, at least eventually.  So, occupying space, no pun intended, brings with it the inevitable challenge of being encircled by the enemy and the exhaustion of the mass movement.  The Paris Commune could only have succeeded to the extent to which the insurrection spread to other parts of France and, thereby, undermined both the Third Republic and the Germans.  This takes nothing away from the Commune, nor anything away from the Zapatista uprising or the Occupy Movement.  It speaks more to limitations that need to be considered from the standpoint of movement objectives and strategy.

Mass Left radicalism can become a current within which a more coherent Left can emerge.  By “coherent” we mean both organizationally cohesive but also a movement with more clearly defined objectives that focus on power.  That result, however, is not inevitable given the existence of an ideological approach that, as mentioned previously, discounts the notion of the fight for state power.

The question of who makes historyThe emergence of the Occupy movement, and similar such phenomena in other parts of the world, is both symptomatic of the crisis of socialism and an attempt at Left renewal.  It is symptomatic in the sense that it speaks to the skepticism regarding political parties and state structures.  The thesis of the Occupy movement, to the extent to which there is a consensual thesis, is that the system is so rotten that progressive and Left forces must reject it and build an alternative.  While the assertion of the rottenness of the capitalist system is certainly correct, the approach that has been advanced by many forces associated with the Occupy movement represents a problematic strategy.

From the standpoint of the radical Left (including, but not limited to anarchists, communists, revolutionary socialists, revolutionary anti-imperialists), the capitalist system is rotten and cannot be fundamentally repaired.  That is a basic truism.  Yet there is a long distance between that assertion or conclusion and the realization of a progressive/revolutionary alternative society.  That distance can only be traversed through the construction of a strategy, program and organization(s) in order to make it happen.

It is here that a distinction develops, both in theory and practice, between anarchism and revolutionary socialism.  Contained within anarchism is the notion of exemplary action as the cornerstone of all work and the worshipping of the spontaneous movement.  The true revolutionaries, from the standpoint of anarchism, must — through their own behavior and actions — demonstrate the alternative course to which the masses must gravitate.  For revolutionary socialism, while the actions of the organized forces are critical, they are so only and insofar as they unite with the actual experiences, concerns and hopes of masses of the oppressed and dispossessed.  In other words, it is the masses that make history rather than a committed few.  This is where revolutionary socialism and anarchism diverge.  Ideological anarchists[v] tend to privilege the activities of the committed few who, through exemplary action, will inspire the masses forward, as if no preparatory work (including political education) is necessary.

It is true that throughout the 20th century there were those who embraced Marxism though followed paths that were not altogether different from anarchists.  Regardless of their courage and commitment — or the courage or commitment of anarchists — the approach represented by ideological anarchism misses the point regarding change and social transformation.  Change and social transformation must be brought about through mass action and mass intervention.  This means that a critical proportion of the oppressed and dispossessed must not only be inspired by the conscious radical forces but must themselves understand and embrace the change process that they wish to see play out.

The Stalinist approach to change was to introduce change from above.  It assumed that the revolutionary party was the equivalent of a purist religious sect that held a monopoly on the truth.  The concerns of the masses were always to be interpreted through the Party, thus there was no need for any forms of real mass representation, and certainly no need for alternative political structures that might contest with the Party.

Anarchists, of course, rejected Stalinist theory and practice, but at the same time fell prey to two problems.  One error was that of spontaneism.  The second was that of exemplary behavior, as mentioned earlier.  The spontaneism of anarchism is a formulation that believes that the masses will come to revolutionary conclusions on their own.  Within this framework organizing and activity is important at the level of campaigns and struggle, but political education and organization, not to mention conscious strategy is ignored if not perceived as a problem.  Spontaneism dovetails with ‘exemplary action’ in that those who hold to the latter believe that through their own actions the masses will rally to the ‘correct’ course.  In neither case do the masses end up making history, however.  In the case of spontaneism, the impact of reactionary culture (depending on the society it could be bourgeois, feudal or pre-feudal) is ignored with respect to its bearing on the consciousness of the oppressed.  Action is given a premium at the expense of theory and consciousness.

As positive as have been the eruptions in Europe and North America in opposition to the worst features of neo-liberal globalization, they potentially run aground to the extent to which they are influenced by anarchist frameworks.  The massive actions against austerity, for instance, in the absence of a program and strategy for power means that those in action are presumed to have an understanding of what happens if mass demonstrations fail to halt the course of neo-liberalism.  There is no reason that one should believe this to be the case.  Masses of the dispossessed, after demonstrating in their hundreds of thousands and yet seeing the ruling elites pursue reactionary courses, can come to any number of conclusions, not the least being the erroneous conclusion that mass action does not work.  For this reason mass action, theory and strategy must be seen as integral components for a movement for social transformation.  No one component can stand alone.

