Julio Huato wrote:
Louis is spot on in his implicit assumption that the perfect
alternative to capitalism can only be found in the realm of
ideological fantasy, something that requires at most a modicum of
chemical neural stimulation. It's only if or when we are forced to
locate the real-world, imperfect alternative to capitalism in the
*existing social conditions* -- to then build from such -- that we
turn to unions, cooperatives, and other not-very-sexy instruments of
collective workers' action as they are.
I am just not into utopian socialism.
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/neo_utopian.htm
It is really hard to believe, but adherents to rival utopian visions can
have nasty splits just like "Marxist-Leninists". Evidence of this is
contained in the most recent copy of "Democracy and Nature", a journal
formerly known as "Society and Nature". The International Managing
Editor is Takis Fotopoulos.
In the "Dialog" section of the issue, the editors air their dirty
laundry. Murray Bookchin, a member of the advisory board along with
other luminaries such as Noam Chomsky, Andre Gunder Frank and Cornelius
Castoriadis, is tendering his resignation. Bookchin is the guru of the
social ecology movement, which --crudely put-- is a mixture of anarchism
and environmentalism. He lives in Vermont and posts jeremiads against
capitalism to his followers near and wide.
"Very disturbingly, Takis and I have even drifted apart on the issue
that long held us together, libertarian municipalism. (I now strongly
prefer the word 'libertarian' over 'confederal' municipalism because
'libertarian' has a revolutionary political content, rather than merely
a structural and logistical one.) His current advocacy of a personal
voucher system and an 'artificial market' (whatever happened to a
libertarian-communist moral economy?), and his notion that libertarian
municipalism could somehow creep up on the bourgeoisie and erode the
power of the state are highly disturbing to me. These notions divest
libertarian municipalism of its confrontational stance toward the state
in the form of a revolutionary dual power. I did not propound this
theory of politics to see it mutate into Bernsteinian evolutionary
social democracy."
Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism" is offered as an alternative to
the Marxist vision of a transformation of society led by the
working-class. "Social ecology would embody its ethics in a politics of
confederal municipalism, in which municipalities cojointly gain rights
to self-governance through networks of confederal councils, to which
towns and cities would send their mandated, recallable by delegates to
adjust differences."
Okay, let's see if we can get this right. Capitalism will be replaced by
a more humane system through the incremental replacement of capitalist
chunks of real estate by new egalitarian units. Today we have liberated
Putney, Vermont and Madison, Wisconsin. Next week we have a shot at
taking over Dallas, Texas. When all the towns and cities have been
become liberated zones, we then celebrate our victory by eating dishes
of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
What is that Takis Fotopoulos believes in that so exercised Bookchin?
(Don't let it go beyond PEN-L, but I've heard rumors that Bookchin is in
a permanent snit and almost anything will set him off.) The fight is
over models and nothing else. Bookchin clings to one model, while Takis
to another.
In his "Outline of an Economic Model for an Inclusive Democracy",
contained in the very same issue, Fotopoulos makes a sales presentation
for this breakthrough in model-creation. He starts off by trying to
parry the thrust that he knows I have in store for him:
"Although it is up to the citizens' assemblies of the future to design
the form an inclusive democracy will take, I think it is important to
demonstrate that such a form of society is not only necessary, so that
the present descent to barbarism can be avoided, but feasible as well.
This is particularly important when the self-styled 'left' has abandoned
any vision that is not based on the market economy and liberal
'democracy', which they take for granted, and has dismissed an
alternative visions as 'utopian' (in the negative sense of the word.)"
Hmmm. I think that there is a problem of utopianism, but his definition
of the 'left' would seem to exclude me since I am opposed to the market.
In any case, the notion that "feasible" visions of socialism is the
world is waiting for certainly does appear "utopian" to me. It is the
same vision that Schweickart, Pat Devine, Cockshott-Cottrell and
Hahnel-Albert share. Each is vying with the other to present a model
that works on all planes: economic, political and ethical. The problem,
however, is that class struggle will dictate the contours of a new
socialism, not excellent working models.
Fotopoulos takes swipes at Hahnel-Albert in his article, who are of
course rival utopians. He believes that their schema invites bureaucracy
because it provides for some state agency that invites people to state
what their consumer "needs" are. Agencies, as we know from bitter
experience, can turn into utter monstrosities. One day they will ask you
whether you want pleats in your trousers or not. The next day they will
be sending you to prison for stating the wrong preference.
Fotopoulos' schema revolves around the issuance of vouchers.
"Basic Vouchers (BVs) are used for the satisfaction of basic needs.
These vouchers, which are personal and issued on behalf of the
confederation, entitle each citizen to a given level of satisfaction for
each particular type of need that has been characterized as 'basic', but
do not specify the particular type of satisfier, so that choice can be
secured."
Eureka! Choice can be secured. All across the planet a mighty roar can
be heard. Basic Vouchers are the answer to consumer demand under a
postcapitalist system. Why didn't the Nicaraguans think of this. I can
just see Fotopoulos putting his papers across Carl Oquist's desk and
declaring like Ross Perot that there is "no problem" in satisfying
consumer demand. Just issue BV's. Of course, BV's are not very useful in
a wartime economy and during economic blockade, the exact circumstances
of Nicaragua and all postcapitalist societies since 1917.
