Toward a New Socialism
Harrington, Michael
At the end of 1988, UNICEF reported that half a million children had died during the year, in part because of cuts in social programs in the Third World. At the same time the World Bank...
...If those huge and disabling flaws can be corrected, if there could be a real program for social service, it might offer one of the ways to deal with this problem...
...Why should a country in which there is widespread hunger sacrifice itself in behalf of affluent economies based, among other things, on more than a century of environmental degradation...
...Since northern capital was at that time not too anxious to invest in its own problematic economies, there was money to burn, or, more precisely, to lend recklessly to the poor, nonoil countries of the Third World...
...And this leads to a much larger socialist concept of internationalism, one articulated in recent years by Michael Manley, Willy Brandt, and the late Olof Palme...
...Either the movement will define a new global politics or else it will go down in history as humankind's noblest illusion...
...Finally, let me return to the basic socialist argument...
...But then, there is another critically important aspect of life that has also been omitted from the analysis up to now: the noneconomic...
...business was celebrated as the selfless agency of productivity, labor SPRING • 1989 • 157 Now Socialism denounced as the rearguard of narrow selfinterest...
...or, is all wrong with capitalism and socialism the only alternative...
...When the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quadrupled the price of oil in 1973-4, tens of billions of dollars were shifted from the advanced capitalisms to the largely underdeveloped oil countries...
...Because the Latin debtors were spending so much of their hard • cash earnings to service old loans, Business Week noted early in 1989, they had little money left to buy goods from the United States...
...But if socialists are true to their vision, this incremental change opens up the opportunity to redefine the working life itself...
...In short, when the postwar period came and the Keynesian welfare state actually worked, it provided the only definition of socialization that was specific and workable but, as we have seen, fallible...
...The debt, the Bank said, now totaled $1.32 trillion dollars...
...The principle of social advance through the agency of the State when combined with the acquisitiveness of mass consumer societies made them everywhere hard to govern...
...to delay entry into, or exit from, the labor force...
...And there would have been no crisis of the welfare state...
...The problem is that the turn-down of growth and productivity in the mid-Seventies, which no one has satisfactorily explained, was clearly not the simple result of government spending and most certainly not of a redistribution of income and wealth (which did not take place in any welfare state...
...In part, democratic socialism was the victim of its own success...
...Its good times are compatible with a rise in homelessness and hunger in the most affluent economies the world has ever known...
...accomplished prodigies in eliminating juridical Jim Crow from the United States...
...In the United Kingdom, the top 30 percent of the people received 53.3 percent of pretax income 154 • DISSENT New Socialism in 1968, a Labour year, and 60.4 percent in 1983 under Thatcher...
...Brazil's reaction to the proposals that it forgo the exploitation of natural wealth in the name of environmental responsibility has been less than enthusiastic...
...Global Challenge, the report of a Socialist International committee headed by Michael Manley, has spelled out the details of how a massive northern transfer of capital to the South might act to liberate the poor of the world...
...Now that lesson has to be internationalized...
...But what, exactly, did that mean...
...During the eight Thatcher years between 1979 and 1987, economist Samuel Brittan has calculated, real public spending increased by 14 to 16 percent...
...The air we breathe will be at risk...
...Now, however, internationalism is literally a matter of life and death for the very survival of socialism...
...and if a particular company or co-op is extremely profitable, it cannot claim all of that surplus for the use of a single collectivity...
...But that was not the only difficulty faced by the wealthy countries during the last ten or fifteen years...
...its bad times ruin lives, communities, and even entire regions, and are a plague for the vast majority of humankind in the Third World...
...In her fascinating study, In the Age of the Smart Machine, Shoshana Zuboff points out how the actual operation of existing computerized enterprises opens up the possibility of "re-skilling" the labor force and undercutting the hierarchies central to managerial authoritarianism...
...They knew that European socialists and American liberals had theorized and often managed the postwar prosperity...
...In the eighties a wage hike—even if within the limits of reduced productivity—was regularly denounced as a way of undermining national competitiveness...
...In this perspective socialism was in effect defined as a capitalist society under socialist Keynesian control in which full employment and productivity growth financed increased wages, social programs, investment and profits...
...In the years that followed many of the Third World economies did indeed follow the cruel and antisocial rules of the International Monetary Fund—but they received little, or no, aid from private banks...
...These developments provided a corporate rationale for anti-union policies and for schemes to co-opt the unions when it was impossible to get rid of them...
