Date: Sun, 05 Dec 1999 23:13:52 -0800 From: Sam Pawlett <rsp at uniserve.com>
I don't know if this piece has been forwarded yet and I certainly hope David doesn't mind my passing it along to other left lists. --SP
>From Here to There:
Imagining the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, with a Little Help
from The Communist Manifesto
Let me begin, not with Marx and Engels, but with T.S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang, but a whimper.
This famous concluding stanza of "The Hollow Men" seems eerily appropriate today. Contrary to widespread expectation, our species has pulled back from nuclear Armageddon. The twenty thousand nuclear warheads that the United States and the Soviet Union had pointed at each other, which could have, if launched, rendered our planet unfit for human habitation, have been redirected and some of them destroyed. Of course the warheads still exist and could be retargeted, but we are right to celebrate. The "logic of exterminism," to use E. P.Thompson's unnerving phrase, has been broken.
But not all good things go together. The end of the nuclear arms race has not ushered in an era of global stability and prosperity. The "peace dividend" that was supposed to fund educational, environmental and anti-poverty programs has proved to be utterly illusory--as anyone with a Marxian understanding of how a capitalist economy works would have predicted. The nexus of events that culminated in the break-up of the Soviet Union not only diminished the threat of nuclear war; it also removed one of the main checks to capitalism's inherent rapacity, so that we now find in ascendancy a globalized capitalism that bears striking resemblance to the system described by Marx and Engels 150 years ago. In fact the description is, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, more accurate as a description of our world than it was of theirs.
"The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption everywhere. . . . All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations."
Marx and Engels do not minimize the disruption and destruction attendant of the global extension of Europe's self-proclaimed "civilization."
"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communications, draws all, even the most barbaric, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls. . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce *what it calls civilization* into their midst. . . . In one word, it creates a world after its own image."[1]
Indeed it does--and with ominous implications. It is precisely the contemporary image of modern capitalism according to which the whole world is being created, that of a globalized consumer culture, at once infinitely alluring, savagely unequal, and seemingly unstoppable, that now threatens, among other things, the ecological stability of our planet, giving new currency to Eliot's chilling prediction.
But in an important sense Eliot's phrase misrepresents the current situation. Barring a big-bang nuclear war, the human species is not going to end anytime soon. Ecological degradation is not going to extinguish humankind--as a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union might have done. Our species, in overexploiting its resources and soiling its nest, is not going to render the planet unlivable. Climate change, increasing incidents of environmental diseases, declining food and water supplies may cause massive amounts of human suffering, but none of these factors threatens the species with extinction. Billions may die prematurely (even more than now) and billions more may find their quality of life deteriorate (even more than now), but billions will adapt and survive. We should be wary of ecological doomsdayism--and of Left analyses that seek to substitute ecological for economic crises in an otherwise unmodified theory of socialist revolution.
So in once sense Eliot is wrong, but in another, equally important, sense Eliot may prove to be right. The world may well end with a whimper--if by "world" we mean, not our biological species, but the cultural world we who are alive have inherited from our recent ancestors, with its modernist, species-being dream of human happiness for all. At precisely the moment in human history when we have the technological and organizational capacities to approach this dream--not in the Utopian sense of guaranteeing happiness for all, but it the non-Utopian sense of making it a reasonable aspiration for every human being--the dream itself is being extinguished. Global capital is triumphant and arrogant. Neither the poor nor the meek nor those who hunger and thirst for justice are going to inherit the earth, it says. Are you kidding? The earth will belong to the smart investors.
Will it? The arrogance of global capital is not without objective foundation. Capitalism's economic scope and power have never been greater, certainly not in this century, and its intellectual hegemony is still on the ascendancy, as disillusioned, dispirited Leftists cash in their revolutionary aspirations and now turn their attention to other matters.
But we should not succumb to what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed "bankers' fatalism." Bourdieu notes that the economic determinism that once infected Marxism has been taken over with a vengeance by the prophets of the New World Order. This "neoliberal" determinism "ratifies the spontaneous philosophy of the people who run the large multinationals and of the agents of high finance. Relayed throughout the world by national and international politicians, civil servants, and most of all the universe of senior journalists--all more or less ignorant of the underlying mathematical theology--is becoming a sort of universal belief, a new ecumenical gospel."[2]
Bourdieu correctly observes that the fatalism of this new gospel serves to redouble the force of the economic realities it supposedly represents.
Now clearly, this fatalism must be challenged. It must be more than challenged. It must be defeated. Not just the neoliberal theology that undergirds the bankers' fatalism, but--let us proclaim this openly--global capitalism itself must be defeated. Resistance, which in fact is widespread, is not enough. To change the world--which, let us be frank, is what must be done--the forces of resistance must coalesce into a "counter-project."
This counter-project does not yet exit. Virtually all the concrete resistance right now to global capital's neoliberal agenda is either straightforwardly defensive (First World struggles to impede the dismantling of social democracy) or attempts by Third World workers, women, peasants, and indigenous minorities to achieve the gains that (some of) their First World counterparts have already achieved (e.g., struggles for human rights, worker rights, women's rights, minority self-determination). As important as these struggles are, they do not amount to a counter-project.
An important component of the counter-project, a crucial component, is an alternative vision--a plausible picture of how we as a species might live in harmony with one another and with our fragile eco-system. This vision must be ethically and psychologically appealing. It must be a vision capable of inspiring the virtues of hope, courage, perseverance, and personal responsibility, which will be necessary if the vision is ever to become a reality.
