Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 16:04:11 -0800 From: Sam Pawlett <rsp at uniserve.com>
David Schweickert is a brilliant Marxist intellectual whose work deserves to be widely read, so here it is.
I know this willbounce on lbo talk but I don't know of any other way to send it.
happy new year, Sam Pawlett
From: "David C. Schweickart" <dschwei at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU>
To s*bscribers to the Society for the Philosophical Study of Marxism list:
Happy New Millennium!
Forgive my late intervention into the debate about my paper, "From Here to There: Imagining the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism with a Little Help from *The Communist Manifesto.*" I have been following the debate with much interest, but I've been utterly preoccupied with finishing a book manuscript that was due at the publishers last July.
It's finished now and sent off. The book has been tentatively titled, *Beyond Capitalism.* It was supposed to be a shorter, less academic, more popular presentation of the basic ideas of *Against Capitalism.* It turned out to be that, but more than that. *Against Capitalism* was a sustained defense of a model of market socialism I've called "Economic Democracy." BC does that also (with far fewer footnotes and far less engagement in technical economic and philosophical debates), but it also situates the model in a larger, more realistic context. Rather than go into detail here, I am going to append to these remarks a copy of Chapter One of the book. You will see that a great many of the issues discussed in the debate about FHTT are addressed there. I'm certain that my treatment will not satisfy everyone, but it will at least spell out my position on a lot of important issues raised in the discussion that were not treated in FHTT.
Let me situate my overall position by responding briefly to a number of the comments made during the course of the discussion (which, by the way, I found to be very valuable):
In a sense my own position can be seen as being in stark contrast to the view expressed by Ralph Dumain on at least three counts:
1) Contrary to what Ralph and many other people maintain, I *do* think we can say what a viable, desirable socialism would look like. Not only that, I think the "model" I propose (or at least significant elements of it) will soon be on the historical agenda, since the structural "reforms" I advocate respond to real, felt contradictions in contemporary capitalism. The first is the lack of workplace democracy. This is an issue that is very easy for ordinary working people to understand--why are we allowed to elect the president, governors, mayors, congressmen--but not our bosses? It is a very natural question that is assiduously kept out of "acceptable" public debate, and for good reason. Not only is the concept appealing to ordinary people and fully in harmony with prevailing democratic ideology, but there is now a large body of empirical evidence on hand to demonstrate that workplace democracy *works*--even in economic terms. Since we can view the history of these last two centuries as one involving the gradual spread and extension of democracy, we can be pretty confident that sooner or later, the non- democratic character of the workplace is going to be on the historical agenda.
The second place where the contradictions of capitalism are most acutely felt concerns economic *instability*--booms and busts that seem wholly irrational. If these persist and worsen--and I think it highly likely that they will, given the deregulation and globalization of financial markets--more and more attention will be focused on the cause of this destructive irrationality. Which turns out to be not what most on the Left reflexively think. The cause is *not* the market--and least not the market for goods ands services. It turns out to be in the area of finance--in a nutshell, the reliance under capitalism on *private investors* to supply funds for investment and the financial markets to allocate these funds. (The "market" here is an important part of the problem, but not the only part.) The remedy for this anachronistic mechanism is what I call "social control of investment," the details of which are spelled out in *Against Capitalism*and in BC. (In essence, generate the investment fund by a capital-assets tax, and distribute it to regions and communities on a per-capita basis.)
It is my contention that if we know where to look, we can see, even today, forces at work pushing in the direction of these solutions to the felt contradiction of contemporary capitalism. It also my contention that properly integrating workplace democracy and social control of investment into a market economy will produce a genuine socialism that will work. It will be not only more democratic and egalitarian than capitalism, but it will be more stable, more efficient and more rational in its growth.
2) How will this happen? Ralph and some others have suggested that we don't have clue as to what a revolution would look like in an advanced capitalist society. I disagree. We can say it won't look like the Russian or Chinese or Cuban revolutions, but we can say something positive as well. We can now tell a plausible story--give a plausible scenario-- as to what concrete institutional changes might be attempted if conditions (and pre- conditions) are right. (This need not, by the way, involve street fighting, storming the White House or Federal Reserve Banks or anything like that.) This conception of revolution, missing in *Against Capitalism* (apart from a few words) is spelled out in some detail in the last chapter of BC. I happen to think it is now essential to the socialist project that we be able to say concretely what it is that we want, in terms of positive institutional changes, and to be able to give some sort of plausible account as to how these might come about, given the real forces at work in the world today.
