Bitterly has the thought been fought, with imagination, explanation, historical excuse, a lifetime's commitment, it cannot be denied: Socialism is dead.
The striving towards fairness, impartial justice, the commitment to reason not faith, and to the technological, not use-of-force solution to inadequacies of physical provision (with social provision for diversely occurring vulnerability - youth, sickness, age, disbility), is undimmed. But socialism as it is determined in and by all its nineteeth and twentieth century glory, is history. Worse, by failing to bury what is dead we contaminate everything we wish to achieve for our lives. And provide easy targets for the wicked of the world to deny goals and denigrate achievments that are wholly to be endorsed.
Surveying the dreary deathscapes produced by Stalinism, and all its lesser manifestations from Cambodia through the miserable post 1945 years for everyone east of Berlin, to the (so minor in comparison, but nonetheless deeply repugnant) BrownLabour party, we are defenceless in proposing the good if we associate ourseves with socialism. The self-seeking of apparatchiks and their client-state producing tactics when threatened by democratic votes, subverted everything that wasn't killed.
What is to be done?
5 comments:
I have been reading Lenin. The question should really be, 'What is to be done now ?' ? for Lenin's answer was to form the spearhead of the workers' revolution, leading the soviets, and his answer has failed.
This is a very tall order. Once I had lunch in the Brussels café where Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, on the Grande Place, but have not spent near enough time in the British Museum Reading Room to answer this, actually I have been there only twice.
The values that generated socialism - solidarity, equality, social justice, democracy and participation, some social control over chaotic economic processes - are still there. The fact that we are on average richer than we used to be does not reduce the need for them.
Soviet type implementation of these values failed utterly, as the communist party nomenklatura pursued their own privilege while paying lipservice to equality, the masses indulged in moral hazard (why work hard when it makes no difference?), the planners pursued impossible targets delivering failure instead of the feasible. Instead of defeating inflation the authorities repressed it, creating endemic shortages, queues and black markets that had absolutely nothing to do with the socialist blueprint and prevented the creation of a market version of socialism. Full employment of labour was achieved not by design but by default (or we could say, serendipity) as a result of endemic excess demand. Because of this the economy had to stay insulated from global trade and remain inefficient. Participation went by the board, "Soviets" (=councils) disappeared and turned into a designation of citizenship, like "Germans".
Socialist democracy turned out to be very expensive, equally prone to inefficiency, corruption and moral hazard, and sometimes murderous - though not as much as Stalin or Pol Pot.
There was a Russian debate in the 1920s on whether you could have "socialism in one country"; of course isolation and outsider hostility made it all that much harder. The same is true today even for much milder socialdemocratic policies. Tax elusion by multinational companies, tax competition among countries, fiscal austerity dictated by supranational agencies (be it the IMF or the EU) have killed the welfare state. International trade, employment de-localisation by mobile capital and the competition of immigrants have weakened organised labour in the advanced countries. The global economy has made us richer on average and inordinately more unequal. If the chances of socialism in one country, or a few, is today distant, the chances of global socialism are impossibly remote.
Maybe global warming will revive the chances of global socialism? Possibly, eventually, but things are still nowhere near bad enough for this scenario to arise in this century.
"Whatever shall we do now?" Hans Aa. the Danish socialist economist asked me at a drunken party in 1990. "Keep a low profile and wait for the backlash" - I said then and would still say now.
P. You also remarked 'In a capitalist economy my advice to you all is to live as comfortably and richly as you can'.
So we do, and we prepare against the backlash, and we keep a (relatively) low profile.
Our excuse (and I fear we do need to offer one for behaving as you suggested so ironically) is that we are old, we tried at enormous cost to ourselves and our family, and we lost even as we celebrated the end of colonialism in its most primitive form, the defeat of neo-liberalism in its more brutal attacks on welfare and state planning. The 'new dawn' was neo- liberalism with state aparatchiks - yuk.
Socialism is a statist system, it needs institutions and governance to deliver. If socialism in one country has failed then 'the values of solidarity, equality, social justice, democracy and participation, and some social control over chaotic economic processes'most certainly cannot be delivered for the planet, where only the market has structure.
Lenin spoke of the withering away of the state, and it is doing so, and socialism with it; but what of the values it tried to carry for 150 years?
The fears of the effects of global warming are perhaps fears of the effects of all this; the loss of systems of allocation and distribution that are so shakily installed on the values that dying socialism sustained.
The picture of a future feasible and appropriate strategy for asserting the values of socialism is a large painting to be painted with a miniature brush, not with our large splashes.
The answer is not a "ritorno nel privato", but Back to the drawing board.
Hard.
Old.
Have given.
You certainly have, P. Poles should be grateful in their millions, not to speak of assorted others east of the West.
You caused quite a stir before the assembled Cuban economics dignatories when you recommended putting goods in the shops and food on the tables and a great deal less into production resources. All those machine guns wavered for a bit.
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