Anniversary Essay: Socialism is Dead; Long Live Socialism
Burbach, Roger
Twentieth century socialism is moribund. In the Americas, socialist-oriented movements were dealt severe blows by the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, the general impasse...
...In the end, the United States and its allies inside and outside of Nicaragua proved to be adept at tarring the Sandinistas with the "totalitarian" brush while manipulating public opinion and civil society...
...real (workers') democracy- which were only smokescreens that concealed a pitiful reality: an undemocratic, authoritarian left, politically cast in the Soviet mold, which raised the banners of political liberties to attack its opponents, but was not prepared to practice them inside its own structures, not to mention if it ever achieved power...
...In fact, Cuba's economic plight was much more severe in the late 1960s than it is today...
...it will have to emerge out of concrete, ongoing economic and political struggles...
...Ruben Zamora, July/August 1995, Vol...
...XXIV, Number 5 to advance the interests of the transnational elites...
...For one, it means that it will never again be effective for socialists to build their movements around a verticalist Marxist-Leninist state or political party...
...17-47...
...A subcontractor for a large corporation, a refuse scavenger, a workerrun cooperative, a micro-entrepreneur in the informal economy, a peasant or a street vendor-none of them abandon their activities because there is little else they can do to survive...
...153-169...
...The Cuban variant of socialism may survive into the foreseeable future, but until the political system opens up, the revolution will remain in a largely defensive position, unable to provide inspiration for a renewal of socialism in the Americas...
...The implications of this epochal shift for the future of socialism and socialist struggles are many...
...1 tary...
...Over 350 enterprises of all sizes and types are now owned and run by the workers, many of which were controlled by the state under the Sandinista government...
...invasion of Grenada in 1983 came only after the revolutionary movement had self-destructed and executed its own leaders...
...The doors to socialism are not permanently closed...
...Rather they lurk on the sidelines, seizing those activities that the transnational world decides to dispose of...
...But it is important to note that even in these instances, the regimes do hold referendums and elections that give them a certain sense of legitimacy, both domestically and internationally...
...13-18...
...Orlando Nuiez develops the concept of the popular economy in: La economia popular: asociativa y autogestionaria, (Managua: CIPRES, 1995...
...For some of them, especially those who have been incorporated into the center-left government led by the Christian Democrats, policies that would nationalize sectors of the economy are even more problematic in the era of globalization because any efforts to restrict or control the flow of international capital by a given government are immediately met by capital flight and economic crisis...
...Internationalism has served capital well...
...January/February 1987, Vol...
...He has been associated with NACLA as volunteer, staff and editorial board member since 1972...
...5. For an extensive discussion of democracy and its relationship to neoliberalism and the struggles of the left, see Steve Volk's anniversary essay "'Democracy' Versus 'Democracy,"' NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...31, No...
...4 The effort to oust Pinochet in Chile was the first manifestation of this new policy approach in the hemisphere...
...30, No...
...of workers and peasants...
...NACLA's recent Report on Latin American billionaires documented the extent of this process.3 These elites now view their interests in an international context and are increasingly opposed to national, protectionist policies-policies once favored by important sectors of the bourgeoisies in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina...
...July/August 1979, Vol...
...As James Petras points out in a recent essay, for example, there is a renewed insurgency among the peasantry of Latin America, as demonstrated by the landless movement in Brazil, the struggles of the coca farmers in Bolivia and the Zapatista movement of Chiapas...
...A socialism with room for these needs...
...0 These economies do not and cannot compete head to head with transnational capital in the globalization process...
...ideological campaign against Communism and socialism...
...On the other hand, in those centralized and verticalist socialist projects such as Cuba, the lack of authentic democratic processes weakened their popular support and led to the implementation of inefficient state-dominated economies...
...These are important self-help approaches, calculated to develop alternative, viable economies at the local and regional level...
...4 They exist here and now, even if socialism is not mentioned and capitalism retains control of the global economy and the formal political I The concept of postmodern socialisms will not become a banner that people fight and die for...
...We're used to reciting and repeating, to quoting correctly...
...It concentrates and integrates capital and trade, while at the same time casting off industries, peoples and even countries that it has no use for...
...Their political and economic demands are focused largely on the needs of Chiapas an its indialgenous peoples...
