Reimagining socialism?

Barbara Ehrenreich

The latest issue of The Nation Magazine has a number of articles addressing the topic of “Reimagining Socialism” with a lead item by Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. titled “Rising to the Occasion“,  with four responses to it by Immanuel Wallerstein, Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit and Tariq Ali. Except for Ali’s article, I had problems with the others despite their value in taking the idea of socialism seriously. As the financial crisis deepens, we can expect more of this.

Barbara Ehrenreich is an honorary chairperson of Democratic Socialists of America, the U.S.’s official section of the Socialist International. Most of her articles and books in the recent period have had to do with the problems of the working poor. My most vivid memory of her take on socialism prior to this article goes back to a Socialist Scholars Conference in New York shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union when she rebuked the audience for not understanding the importance of consumer goods. Unless we could supply the X-rated videos and bananas that East Germans were now buying after their liberation, we had nothing to offer the working class. At the time I felt that this was a prime example of lowering the socialist bar, especially in light of the fact that people make revolutions in order to stop being killed by cops and the military rather than being able to buy “Debby Does Dallas”. But, more to the point, the consumer goods that East Europeans hankered for now seem to be a thing of the past under conditions of economic ruin.

In many ways, Ehrenreich and Fletcher’s article has the same kinds of preoccupations as her early 1990s talk. They still worry whether socialism can deliver the goods, but are much less sanguine about the power of the marketplace which seduced so many Marxists in the early 1990s at the height of Francis Fukuyama’s nonsense:

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism–with some help from industrial communism–has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don’t have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what’s next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

If the only relevant question is whether we have a plan, it is understandable why the comrades would recommend something like this:

Z Magazine founder Michael Albert developed a detailed approach to mass-based planning that he calls participatory economics, or “parecon,” and one of us (Fletcher, in his book Solidarity Divided, written with Fernando Gapasin) has proposed a locally based network of people’s assemblies.

Not having read Fletcher and Gapasin’s book, I really can’t comment but I can say that Albert’s blueprint is nothing less than the sort of socialism that I have dealt with in an article on Neo-Utopian Socialism.  In that article, I pointed out how parecon was a throwback to the 19^th century:

In a reply to somebody’s question about social change and human nature on the Z Magazine bulletin board, Albert states:

“I look at history and see even one admirable person–someone’s aunt, Che Guevara, doesn’t matter–and say that is the hard thing to explain. That is: that person’s social attitudes and behavior runs contrary to the pressures of society’s dominant institutions. If it is part of human nature to be a thug, and on top of that all the institutions are structured to promote and reward thuggishness, then any non-thuggishness becomes a kind of miracle. Hard to explain. Where did it come from, like a plant growing out of the middle of a cement floor. Yet we see it all around. To me it means that social traits are what is wired in, in fact, though these are subject to violation under pressure.”

Such obsessive moralizing was characteristic of the New Left of the 1960s. Who can forget the memorable slogan “if you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.” With such a moralistic approach, the hope for socialism is grounded not in the class struggle, but on the utopian prospects of good people stepping forward. Guevara is seen as moral agent rather than as an individual connected with powerful class forces in motion such as the Cuban rural proletariat backed by the Soviet socialist state.

Albert’s [and Hahnel’s] enthusiasm for the saintly Che Guevara is in direct contrast to his judgement on the demon Leon Trotsky, who becomes responsible along with Lenin for all of the evil that befell Russia after 1917. Why? It is because Trotsky advocated “one-man management”. Lenin was also guilty because he argued that “all authority in the factories be concentrated in the hands of management.”

To explain Stalinist dictatorship, they look not to historical factors such as economic isolation and military pressure, but the top-down management policies of Lenin and Trotsky. To set things straight, Albert and Hahnel provide a detailed description of counter-institutions that avoid these nasty hierarchies. This forms the whole basis of their particular schema called “participatory planning” described in “Looking Forward”:

“Participatory planning in the new economy is a means by which worker and consumer councils negotiate and revise their proposals for what they will produce and consume. All parties relay their proposals to one another via ‘facilitation boards’. In light of each round’s new information, workers and consumers revise their proposals in a way that finally yields a workable match between consumption requests and production proposals.”

