Latin America & Twenty-First Century Socialism: Inventing to Avoid Mistakes

[Ozymanithrax]

Latin America & Twenty-First Century Socialism: Inventing to Avoid Mistakes

Marta Harnecker

Some Features of Twenty-First Century Socialism

In what follows, I shall present some of the features that, according to the opinions of several thinkers and political leaders, should be characteristic of twenty-first century socialism. In fact, they restate many of Marx’s original ideas.

Our socialist conception does not, unlike the capitalist, start off with the idea of people as individual beings isolated, separated from others, but with the idea of people as social beings, who can only develop themselves if they develop together with others.

As the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre understood, there is no such thing as an abstract citizen, someone who is above everything, who is neither rich nor poor, neither young nor old, neither male nor female, or is all of those things at once. As Miodrag Zecevic said: “What exist are concrete persons who live amongst and depend on other people, who associate with and organize in various ways with other people in communities and organizations in which and through which they make real their interests, rights, and duties.”90

In positing social human beings as the philosophical basis of socialist democracy, we are not proposing the negation of the individual; what we are saying is that individual human nature is eminently social and that by developing social values—for example, solidarity—the individual develops more fully. There is a complementary, dialectical relationship between individual being and social being that makes it impossible to separate the individual character of human beings from their social surroundings.

We talk a lot about socilism and capitalism here. Each side has its defenders, but this is a good descriptons of what Socilism might be in this century.

***Edited to add the author's name.

[justinaforjustice]

1. Excellent Article on Venezuelan Community Democracy

Harnecker explains the difference between fully participatory democracy in Venezuela's community council, where spokes-people, not "Representatives" are elected and differentiates between "representatives", such as our congressional representatives, and those elected to express the will of their local councils, where their actions are continually subject to recall.