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THE LEFT NEEDS MORE SOCIALISM
standards of fairness, democracy, equality and justice are as
much a part of daily life as are capitalism's values of privilege,
unequal rewards and power.
In this post-communist era when even “liberal” has
become a dirty word, the effort to create a more humane society
will not be revived without explicit demands long associated
with socialism. Social movements for environmental protection,
women’s rights and racial equality sooner or later run up against
the institutional constraints imposed by capitalism. Then they
discover that they can’t achieve their goals without becoming
anticapitalist. What will individuals and groups demanding
equality, democracy, respect for the environment and freedom
from the market call themselves as they try to coalesce around
increasingly global demands and on behalf of increasingly global
alternatives? We need not be timid about naming this socialism.
What else is it? What a new progressive movement needs can
be simply stated: more socialism.
BY RONALD ARONSON
It's time to break a taboo and place the word “socialism"
across the top of the page in a major American progressive
magazine. Time for the left to stop repressing the side of our
selves that the right finds most objectionable. Until we thumb our
noses at the Democratic pols who have been calling the shots
and reassert the very ideas they say are unthinkable, we will
keep stumbling around in the dark corners of American politics,
wondering how we lost our souls — and how to find them again.
I can hear tongues clucking the conventional wisdom
that the “S” word is the kiss of death for any American political
initiative. Since the collapse of communism, hasn’t “socialism"
— even the democratic kind — reeked of everything obsolete
and discredited? Isn’t it sheer absurdity to ask today’s main
stream to pay attention to this 19th century idea? Didn’t Tony
Blair reshape “New Labour” into a force capable of winning
an unprecedented string of victories in Britain only by first
defeating socialism and socialists in his party? And for a
generation haven’t we on the American left declared socialist
ideology irrelevant time and again in the process of shaping our
feminist, antiwar, progay, antiracist, multicultural, ecological and
community-oriented identities?
People who espouse these and a dozen other argu
ments against the relevance of socialism today may regard it
as.quaint that Bolivia’s new president, Evo Morales, leads the
Movement Toward Socialism Party, or that Venezuela's Hugo
Ch£vez intends to create a “new socialism for the 21st century.”
After all, socialist parties elsewhere, such as in France, Spain
and Germany, or indeed Brazil’s Workers Party and Chile’s
Socialist Party, have no intention of introducing anything like
socialism in their countries. Still, the newest significant formation,
indeed, today's equivalent of the 19th century International
Workingman’s Association, calls itself the World Social Forum.
The name reminds those who believe “another world is possible"
that it can come about only if it is global, only if it is guided by a
loosely organized “forum" rather than a top-down party — and
only if its character is social.
Among Americans it has long since become obvious that
the left is doomed without a vision, a sense of direction and an
effective call to amis. One of the reasons we are having such
tough sledding nowadays is that we have been unable to
develop our own compelling alternative to those created by the
right and the center over the past generation and embodied in
the politics of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. We need to point
to a clearly different direction from the one in which the United
States and the world are heading. We need to spell out a histor
ical diagnosis and project, a strategy and tactics, and root these
in widely shared ultimate values.
We would be further along on all of these fronts today
tiad it not been for the immense success of the Anglo-American
right in insisting for nearly a generation now, that in Margaret
Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative," that the conservative
project of free markets, privatization and deregulation is simple
obedience to necessity. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the
“end of history" 14 years ago, he ruled out picturing “to ourselves
a world that is essentially different from the present one, and
a, the same time better." Capitalism’s victory over communism
in the Cold War silenced any and all alternatives, present and
future, he said. And today among apologists for global capitalism
like Thomas Friedman, the ideological assault on alternatives
has become even more insistent, the faith in the market almost
total
Successful ideological and political campaigns close
up the space in which imagination might conceive of a world
different from the status quo. Alternatives become “unthinkable.”
In contrast, for two generations between 1917 and 1989, the
prospect of social change and political action worldwide were
nurtured by the competition between two different world
embracing economic systems. Ugly as it was in so many ways,
the Soviet Union not only spurred imitators but stimulated and
sometimes supported resistance movements, and, more relevant
to us, along with the presence of vigorous socialist movements
and ideas it encouraged thinking and acting toward alternatives
that would be neither capitalist nor communist. The 1930s
through the 1970s saw important and still relevant efforts at
social change led by anarchists (Spain), social democrats
(Scandinavia), non -Stalinist communists (Yugoslavia, Italy),
coalitions of socialists and communists (Chile), and coalitions
of leftists and less ideological forces of national liberation
(Nicaragua, South Africa). Until the end of the Cold War,
alternatives to capitalism and communism seemed both
thinkable and possible.
Today, when the bottom line is touted as the answer
to every question, American s are imprisoned in a mental
world shaped by economic trends. Ironically, its ideologists
have become pitchmen for a capitalist caricature of Marxism —
promulgating a crude economic determinism in which the market
rules every social, mental and geographic space. Since the fall
of communism, market-oriented ways of thinking, feeling and
seeing have permeated our lives and our culture to a degree
that Marx never dreamed of.