I don't mean any of this to be interpreted as a "detailed blueprint." How history will in fact unfold cannot be foreseen. But vision is important for activists. History is made by human beings. Now more than ever, we need a positive vision to motivate action. That's what I'm proposing.
3) This brings me to my third major disagreement with Ralph (and with many other on the Left). I do not think it productive anymore to merely harp on the negative. Some people may feel "overwhelming," "total" alienation today, but not most people. The fact of the matter is, workers (and almost everyone else in advanced capitalist societies, apart from what Marx termed the "lumpenproletariat") have far more to lose that their chains. Most people are simply not going to buy an ideology that tells them otherwise. And they are right not to do so. An honest, honorable and effective socialism has got to have responsible, positive vision. We cannot propose a utopia. We have to be able to argue convincingly that things will not get *worse* if political power should pass into the hands of a democratic party that can make major structural changes. I think we are now in position to make just such an argument--which will not persuade everyone all at once, but it's an argument that must be developed, refined and propagated. If the capitalist class shows itself to be deeply incompetent--which in the eyes of most people in rich countries is not yet the case, but that could change in the not-so-distant future--we'd better have some solutions to propose. (The fascists, of course, will have theirs.)
Let make two other comments, then append my Chapter One. If interested readers would like to see more, I could probably send additional chapters to people who contact me. I'm teaching this year at Loyola University's study-abroad program in Rome, and the computer facilities aren't great here, but I could try. The whole manuscript that I sent off to the publishers is about 140 pages or so, single-spaced.
Sam Pawlett is concerned that market socialism would exacerbate inequalities between rich countries and poor countries. This may or may not be true in general, but it is not true for Economic Democracy. I pay a lot of attention in BC to the international dimensions of the model, and the global issues of ecology and poverty. I propose, among other things, a policy of "socialist protectionism" which will put a tariff on goods coming from countries where wages are lower or environmental restrictions are less than in the importing country to bring the price of the goods up to that they would be if workers abroad were paid the same wage as domestic workers and subject to the same environmental restrictions. The funds collected from importers generated by this tariff is then *rebated* to the poor country exporting the goods. (This is what makes the protectionism "socialist.") In effect, rich country consumers must pay a *fair* price for a poor country's goods, not the "free market" price. The long-range implications of this: fewer goods produced in poor countries to supply the demands of rich country consumers, so more resources left for local development. This, by the way, is something the Seattle protesters should have been demanding. (It's possible some of them were, but in general "socialist protectionism" has not yet made it onto the Left's agenda.)
Chris Buford remarks that I don't use the Marxian concept of value in my proposal. This is true and not true, in BC as well as FHTT. I don't use any of the standard categories of Marxist economics in my analysis, nor do I pay much attention to important debates on the Left (including the market socialism debate), since the intended audience, at least for BC, is *not* a Marxist audience. Of course I hope the book will be read on the Left, but it's meant to be something accessible to students or trade unionists or anyone else who is concerned with the plight of the contemporary world and wants some sense as to what to do about it. So I try to keep the style and concepts as "standard" as possible.
On the other hand, the substance of the analysis derives heavily from Marxian economics. My critique in Chapter Two of standard defenses of capitalism relies heavily on the labor theory of value (what I take to be true about the LTV)--although it remains unnamed. Even more importantly, the specific feature of the mechanism I propose for instantiating "social control of investment" derives from Marx's insight that it is "living labor," not "dead labor" (i.e., capital) that is the source of surplus value. (Hence the capital-assets-tax-generated investment fund is allocated to regions on a per-capita basis, not in terms of the region's contribution to the fund.)
Let me conclude by apologizing to all of you who made valuable comments to which I haven't time to respond here. (This is going to be a very long post, since it includes book chapter), and to thanking all the participants. For me at least this has been a rewarding experience.
Sincerely,
David Schweickart