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>From a rough draft of a forthcoming article on socialist economic planning
>being written with Djamil Lakhdar-Hamina and Brendan Sullivan.
--
Visions of Socialism:
One of the most striking phenomena in US politics since the 2008 economic crash
has been a revival of interest in socialism, especially among the Millennial
generation. In fact, you would have to go back some eighty or more years ago to
see a time when there was such a big interest in socialism. Even in the 1960’s,
the last period when we saw the flourishing of major leftist political
movements , there wasn’t so much a mass interest in socialism as much as there
were movements led by people who identified as socialists or communists. Most
public discussion then was over things like civil rights, black power, and
opposition to the Vietnam War. There wasn’t that much talk as to what a
socialist alternative to capitalism would look like, even though many political
activists back then would have described themselves as being anti-capitalist.
It must be said that up to now, things haven’t seemed all that different. As
much as half of the Millennial generation, according to recent opinion polls,
seems willing to identify as socialists. Yet, it is not at all clear as to what
they mean by that term. Do they mean an economic order where the means of
production are owned by workers and their use is the product of democratic
deliberation, as Marx stated “a community of associated producer” (the classic
definition)? Or do they mean a more humane capitalism with a more generous
welfare state - more or less like what exists (and is being meticulously
disassembled) in the Scandinavian countries?
Right now, a major candidate in the race to become the Democratic Party’s
presidential nominee in 2020, Bernie Sanders, calls himself a socialist. But
what does he mean by that? It would seem that for him, socialism is basically
just the liberalism of FDR and Truman, something that he has reiterated time
and time again in his speeches. So is socialism nothing more than a revival of
the liberal reformism of FDR, or God forbid, JFK? For many, that is perhaps all
they mean by the term. A matter of pouring old wine into new bottles, while
sticking on somewhat misleading labels.
Having said that, it is evident that many people are seeking something more
radical than that. In the face of the environmental threats being posed by
climate change, not to speak of the ever increasingly growth of economic
inequality, reaction, racism and sexism, it doesn’t seem that a revival of
FDR’s liberalism is a panacea. In other words, it doesn’t seem to be enough to
just seek a reformed capitalism. That has been tried before, and we have seen
that while in the short and medium run, capitalists can acquiesce when reforms
are legislated, they will, over the long run, seek to gut and overturn them.
This is the confirmed history of social democratic reforms, a history that has
played out in the US and most other industrial countries over the last 50 years.
So, what is to be done? It is clear that at least a sizable minority of the
people who now identify as socialists are in fact seeking a new economic order
to replace capitalism outright. This entails that working people will actually
own the means of production and the market economy that we have now will be
replaced by a planned economy.
Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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