Socialism - Humanity's Hope for the New MillenniumSocialism - Humanity's Hope for the New MillenniumSocialism, a columnist opined not long ago in The New York Times, is as dead as the Egyptian mummies. Even more dead because people remain interested in ancient Egypt.
Perhaps. Then again, the specter that Marx and Engels found haunting Europe in 1848 has not quite been banished. From the streets of Seattle in the fall of 1999 and Quebec in April 2000 to the living wage protest at Harvard to this morning's discussion on biotechnology, fundamental questions about how our society is organized are being debated. Who benefits? Why? Can we develop a society with less poverty, less inequality, more democracy?
In the last two centuries, mass movements in most of the world have answered these questions by posing socialism as an alternative to the rule of the capitalist market.
What then do we mean by socialism? Does the term have any relevance in a new century? As we answer those questions, let us turn to the last work of America's last leading socialist, Michael Harrington.
"I write at the end of a right-wing era that resulted from the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state - and on the eve of a new move toward the Left in the West, and perhaps in the Communist East and the Third World." Those words begin Michael Harrington's summation of Socialism: Past and Future. Five months after these words were published, the Berlin Wall fell, and the collapse of Communism as a world system quickly followed. The end of a system that he strongly opposed would have cheered Harrington, who died in August 1989, three months before the jubilant crowds tore down the Berlin Wall. Given Mike's eternal optimism, he may have seen the mass movements that toppled Communist oppression as harbingers of the move toward the Left that he anticipated so eagerly.
The reality has been more difficult, complex and challenging for the Left. In the early 1990s, the parties of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl flourished, and voters in the former Communist bloc chose parties of the Right. Subsequently, Kohl personally and successors of Reagan and Thatcher were defeated at the polls, but their opponents, in some significant ways, ratified the policies of their conservative predecessors. Clinton's embraces of NAFTA and welfare reform stand out as clear examples. Tony Blair fashioned himself as the British Clinton, governing against the Tories and the left wing of his own Labor Party.
The Right has redefined political discourse and will continue to push its agenda: privatization of public property and services, reduction of public benefits to citizens, tax cuts and reliance on market forces to solve most problems. In the US context, we see this dynamic carried to extremes. George W. Bush seeks to relive the Reagan administration and complete its agenda with massive tax cuts and a massively expensive missile shield.
We will fight the good fight against Bush's tax giveaways to billionaires and efforts to destabilize the Earth by arming the heavens, and we will work with anyone who agreed to oppose this madness. We need to win these battles, but we also need some greater certainty of what we are fighting for, not just what we oppose. As we define our agenda, we define the agenda for a broader left, too.
Part of the Left's dilemma right now reflects uncertainty. More precisely, the socialist Left lacks an appealing vision of a good society, an immediate program of reform and a convincing strategy of how the two are connected. Some of the lessons outlined in Socialism: Past and Future need to be learned again - or perhaps really learned for the first time. For all the limits of our era, we face unprecedented opportunities.
In most of the twentieth century, defining socialism required defining what it was not. Mike Harrington and all of us committed to fundamental democracy and human rights always explained that when we spoke of socialism we did not mean the tyrannical rule of a bureaucratic class in the Soviet Union (or China or East Germany or Cuba). After 1989, that long preface should have seemed unnecessary. Yet, the identification of socialism with centrally planned, poorly run economies seemed stronger than ever after 1989.
Part of the problem remains an outmoded conception of socialism, which remains the popular view of what we believe. For generations, socialism meant the nationalization of major industries. No serious democratic socialist believes any longer that socialism equals the nationalization of key industries. When dealing with General Motors and US Steel, the idea might have made some sense (even there, the experience of nationalized industries has not been a model of social enlightenment). Can anyone imagine nationalizing Microsoft or AOL? The idea lacks coherence. Yet, the straw man of incompetently managed nationalized industry is built up and attacked constantly by the Right to define and discredit socialism. The specter of Stalinist repression is thrown in for good measure. The function of anti-socialism now, as in Mike Harrington's life and in the nineteenth century, is to shut off debate and thinking about any alternatives to the status quo. Our job clearly is to open up thinking about what socialism can be.
Harrington's last work gave us some of the elements of that vision. I want to list just a few here and relate them to current struggles:
Equality-The American and French Revolutions signaled the political coming of age of the bourgeoisie. Both made the demand for equality a central theme of the struggle. Glancing over a few days of news makes a mockery of the idea of equality. Freshly minted law school grads can earn more than $100,000 to start; MBA's get more. With a few years experience and some stock options, they earn real money. Yet when Harvard students and Cambridge citizens urge that Harvard establish a living wage of $10.25 per hour, Harvard officials and Boston Globe editorialists react in horror. Bill Gates' net worth exceeds $100 billion. Millions of people around the world subsist on less than a dollar a day. No economic calculus can justify such disparities. A more egalitarian United States can help create a more egalitarian world.