To be clear, none of this is aimed at trivializing (or “trashing”) either the Occupy movement or the movements in Europe (and elsewhere) against austerity.  They have been visionary, courageous and audacious! The challenge, as it was for Marx and Engels in examining the experience of the Paris Commune, is to establish the lessons to be learned, not only in this case from the Occupy and anti-austerity movements, but from responses to the crisis of socialism, and from there to then suggest a path forward.

Refounding the Left In the aftermath of the defeat of the Paris Commune Marx and Engels had to reflect on that experience and question some of their own propositions.  This level of both self-analysis and self-criticism has been repeated occasionally in Left circles, but more frequently the radical Left holds onto certain ideological assertions as basic canon rather than making a concrete and exhaustive analysis.

Addressing the crisis of socialism is our ‘post-Paris Commune’ moment, that is, we on the Left are called upon to assess the socialist experience in the 20th century rather than assessing one specific instance of the class struggle (as important as was that examination in the case of the Paris Commune or today in assessing the Arab democratic revolutions, the anti-austerity movements and Occupy).  Several important theorists have begun doing this work, such as Samir Amin, Marta Harnecker and Michael Lebowitz, not to mention leaders in some of the parties and organizations noted earlier in this essay.  For the remainder of this essay we will suggest a few propositions for further exploration as part of a process of Left renewal or refoundation.

The theory and practice of socialism: How should we understand socialism? We need to answer this in two ways with the first being at the level of theory and practice; the second, at the level of society.  At the level of theory and practice, socialism must be a phenomenon which is revolutionary, Marxist and democratic.  This distinguishes or should distinguish 21st century socialism[vi], at both the levels of theory and practice, from much of what went by the name of socialism in the 20th century.

Revolutionary: In the 1960s and 1970s much of the Left defined “revolutionary” in terms of either armed struggle; the rejection of the reform struggle (and those who engaged in it); and the nature of demands.  In the 21st century we must break with one-dimensional thinking.  The “revolutionary” in socialism must involve the extent to which it is prepared to introduce new theory and penetrating critiques.  Revolutionary must exist at the level of experimenting with new forms of organization and engagement. Revolutionary must also exist at the level of being focused on social transformation rather than being limited to social reform, and as such the need for a prioritization of the organization of the masses to emancipate themselves from all forms of oppression.

Marxist: Marxism offers a frame of analysis which is, simply put, unparalleled in revolutionary theory.  The dialectical analysis and the materialist conception of history exist as frameworks without which a true revolutionary movement will be stymied. But to say that the socialism of the 21st century must be Marxist does not mean holding on, uncritically, to various propositions from the 19th and 20th centuries.  A case in point would be how one views imperialism.  The nature of global capitalism has changed significantly since the publication of Lenin’s Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, yet too many people on the Left insist that the current realities must be fit into Lenin’s framework rather than studying the current reality and trends of global capitalism in order to come to appropriate conclusions.  Samir Amin and, in a separate way, William Robinson, though coming to somewhat different conclusions, have worked to understand the nature of actually existing global capitalism rather than using Lenin’s conclusions as the starting point.  It is the framework that matters.

Democratic: The “d” word has been used and abused.  The states that were formed in the aftermath of World War II in Eastern Europe were self-defined “people’s democracies” yet, particularly from 1948 onward, they were anything but that, despite often remarkable social service programs and educational institutions.  This use of the world “democracy” did great damage to the work of the Left.  Separately, and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the “d” word has been used increasingly in the mainstream, capitalist media.  In bourgeois discourse the term really means multi-party elections in an environment that favors a capitalist economy.  From the standpoint of genuine socialism, “democratic” should have a different meaning.  Learning the painful lessons from the experience of Stalin’s Soviet Union or the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia/Kampuchea, we must appreciate that “democratic” is not a rhetorical term nor should it be simply a vague objective.  “Democratic” should reference both a practice and an objective.  That is, socialists must be the strongest advocates for what Lenin called “consistent democracy”, including at the economic and political levels, but also democratic at the level of the operations of socialist organizations and mass organizations.  The recognition of the need for independent organizations out of progressive social movements has been a major advance in socialist theory and practice, but it must be understood that such recognition is not only for the period of struggle under capitalism but also for socialism.  And the negative experiences that have emerged under so-called actually existing socialism should teach us that democracy means real popular control. The State: The contemporary Latin American Left, along with the Nepalese Maoists, South African Communists and others, has raised some significant questions regarding the matter of the capitalist state.  Marx and Engels, as one may remember, in reviewing the experience of the Paris Commune, suggested that one of the lessons of the Commune was the need for a worker’s movement to smash the capitalist state.  Lenin, in his famous treatise, State and Revolution, reiterated this point, emphasizing the need for the withering away of the state once the oppressed had gained power.

