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Many people, especially those with eyes open to the ravages of capitalism, know what they don't want. Fewer know what they do want. That is understandable, given that the task of building mass movements on so many fronts is daunting. But while what is meant by the creation of a better world can't be precisely the same for everybody, movements nonetheless have to have some basic concepts of what a better world might look like.
Providing a blueprint is impossible. Having visions is a necessity. Concrete concepts, even if only outlines, need to be part of our toolboxes if we are to overcome "There is no alternative." There are many outlines that have been sketched, naturally of varying viability. One that has been around for three decades has been the concept of "participatory economics," often associated with one of its leading proponents, Michael Albert.
In his latest book, No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World, Mr. Albert has organized his decades of work on this project and presented what he terms a "scaffold" as opposed to a blueprint. At 200 pages, this scaffold is perhaps sufficiently detailed to be something beyond that, but however one wishes to classify his vision of participatory economics, No Bosses provides a stimulating contribution to the literature of a better world.
As always, judgment on a book's merit should be on how well it encourages serious thinking and provides useful material and commentary, not on whether we fully agree with the content. On the former, it is hard to imagine anyone serious about wanting a better world not giving it high marks. The latter, of course, is a much more complicated proposition. So let's see how viable this vision might be.
Crucially, the author does not declare his presentation a finished project. His intent is to show what is necessary, not provide a blueprint, and repeatedly says the project will need improvement. "We have no other choice," he writes. "Alone on foot in the desert, we must walk until we reach water. To curse the sun's heat and bemoan the sand's seeming endlessness while standing still guarantees death." [page 16]
Seven guiding principles in a world without capitalists
The guiding values put forth are viable self-management, equity, solidarity, diversity, sustainability, internationalism and participation for all who can participate. There would be no private ownership of productive assets, and thus no capitalists or capitalism. The author emphatically rejects both capitalist markets and central planning. Both, in his view, inevitably lead to small majorities bossing around and dictating to a working majority. Capitalism creates a "coordinator class" that monopolizes empowering tasks. Even if a workplace is democratic, if a corporate division of labor is retained, coordinators dominate, subverting self-management goals. That happened in Argentina's recovered enterprises, Mr. Albert argues, with the "old crap," in the words of a disappointed worker, returning in many recovered, self-managed enterprises after the old capitalist bosses were kicked out.
"They were all working class before, but some began to become coordinator class by doing empowering jobs. Those doing empowering jobs began to dominate council meetings. They had the needed information. They had the confidence to develop agendas. Attendance of others began to fall because others didn't want to attend meetings which ran according to agendas set by the coordinators and dominated by coordinator speeches and proposals. … The coordinators had come to feel they were smarter, more responsible, and more essential. They deserved more. They paid themselves more. And the wages paid the others, the workers, as decided by the coordinator class, started to deteriorate. The upshot was that the old crap didn't return due to an inexorable outcome of human nature or of the intrinsic requirements of complicated work. The old crap returned due to a social choice that wasn't even consciously made. The workers had routinely, reflexively, maintained the corporate division of labor. And the corporate division of labor had in turn routinely, reflexively, subverted sought results." [pages 49-50]
If there was a management that was making basic decisions, including those of wages, rather than all members, then such an enterprise can't really be said to be self-managed. But even when there is a real self-management in place, the dangers of a division of labor can easily assert themselves. In communist-era Yugoslavia, enterprises were not in private hands and instead run by self-management — an assembly of all workers had to approve all decisions, including setting wages. (I wrote a chapter-length discussion of Yugoslav self-management for my forthcoming book What Do We Need Bosses For? [Autonomedia].) In this system, the workers elected a workers' council — in effect a management board that made strategic decisions — and an enterprise was headed by a director (chief executive officer) not necessarily picked by the workers. Councilors were limited to two one-year terms and were recallable, enabling large numbers of people to sit on these councils and theoretically making them accountable. But there was a central plan that constrained what enterprises could do, and a pattern began where technicians and managers would present plans to the councils, which would simply rubber-stamp them. Holding the right to veto a plan they didn't like, as opposed to drawing up plans themselves, was enough for many councils. That the councils were instituted in a top-down fashion, rather than being the organic product of grassroots activity, did not help.
