[Peace-discuss] The left needs more socialism

[Paul Patton]

*The Left Needs More Socialism *
  *by Ronald Aronson*


It's time to break a taboo and place the word "socialism" across the top of
the page in a major American progressive magazine. Time for the left to stop
repressing the side of ourselves that the right finds most objectionable.
Until we thumb our noses at the Democratic pols who have been calling the
shots and reassert the very ideas they say are unthinkable, we will keep
stumbling around in the dark corners of American politics, wondering how we
lost our souls--and how to find them again.

I can hear tongues clucking the conventional wisdom that the "S" word is the
kiss of death for any American political initiative. Since the collapse of
Communism, hasn't "socialism"--even the democratic kind--reeked of
everything obsolete and discredited? Isn't it sheer absurdity to ask today's
mainstream to pay attention to this nineteenth-century idea? Didn't Tony
Blair reshape "New Labour" into a force capable of winning an unprecedented
string of victories in Britain only by first defeating socialism and
socialists in his party? And for a generation haven't we on the American
left declared socialist ideology irrelevant time and again in the process of
shaping our feminist, antiwar, progay, antiracist, multicultural, ecological
and community-oriented identities?

People who espouse these and a dozen other arguments against the relevance
of socialism today may regard it as quaint that Bolivia's new president, Evo
Morales, leads the Movement Toward Socialism Party, or that Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez intends to create a "new socialism of the twenty-first century."
After all, socialist parties elsewhere, such as in France, Spain and
Germany, or indeed Brazil's Workers Party and Chile's Socialist Party, have
no intention of introducing anything like socialism in their countries.
Still, the newest significant formation, indeed, today's equivalent of the
nineteenth-century International Workingmen's Association, calls itself the
World Social Forum. The name reminds those who believe "another world is
possible" that it can come about only if it is global, only if it is guided
by a loosely organized "forum" rather than a top-down party--and only if its
character is social.

Among Americans it has long since become obvious that the left is doomed
without a vision, a sense of direction and an effective call to arms. One of
the reasons we are having such tough sledding nowadays is that we have been
unable to develop our own compelling alternative to those created by the
right and the center over the past generation and embodied in the politics
of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. We need to point to a clearly different
direction from the one in which the United States and the world are heading.
We need to spell out a historical diagnosis and project, a strategy and
tactics, and root these in widely shared ultimate values.

We would be further along on all of these fronts today had it not been for
the immense success of the Anglo-American right in insisting, for nearly a
generation now, that in Margaret Thatcher's words, "there is no
alternative," that the conservative project of free markets, privatization
and deregulation is simple obedience to necessity. When Francis Fukuyama
proclaimed the "end of history" fourteen years ago, he ruled out picturing
"to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one,
and at the same time better." Capitalism's victory over Communism in the
cold war silenced any and all alternatives, present and future, he said. And
today, among apologists for global capitalism like Thomas Friedman, the
ideological assault on alternatives has become even more insistent, the
faith in the market almost total.

Successful ideological and political campaigns close up the space in which
imagination might conceive of a world different from the status quo.
Alternatives become "unthinkable." In contrast, for two generations, between
1917 and 1989, the prospect of social change and political action worldwide
were nurtured by the competition between two different world-embracing
economic systems. Ugly as it was in so many ways, the Soviet Union not only
spurred imitators but stimulated and sometimes supported resistance
movements and, more relevant to us, along with the presence of vigorous
socialist movements and ideas it encouraged thinking and acting toward
alternatives that would be neither capitalist nor Communist. The 1930s
through the '70s saw important and still relevant efforts at social change
led by anarchists (Spain), social democrats (Scandinavia), non-Stalinist
Communists (Yugoslavia, Italy), coalitions of socialists and Communists
(Chile), and coalitions of leftists and less ideological forces of national
liberation (Nicaragua, South Africa). Until the end of the cold war,
alternatives to capitalism and Communism seemed both thinkable and possible.


Today, when the bottom line is touted as the answer to every question,
Americans are imprisoned in a mental world shaped by economic trends.
Ironically, its ideologists have become pitchmen for a capitalist caricature
of Marxism--promulgating a crude economic determinism in which the market
rules every social, mental and geographic space. Since the fall of
Communism, market-oriented ways of thinking, feeling and seeing have
permeated our lives and our culture to a degree that Marx never dreamed of.

Yet the real Marxism, although no longer embodied in movements or
governments, has never been truer or more relevant: Most of the world's main
problems today are inseparable from the dynamics of the capitalist system
itself. With corporate capitalism everywhere in command, the outlook is for
increased poverty, more environmental degradation, ever more uneven
distribution of resources and the undermining of traditional societies and
ways of life, for a culture dominated by marketing, advertising and uneven
global development.