Antonio Gramsci, while not disagreeing with these conclusions, nevertheless focused his attention on the challenge of building up an historic bloc of popular-democratic forces in favor of socialism during non-revolutionary periods leading to the eventual seizure of power.  One of Gramsci’s great contributions was to frame much of his analysis in terms of the specificity of Italy and the challenge of the largely northern Italian working class allying with the southern Italian peasantry (in a situation where southern Italians and Sicilians were — and continue today — to be viewed by many northerners as a separate and despised nation).  Yet the overarching challenge for Gramsci was the notion of hegemony and the work of the popular-democratic bloc in becoming a counter-hegemonic force in the struggle for socialism.

Gramsci was interpreted by some in the communist movement and other parts of the Left as suggesting a more reformist go-slow approach to change.[vii] This would be a misreading of Gramsci.  Gramsci recognized that a Left strategy would collapse into reformism without a clear sense of conducting a total/all-round struggle against capitalist hegemony.  Contrary to many of the European Communist Parties that claimed to adhere to Gramsci’s framework, this struggle went beyond electoral politics but it placed a premium on the building of alliances and ultimately a bloc that would be capable of seizing power, representing the oppressed and dispossessed.

The actual practice of some of the newer Left forces in Latin America, by way of example, help one understand the complexity of such a course of action.  It begins with the recognition that the ideal opportunity for gaining power never arises.  There are, however, moments when the Left is better positioned to gain power, either as part of a coalition or leading a coalition, but where the mandate of such a coalition may not be for the complete elimination of the democratic capitalist state, at least not all at once.

A contrasting example may help to make the point.  In 1979 on the island of Grenada in the Caribbean, an uprising brought to power a revolutionary force known as the New Jewel Movement.  Led by Maurice Bishop, these were Left forces who took on a corrupt tyranny.  The uprising had widespread popular support.  Over the next four years the regime — referred to on the island as the “Revo” — encountered serious challenges.  They organized themselves along traditional Marxist-Leninist lines, despite the fact that this was not a socialist revolution and the NJM was not a Marxist-Leninist party.  But the NJM functioned more and more like one and created NJM-controlled mass organizations.  By 1983 the “Revo” was in trouble and the leadership knew this.  The coup against Bishop, which ultimately led to his murder, was carried out by pro-Soviet Marxists led by Bernard Coard.[viii] What Coard and his followers failed to acknowledge was the nature of the popular mandate that the NJM had won.  They were supported as an anti-imperialist/anti-corruption/anti-tyranny effort, but they did not have popular support for a transition to socialism.  Coard fell into a Stalinist framework and believed that a removal of the current leadership could force the Revo forward.  He was tragically wrong on so many levels.

Any Left movement that has the possibility of gaining power, whether at a national level or sub-national level, must assess the nature of the popular mandate.  In the cases of Venezuela and Bolivia, in particular, despite contradictions and challenges within the governing coalitions, they seem to have focused on just that question.  In other words, whether the Left is elected to office or gains office through an insurrection is not enough to ascertain the nature of the process that is to unfold.  The question that must be addressed is how do the masses understand the nature of the process and what mandate have they offered such a project.

For these reasons the Left coming to power in a democratic capitalist state brings with it a whole series of challenges.  To what extent is the radical Left (and we are making a distinction between a legitimate, radical Left and a reformist Left) placed in the position that is familiar to social democrats, i.e., of managing a democratic capitalist state? In the alternative, can the Left begin, even under the conditions of democratic capitalism, the process of a movement for social transformation?

A movement for social transformation cannot wait until the seizure of state power and the beginning of the construction of socialism.  It becomes the task of the Left to advance a project for social transformation even under democratic capitalism.  The framework for such an approach can be found in both Gramsci and, indeed, Lenin.  Lenin’s advocacy of the position of the Left as being the chief advocates for consistent democracy should mean that it is the radical Left that is advancing a program and practice for the democratization of society.  This includes, but is not limited to significant structural reforms that improve the basic lives of the people but also involves opening up the means and opportunities for the oppressed to educate and free themselves.  As has been seen in parts of Latin America, this necessitates a struggle over the very constitution of the state and a fight to democratize that constitution in such a way to begin to break the back of ruling elite.  To borrow from Harnecker, the rules of the “game” must be changed in favor of democracy and in favor of the oppressed.