Their idea of a feasible socialism is beyond reproach, just as any idealized schema will be. The problem is that it is doomed to meet the same fate as ancestral schemas of the 19th century. It will be besides the point. Socialism comes about through revolutionary upheavals, not as the result of action inspired by flawless plans.

There will also be a large element of the irrational in any revolution. The very real possibility of a reign of terror or even the fear of one is largely absent in the rationalist scenarios of the new utopians. Nothing can do more harm to a new socialist economy than the flight of skilled technicians and professionals. For example, there was very little that one can have done to prevent such flight in Nicaragua, no matter the willingness of a Tomas Borge to forgive Somocista torturers. This had more of an impact on Nicaraguan development plans than anything else.

The reason for the upsurge in utopian thought is in some ways similar to that of the early 19th century: The industrial working-class is not a powerful actor in world politics. Engels observed that in 1802 when Saint-Simon’s Geneva letters appeared, “the capitalist mode of production, and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very incompletely developed.”

Isn’t this similar to the problem we face today? Even though the working-class makes up a larger percentage of the word’s population than ever before, we have not seen a radicalized working-class in the advanced capitalist countries since the 1930s, an entire historical epoch. In the absence of a revolutionary working-class, utopian schemas are bound to surface. Could one imagine a work like “Looking Forward” being written during the Flint sit-down strikes? In the absence of genuine struggles, fantasy is a powerful seductive force.

Contrary to Ehrenreich and Fletcher, I would argue that the main task facing socialists today is breaking with the two-party system, not coming up with blueprints for socialism. This is of particular urgency given the fact that The Nation Magazine serves as the most important left support for Obama in the U.S. Despite trenchant criticisms of Obama, the magazine still sees its role pretty much as the CPUSA saw its role in the 1930s vis-à-vis FDR-as a kind of left flank rather than an independent political alternative. You can still see this kind of confusion in the Nation, even from somebody as committed to social transformation as Immanuel Wallerstein, who compares the MST’s support for Lula and the U.S. left’s relationship to Obama in an article titled “Follow Brazil’s Example“:

In my view, the only sensible attitude is that taken by the large, powerful and militant Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. The MST supported Lula in 2002, and despite all he failed to do that he had promised, they supported his re-election in 2006. They did it in full cognizance of the limitations of his government, because the alternative was clearly worse. What they also did, however, was to maintain constant pressure on the government–meeting with it, denouncing it publicly when it deserved it and organizing on the ground against its failures.

The MST would be a good model for the US left, if we had anything comparable in terms of a strong social movement. We don’t, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to patch one together as best we can and do as the MST does–press Obama openly, publicly and hard–all the time, and of course cheering him on when he does the right thing. What we want from Obama is not social transformation. He neither wishes to, nor is able to, offer us that. We want from him measures that will minimize the pain and suffering of most people right now. That he can do, and that is where pressure on him may make a difference.

While I don’t want to take a position on MST’s critical support for Lula, there is a point that Wallerstein misses completely when comparing the Brazilian situation to our own. The Workers Party in Brazil is essentially based on the trade unions while the Democratic Party in the U.S. is a bourgeois party through and through. In the 1920s, Lenin urged Communists to back socialist candidates because they could only get a hearing from rank-and-file workers if they did so. But in 2007, there were no illusions in the Democratic Party worth exploiting. Most people vote for Democrats because they fear and hate the Republicans. In order for the class struggle to move forward in the U.S., a class alternative to the two big capitalist parties must be forged. Just as the Republican Party came into existence in the 1850s as an alternative to the two parties that backed chattel slavery (the Whigs and the Democrats), a new party opposed to wage slavery must be built today. That, not blueprints for a future society, is what is on the agenda today.