But Americans need only glance around the world to see that there are
alternatives. The vibrant World Social Forums are an example, under way
since 2001 and now envisioning several annual meetings of an immense variety
of groups, organizations and networks. Another is the continuing leftward
movement of South American governments, now adding Bolivia to Argentina,
Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile and Brazil. A third is the continuing European
efforts to defend social welfare programs, as evidenced in the German Social
Democrats' remarkable reversal of a slide into oblivion to tie the Christian
Democratic Party in last September's election, and the unflagging popular
support for Britain's National Health Service.

The reigning economic system will continue to generate opposition as long as
it speaks of equality (which it must) yet continues to be unequal and
undemocratic (which it must); as long as it incites dreams of a better life
(which it must) but deforms social, cultural and political life according to
its bottom line (which it must); as long as its rampant abuse of the
environment and pillage of natural resources continue (also inevitable).

Living in a capitalist world, we can't get far thinking and talking about
alternatives and new directions without acknowledging that many of our key
values and starting points are drawn from a common historical source: the
socialist tradition. We have not reached the end of history as long as the
spirit of solidarity animates antisweatshop movements, as long as a root
sense of fairness motivates our efforts for a living wage, as long as the
belief in equality nourishes our demand for a national healthcare system, as
long as we embrace the democratic social provisioning embodied in Social
Security. The next left will have to acknowledge, and even celebrate, the
socialist spirit. Socialism's values continue to nourish community life.
Much of our world continues to be organized collectively, democratically and
socially, operating according to need and not according to profitability--in
schools and cooperatives; libraries and nonprofits; local, state and federal
government programs. September 11 and Hurricane Katrina showed the undying
need for extensive and intensive structures of community. The socialist
standards of fairness, democracy, equality and justice are as much a part of
daily life as are capitalism's values of privilege, unequal rewards and
power.

In this post-Communist era when even "liberal" has become a dirty word, the
effort to create a more humane society will not be revived without explicit
demands long associated with socialism. Social movements for environmental
protection, women's rights and racial equality sooner or later run up
against the institutional constraints imposed by capitalism. Then they
discover that they can't achieve their goals without becoming
anticapitalist. What will individuals and groups demanding equality,
democracy, respect for the environment and freedom from the market call
themselves as they try to coalesce around increasingly global demands and on
behalf of increasingly global alternatives? We need not be timid about
naming this "socialism." What else is it? What a new progressive movement
needs can be simply stated: more socialism.

There can be no future social movements without key socialist themes: the
importance of economic class, the centrality of labor and workers in shaping
the world, the idea that people must act to create their own destiny. Not to
mention themes already suggested: the decisive role of the economy in
determining the rest of our life, the fact that today it is above all driven
by the pursuit of profit, the insistence on freeing people from its
domination and the need to think and act politically in terms of the
socioeconomic system rather than in terms of individual policies. Whatever
language people use, socialist ideas, experience, models, aspirations and
analyses will help form the heart and soul of the alternative-in-the-making,
or there will be no alternative.

Equality is the most important among these. Socialists have conceived a
society that provides for the needs of every individual, including adequate
means to live a decent life and develop each person's capacities. Our
society, in contrast, is ambivalent and ultimately incoherent about
equality. We are all said to be equal politically and before the law, but
socially and economically our individual worth varies enormously. This is
built into the American system: Social and economic inequality, a hallmark
of life under free enterprise, make a mockery of a proud hallmark of
American democracy, civic equality. In its own terms our society should be
taking steps at least to insure that we are equal to become unequal. In
other words, fair competition requires an equal starting point. Yet today
this is not a liberal but a radical demand. Unequal schools, the rising
costs of higher education, the growing gap in living conditions between
well-off and poor, the abolition of the estate tax encouraging a
plutocracy--all heighten the system's unfairness. In fighting against our
increasingly unequal society, liberals and progressives will need to draw
upon socialist thought in developing clear and consistent ideas, critiques,
programs and watchwords about equality.

Doing battle against the prevailing inequality means invoking the idea that
we all belong to a community, as opposed to the illusion, voiced famously by
Thatcher, that "there is no society, only individuals." The paradox of our
time is that individualism is riding high even while our universal
interconnectedness is intensifying in this increasingly interdependent
global society. The more interdependent each person in the world becomes,
and the more large corporations rule not only economic but social life, the
less social awareness there seems to be. We are supposed to live our lives
as if there were no community, while more and more, vital social functions
become performed for private gain, as if each of us had become a Robinson
Crusoe.

The fantasy universe of purely private individuals, for all its lip service
to religious belief, is no longer able to inculcate the basic social
morality and sense of responsibility any society needs to function.
Twenty-five years of attacking government has drained much of the basic
civic spirit and social responsibility we must have to transact our
collective business with integrity. If nothing is higher than the
individual, the only thing that matters is whether I alone succeed. In the
Enron and other corporate fraud scandals, in the debacle of Hurricane
Katrina, the chickens have been coming home to roost.

On the road to shaping an alternative, the left might respond with a
time-honored socialist insight, namely that "I" only exists within a "we,"
and that unless we look out for everyone, no one is secure. To say this
confidently means accepting that we stand for a clear alternative and embody
decisively different values and traditions than those on the right. This
means getting friendly again with socialism.
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