Global communities bound by a commitment to justice-College students protest that the athletic uniforms and T-shirts for their universities are produced under sweatshop conditions in the Third World. Conscious movements of workers and consumers can begin to establish some levels of control over global capital. Steelworkers and environmentalists rallied together against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. They did not argue against globalization but raised the valid question: globalization for whom? We need international institutions to enforce rules over global capital (see point on social markets). Creating those institutions will be a long-term struggle. In the meantime, movements of labor and citizens can help establish some minimal rules of conduct; violating those rules means international boycotts, strikes with cross-border solidarity, shareholder actions and more. Beyond that, we can imagine a world in which hunger and extreme poverty cease to exist. That could and should become an explicit goal of trade policy; again citizens' movements can enforce some sets of standards as they did in the global campaign against Nestle. Capitalism has an inherent dynamic toward inequality, but socially aware human beings have an inherent drive to care about one other. The levels of human misery in our world demean all of us.
Social markets-Robert Reich quipped that God did not create the market on any of the six days outlined in Genesis. Socialists need to be clear that the market is itself a social creation. Saying that society needs market mechanisms to make key decisions should be the beginning, not the end of political debate. What kind of markets? Under what rules, with what incentives? According to the US Justice Department and a federal court, Bill Gates exercised and abused monopoly power on his way to becoming the world's richest man. In some ways, the most fascinating element of his case is that the very possibility of Microsoft grew from anti-trust action against IBM a generation ago. As Harrington notes in his Socialism: Past and Future, Marx saw the struggle to limit the working day (a form of regulating the labor market) as the political economy of the working class. Figuring out the interventions where we can reshape the market to meet social needs remains the political economy of the socialist movement. As we try to reshape markets to meet social ends, we can forge new alliances with the growing numbers of socially responsible investors and socially responsible businesses.
Time as the ultimate commodity-Julie Schor has written of the overworked American. With two earners and demanding jobs, family and leisure are endangered. Socialists have always fought for a society that realizes full human potential. That means people having the time and energy for activities beyond work. It probably means a democratic decision to take the value of increased productivity in leisure rather than in increased wealth. But conservatives may argue, people have the choice between leisure and added income, and they choose more money. Isn't this a case where socialists are really elitist social engineers trying to outsmart the free market choices of individual consumers? The "choice" of additional income is a free choice in the same sense that working in unattractive jobs is a "free choice" for low-income workers. People choose additional income because they need it. The current economic boom is based on consumer spending, much of it financed by debt. A more egalitarian distribution of income could allow the bottom two-thirds of the society to climb out of debt and find more time for leisure. And as Julie Schor's more recent work argues, we could move toward a less consumerist society in the process, which definitely relates to the next point.
The Red and the Green-Germany's left-wing government is a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Green Party, which grew out of the peace and environmental movements. In the United States politicians from former Vice President Al Gore to former New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman campaigned against sprawl. Central cities continue to lose population as suburbs spread into what used to be undeveloped land. No one can get around without a car, but traffic becomes increasingly jammed. Even conservatives advocate for some level of planning so that people can get what they wanted in the first place: a decent, affordable house close to work, good schools and opportunities for recreation. Socialists need to join that discussion insisting on the link between social justice and environment.
Community and utopia-Modern socialism began as a quest for community. The utopians and the Guild socialists wanted to restore what industrialism was taking away. Marx dismissed the utopians for failing to understand that early capitalism relentlessly centralized and concentrated activity. Socialists understood the monopolistic tendencies of capital and saw a solution in nationalizing the firms that dominated their industries. Late capitalism has a different technology and a different set of possibilities; it's the difference between the blast furnace and the personal computer. While the drive toward monopoly and centralization continues, there is also at least the possibility of a tendency toward decentralization in capitalism now. Technology allows endless possibilities of breaking down large-scale bureaucracy, and we've seen highly focused small firms outperform corporate behemoths. Capitalism has endless possibilities of rebuilding the large-scale bureaucracies, and the small, agile firms can and will be outspent by the corporate behemoths. But we have the possibility here of returning to some pre-Marxist conceptions of socialism. Small work communities and revitalized residential communities where Jeffersonian notions of citizenship bind us together are attractive ideals that are materially possible if people can control the social abundance our world can create.
Mike Harrington opened his last book with these words: "Socialism, I want to propose, is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century." He leaves us with a challenge of understanding how we can define the specific political program for that hope.
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