Professor Richard Wolff: A Socialism for the 21st Century

[marmar]

A Socialism for the 21st Century

Friday, 07 June 2013 00:00
By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis


Capitalism has stopped "delivering the goods" for quite a while now, especially in its older bases (Europe, North America and Japan). Real wage stagnation, deepening wealth and income inequalities, unsustainable debt levels and export of jobs have been prevailing trends in those areas. The global crisis since 2007 only accelerated those trends. In response, more has happened than Keynesianism returning to challenge neoliberalism and critiques returning to challenge uncritical celebrations of capitalism. Capitalism's development has raised a basic question again: What alternative economic system might be necessary and preferable for societies determined to do better than capitalism? That old mole, socialism, has thus returned for interrogation about its past to draw the lessons about its present and future.

The Historical Background of Socialism

Since the mid 19th century, socialism has mostly been differentiated from capitalism in two basic ways. Instead of capitalism's private ownership of means of production (land, factories, offices, stores, machinery, etcetera), socialism would transfer that ownership to the state as the administrator for public, social or collective ownership. Instead of capitalism's distribution of resources and products by means of market exchange, socialism would substitute state central planning to accomplish that distribution. Marxism was generally viewed as the basic theoretical criticism of capitalism that went on to define and justify a social transition from capitalism to socialism. Communism was generally viewed as a distant, rather utopian stage of social development beyond socialism wherein class differences would disappear, the state would wither away as a social institution, work activity would be transformed and distribution would be based purely on need.

Before 1917, socialism comprised both the critical analysis of capitalism and the anti-capitalist programs promoted by various social movements, labor unions, writers and political parties. They advocated transitions from private toward state ownership of means of production, and from market toward state-planned distribution. Socialism was stunningly successful at winning hearts and minds; it spread quickly across the globe. By 1917, a revolution in Russia enabled a new government to replace the capitalism it had inherited with what it understood as socialism. Bolshevik leaders thus moved to nationalize productive property in industry and institute planning as hallmarks of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' (USSR's) economy.

Yet Soviet socialism also changed and complicated the meaning of socialism in the world. Beyond being a general theory and program of anti-capitalism, socialism came also to be the label applied to what was said and done in and by the USSR. This change had profound consequences. Socialists around the world split into two wings or segments. (1) For one wing, the evolving Soviet revolution was the realization of what socialism had always sought. It therefore had to be defended at all costs from capitalism's assaults. That wing increasingly defined socialism as what the USSR did after 1917; Soviet socialism became the model to be replicated everywhere. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/16797-a-socialism-for-the-21st-century

[xchrom]

1. ...

[Ron Green]

2. I heard Rick Wolff on Bill Moyers' show last night.

I'm reading two of his books right now.

The Occupy reading group I attend seems to discuss him at every meeting.

I hope he becomes as big a name as Krugman; his message is one that ought to go viral.

[socialist_n_TN]

3. This sounds suspiciously like a Trotskyist program...

I'm glad I read it. It fleshes out some of his beliefs for me. Of course, he said nothing about how we're supposed to get TO a Socialism for the 21st Century. I'd also be interested in hearing/reading his views on that.

[CanSocDem]

4. Saving what's left of democracy...

...may be taking time away from our socialist revolution, but it is a crucial time in the history of western culture. Capitalism has failed spectacularly and the people haven't stepped up to save themselves.

" Socialist parties focused on electoral politics, increasingly rejecting revolutionary strategies, tactics and language. The socialist wing largely accommodated itself to the view that capitalism seemed securely in place. The role for socialists was then to expose its flaws (injustices, wastes and inefficiencies) and struggle politically to impose governmental rules, constraints and interventions that would impose "a human face" on capitalism. Socialists thus focused on obtaining redistributive tax structures, government-provided social safety nets and state-regulated markets. In many countries, the socialists became the more or less accepted mass-based left that favored a state-regulated, social-welfare capitalism. Opposing the socialists was a basic right that favored less state regulation, a capitalism in which the private capitalist sector was dominant."

Having grown up in a thriving social democracy, aka "elected socialist government" I have personally witnessed how a generation, brought up well and prosperous, suddenly emerged, with born again enthusiasm to embrace the lure of capitalism. I know our own politicians seemed unable to promote the public interest, in the street fight to stop industrial exploitation of the working class. Consumerism rules.

And I think the author does offer up tentative steps towards the democratization of the workplace by suggesting worker co-ops. These are proven models of an 'alternative economic system.'

"Other social institutions formerly dependent on receiving distributions of capitalist surpluses from the appropriators will then be dependent instead on workers directing their own enterprises and thus distributing their own surpluses. Government revenue, for example, to the extent it depends on taxes on enterprise surpluses, would then flow from (and hence be responsive to) workers in their capacity as enterprise self-directors. The state would then become directly and financially dependent on the organized (in and by their enterprises) workers in a way and to a degree unequaled in human history. Correspondingly, the risks of power passing from the mass of people in their residences and workplaces to a state bureaucracy - a serious problem for traditional socialism - would be reduced."

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