...The two wealthiest countries in the Western Hemisphere-the United States and Canada-have experienced a growing economic polarization and a decline of the influence of their working classes and trade unions...
...These movements over a period of time will have to frame and characterize their struggles from the ground up, creating local, regional and international ties to other struggles and movements...
...Nor is it a beaten path...
...4. William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996...
...6. See especially one of NACLA's most important groundbreaking reports, Elizabeth Farnsworth, Richard Feinberg and Eric Leenson, "Facing the Blockade," NACLA Latin America and Empire Report, Vol...
...The development of a new economic model is key to the resurrection of the left...
...Voices on the Left" NACLA Report on the Americas, p. 5...
...The reasons for the failure or demise of each of these experiences are varied, although if there is one Vol XXXI, No 3 Nov/DEC 1997 overriding cause it is that U.S...
...Many of the socialist leaders who survived the Pinochet years now argue that the economic policies of Allende's Popular Unity government may never have been viable...
...2. Roger Burbach, "Globalization as an Epochal Shift," paper presented to the International Conference on Critical Geography, Vancouver, Canada, August 10-14, 1997...
...In the Americas, socialist-oriented movements were dealt severe blows by the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, the general impasse of Central American revolutionary movements and the crisis of Cuban Communism with the collapse of the Soviet Union...
...Simultaneously, as capital becomes increasingly internationalized, it incorporates Third World elites into its fold...
...and that the unregulated market advocated by neoliberals is incompatible with authentic democracy...
...Can the most democratic socialist experience in the Americas, Chile of the early 1970s, serve as a model for the future...
...Such a move would also probably have required the arming of workingclass civilians and the overnight creation of popular militias to fight with the loyalist sectors of the miliVol XXXI, No 3 Nov/DEC 1997 17ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ SOCIALISM To locate the science and organization of work in the hands of working people, and to put an end to capital's ceaseless attack on labor in all its myriad forms, it is imperative that the working class seize control from capital of the means and process of production...
...Interestingly, it was not direct U.S...
...Here it was not verticalism or the lack of democracy that debilitated the Popular Unity coalition, but the "invisible blockade" of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger...
...On a larger scale, the struggles of peasants and workers in post-Sandinista Nicaragua are reflective of another kind of popular economy: the selling off of large but weak enterprises to worker and peasant cooperatives...
...Popular economies can survive and grow even in the midst of a globalized world only if people become increasingly conscious of their need to struggle for them-building a "new politics" along with new economic activities...
...A third, fourth, fifth way...
...Of course this approach does not prevent the United States from endorsing pseudo-democracies such as the Fujimori regime, which shut down Peru's Congress in 1992, ruled by emergency decree and then adopted a new constitution that granted President Fujimori virtual dictatorial powers...
...Those economic and political spheres that remained autonomous were thus in a position to undermine or sabotage Sandinista initiatives...
...Clearly these new economies need to advance in tandem with alternative political movements and with the struggles The September/October 1995 cover of NACLA Report on the Americas...
...of its autonomy to international institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF...
...Voices on the Left," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...As Bishop Samuel Ruiz pas remarks, the Zapatista "emerged without faces 1- 1 because L ey repre- sent many unseen faces from elsewhere which are now emerging as new subjects...
...In those socialist experiments that were the most democratic, like Chile from 1970 to 1973, the United States was able to exploit relatively open political and economic processes to destroy them from within...
...4, Jan/Feb, 1997, pp...
...that true democracy extends to the economic arena...
...7. Jorge G. Castenada, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 432...
...But if we aspire to a future, now more than ever we have to overcome our fear of creativity, to recover the utopian dimension of socialism...
...Radical movements for change can only be successful to the extent that they are able to demonstrate that they are more democratic in their struggles and goals than the neoliberal democratic paradigm...
...This bloc brought Violeta Chamorro to power in 1990...
...The party has to have a program that takes care of the society in a general sense, transforming it...
...In particular, they need to continually demonstrate that capitalist democracy is insufficient...
...8 These struggles are more than defensive...
...XXI, No...
...But the Sandinista revolution was caught between the new and the old...
...In the interviews with these activists, all of whom are "engaged in the struggles of their times and places," the editors note an emphasis "on democratic modes of development, mass participation in politics and structural, 'achievable' reforms...