...If one equated the welfare state and Keynesian economy with socialism, then their crisis was a crisis of the socialist ideal itself...
...They find them a convenience, not a trust...
...But that should not keep socialists from stressing the truly moral context of socialism...
...Democracy, only recently returned to those societies, finds it difficult to win popular support for the suffering demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the rules of the world market...
...and small private businesses...
...Eventually, Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, the application of science to production would lead to a labor force in which the workers would simply be the "watchers and regulators" of miraculous machines...
...These measures are critical if the ecosphere is to be protected...
...But isn't that simply one more statement of an old-fashioned and quite vague ideal...
...And, as I pointed out in the Fall 1988 Dissent, the confusion is made all the more pernicious by the simplistic assumption that capitalism is the market economy and socialism the antimarket economy...
...I city only a few trends, but one example might illuminate this complex transition...
...There is, in short, no question as to whether the future will be radical...
...Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the ideologists-inchief...
...Multinational corporations internationalized production and created a "global factory" such as had never existed before...
...But if it is to succeed, not just in passing this or that law, but in beginning to change the very moral atmosphere of the society, it must be bound together by an ideal...
...Still, it is important for socialists to make it clear that productivity and wealth creation are not an end in themselves...
...What was new was that, because of unprecedented economic internationalization, the misery of the subject peoples had become a problem for the affluent...
...As early as 1976 James Callaghan, the Labour prime minister of Britain, made a searing indictment of the policies that his own party had followed for a generation: We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending...
...Our one world, our microbiology and photonics and superconductors have already settled that...
...One cannot license corporations, public or private, or even cooperatives, to destroy the preconditions of life and then penalize them after the fact...
...Computerized and automated production helped to undermine the foundations of the welfare state...
...The coalition of trade unionists, minorities, immigrants, feminists, environmentalists, students, and other groups that of necessity must be the basis of a pluralistic political movement in advanced society has certain common interests and it is important to state them...
...in an output that respects the ecosphere and pays all of its costs of production...
...professionals and technicians became more important and intermediate strata, socially liberal and economically conservative, made their appearance...
...There were those, like Ferdinand Lassalle, who wanted to move directly to the political seizure of power...
...Then came the second OPEC price hike in 1979, and in 1982 the severest recession since the Great Depression, and the stratospheric interest rates with which American monetarists fought inflation without a thought of international consequences...
...Socialists should certainly aim at reducing the working week to thirty hours in the foreseeable future...
...Even if there were space, neither socialists nor anyone else have some blueprint to deal with the complex tragedies generated by the present order of things...
...I think so...
...But they also became very vague when it came to the future, not the least because they abominated German professors who developed elaborate blueprints for the good society while sitting in their studies...
...There is already a disturbing tendency within the existing welfare states, shrewdly analyzed by Fred Siegel in the Fall 1988 Dissent, to use social conquests, like health care and pensions for the aging, to support an individualistic, antisocial life style...
...In the organization of work, the creation of the world economy and everything else that it did, capital centralized, made economic life more and more interdependent, and moved from laissez-faire to monopoly, from entrepreneurs to managers, from the "nightwatchman state" to the government intervention of Bismarck and Lloyd George...
...Those who advanced this formula are blissfully unaware of the fact that even such an "orthodox" Marxist as Leon Trotsky insisted, more than half a century ago, that markets and prices were essential to any transition to socialism...
...That analysis, particularly when refined by twentiethcentury Marxists like Hilferding and Gramsci, predicted more than a century of economic development...
...In the not-too-distant future, there will unquestionably be new corporate initiatives to deal with this problem...
...But was this crisis really the unintended consequence of the banks' innovative recycling...
...Not quite...
...In the mid-seventies, growth slowed in the advanced economies but continued at a brisk pace in the Third World and particularly in Latin America, which received most of the banks' largesse...
...So the socialists were thrown out of office, and where, as in Giscard's France, the right had the misfortune to be in power when the crisis hit, the people turned to the left...
...Out of an understandable identification with the victims of colonial injustice, some socialists did indeed refuse to see, or even rationalized, the repressiveness and inefficiency of the new nations calling themselves socialist...
...One must quickly add that a widely believed misunderstanding is, alas, more politically powerful than a solid, widely ignored fact...
...Yet it can be demonstrated that Marx and Engels's basic insight about capitalism as a system of irresponsible, antisocial socialization is truer today than it was a century ago...
...Take just two indices of how the causes of the economic crisis were not as the public, or even Callaghan, imagined them...