There were many headwinds faced by Yugoslav self-management, including some unique to the country and its decentralized political structures owing to ethnic rivalries, and, ultimately, the forces of capitalism and capitalist competition, which buffeted Yugoslavia ever stronger, would eventually break down the system and tear apart the country itself, although it produced perhaps the world's fastest growing economy for its first 20 years. The consequences of market forces — of being integrated into the world capitalist system — steadily mounted, and ultimately became unsustainable. Those consequences included debt to foreign banks and institutions, punishing austerity imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, strong sensitivity to the vicissitudes of capitalist cycles, and the discovery that competing in the world market is difficult, all the more so for a medium-sized developing country.
One lesson from here is that no better world can be reliant on market mechanisms — capitalist markets will assert themselves, and as I have often noted, capitalist markets are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the world's most powerful industrialists and financiers. That a traditional division of labor was retained in the self-management system is another factor that can't be overlooked.
Workers' and consumers' councils as the core
Back to No Bosses. The core institutions of participatory economics are workers' councils and consumers' councils. Workers' councils in this conception are meetings of all enterprise workers that make all decisions, whether by simple majority or a specified super-majority. (Perhaps it would be better to call these "workers' assemblies" to match generally used terminology.) These bodies of the whole make all decisions and there are no higher bodies. There are no managers or bosses, not even elected ones. Everybody participates in all decisions. Consumers' councils are collective decision-making bodies that would democratically make decisions on public goods and services, such as "neighborhood pools, county parks, state utilities or national security," as well as collate individual needs. Although expertise would be listened to, decisions wouldn't be devolved to experts; rather these councils would seek to raise levels so that all could participate.
Another key conception is a system of "balanced job complexes" to break down the division of labor. Here No Bosses offers one of the most serious proposals I've ever encountered to break down the division of labor, an often underappreciated contributor to inequality. Simply put, if there is not a serious effort to break down the division, inequality will remain. The book conceptualizes balanced job complexes not as short-term stints in alternative circumstances but rather having a set of tasks for all jobs that would enable comparable empowerment in all jobs. Balancing would occur not only within a given workplace, but across all workplaces, to give everybody an equal chance of participating in decision-making and provide a "steady social exchange."
The book cautions that "balancing empowerment across jobs is not the same as balancing the amount of type of intellect required for that job." There are numerous empowering jobs in any workplace, including how to best satisfy customers, how to plan for the future or determining how best to do other jobs. Along with equalizing job circumstances would be equalizing pay. Income would be based on duration, intensity and onerousness of socially useful work — a point repeatedly stressed. Differentials from an average, however, should be small and limited given that jobs would be balanced. The only way for pay to rise would be for the average to rise — thus, the book argues, mutual aid is built into the proposed system.
How would the average be calculated? The book doesn't offer an answer to that important question. At one point, a complicated 20-point system is put forth, whereby every task would be assigned a number from 1 to 20 based on difficulty, with jobs being cobbled together based on averaging out the numbers and special bodies assigned with calculating these numbers. But it is then admitted that something so precise is unlikely to be put into actual practice and this detail seems to be offered more as a thought experiment. Indeed, such complications are unnecessary. There could simply be a standard wage and everybody paid it, and if an enterprise elects to allow differentiations, these should be minor (no more than, say, 20 percent) and within parameters established by law or consensus. However an average wage would be determined, having everybody make it or very close to it would uphold the ideals of solidarity and equality, as expressed thusly:
"[I]n a good economy, there should be no way to improve one's consumption or one's work life at the expense of others. There should be no opposed classes, nor even opposed individuals, at least in any damaging, persistent, structural sense. This can't be achieved by market allocation where everybody buys cheap and sells dear and nice guys finish last. This also cannot be achieved by central planning where we do what others decide we must do. Equitable remuneration and solidarity instead point toward needing a new approach to allocation. It will turn out to be that we cooperatively negotiate outcomes to enjoy gains and endure losses together, even as we also seek work and consumption that is best suited to our personal fulfillment." [pages 94-95]
If something can't allocate products and services, it doesn't work
And how would products and services be allocated? The seventh chapter of No Bosses, by far the longest chapter in the book, step by step builds a picture of how participatory economics would work. This is where the vision has to cohere into a workable model. Again, not a model in the sense of "this is how it will be or should be" but rather in the sense of useful ideas that can be seriously debated as we sketch out the basics of a better world. A series of "takes" provide successively more detail. "A new means of allocation that will sustain classlessness" and "foster solidarity/empathy" is the goal.