...Certainly this process has deepened since Marx's time, but for over a century, the Manifesto's corollary-the growth of an international struggle for socialism generated by the expansion of capital and its contradictions-has been undermined by the nation-state and its ability to coopt the working class into national and chauvinist conflicts among nations...
...As William Robinson shows in "Promoting Polyarchy," the United States has turned against many of the dictators it once nurtured, and has adopted a policy of supporting, and even imposing, controlled democracies in order to integrate the third world into a global neoliberal economy...
...The new popular or postmodern economies are still incipient in Latin America and other parts of the world, comprised of highly differentiated activities and economic islands that rise out of what capitalism discards...
...Over the years NACLA has played a critical role in reporting and analyzing the four major socialist or neo-socialist experiences in the Americas-Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas in Berkeley California...
...In general, the United States and the other imperial powers now recognize that dictators can be politically unstable and may not provide the best terrain for the advance of free trade and transnational capital...
...The strength of the Zapatistas has not come from the "barrel of a gun"--in fact at times they have had only wooden guns-but from their ability to wage a political-ideological war against Mexico's ruling party and the state...
...7 hile any economic alternative will have to deal with the realities of the global market, we cannot limit ourselves to choosing one variant of capitalism over another...
...5 Despite the limitations of capitalist democracy, the growing awareness among socialists of the importance of transparent elections and basic political freedoms explains why Cuba in recent years has ceased to serve as a model for socialist struggles in the Americas...
...1 resembles the transition from feudalism to capitalism...
...From Perestroika- that desperate but belated recognition- to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world has witnessed one of the most profound changes in history...
...While allowing pluralist elections, the FSLN was a vanguard party with a "national directorate" that exercised tight control not only over the party but also over the affiliated "mass" or social movements...
...1, July/August, 1997, pp...
...Here it is important to recognize that the globalization process of transnational capital is both centripetal and centrifugal...
...Alberto Flores Galindo, JanuarylFebruary 1991, Vol...
...And we know that this means a struggle against capitalism for socialism...
...Any new approach, of course, cannot be simply willed into existence...
...III, No...
...Radical grassroots movements as Judith Hellman noted in a previous anniversary essay, have by no means disappeared in the Americas, but those that enunciate socialist goals are few and far between...
...The landless movement in Brazil is developing alternative economic projects and securing limited international funding, often from non-governmental organizations...
...A century and a half ago, Marx argued in the Communist Manifesto that capital was an inherently universalizing process that continually internationalized itself, breaking down regional and national barriers as it advanced...
...This provided grist for the ongoing 15ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ SOCIALISM U.S...
...Here, I maintain the starting point is that capitalism in recent years has undergone an epochal shift with globalization...
...blockade that has weakened the appeal of Cuba...
...289-312...
...6, May/June, 1997...
...This historic process Meanwhile, the past 15 years have also been dominated by the crisis and death of existing socialism...
...Yet with globalization, the conditions that facilitated the cooptation of national working classes are changing, and we are seeing the emergence of an array of social movements, many of which have internationalist perspectives...
...9. While Petras argues for a revived peasant movement in Latin America, it is clear from his article that he does not believe the NGO's are useful in this process, nor does he place hope in the building of alternative economies among the peasantry as this essay does...
...What was believed to be irreversible- Soviet socialism born of the most powerful revolution of the twentieth century- showed itself to have feet of clay and fell to pieces in less than five years...
...Here the EZLN and the Zapatistas in Chiapas are particularly illustrative of how this process can unfold...
...For socialists, the epochal shift to globalization also means that the historical argument of Lenin and other Marxists that imperialism nurtured a labor aristocracy is losing its validity...
...8. See James Petras, "The Peasantry Strikes Back," New Left Review, No...
...The most extensive of these economies, particularly in Latin America, is the informal sector-the ever more numerous street vendors, flea markets, petty family businesses, and even garbage scavengers who recycle aluminum cans, cardboard and bottles while using what they can of the refuse...
...It was this paradoxical choice between maintaining the Popular Unity's commitment to democratic institutions and procedures and the need to take military steps to destroy the opposition that makes Chile the most tragic socialist experience in the Americas and perhaps in the history of twentieth century socialism...
...rather the term is a conceptual framework for viewing the diverse struggles that are growing throughout the hemisphere and the rest of the world...
...The international struggle of the autoworkers and of all workers must be an international struggle for socialism...