...It must be a central goal of the new socialism to create an environmentally responsible system of production within and among the nations in the first place...
...And the crisis of undemocratic socialization in the communist world clearly shows that no solutions are to be found in the past or present of those societies...
...Changes in ethical standards arise out of actual experience but they can be affected by the way in which movements interpret those experiences and even, in some instances, by laws...
...Socialists as diverse in their ideological origins as R.H...
...democratic socialism survived in the small neutralist countries of Scandinavia...
...All subtlety disappears and it is simply asserted that Gorbachev's move away from the totalitarian command economy is a retreat from "socialism" to capitalism...
...Both internationally and nationally, then, capitalism continues to be a contradictory, crisis-ridden system that at its best makes advances financed by the vulnerable and at its worst imposes priorities that contribute to the deaths of half a million children a year...
...Such events have clearly been disastrous for the poor of the globe—the dead children first and foremost...
...Publicly owned and worker-owned enterprises are most emphatically included under this rubric...
...In Southern Europe socialist parties might still have a role to play as agents of belated democratisation...
...It is an irony that the historic changes now taking place in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev often work, in the short run, to discredit socialism...
...Will that ever happen in all of its fullness and perfection...
...In the aftermath of World War I, the socialists had political power imposed upon them in a number of countries and discovered that there was not really political support for a revolutionary socialization of the economy that they were hard put to define...
...Once the crisis of the welfare state struck, the conservatives had a political answer...
...Thatcher never did practice the monetarism she preached...
...But that will happen only if society can liberate itself, not simply from the imperatives of capitalist production but from those of capitalist leisure as well...
...Changes in the World Economy Then almost every single major determinant of this system began to change...
...This is not the place to go into that hypothesis, rather silly on the face of it...
...Profiteering lenders "recycled" OPEC money to the deserving poor countries, which had just seen their energy bill, paid in inflated dollars, soar...
...The trade unions, socialist parties, and people of the North must come to understand that, in reaching out in solidarity and decency to the suffering masses of the South, there is the possibility of a mighty impetus for prosperity in the North itself...
...I know that lessons from small, culturally and ethnically unified societies do not travel well, but then we must find the political equivalent of that Scandinavian accomplishment...
...The problem is clearly international, for acid rain, the greenhouse effect, and the depletion of the ozone layer blithely ignore national borders...
...The problem of socialism, then, remains as it has been for a good hundred years: How does one democratically and efficiently manage the already social means of production, East and West, North and South...
...In the short run, socialist parties and unions and the American left would seek approximations of that goal...
...co-operatives, which have been given a new lease on life by the emergence of a small-batch, computerized production which is best carried out in small shops...
...All" that is claimed here— and this is counterposed to the prevailing conservative wisdom about scarcity and limits— is that a socialist organization of the economy can produce new sources of wealth in such a way as to let us begin to solve those problems...
...The World Bank also reported that since 1982 the Third World debt had doubled, despite the draconian cuts in domestic programs and the use of export profits to pay off the banks of America and Europe...
...There was a rapid growth in trade during the Great Prosperity, primarily among the affluent economies, but, in the glory days, production remained national...
...And yet this very same development could provide the basis for a quantum leap in worker and union power, with a new relevance to the idea of a democratic economy...
...Affluence had eaten into old class loyalties...
...Education had provided ladders of escape from the working class...
...It is impossible even to begin to outline an answer to that question in a single essay...
...In the case of the Third World, socialists are not quite so blameless...
...The new Common Market should also offer new possibilities for the internationalist politics described earlier...
...Markets for the developing countries contracted at the same time that the service charges on their loans followed the American interest rates through the roof...
...Leon Blum, consciously imitating Roosevelt, tried the same strategy in France during the brief period of the Popular Front and failed, while Roosevelt himself, committed to conservative economics, improvised a welfare state he did not quite understand...
...How can the mores of an entire society change...
...But why had so many socialists in effect accepted welfare capitalism as the practical embodiment of their ideal...
...This socialization was, however, private, unplanned, constantly running into the consumption limits of an economy in which the managers simultaneously increased productivity as if there were no tomorrow and fought to hold down the wages that would provide the effective demand for that soaring output...
...The real incomes of working people dropped...
...Neither Reagan nor Thatcher delivered on their ideologies...
...The new technology does not require that people follow a yearly economic calendar...
...SPRING • 1989 163...
...Between 1977 and 1987 in America the average real income of all families went up by $747 (in 1987 dollars), but groups in the bottom 80 percent saw their purchasing power drop while the income of the top 1 percent rose by an average of $134,513...