This vision can no longer afford to be abstract. The failure of so many of the socialist experiments of this century no longer permit such intellectual luxury. Our vision must contain an elaborated conception of a successor-system to capitalism, an orienting model that is specified concretely enough to be rationally defensible as both economically viable and ethically desirable. We must be able to assert with confidence that capitalism as an economic system is technically obsolete, and that an efficient, innovative, ecologically-sustainable democratic socialism is now possible.
My own work, in *Against Capitalism* and elsewhere, has been largely concerned with the question of the successor- system. It is my contention that what I call Economic Democracy, a market economy that replaces wage labor by worker-self-management and private investors by democratically-accountable public investment banks, fulfills the above criteria.
I won't rehearse my arguments here. I do want to emphasize here that such a model is only a *part* of an alternative vision. Relying as it does (as it must) on democracy, the model, even if implemented, will not guarantee that we as a species will *in fact* live in harmony with one another and with our fragile eco-system. Workplace democracy introduced into a sexist, racist, homophobic society could have sharply alienating consequences for many workers. The pain of daily life could become worse, not better. Social control of investment introduced into a society dominated by consumerist values need not result in heightened ecological sensitivity. We could decide to invest more, not less, in all-terrain vehicles and shopping malls. Democracy is a necessary condition for the world we want, but it is by no means sufficient.
So we can see how vitally important to the counter- project are the current struggles *against* racism, sexism and homophobia, *against* senseless violence, rampant consumerism and environmental destruction, and *for* new ways of living with one another and with nature. Without major advances along these fronts, Economic Democracy, even if achieved, will not fulfill its potential.
Needless to say, there is no guarantee that a genuine counter-project will develop and come to fruition. At present it is difficult to even *imagine* the transition from capitalism to a new society beyond capitalism. Indeed, this is a major lacuna in Left thinking that needs to be addressed. We need to be able to say, not only where it is we want to go (which is difficult enough), but how it is we propose to get there. The counter-project needs a new theory of transition-- a new theory of "revolution."
We don't yet have such a theory, but I think we are now in position to suggest its general contours. It seems clear to me that an adequate theory will have to have several key features.
1. It will recognize that the old models of social revolution, drawing their inspiration from the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban Revolutions are largely inappropriate to the world today, even in poor countries.
2. It will be animated by a more concrete telos than has been customary in the past. It is not enough to say "Seize state power and establish socialism." The concept of a successor system fits in here. We must be able to say where it is we want to go before trying to say how we hope to get there.
3. The theory will emphasize the need for reform struggles now, before the time is ripe for truly fundamental socio-economic changes. What we get, if and when conjunctural historical forces open up space for genuine structural transformation, will depend crucially on what we have already gotten--and on who, during the course of many struggles, we have become.
4. The theory will underscore the need for diverse strategies. How we get to where we want to go will depend crucially on where we happen to be. The transition to a genuinely democratic socialism will necessarily be different, depending on whether the country is rich or poor, whether the country has undergone a socialist revolution in the past, and if so, the degree to which a new capitalist class has come into being and succeeded in legitimizing itself.
5. An adequate theory of the transition from global capitalism to democratic, sustainable socialism will doubtless stress the need for an *international* social movement--which brings us back to Marx and Engels. I suspect that the theory will call for something that looks rather like the "communist" movement envisaged by Marx and Engels in *The Manifesto*.
Let me elaborate on this last point by recalling and commenting on some of their pronouncements:
A. Communists do not comprise a separate political party opposed to other working class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. [3]
This, we observe, is something very different from the Leninist model that came to be hegemonic on the Left. There is no talk here of democratic centralism, of a tightly organized, tightly disciplined party with an acute sense of its doctrinal correctness.
B. In the national struggles of the proletarians of different countries, [communists] point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. [4]
And also
C. The proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation . . . The first step in the revolution by the working class is to . . . win the battle of democracy. [5]
Notice, although communism is envisaged as a international movement, Marx and Engels do not call for the abolition of the nation-state, nor do they declaim on the futility of national struggles. To the contrary, they insist that the essential struggles must take place on precisely that terrain--and can be won only insofar as genuine democracy is truly established.
D. In the beginning, this cannot be effected except . . . on the conditions of bourgeois production, by means of measures, therefore, which seem economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production. [6]
We see here that Marx and Engels not only *endorse* a reform agenda, but see such reforms as *unavoidable* as a means to radical transformation. (The ten specific reforms urged upon "most advanced countries" are well worth a careful look, but there's no space for that here.)
To summarize briefly: The conception of a revolutionary movement that emanates from the pages of *The Manifesto* is something quite different from the kinds of revolutionary movements that have in fact emerged in this century. Marx and Engels advocate an international organization of committed activists who share a more-or-less common global vision, who represent the most progressive elements of all progressive organizations and parties, who work primarily within the confines of their own nation-state, but who keep the international dimensions of the struggle in focus, and who recognize that many reforms are possible and desirable *before* global capitalism gives way to socialist reconstruction.
We don't yet have a "new communist movement," nor an adequate theory of the counter-project that would animate such a movement. Some of the theoretical and practical pieces are in formation, but many others need to be developed. Clearly there is much that needs to be done. Clearly, we have much work to do.
--David Schweickart Philosophy Department University of Loyola, Chicago
NOTES
1. The Communist Manifesto, (London, Verso, 1998), pp. 39-40 Hobsbaum's remark is on p. 17. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, "A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism," New Left Review 227 (January-February, 1998): 126. 3. The Communist Manifesto, p. 50. 4. Manifesto, p. 51. 5. Manifesto, pp. 58, 60. 6. Manifesto, p. 60.