...Imperialism, especially U.S...
...The state is still a very powerful entity, but now it responds to the needs of transnational capital rather than national interests...
...Yet before a new socialism can be postulated, we need to understand the nature of late capitalism and imperialism as we approach the new millennium...
...Capitalism first took hold in feudalism's nooks and crannies, slowly gathering momentum until it became the dominant mode of production...
...The postmodern economies and their participants will continue to grow in importance because global capitalism excludes more and more people, and also because of inherent crises and contradictions within the system itself...
...6 The blockade undermined the economy, destabilized the political system, and laid the ground for the U.S.-backed coup by General Pinochet...
...30, No...
...1 (January, 1973...
...These processes have also had adverse effects on the middle classes of these nations...
...The trade union is an organ for winning immediate conquests while the party should be the organ for changing society...
...More recently, the invasion of Haiti to reinstall Jean-Bertrand Aristide served as a dramatic illustration of this policy shift...
...Thus the Sandinistas, instead of monopolizing political power, brought other parties into the process in a coalition government and began holding open elections in 1984...
...At this point in history, the left, instead of lamenting the lack of "grand narratives" and an explicit economic alternative, can draw inspiration from the fact that there are so many local, unconnected movements occurring throughout the Americas...
...Orlando Nuiez, La economia popular, pp...
...But in the 1960s the revolution enjoyed extensive popular support because Cubans then had a sense of participation in the political and economic life of their country...
...6, May/June, 1997, pp...
...In a sense this newness is a matter of degree...
...His most recent book, coauthored with Orlando Nufez and Boris Kagarlitsky is Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms, (Pluto Press, 1997...
...Cuba, Chile, Grenada and Nicaragua...
...Globalization And Its Discontents, see especially Chapter 9, "The Long Transition To Postmodern Socialisms," pp...
...In the era of globalization, transnational capital is now free to roam the world, tapping the cheapest labor markets, thereby undermining wages and the standards of living in the core countries...
...Years later, after the Second World War, it spread to other continents, Asia and Africa...
...People began to abandon the old dichotomies- economic democracy vs...
...While none of this constitutes socialism, these are all proto-socialist activities because they represent efforts by people to take control of their lives at the most fundamental, grassroots level...
...XIII, No.3 Notes 1. Judith Adler Hellman, "Social Movements: Revolution, Reform and Reaction," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...1 Can socialism be reborn...
...30, No...
...As for the Zapatistas of Mexico, a central plank of their struggle is that the indigenous communities of Chiapas are entitled to the resources necessary to carry out their own autonomous economic development...
...Moreover, the dominant political parties of these two revolutions-the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and the New Jewel Party-were powerfully imbued with socialist concepts and ideals...
...It is not the economic difficulties Cuba is experiencing nor the U.S...
...My general thesis is that twentieth century socialism has been defeated for two contradictory reasons...
...The Sandinista revolutionary leadership understood to a certain extent that the old socialist paradigm of single-party states was no longer viable and that democratic elections were necessary...
...political democracy, formal (bourgeois) democracy vs...
...XIII, No...
...In recent years in Cuba there has been a devolution of many state enterprises to worker and peasant run cooperatives, particularly in the agricultural sphere...
...They forged a counterrevolutionary bloc comprised of a number of political parties, civic and business organizations, the Catholic hierarchy and even trade unions and sectors of the peasantry...
...On the economic front, the Sandinistas advocated a "mixed economy," wherein some enterprises were controlled by the state while others remained in the hands of private interests...
...The May/June 1980 cover of NACLA Report on the Americas...
...These measures were abhorrent to Allende and to most of the parties of the Popular Unity coalition, given their deep commitment to maintaining Chile's democratic institutions...
...223, May/June, 1997, pp...
...9 In fact, these local and regional initiatives can be viewed as part of a deeper long-term process of creating alternatives to modern capitalism...
...This argument of leftists against any effort to revive such state socialist policies is perhaps best encapsulated in Jorge Castaneda's book, Utopia Unarmed, which argues that the left has to accept "the logic of the market" and limit itself to choosing what type of capitalist system it buys into-neoliberalism or the "social market" of Western Europe or Japan...
...The genius of these struggles is that every effort to raise consciousness or to develop self-help projects at the local level is innately part of the long-term process of building new socialisn of Chia rebels ns...