...Even with all the problems I have insisted upon, it remains powerful and compelling...
...As a result, political strains were showing up in places like Argentina and Brazil...
...In the case of co-ops, the workers are the owners...
...These historic distinctions and complexities are ignored...
...Keynesian social democracy and American liberalism had not realized that because of its economic power capital still had decisive influence...
...But under the conditions of the new technology it is an innovative program for increasing both democracy and productivity...
...Many of us did insist on the tragic truth defined long ago by Marx: that the socialization of poverty would lead, not to socialism, but to the "old crap" in new form...
...In one sense, yes...
...The crisis of the social democratic welfare state in the mid-seventies was an even more complex aspect of the crisis of socialism itself...
...More broadly, the "recovery" in both the United States and Britain was achieved in classic capitalist style, that is, at the expense of the most vulnerable...
...King understood, the right to eat in a once segregated restaurant is almost meaningless if you are poor or part of a despised underclass...
...to follow interests, passions, and hobbies of no great economic value, and so on...
...That does not, and can not, mean that the democratic enterprise is completely sovereign...
...There were widespread fears that this vast transfer of wealth would lead to recession or even depression in the North, as money and the internal demand it paid for went South...
...These facts notwithstanding, socialists are now being blamed for an economic mess that they long analyzed and deplored...
...Its vaunted flexibility means that individuals might decide to take a year, or years, off...
...As the OECD explained, "the sharp decline in GDP growth in 1974 and 1975 gave rise to an abrupt increase in public expenditure share which was not matched by as great an increase in the tax revenue share...
...For a while, this idyll seemed to come true...
...The new heroes of the Reagan-Thatcher mythology were entrepreneurs, not workers...
...But democratic socialism—or, in the continental usage, social democracy—was inflationary...
...Ideally, there would be nationally owned industries in those sectors that, because of their necessary scale, cannot be operated on a decentralized, face-toface basis...
...So he proposed a typically conservative alternative: If the debtor countries would follow proper capitalist rules, such as cutting social spending and consumption, the private banks would, with government encouragement, give them new money to finance development...
...Is it an ideal that can, and must, inspire people to the very practical approximations we can make of it...
...There is a considerable irony in this exercise in enlightened self-interest, for the international financial crisis, with its threatening consequences for both North and South, was created by banks operating on a similar philosophy...
...It would be the socialization of the already social but still private means of production, a democratic political movement that would impose humane priorities on this system of antisocial socialization...
...It was not understood that the welfare state was historically specific, the result, often unintended, of bitter struggles that created a mass consumption floor appropriate to a mass production economy in which blue-collar workers were the most politically powerful class...
...Walter Fackler of the University of Chicago Business School estimated that real government expenditures rose by 3.5 percent between 1980 and 1988 in America...
...The environment is perhaps the most obvious single case in point...
...The Swedish socialists, acting on the preKeynes "Keynesianism" of Gunnar Myrdal and Ernst Wigforss, actually carried out a deficit-financed recovery...
...Yet for at least a generation practically no democratic socialist has accepted Heilbroner's underlying assumptiOn: that the Soviet Union and similar societies are either exemplars or approximations of socialism...
...In fact, as every serious political person knows, the democratic socialist movement is in deep crisis...
...No analyst I know of has persuasively accounted for the decline in productivity throughout the advanced world in the seventies—but then no one has seriously argued that government spending was "the" cause...
...They will have in common the fact that they are dedicated to maintaining the international order of domination and inferiority...
...That raises a larger issue...
...Indeed, under the impact of the Cold War, some of the more right-wing socialists overstated that truth and argued that totalitarianism was a completely seamless evil that did not permit any internal change, i.e., that what has in fact happened could not happen...
...Still, when one looked below the surface of this conservative success, it turned out to be both problematic and precarious...
...But the poverty in the South was bad for the North as well...
...At the same time the World Bank estimated that in 1988 the seventeen most highly indebted countries of the global South had given rich economies and multinational lending institutions $31.3 billion more than they received from them...
...Private cash had come to the rescue and profit-making priorities were promoting the global common good just as Adam Smith and David Ricardo said they would...
...That same goal is one of the many reasons why the affluent economies must redefine their relation to the Third World in every way...
...Japanese" management became the vogue...
...The socialist alternative to these horrors is not guaranteed by a benign history or any other kind of providence and it is, as any socialist who has thought about the last hundred years must acknowledge, problematic even at the best...
