CAPITALISM SUCKS- Reviving Socialism From Below

Orwellian_Ghost

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Tue Jun-23-09 07:24 PM
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CAPITALISM SUCKS- Reviving Socialism From Below

Reviving socialism from below

Capitalism’s biggest crisis since the 1930s raises the question of what can replace it.

A SPECTER is haunting capitalism. As the world economy plunges into its worst crisis since the Great Depression, political discourse in the United States has been dominated by a discussion of socialism. John McCain accused Barack Obama of supporting socialist policies during last year’s presidential election campaign. Since then scores of right-wing pundits and talk show hosts have been screaming that the new administration, with its stimulus bill, bank bailout plan, and unprecedented budget deficits is turning America into either a European socialist state or a Leninist dictatorship.

While Obama claims, correctly, that his big spending plans are intended not to bury capitalism but to save it, a February cover article in Newsweek declared “We are all socialists now” (although in a companion article—written before the scandal of $165 million in government-funded bonuses for AIG executives who had wrecked the company—it also reassured its readers that there will not be a revolution in the U.S., because Americans don’t hate the rich). Newsweek pointed out that the crisis had already forced the Bush administration to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banking and mortgage industries, and that it had earlier passed “the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years,” in the form of a prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients.

But as Frederick Engels argued back in the 1870s, even state ownership of particular industries is not the same as socialism and is, in fact, quite compatible with support for capitalism. Commenting on events in Germany at the time, Engels noted,

Since Bismarck went in for state-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism.

If socialism means more than state ownership or state intervention, then how should it be understood? In the past, most socialists defined their ideology by pointing to concrete models, whether Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or the expanding social democracies of Western Europe. But the Stalinist command economies collapsed, Mao’s China was replaced by a system of market exploitation, and Europe’s social democrats—including Britain’s Labor Party and France’s Socialist Party—long ago transformed themselves from defenders of the welfare state to advocates of privatization, deregulation, and other neoliberal policies.