In a couple of days or so, I want to try to get a handle on why all
these utopian schemas have proliferated over the past 5 years or so.
Obviously, they are related to the collapse of the USSR but there is a
lot more going on that would be useful for scientific socialists to
understand when considering this new outbreak of utopian socialism.
Louis Proyect
These are some final thoughts on the utopian socialism question. What
Marx and Engels saw as its three of main features of utopian thought were:
1) Ahistoricism: The utopian socialists did not see the class struggle
as the locomotive of history. While they saw socialism as being
preferable to capitalism, they neither understood the historical
contradictions that would undermine it in the long run, nor the
historical agency that was capable of resolving these contradictions:
the working-class.
2) Moralism What counts for the utopian socialists is the moral example
of their program. If there is no historical agency such as the
working-class to fulfill the role of abolishing class society, then it
is up to the moral power of the utopian scheme to persuade humanity for
the need for change.
3) Rationalism The utopian scheme must not only be morally uplifting, it
must also make sense. The best utopian socialist projects would be those
that stood up to relentless logical analysis.
As Engels said in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific", "To all these
socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and
has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own
power. And as absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the
historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it
is discovered."
All of these themes are present to one degree or another in the projects
of market socialists like John Roemer or their new left rivals Albert
and Hahnel.
At first blush, John Roemer seems an unlikely utopian since he couches
his schema in hard-headed microeconomics. In "Market Socialism, a
Blueprint: How Such an Economy Might Work", he says that "it is possible
to use markets to allocate resources in an economy where firms are not
privately owned by investors who trade stock in them with the purpose of
maximizing their gain, and that the government can intervene in such an
economy to influence the level and composition of investment should the
people wish to do so."
This doesn't sound particularly 'visionary', does it? What is
particularly utopian about the schemas of Schweickart, Roemer et al is
not that they have the redemptive and egalitarian power of Saint-Simon
or Robert Owens, but that it is based on an ahistorical notion of how
socialism comes into existence.
Specifically, there is no historical agency. Roemer shares with the 19th
century utopians a tendency to present a vision that is detached from
history. Since history play very little role in Roemer's thought
overall, it is understandable why he would devote himself to utopian
schemas. Furthermore, since AM is based on removing one of the key
aspects of the Marxist understanding of capitalism --the labor theory of
value-- it is difficult to see how any historical agency can carry this
social transformation out. Once the class-struggle is removed, the
socialist project becomes an exercise in game-playing by rational
actors. Since rationalism is a cornerstone of utopian thought, market
socialism would have an appeal because it is eminently rational.
Answering the question of whether his schema will work, Roemer offers
the following assurance:
"Is it possible for a market system to equilibrate an economy in which
profits are distributed as I have described and in which the government
intervenes in the investment behavior of the economy by manipulating
interests if the managers of firms maximize profits, facing market
prices, wages and interest rates? My colleagues Joaquim Silvestre,
Ignacio Ortuno, and I have studied this question, and the answer is yes."
My, isn't this reassuring. There is only one problem. The difficulties
we face in building socialism are not on the theoretical front, but in
the application of theory. The reason for this of course is that such
applications always take place in the circumstances of war, economic
blockade, internal counter-revolution, etc., where even the best laid
plans off mice and men often go astray.
Furthermore, one has no idea how Roemer's theory can ever be put into
practice since it is not really addressed to the working-class, the
historical agent of change in Marxism. Who will change the world, the
subscribers to "Economics and Society"? Roemer's proposals are directed
toward the narrow, insular, academic world of "dueling blueprints". I
suppose if one was to be given a choice of utopian worlds to identify
with, a much more palatable choice would be that of their new left
rivals, Albert-Hahnel.
Turning to their "Looking Forward", we find a completely different set
of politics and economic reasoning, but the utopian methodology is
essentially the same. Their vision of how social transformation takes
place is virtually identical to that of the 19th century utopians. In a
reply to somebody's question about social change and human nature on the
Z Magazine bulletin board, Albert states:
"I look at history and see even one admirable person--someone's aunt,
Che Guevara, doesn't matter--and say that is the hard thing to explain.
That is: that person's social attitudes and behavior runs contrary to
the pressures of society's dominant institutions. If it is part of human
nature to be a thug, and on top of that all the institutions are
structured to promote and reward thuggishness, then any non-thuggishness
becomes a kind of miracle. Hard to explain. Where did it come from, like
a plant growing out of the middle of a cement floor. Yet we see it all
around. To me it means that social traits are what is wired in, in fact,
though these are subject to violation under pressure."
Such obsessive moralizing was characteristic of the New Left of the
1960s. Who can forget the memorable slogan "if you are not part of the
solution, then you are part of the problem." With such a moralistic
approach, the hope for socialism is grounded not in the class struggle,
but on the utopian prospects of good people stepping forward. Guevara is
seen as moral agent rather than as an individual connected with powerful
class forces in motion such as the Cuban rural proletariat backed by the
Soviet socialist state.