...It means a board of directors with real powers over decisions about technology, the organization of work, investment, and the like, with decisive participation of workers' representatives...
...After a quarter of a century of the "Great Prosperity" that followed the Second World War, growth and productivity, tremendously stimulated by the mass consumption of the social democratic (and American liberal) welfare state, began to decline...
...During the thirties and after the Second World War, the left demonstrated that social justice within the various capitalist nations could be a locomotive 160 • DISSENT New Socialism of economic growth...
...So, that shrewd corporate publication concluded, the newly elected George Bush should, in the pursuit of American goals, find ways to reduce the debt pressure...
...Socialism Under Siege In part the current crisis of socialism is the result of misunderstandings on the part of nonand antisocialists and, unfortunately, even of some socialists themselves...
...There are no purely national solutions to problems, as the French Socialists learned in 1981-82 when they tried to stimulate their economy with a left-wing version of Keynesianism...
...What is pertinent is that the right had a coherent explanation of what had gone wrong and a program of action following from it, while the left was bewildered by the loss of some of its most cherished illusions...
...The fact that centralized, dictatorial planning is not merely antidemocratic but monstrously inefficient precisely because it is antidemocratic has been an axiom of socialist discourse for years...
...I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step...
...Even if socialism is going to be decentralized—and that, we will see, is a critical value for the movement—there can be a collective egotism and irresponsibility of democratic units of production, not only of capitalist companies...
...Any analysis of the continuing relevance of socialism must deal with the palpable disarray of the left as well as the often hidden contradictions of the right...
...There is a corollary proposition that has to do with the social costs of production, private or public...
...Between 1960 and 1973, according to OECD study documents, real public expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up by 5 percent in the seven richest countries...
...But there is a potential solution to that problem in the very notion of a democratic economy...
...Ultimately, that socialist transformation would result in an economy with three basic kinds of enterprises...
...Eventually the system would lose its only excuse for being—the fact that it constantly expanded and thereby opened up the possibility, not simply of periodic crisis, but of a new kind of society...
...Space does not allow for a full explanation of how an internationalized, democratic economy could provide the resources for solving so many of the critical problems of North and South: to deal with cancerous urbanism, homelessness, the destruction of community, and numerous other imperative issues...
...Keynesian" currents were also developing in the British Labour party and among unionists intrigued by calls for "planning...
...The Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy...
...But the notion of an increase in the knowledge and participation of the women and men on the shop floor also implies a certain down grading of some of the most cherished "prerogatives" of management...
...The American President had proposed a "supply-side" recovery stimulated by disproportionate tax cuts for the upper classes, who would invest their bonanza in productivity and plants, and thereby generate efficiency and employment...
...They will function, not simply to assert bottom-up popular control over our social ingenuity but also to create an institutional structure that can effectively harness the powers of the new technology and work toward that humane end...
...Socialism...
...But, as Alec Nove has pointed out, that problem will exist in any economy with large-scale production...
...Similarly with the British prime minister...
...Economic Democracy The second basic concept of a new socialism is the democratization of the economy...
...That answer, though quite understandable, is frightening for those concerned with the future of the species...
...Japanese" management aims at a manipulated communitarianism that preserves the basic authoritarian structure of production...
...For instance, an influential recent article in the New Yorker by Robert Heilbroner, perceptive and nuanced in many ways, began: Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won...
...Under his rule "socialization" meant centralized, dictatorial control of production and the modernization of a backward economy through super-exploitation of workers and peasants...
...For a quarter of a century there was indeed a partial convergence of interest between sophisticated business and the socialist, labor, and American liberal movements...
...In an inspired insight, Marx and Engels had defined capitalism as a system of private socialization...
...By 1986-7, Conservative outlays as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) were higher than they had been in the last year of Labour party rule...
...Obviously Jenkins describes an important political truth (as well as some truths, pure and simple...
...Martin Luther King, Jr...
...And that was exactly the mistake of many socialists and socialist parties...
...but across the whole swath of northern Europe the mode of politics which had dominated the post-war period, and much of the twentieth century, was in decline...
...They are also unaware that there is a long social-democratic tradition— as in the book brilliantly summing up the prevailing socialist wisdom of the fifties, Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism— SPRING • 1989 155 New Socialism that markets can only really work in an egalitarian, socialist society...
...It is also a source of a tremendous new productivity that would lead, not to a growth in Gross National Product but to one in Net Qualitative Product, i.e...
...I doubt it...