...imperialism, is now extremely adept at using the language and even the basic forms of democracy 16NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ SOCIALISM Socialism is not just one path...
...we just have to find news ways to open them...
...The latter two were not self-proclaimed socialist experiments, but the processes were antiimperialist and the governments enacted policies designed to alleviate or eliminate economic and social inequalities...
...3. See "Latin America in the Age of the Billionaires," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...All these areas of postmodern economic activity are growing in importance in Latin America and the Caribbean, not because they can compete in any significant way with transnational capital, but because they are the only option available to ever-increasing numbers of people...
...6-12...
...And if so, what might it look like...
...The painful evolution of the Latin American: left from Allende to the national-security regimes forced it to begin to value political democracy...
...2 Briefly stated, those who view globalization as a new stage of capitalism argue that the economies of the world are now integrated under the aegis of transnational capital and that the nation-state is losing much The September 1971 cover of the NACLA Newsletter...
...4 For the Soviets, the 1970 election of Salvador Allende as president of Chile was a vindication of their contention that a peaceful road to socialism was possible, albeit a socialism that had little in common with the Soviet variety...
...When the Chamorro government began to sell them off as part of the privatization process demanded by the IMF and World Bank, the workers on many of these enterprises simply occupied them, and/or began to negotiate for taking control of them...
...The world became unipolar...
...Few steps, however, have been taken to democratize the country as a whole, as Fidel Castro and the party insist on retaining total political power...
...l2 In other articles, I have argued that this constitutes a new, postmodern politics, a politics that is leading to the rise of postmodern socialisms.' 3 It is a socialism of place, a socialism with a local agenda, a socialism with a hundred faces and experiences, a socialism without a name or a grand narrative at present...
...Socialism came to power unexpectedly in 1917, a mere 70 years ago, in one of the most unlikely places imaginable...
...The 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was an abysmal failure and led to the consolidation of Cuban socialism, while the U.S...
...XXIX, No...
...Capitalism, on the other hand has been expanding for several centuries...
...In the introduction to the recent NACLA Report, "Voices on the Left," which contained interviews with activists from around the hemisphere, the NACLA editors note the remarkable reality that "that in this age of doubt and cynicism, the activists interviewed maintain a radical commitment and enthusiasm...
...However, as Allende realized, a decision to back Prats with these measures would have provoked a civil war and required the suspension of the Chilean parliament and constitution...
...Only they have the capacity to create a grand new narrative capable of challenging capitalist globalization and replacing the state socialism of the twentieth century with a new emancipatory project...
...It was during the 1970s that the Cuban Communist party and the state consolidated control over virtually all facets of the economy and exercised centralized control of the trade unions, the educational system and "mass organizations...
...now it's labor's turn...
...Both the United States and Canada have become "third worldized" due to the pauperization of certain sectors and the expansion of immigration from the Third World-a phenomenon also related to the process of globalization...
...he shift to globalization has also altered the political paradigm that the core countries are advocating for the Third World...
...Rather, the Zapatistas have centered on civil society as the agent of change, calling for the mobilizationU o a wideU array of civic associations and organizations to demand authentic economic and political democracy...
...This is probably the first national liberation movement that did not proclaim as its objective a march on the capital city and the seizure of state power...
...military intervention that defeated them...
...imperialism proved to be very flexible and adaptive, developing a variety of interventionist strategies in the economic, social and political spheres...
...Today there is a national association of worker-run enterprises that facilitates their development and access to technical assistance and capital while lobbying with the government and the banks for their growth and expansion into new areas of the economy...
...In the parts of the world that capitalism discards, a new mode of production is taking hold, which is comprised of what can be called "popular economies," or what we have elsewhere referred to as "postmodern economies...
...A socialism built on new foundations, one that recognizes the dreams, hopes and desires of the people...
...For an extended discussion of postmodern economies and postmodern socialisms, see Roger Burbach, Orlando Nuhez, and Boris Kagarlitsky, Globalization And Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms (London: Pluto Press, 1997...
...Jaco Bittar, Brazilian oil workers leade, May/June 1979, Vol...
...The government of Salvador Allende made one fatal mistakeit's failure in mid-1973 to retain General Prats as head of the military and to purge the officers who were conspiring against him...
Vol. 31 • November 1997 • No. 3