This struggle, however, also necessitates the sorts of alliances that Gramsci suggested and a distancing of the Left from organizational or class sectarianism and instead favoring an approach toward strategic alliances or strategic blocs whose aim it is to build a power sharing relationship among the oppressed.

Dictatorship of the proletariat: Marx and Engels barely defined the notion of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and as a result it was largely Lenin and later Stalin who placed an imprint on the concept. In looking at the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat there are really two questions that emerge.  The first is whether the concept is basically correct.  The second is whether, largely for historical reasons, the term is compromised.The notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, when examined from the standpoint of Marx’s all too brief writings on the subject, has nothing to do with a “dictatorship” in the manner in which the term is commonly used.  The closest reference point would probably be “hegemony” as articulated by Gramsci. Even in Lenin’s State and Revolution the dictatorship of the proletariat comes across as something other than a traditionally defined dictatorship.  Instead it refers to the leadership of a class and suggests that at all points the state is used as an instrument of one class against another (or against several others).  The dictatorship of the proletariat, then, is supposed to be a state of the working class, organized in such a way as to ensure the widest democracy and the suppression not only of the bourgeoisie but of the reactionary practices that had been inherited from earlier eras.  It is also supposed to be a state during a period of transition, that is, a state structure for socialism which itself is a period of transition between capitalism and a classless society (and, as a result, the state will wither away).

While the theory is good, and was re-articulated in a very comprehensive manner in the 1970s by Etienne Balibar in his rigorous book On the dictatorship of the proletariat, the term is associated with authoritarianism.  While one can argue whether the Stalinist system was actually socialist vs. a perverse form of state capitalism, the fact remains that in the popular mind the dictatorship of the proletariat means one-party rule, secret police, Gulags, etc.  It seems, to the average person, to fly in the face of the Left’s historic practice of fighting in favor of democracy, civil liberties, equality and the rights of minorities.  It is with this in mind that one can say that in much of the global North there is a popular hatred of capitalism but there is a fear of socialism.

As a result the crisis of socialism compels the Left to examine the question of the process of socialism, but the terminology as well.  The Left cannot favor dictatorships.  It must favor popular, revolutionary democracies that expand the rights and activities of the oppressed and narrow the field for the oppressors.  It must be in favor of a system that takes on all forms of oppression but gives the means and opportunities for different views to contend without the fear that someone will end up dead or incarcerated for expressions of alleged heresy.  And, the reality is that it must do all of this under conditions that are less than favorable, conditions that include external capitalist forces/powers seeking to undermine socialism and internal reactionary forces that wish to turn back the clock.

Socialist organization: There have been a variety of organizational experiences within socialist movements.  One cannot come to sweeping conclusions about each and every form.  That said, one conclusion that can be arrived at is that structure follows function.  To put it another way, the actual form of an organization should flow from its purpose and from the actual conditions under which it is operating.  In that sense, the efforts carried out by the Communist (Third) International at what was called “Bolshevization” (an effort to transform all communist parties into a form dictated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) were problematic in that they assumed that there was only one form of revolutionary organization.  It was additionally problematic in that this process was based on a mythical notion of what the Bolsheviks had looked like in their pre-revolutionary days.The form of organization must begin by an understanding of the state structure in the territory in which an organization or party is operating.  In that sense it is quite interesting that Marx and Engels did not focus their attention on one and only one form of organization, seemingly recognizing that organizations could exist in multiple forms.  Specifically, the form does not make an organization radical, revolutionary, or for that matter reformist.  The content of its theory and practice, however, do.

In a situation of high levels of state repression, Left forces cannot operate as openly as they would within less authoritarian variants of capitalism.  But even in situations of alleged democratic capitalism, such as the United States, the history of the repression of the Left and the repression of freedom movements of oppressed nationalities (e.g., African Americans, Chicanos/Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, Asian Americans), has meant that not all Left formations can operate openly.

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Relationship to anarchists: Anarchists have reemerged as a potent force on the Left particularly in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc.  Their critique of actually existing socialism (what many of us would define as either a contradictory socialism or in some cases state capitalism) is frequently persuasive, viscerally if not analytically.  And they have become very active forces in the global justice movement, environmental movements, and certainly in the Occupy movement.It would be a mistake to dismiss anarchists (ideological or non-ideological anarchists) and/or to make reference to 19th century polemics between Marx and Bakunin.  The non-anarchist revolutionary Left must see in modern anarchism the results of our failures.  Modern anarchism is a product of the crisis of socialism.