...When that formation began to unravel in the mid-seventies, there was, then, a crisis of socialism itself...
...Then, in two years, 1974 and 1975, there was another 5 percent increase...
...The welfare societies it had helped to build had opened other and less-collectivist avenues of advance...
...In the West, when capitalism all but collapsed in 1929, most socialists did not know what to do...
...The color of your skin no longer matters, but the color of your money does...
...Every unit of production must obviously obey environmental, health and safety restrictions that apply throughout the society...
...Throughout the post–World War II period, even after decolonialization had brought independence to the nations of Africa and Asia, political sovereignty in the Third World was routinely subverted by economic dependence...
...Either we will get control of the technology that creates these global effects or we will run the risk of rendering the biosphere uninhabitable...
...Experts talk, with good reason, of the possibility that the military might once again take over...
...It is also true, as some of the more advantaged participants in those movements often forgot, that the quality of life cannot be transformed unless we also solve the problems of the quantities of life...
...Stagflation (simultaneous high inflation and unemployment) led to the triumph of conservatives in a number of Western societies—Sweden, Britain, the United States, and West Germany among them—and the apparent victory of a new, rightist ideology...
...There will then be continental setting for one of the most primordial demands of labor: increased leisure...
...If the prodigies of human creativity now transforming the structures of the globe take place under the aegis of the multinational corporations and governments dedicated to their interests, life will become more ingeniously bureaucratic and manipulative...
...Indeed, the very actions that led to the world debt crisis were widely hailed in the seventies as proof of the resilience and creativity of the capitalist system...
...Second, Martin Neil Baily and Alok K. Chakrabarti have documented the fact that, in the United States, had productivity growth continued at the 1948-1965 rate after 1965, output in 1985 would have been 45 percent higher than it actually was.* If it had simply maintained the pace that prevailed from 1870 to 1965, production would have been 20 percent higher...
...Socialists must come up with proposals for North-South cooperation designed to destroy the global structure of inequality rather than to make it more efficient...
...When new, "flexible" modes of industry developed, the social democratic and American liberal institutions were subject to (self-interested, unfair) attack as being overly rigid...
...In 1982 when the possibility of Mexican bankruptcy revealed the depths of the problem, the United States stonewalled, demanding one hundred cents on the dollar...
...So with the money all but forced upon these risky regimes—the banks had to put the petrodollars to "work" at almost any cost—the fact that government grants and concessional loans from the North were declining was no SPRING • 1989 • 153 New Sedans= problem...
...It is also the hope for freedom and justice in the next century...
...Therefore it is imperative that the North provide developmental alternatives that permit the Third World to respect the environment without having to perpetuate its poverty...
...Here, as in the case of world interdependence, a single development contains antagonistic futures...
...Socialization" now meant democratic state control of monopolies that remained monopolies...
...It is significant that the most dynamic social movements of the past twenty-five years have been based on the struggles of women, minorities, environmentalists, peace activists, and the like—struggles that were not primarily focused on economic questions...
...And to do that requires commitment to designing means of production that are truly social...
...But few people read serious productivity and expenditure analyses made more than a decade after the onset of a crisis...
...The point is, decentralized social ownership requires economy-wide planning to provide an environment in which the right to choose is truly meaningful...
...A socialist commitment to democratizing the economic process would build on the new technology in order to alter the fundamental relations of power in the direction of working people—including clericals and even mid-level "executives" — and their communities...
...At the end of 1988, UNICEF reported that half a million children had died during the year, in part because of cuts in social programs in the Third World...
...Global Socialism From Marx to the present, socialists have proclaimed their fidelity to an international ideal...
...In the 1860s and 1870s most socialists probably took it to refer to cooperatives or "national workshops" on the Louis Blanc model...
...So, too, with the ideal of genuine equality for women, respect for the environment, and creating alternatives to military violence throughout the world...
...Marx and Engels regularly described it in libertarian, worker-control terms, often using the French syndicalist term, "association...
...But when the corporations could no longer make their accustomed profits in the early seventies they began to get positively surly and by the early eighties they used their politicaleconomic power, particularly in the United States and Britain, in a savage anti-union offensive and an attack on some gains of the welfare state...
...Couldn't it have been a mere case of bad luck...
...however mindless the culture of commercialism, it is more attractive than state moralism...
...so is the fact that contemporary "free enterprise" and the Japanese and other Asian variants are dominated by monopoly and oligopoly and guided by pervasive state rigging of supposedly autonomous markets...