Albert's [and Hahnel's] enthusiasm for the saintly Che Guevara is in
direct contrast to his judgement on the demon Leon Trotsky, who becomes
responsible along with Lenin for all of the evil that befell Russia
after 1917. Why? It is because Trotsky advocated "one-man management".
Lenin was also guilty because he argued that "all authority in the
factories be concentrated in the hands of management."
To explain Stalinist dictatorship, they look not to historical factors
such as economic isolation and military pressure, but the top-down
management policies of Lenin and Trotsky. To set things straight, Albert
and Hahnel provide a detailed description of counter-institutions that
avoid these nasty hierarchies. This forms the whole basis of their
particular schema called "participatory planning" described in "Looking
Forward":
"Participatory planning in the new economy is a means by which worker
and consumer councils negotiate and revise their proposals for what they
will produce and consume. All parties relay their proposals to one
another via 'facilitation boards'. In light of each round's new
information, workers and consumers revise their proposals in a way that
finally yields a workable match between consumption requests and
production proposals."
Their idea of a feasible socialism is beyond reproach, just as any
idealized schema will be. The problem is that it is doomed to meet the
same fate as ancestral schemas of the 19th century. It will be besides
the point. Socialism comes about through revolutionary upheavals, not as
the result of action inspired by flawless plans.
There will also be a large element of the irrational in any revolution.
The very real possibility of a reign of terror or even the fear of one
is largely absent in the rationalist scenarios of the new utopians.
Nothing can do more harm to a new socialist economy than the flight of
skilled technicians and professionals. For example, there was very
little that one can have done to prevent such flight in Nicaragua, no
matter the willingness of a Tomas Borge to forgive Somocista torturers.
This had more of an impact on Nicaraguan development plans than anything
else.
The reason for the upsurge in utopian thought is in some ways similar to
that of the early 19th century: The industrial working-class is not a
powerful actor in world politics. Engels observed that in 1802 when
Saint-Simon's Geneva letters appeared, "the capitalist mode of
production, and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, was still very incompletely developed."
Isn't this similar to the problem we face today? Even though the
working-class makes up a larger percentage of the word's population than
ever before, we have not seen a radicalized working-class in the
advanced capitalist countries since the 1930s, an entire historical
epoch. In the absence of a revolutionary working-class, utopian schemas
are bound to surface. Could one imagine a work like "Looking Forward"
being written during the Flint sit-down strikes? In the absence of
genuine struggles, fantasy is a powerful seductive force.
Another cause of utopian thought is the collapse of the Soviet Union and
its allies. Except for North Korea and Cuba, there is not a country in
the world that doesn't seem to be galloping at full speed into the
capitalist sphere. As this anti-capitalist reality becomes part of
history, it is tempting to create an alternative reality where none of
the contradictions of "existing socialism" existed.
This is fundamentally an ahistorical approach and will yield very little
useful new political guidelines about how to achieve socialism in the
future. These answers will not come out of utopian fantasies, but in
further analysis of the historical reasons underlying the collapse of
the USSR. In-depth analysis by serious scholars such as Moshe Lewin
focus on the structural problems, not on statements made by Lenin and
Trotsky made on management wrenched out of context.
The biggest problem, of course, is the socialist project itself. What
sense does it make to think in terms of scientific socialism when the
working-class as we know it is not the same class that created the Paris
Commune. If we had something like the Paris Commune in the last 50 years
or so in one of the advanced capitalist countries, left economists would
be thinking about ways that such an experience could be replicated.
Since we lack such an example, we console ourselves with fantasies of a
good society instead.
My goal in writing this is not to stop people from continuing with their
utopian dreaming. I have been thinking about the issues since 1979 when
an old friend of mine from my Trotskyist days mentioned to me that one
of our leading theorists (a big fish in a little pond) by the name of
Les Evans had resigned and entered graduate school. Apparently he had
become disillusioned with Trotskyism and wanted to study alternatives.
One of these alternatives, according to my friend, was market socialism.
He had come to the conclusion that some element of individual ownership
of property was necessary to forestall dictatorship. My response was to
simply state that this would seem to go against the grain of history, in
which all private ownership was being concentrated into fewer and fewer
hands. I remember thinking to myself at the time, "how utopian".
When I discovered the Internet about 3 years ago, I ran into an
incredible firestorm of utopian thought. There has not been a month that
I have not been on PEN-L or a Spoons list that I have not heard a
defense of Cockshott-Cottrell, Albert-Hahnel, Schweickart, etc. I always
accepted this debate as differences within Marxism.
I no longer do. With all due respect to the good people who are involved
in these projects, I now regard them as being involved with utopian
thinking. Jim Devine is correct. Marx and Engels did respect what they
were doing since utopian publications, with their "hatred for every
principle of existing society", are full of "the most valuable materials
of the enlightenment of the working-class." I would continue to urge
people to read Cockshott-Cottrell's "Toward a New Socialism", my
favorite utopian exercise. What I would no longer do is classify them as
examples of Marxist thought, which has its object the critique of
capitalist society in order to facilitate its destruction.
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