The non-anarchist revolutionary Left needs to embrace anarchists as distant cousins rather than enemies.  This does not mean that we embrace anarchism.  We can and should continue to hold to a strong analysis of the problems with anarchism but we should look at most anarchists as comrades in a common struggle against capitalism.  To some extent they are our conscience in the struggle against bureaucracy and any and all forms of restoration of oppressive regimes.

None of this should suggest that the relationship is or will be easy.  There are significant strategic and tactical differences with anarchists, as there frequently are with other Left trends.  But to treat them as enemies runs many risks, not the least of which is sectarianism.  To the extent to which anarchists appeal to younger radicals, the non-anarchist revolutionary Left runs the risk of being perceived as oblivious to the criticisms of actually existing socialism shared by many younger activists.  It is our job to listen and respond to such concerns and criticisms.  Frequently there is a firm basis upon which to unite, while at the same time the non-anarchist revolutionary Left is compelled to struggle with the philosophical idealism inherent in anarchism, particularly its failure to recognize what is involved in the course of making a transition away from capitalism.

There are a host of other areas for deeper exploration, self-criticism and new theory, including but not limited to gender, race/nationality and the environment.  Time and space do not permit such an examination here.  Suffice it to say that a renewal of the radical Left must necessitate not a regurgitation of 19th and 20th century platitudes on these areas, as if that will reinforce our ideological lineage, but rather an examination of the structures and movements in these areas.  A renewed Left must establish that it can and will learn from the forces on the ground involved in such movements while at the same time utilizing the Marxist method in order to link these struggles and movements into an overall narrative that favors the oppressed.  Carrying out such work involves more than the circulation of ideas and even rigorous analyses; it necessitates well-grounded and clearheaded Left organization that can link the practioners and the theorists, making each both.

Notes:

[i] There are important qualifications to make here.  Internal struggle is inevitable and took place within Stalinist-influenced parties.  How the struggle unfolded and was resolved, however, was the critical question.  The parameters for internal struggle were increasingly narrowed as Stalinist Marxism gained hegemony.  Within the Trotskyist tradition, there was the theoretical justification for internal factions but this did not necessarily mean that the internal life was any more democratic.

[ii] “Maoism” must be understood as a term referencing both (1) a theoretical and ideological orientation of the ruling Communist Party of China from the middle 1950s through 1978 regarding the construction of socialism, and, separately, (2) a movement, set of theories, inspirations, etc., that people elsewhere drew from the Chinese experience regarding the questions of the struggle for and construction of socialism.

[iii] It is important to not analyze backwards and look at the rise of Islamist formations in the aftermath of these Arab democratic uprisings as somehow meaning that the uprisings themselves were religious.  The Islamists, often due to on-again/off-again complicity with the tyrannical regimes and the USA, were among the best organized of the forces on the ground.  Thus, even though the uprisings drew upon various political, religious and ideological tendencies, many of these tendencies had been severely repressed over the years and did not have the organizational strength to win mass leadership.  It should also be added that there was an ideological tendency in some of these movements that downplayed the actual need for coherent organization and believed that the mass uprisings would lead themselves.

[iv] To be clear, we are not suggesting that Occupy is a revolutionary movement on the scale of the Paris Commune.  Among other things, it is a movement inspired by radicalism.  Additionally, we are suggesting that there is a certain approach to the entire “power” question contained within much of the Occupy movement that is not dissimilar from interpretations of Zapatismo in much of the global North.

[v] We use the term “ideological anarchists” and “ideological anarchism” to differentiate those whose worldview is or has been shaped by a conscious embrace of the theory and practice of anarchism vs. those who emerge in various mass movements utterly disenchanted with mainstream politics, government and political forces and may spontaneously react against the errors of 20th century socialism.  The former group would be those we would define as “ideological anarchists”.

[vi] We are using the term generically.  The specific term “21st century socialism” became popularized in Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez.  For some it has come to mean a specific road as followed in Latin America by movements such as those in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.  We are using the term far more generically as referencing a socialism for this century, including but not limited to the experiments underway in Latin America.

[vii] Beginning with the post-World War II Italian Communist Party led by Palmiro Togliatti.

[viii] “Pro-Soviet” in their ideological orientation.  This is not to suggest that they were operating under orders from the USSR. Dubois1

The writer is a racial justice, labor and international activist. He is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies (Washington, D.C.), serves on the editorial board of BlackCommentator.com, is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, and is the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided (a book which analyzes the crisis of the US trade union movement). He can be reached at billfletcherjr@gmail.com.