Doug Henwood wrote:
The Nation is doing a series on socialism. My contribution:
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/henwood>.
I was pleased to see Doug render a judgment on Rebecca Solnit's article:
I also want to dissent from another prescription: Rebecca Solnit's
contention that the revolution is already happening, via "gardens and
childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers' markets and countless
ways of doing things differently and better." While many of these things
are very nice, they're well short of a transformative vision. The
package draws heavily on an ancient American fantasy of self-reliance
and back-to-the land escapism. It's no model for running a complex
industrial society. Such a system couldn't make computers or
locomotives, and it probably couldn't feed 6 billion earthlings either.
Maybe Solnit wants to give all that up. If so, she should tell us.
---
For those with a good memory, this was exactly the prescription
recommended in a book by Roger Burbach about which I wrote:
Perhaps no other leftwing figure expressed these moods better than Roger
Burbach, a Berkeley Latin American studies professor who had been
heavily invested in the Sandinista revolution. In 1997, he wrote
"Globalization and its Discontents: the rise of postmodernist
socialisms" with Orlando Núñez and Boris Kagarlitsky (Kargalitsky would
eventually disown the book). Burbach writes:
"The left has to accept the fact that the Marxist project for revolution
launched by the Communist Manifesto is dead. There will certainly be
revolutions (the Irananian Revolution is probably a harbinger of what to
expect in the short term), but they will not be explicitly socialist
ones that follow in the Marxist tradition begun by the First
International." (Globalization, p. 142.)
Socialists would have to lower their expectations. Instead of
proletarian revolution, they should shoot for "radical reforms",
especially those that have modest geographical and economic ambitions.
On the high end of the scale, you have a struggle like Chiapas, which
has tended to function iconically for the post-Marxists as 1917 Russia
functioned for a generation of classical Marxists. At the low end, you
have soup kitchens, housing squats, and even homeless men selling
"street newspapers" in order to raise the funds for their next meal or a
night's stay at a flophouse. Burbach's program comes across as a leftist
version of George Bush's "thousand points of light":
"In both the developed and underdeveloped countries, a wide variety of
critical needs and interests are being neglected at the local level,
including the building, or rebuilding, of roads, schools and social
services. A new spirit of volunteerism and community participation,
backed by a campaign to secure complimentary resources from local and
national governments, can open up entirely new job markets and areas of
work to deal with these basic needs." (ibid, p. 164)
----
I should of course mention that Burbach's more recent engagement with
the Bolivarian revolution has led to a more state-oriented approach.
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