...Here is how Peter Jenkins, a perceptive British journalist who wrote, as it seems, out of sadness rather than anger, described the triumph of Thatcherism: The Socialist Age was coming to an end...
...The founding generation treats such programs with the respect that comes from having struggled for them, but those who come after—admittedly in a very capitalistic welfare state—do not have such concerns...
...Marx and Engels counseled a much more pragmatic tactic, which laid the basis for the greatest movement of social idealism in history...
...They are the means to a new civilization...
...Society," they said, would take over the already productive system...
...What I can do, however, is to sketch two concepts that are basic to the new socialism of the 1990s...
...What is at issue is whether this epochal transformation of the very conditions of human life shall be carried through by elites of whatever kind on behalf of their own purposes or whether men and women can, by being as radical as the work of their own hands and brains, finally seize control of their destiny...
...All across Europe there have been reactions against the power of trade unions, seen as the engines of inflation, and, as inflation went on the rampage, against the State itself...
...flexible" automated and computerized tools began to replace the huge machines "dedicated" to a single industrial purpose...
...that union bargaining power and social programs seemed to be increasing radically (even though we know that there was no redistribution of income and wealth...
...Not easily...
...These judgments are not prophecies...
...Taxes on poisonous substances, the standard remedy of free-market economists, are not enough...
...In 1988 environmentalists became alarmed because Brazil was destroying the Amazonian rain forest as part of a development scheme...
...The world market is structured so as to keep the poor countries in a position inferior to the rich and that is why Ricardo's prediction, based on his now hallowed theory of "comparative advantage," that free trade would produce increasing global well-being has been falsified since it was made in 1815...
...By 1891 and the enormously influential Erfurt Program of the German Social Democracy it was clear that the gigantic factories of the new corporate capitalism could not be run 158 • DISSENT New Socialism as co-ops...
...There will be more children dying in the Third World in order to maintain the old international order of injustice...
...If there are marvelous legislative innovations and the venality and competitiveness of the old order persist, the future will be corrupted before it even begins...
...She was reelected with a minority of the votes primarily because of the disarray of her opposition and she benefited from North Sea oil profits that are soon to end...
...The fact is, the new technology works much better if it is understood by those who use it instead of being seen as a mysterious "black box" that issues orders to obedient, ignorant machine tenders...
...It is not simply a proposal to end the alienation and powerlessness typical of the direct producers in a capitalist society...
...That is, nationalization does not here refer to a centralized, state-run company operated by technocrats responsible to the legislature or the executive...
...That system, and its trade unionism above all, had been structured according to a nationally based, blue-collar, mass-production system...
...At the same time sophisticated business began to realize that the advanced economies were, to a degree, sharing in the misery of the Third World that resulted from the international debt crisis...
...blue-collar workers declined as a percentage of the labor force...
...Tawney and Antonio Gramsci understood that a new and decent society could survive only if there were a new and decent ethic among the 162 • DISSENT New Socialism people...
...For even if markets will function in areas where they do not allocate necessities or make life-and-death decisions—even if an innovative enterprise should be able to obtain rewards for its ingenuity —there are responsibilities to the society as a whole...
...Indeed, in almost every advanced capitalist country there was a "new poverty" at the time of a proclaimed prosperity...
...What was happening in Britain was part of a world-wide phenomenon: everywhere in the industrialised democratic world the old manual working class was in decline, trade union membership was falling, old class loyalties were crumbling...
...Martin Neil Baily and Alok K. Chakrabarti, Innovation and the Productivity Crisis (Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution, 1988), p 1. In Crosland's The Future of Socialism, the German social democrats' Godesberg Program (1959) and countless other documents and manifestos of the fifties and early sixties, there was a euphoric overgeneralization about the enormous accomplishments of the welfare state (which still did more for the rank and file in the West than any other social-economic formation that has ever existed...
...In the private sector, there must be worker involvement at the decision-making level...
...and however deceptive the ideology of a business civilization, it is more believable than that of a socialist one...
...One of the most effective indictments of capitalism was that this system constantly imposed many of the real costs of its operations upon innocent people in order to SPRING • 1989 • 159 New Socialism maximize profits, e.g., that the factory would spew noxious smoke over the surrounding countryside...
...Nor did Reagan and Thatcher, for all the conservative rhetoric, reduce state expenditure, supposedly their supreme aim...
...More broadly, it must be understood that the right of worker self-management is empty, and even perverse, when it functions within an intolerable economic context...