A new means of allocation would be necessary as the model rejects capitalist markets and central planning. Workers' and consumers' councils and federations (councils at the enterprise or neighborhood level would feed up into bodies successively representing larger territories up to the national level) would meet and preliminarily determine productive capacity and consumer needs; a national facilitation board tallies information and supplies information to the negotiators representing the councils and federations. Talks would continue until equilibrium is reached. Presumably that would necessitate multiple rounds. Plans would be done yearly.
The facilitation board would tally mismatches between worker and consumer proposals. Neighborhood consumer councils would make requests for collective goods (such as public pools, an image that repeatedly crops up; Mr. Albert perhaps likes to swim). As part of the negotiation, the facilitation board would adjust prices to reflect supply/demand mismatches to help negotiators reach agreement; the two sides would presumably adjust their proposals based in part on such price changes. There would be strict budgets — to consume more than your budget allows, the consumer council would have to approve, and if a workplace underutilizes its assets, a higher-level workers' council would intervene and lower the workplace's payroll. The idea is for enterprises to use their productive capacities fully and efficiently while meeting demand.
Numeric prices are presumed to "generate sufficiently accurate estimates" of costs and benefits of inputs and outputs, as well as account for environmental or other social costs. No Bosses argues that this kind of pricing would be superior to prices obtained in markets or central planning because they would be derived from cooperative social proposals that can be checked, and because aggregate social needs would be built into the system.
How would individuals meet their individual and family needs? Everybody would make a request for the coming plan year to their neighborhood council, with aggregate requests going up to higher consumer councils. Once all consumer requests and productive plans are aggregated, negotiations begin, with the previous plan's totals as a reference point and using the information supplied by the facilitation board, including preliminary estimates of the coming plan year's pricing changes. Rounds of talks would continue until a plan is reached; the plan would presumably be "loose" rather than "taut" so that adjustments can be made within the plan year.
A different sort of calculation problem
But here we come to a significant weakness of participatory economics. The plan would require everybody to know exactly what they will need for the coming year — shirts, automobiles, appliances, books, meals at restaurants, even theater tickets. This is impossible! Nobody knows, or can know, all they will consume for the next year, including how many movies they see in theaters. Most of the books I buy are on impulse when I see something interesting in a bookstore; how can I know what I will find ahead of time? Participatory economics presumes that if there are changes, these would cancel each other out and all would be fine in the end. But, note that we saw earlier that people had to stay within a strict budget. Despite the author's insistence that this system would be freer than capitalist markets or central planning, neither capitalist nor Soviet-style governments constrained consumption into such a straitjacket. Sorry, you said you'd go to three theatrical performances; the neighborhood council doesn't have excess theater tickets. Better luck next year.
These levels of negotiations would be enormously, and needlessly, complicated. Negotiations would have to begin months before the current plan year ended, so full information would not be available. Talks would have to conclude at the end of the year so it could go into effect at the start of the new plan year; this would be no simple task. There is no reason that a yearly plan couldn't be worked out and be in place for a new plan year, but with such a complicated negotiation requiring vast sums of information, this simply isn't realistic. The weakness of Soviet-style central planning shouldn't be glossed over; one problem was that no group of officials, no matter how dedicated or sincere, could possibly possess all the knowledge necessary to make proper plans.
Planning is necessary to replace markets, but it should be acknowledged that Gosplan (the Soviet planning agency) proved to not be a substitute for markets, although of course central control and the decades-long emphasis (unchecked because of a lack of democratic control) on producer goods with consumer goods getting perpetually short-changed can't be avoided as significant factors. Democratic, bottom-up planning would inevitably be a central component of any egalitarian future economy designed to meet social and individual needs and enable everybody to reach their potential. (Activists organizing workers' councils in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring envisioned a democratic planning without Soviet-style hard numeric totals and held a national conference to begin codifying a new system based on workers' control before the effort was shut down.)
