[Peace-discuss] Socialism With An American Face

[David Johnson]

Socialism With An American Face

Description: Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 11.59.05 AM


By Gar Alperovitz,
<http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/10/socialism-with-an-american-fa
ce.html?mc_cid=e2f19f5f29&mc_eid=55da8c1ea6> www.america.aljazeera.com
October 23rd, 2015

Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, but the US needs its own version,
not Denmark's

Sen. Bernie Sanders' public defense of socialism in the Oct. 13 Democratic
presidential debate has kicked off America's first major discussion of the
idea in more than a generation. Columnists, talk show hosts and Donald Trump
have all joined in. Most of the discussion, however, has been wildly
misleading, and almost all of it has bypassed some of the most interesting
forms of a very American and practical form of socialism emerging throughout
the United States.

Sanders was clear about what he meant by socialism, pointing to Denmark as a
positive example. But Denmark is a capitalist nation with a record of
welcoming and supporting private business investment. The word "socialism"
is used there - as it is in many European countries - to describe a strong
welfare state that includes comprehensive health care, a solid safety net,
generous retirement benefits, day care and many other programs that almost
any American progressive would support.

The American term for this kind of system - capitalism with a strong welfare
state - is, in fact, liberalism or, perhaps, when combined with very tough
taxes on the rich and corporations, populism. Socialism, on the other hand,
historically has gone far beyond progressive welfare state measures by
asserting that a democratic society can be achieved only if it includes
democratic ownership of the economy.

In many European countries, strong labor movements committed to socialism as
strong liberalism have helped counterbalance the power of capital by
supporting a stronger welfare state. However, this option has always been
constrained in the U.S., where union membership has declined from 35.4
percent of the labor force at its peak in the early 1950s to a mere 11.1
percent today. Racism and other factors historically have weakened and
divided the American labor movement and almost entirely prevented union
organizing in the South.

In sector after sector, corporate lobbyists strongly influence political
outcomes in connection with everything from health care to prison and
poverty programs. Ownership is concentrated: The 400 richest Americans
control more wealth than the poorest 186 million - and as modern election
and lobbying studies all too regularly show, with that wealth comes
political power.

The environmental implications of this power are particularly grave.
Regulating the big oil companies to reduce global warming is even harder,
politically, than regulating the banks. Large Wall Street-financed
corporations must show consistent growth; in the case of the oil companies,
unrestricted growth is increasingly understood as ecologically
unsustainable.

Sanders' comment during the debate that "Congress does not regulate Wall
Street - Wall Street regulates Congress" speaks to this reality, but his
hope that breaking up the big banks will solve the problem is fundamentally
liberal. A traditional socialist would more likely argue that only by
nationalizing the banks could their power truly be curbed.

We live in an era of experimentation, a time when none of the old ways offer
answers to the problems millions of Americans face.

These challenges point to the need for some form of social ownership not
dependent on growth or on Wall Street. What traditional state socialists
often did not understand - and what traditional conservatives and anarchists
saw all too clearly - is that government ownership of corporations brings
with it other problems, above all, excessive concentration of political
power in the hands of the state. If liberalism has faltered since labor's
decline and if nationalized ownership of wealth would result in excessive
state power, might there be any other progressive way?

A possible answer is quietly emerging in many parts of the country. Like
traditional socialism, it involves changing and democratizing who owns
productive wealth, but unlike traditional socialism, it does so in a
radically decentralized, populist and very American form.

It hasn't yet gotten much media attention, but approximately 130 million
Americans are members of one form of cooperative or another - the classic
one-person, one-vote form of ownership. More than 10 million men and women
work for companies that they own in whole or in part. About 25 percent of
electricity in the U.S. is supplied by cooperatives and municipally owned
utilities. And the nearly century-old state-owned bank in conservative North
Dakota has become a model of public ownership being explored in cities
ranging from Philadelphia to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Mayors in many cities are supporting other new forms of cooperative
development. In Cleveland, a highly sophisticated neighborhood- and
worker-owned group of cooperatives, in part supported by the purchasing
power of universities and hospitals like the famed Cleveland Clinic, has
become a development model for many cities. In Boulder, Colorado, an attempt
to establish municipal ownership of the electric utility has received strong
public backing in two major referendums. Neighborhood-based community land
trusts are commonly used in attempts to resist gentrification.

One of the largest publicly owned enterprises in the nation is the Tennessee
Valley Authority, a huge corporation that produces electricity and helps
manage the Tennessee River system. The authority is supported by Democratic
and Republican members of Congress in Tennessee and Alabama, a number of
whom have voiced their opposition to privatization.

These and other forms of public ownership are quietly expanding by trial and
error as the failures of the capitalist system continue to generate pain and
as the standard political answers continue to falter. State and local
governments are serving as laboratories of democracy, as they did in the
years preceding the New Deal. We live in an era of experimentation, a time
when none of the old ways offer answers to the problems millions of
Americans face. These tentative new approaches may well presage potentially
far-ranging change.

Taken together, the steadily evolving localist forms of democratic ownership
confront the traditional socialist questions and begin to answer them in
novel ways. They could pave the way for a new politics aimed at a pluralist
commonwealth reflecting a diverse, practical and very American approach to
democratic ownership.

 

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