...It then becomes the right democratically to sacrifice the decisionSPRING • 1989 • 161 New Socialism makers to the imperatives of the national or international economy...
...They are simply the present writ large...
...So a good portion of their profits was sent back to northern financial centers where it could help fund energy-saving programs and stimulate the Western economy in general...
...So, then, as far as the socialists are concerned, is God in his heaven and all right with the world...
...In part the crisis is the consequence of a genuine confusion—at times a near bankruptcy—in socialist thought and action...
...Let me take a moderate and achievable example of what this means...
...In fact, after the worst recession since the thirties, there was an old-fashioned demand-side recovery based on huge deficits, military "Keynesianism" funding every Pentagon fantasy, and foreign borrowing...
...Now—after an extraordinary "lag" of forty years that strangely saw the greatest economic advance in history—those laws were finally taking their revenge...
...By 1985 then—Treasury Secretary James Baker grasped the self-defeating character of this policy...
...What, exactly, did that delphic formula, the "socialization" of the means of production, mean...
...and that the lovely promises of a crisis-free, social democratic capitalism had suddenly been betrayed...
...Entire regions were devastated (the industrial Midwest in the United States, the North in Britain) as capital restructured and unemployment and then lowwage employment rose...
...In each of these three economic structures the principle of worker management is critical...
...This rapid escalation, the evidence suggests, was not the cause, but the consequence of the 156 • DISSENT New Sodium crisis...
...Yet, as Dr...
...The Scandinavian socialists have succeeded in this task to an extreme degree and conservatives in those countries often have values well to the left of liberal Democrats in the United States, such as solidarity with the Third World...
...The answer leads all the way back to the nineteenth century, to a deep flaw in a socialist analysis that was also profound...
...If this means simply that the working day or week is cut, that will be an undeniable but limited gain...
...Still, when so many of these countries failed, or turned toward market solutions, or when the Cuba that had excited so many romantic hopes of a genuine third way, neither capitalist nor Stalinist, simply insisted on dictatorship even when to do so was clearly an economic as well as a moral and political disaster, the socialist ideal itself came to seem tarnished...
...The international debt crisis was on...
...This means that we are talking not merely of new forms of control over the old technology but of creating a new kind of technology that will not have these dangerous side-effects, whatever the character of the management...
...The relative poverty of the OPEC powers meant that their ability to invest their huge gains in their own modernization was limited...
...It also provided the theoretical basis for a socialist movement that was to take the audacious step of seeing its revolutionary hopes incarnated in a reformist, gradualist trade union movement...
...This is the familiar vicious circle in which recession both cuts government revenue and increases outlays for unemployment, and it was particularly marked in the deep downturn that followed the OPEC price hike of 1974...
...In the United States it is tragic—and perhaps not at all necessary—that proposals for universal social service are so often the work of militarists and anti-union governmental employers looking for cheap labor...
...Indeed, the thirty-five-hour week is already the proclaimed goal of almost all of the major unions and Socialist parties in Europe, and that drive should be given a considerable impetus by the further unification of the Common Market in 1992...
...Lenin understood some of these problems— even though he briefly proposed running a structure modeled on imperialist monopoly capitalism through the participatory democracy of the original Soviets—but Stalin cut the Gordian knot...
...Why, the Brazilians want to know, should the North, the source of about 80 percent of global pollution, lecture nations of the South on these matters...
...Business understood that developing economies cutting their social spending and using a huge part of their export gains to service past loans were no longer good markets for northern goods...
...I think not...
...What did change in the United States and Britain was the identity of those who benefited from state action...
...There will be more new poor in advanced countries with prosperous minorities, precarious majorities, and a growing class of the marginalized...
...The unions and social spending were indeed seen as the cause of the economic crisis that hit in every advanced society in the mid-seventies...
...Then, however, the "invisible hand" took over under the aegis of the banks...
...In the fifties and sixties a wage hike was seen—so long as it did not exceed the pace of productivity—as a contribution to effective demand and eventually to the well-being of the nation itself...
...So, for instance, it was hardly a great gain when the trade unionists of Eastern Air Lines got a significant number of seats on the board in return for significant contract concessions, but were then asked to endorse further cuts in their own compensation as their first exercise of power...
...The world, they argued, is now locked, willy-nilly, in a global system of interdependence...
...They had said in the thirties that the fiscal, monetary, and social programs of .the New Deal and Swedish socialism violated the eternal laws of economics...
...Socialist moralizers, as Orwell described them, can sometimes come off as cranks...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