Yet the real Marxism, although no longer embodied
in movements or governments, has never been truer or
There can be no future social movements without key
socialist themes: the importance of economic class, the centrality
of labor and workers in shaping the world, the idea that people
must act to create their own destiny. Not to mention themes
already suggested: the decisive role of the economy in determin
ing the rest of our life, the fact that today it is above all driven by
the pursuit of profit, the insistence of freeing people from its
domination and the need to think and act politically in terms of
the socioeconomic system rather in terms of individual policies.
Whatever language people use, socialist ideas, experience,
models, aspirations and analyses will help form the heart and
soul of the alternative-in-the-making, or there will be no alter
native.
Equality is the most important among these. Socialists
have conceived a society that provides for the needs of every
individual, including adequate means to live a decent life and
develop each person’s capacities. Our society, in contrast, is
ambivalent and ultimately incoherent about equality. We are all
said to be equal politically and before the law, but socially and
economically our individual worth varies enormously. This is
built into the American system: Social and economic inequality,
a hallmark of life under free enterprise, make a mockery of a
proud hallmark of American democracy, civic equality. In its own
terms our society should be taking steps at least to insure that
we are equal to become unequal. In other words, fair competition
requires an equal starting point. Yet today this is not a liberal but
a radical demand. Unequal schools, the rising costs of higher
education, the growing gap in living conditions between well-off
and poor, the abolition of the estate tax encouraging a plutocracy
— all heighten the system’s unfairness In fighting against our
increasingly unequal society, liberals and progressives will need
to draw upon socialist thought in developing clear and consistent
ideas, critiques, programs and watchwords about equality.
Doing battle against the prevailing inequality means
invoking the idea that we all belong to a community, as opposed
to the illusion, voiced famously by Thatcher, that “There is no
society, only individuals."
The paradox of our times is that individualism is riding
high even while our universal interconnectedness is intensifying
in this increasingly interdependent global society. The more
interdependent each person in the world becomes, and the more
large corporations rule not only economic but social life, the less
social awareness there seems to be. We are supposed to live
our lives as if there were no community, while more and more,
vital social functions become performed for private gain, as if
each of us had become a Robinson Crusoe.
TERRY LABAN
more relevant: Most of the world’s main problems today are
inseparable from the dynamics of the capitalist system itself.
With corporate capitalism everywhere in command, the outlook
for increased poverty, more environmental degradation, ever
more uneven distribution of resources and the undermining
of traditional societies and ways of life, for a culture dominated
by marketing, advertising and uneven global development.
But Americans need only glance around the world to see
that there are alternatives. The vibrant World Social Forums are
an example, under way since 2001 and now envisioning several
annual meetings of an immense variety of groups, organizations
and networks. Another is the continuing leftward movement of
South American governments, now adding Bolivia to Argentina,
Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile and Brazil. A third is the continuing
European efforts to defend social welfare programs, as eviden
ced in the German Social Democrats’ remarkable reversal of a
slide into oblivion to tie the Christian Democratic Party in last
September's election, and the unflagging popular support for
Britain’s National Health Service.
The reigning economic system will continue to generate
opposition as long as it speaks of equality (which it must) yet
continues to be unequal and undemocratic (which it must);
as long as it incites dreams of a better life (which it must) but
deforms social, cultural and political life according to its bottom
line (which it must); as long as its rampant abuse of the environ
ment and pillage of natural resources continue (also inevitable).
Living in a capitalist world, we can’t get far thinking and
talking about alternatives and new directions without acknow
ledging that many of our key values and starting points are
drawn from a common historical source: the socialist tradition.
We have not reached the end of history as long as the spirit of
solidarity animates antisweatshop movements, as long as a root
sense of fairness motivates our efforts for a living wage, as long
as the belief in equality nourishes our demand for a national
healthcare system, as long as we embrace the democratic social
provisioning embodies in Social Security. The next left will have
to acknowledge, and even celebrate, the socialist spirit. Social
ism’s values continue to nourish community life. Much of our
world continues to be organized collectively, democratically
and socially, operating according to need and not according to
profitability — in schools and cooperatives; libraries and non
profits; local, state and federal government programs. Septem
ber 11 and Hurricane Katrina showed the undying need for
extensive and intensive structures of community. The socialist
The fantasy universe of purely private individuals, for all
its lip service to religious belief, is no longer able to inculcate the
basic social morality and sense of responsibility any society
needs to function. Twenty-five years of attacking government
has drained much of the basic civic spirit and social responsibility
we must have to transact our collective business with integrity. If
nothing is higher than the individual, the only thing that matters is
whether I alone succeed. In the Enron and other corporate fraud
scandals, in the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, the chickens have
been coming home to roost.
On the road to shaping an alternative, the left might
respond with a time-honored socialist insight, namely that “I”
only exists within a “we," and that unless we look out for every
one, no one is secure. To say this confidently means accepting
that we stand for a clear alternative and embody decisively
different values and traditions than those on the right. This
means getting friendly again with socialism.
Ronald Aronson wrote this article for The Nation. He
teaches at Wayne State University. Among his books are After
Marxism (Guilford) and Camus & Sartre: The Story o f a Friend
ship and the Quarrel That Ended It (University of Chicago).
He is co-producer (with Judith Montell) of the documentary films
Professional Revolutionary: The Life o f Saul Wellman and First
Amendment on Trial: The Case o f the Detroit Six. His current
book project is Living Without God.
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