I would argue that planning based on negotiations, and that it be bottom-up and not top-down, is a necessity. On that basic concept, I am in agreement with No Bosses. But it would make more sense, and be more efficient, for producers to get together and make plans, plans that would have input from consumer representatives. Put it this way: If 1.2 million shoes were produced and there was a small shortage, representatives from shoe factories (with possible participation and if not that then meaningful input from consumer representatives) could make an informed judgment and declare they need to produce 1.3 million shoes to meet projected demand. It is not as if sales figures are unavailable, and reports of shortages certainly could be collected easily. Replicating this across all industries would enable the assembly of a plan for the coming year. It would be important to know how many shoes would be needed overall; it is not necessary and not possible for hundreds of millions of people to each know precisely how many shoes or theater tickets they will need.
Moreover, one important factor is missing. How do we ensure that there is no discrimination, and that environmental, health and safety standards are upheld? Presumably, advocates of participatory economics would argue that the system would generate such high levels of egalitarianism and solidarity, and provide full employment so that nobody is stuck in a bad job, that such standards would automatically be upheld universally. Perhaps. But might it make sense to have boards that enforce standards, with real penalties for non-compliance. Participatory economics would reward cooperation rather than greed and anti-social behavior as capitalism does, but it might not hurt to have a bit of insurance.
Public goods and public detriments
Finally, the long seventh chapter circles back to collective goods. How would parks, infrastructure, recreation facilities, etc. be funded? A few ideas are kicked around. One example is if a public pool were requested by a neighborhood consumer council. A higher body would have to okay it, with the cost spread among all the areas that might benefit. If a project had a negative impact, such as causing pollution, then the affected areas would have a say in the project and if approved those affected would be compensated. This is an area of participatory economics that hasn't been worked out, and in fairness it must be admitted that devising formulae to determine the cost of pollution or other harms would be extraordinarily difficult.
In reading this part of No Bosses, my own admittedly loose thoughts were that the average or aggregate health care costs of everyone who lives or works a specified distance, say 30 miles, downwind from a coal plant, plus the cost of sick days, be calculated against a regional or national average, and charge the plant that differential. But there is an immediate objection: How could multiple pollution sources be disentangled and quantified? So perhaps my loose idea would not be workable. No Bosses offers no plan due to the complexity and difficulty of such calculations. But it does firmly insist, properly, that environmental and health costs must be accounted for, including in pricing. That is something that would have to be worked out much closer to the arrival of a new economic system.
We can't ask for perfection, and participatory economics is supposed to be a scaffold, not a blueprint. It would be useless to reproach it for not having all possibilities thought out, a task plainly impossible nor even desirable. Maintaining his optimism and enthusiasm, Mr. Albert concludes No Bosses with a series of answers to commonly asked questions. He rejects anarchism, social democracy and Marxism (although a cartoon version of Marxism) while offering participatory economics as "an approach … consistent with the human potential I can imagine." I think we should employ some caution before simply dismissing all that has come before, however flawed — a tabula rasa is impossible. Nonetheless, what is proposed here certainly is imaginative. "Having vision matters for where we wind up," he concludes. "Having vision matters for winning a new economy for a better world."
However much we might quibble with this or that detail, having vision does matter. How could we believe a better world is possible, much less struggle for one, without vision? To restate what was written at the beginning of this review, the judgment to be made isn't whether we agree with all details, it is whether it has made a needed contribution. No Bosses is a marvelous contribution to the growing and needed literature on the contours of a better world, of what we believe it should do. That participatory economics, or any other currently proposed system, is unlikely to actually come into being isn't the point; what is is that we think concretely about the future and are prepared to discuss, dream and formulate serious ideas. And put them into action.
16 Comments Posted in Book review, Envisioning a better world Tagged books, economic democracy, economics
There is perhaps no bigger controversy among partisans of the Left than the nature of China and its economy. Is it socialist? Capitalist? State capitalist? A hybrid? That so much debate swirls around this issue is its own proof that the question doesn't have a definitive answer, at least not yet.
What can be agreed upon is that China has experienced decades of extraordinary economic growth. But the nature of that growth, and the base upon which it has been created, are also subject to intense debate, arguments that necessarily rest on how a debater classifies the Chinese economy. An additional debate is whether China's growth is replicable or is the product of particular conditions that can't be duplicated elsewhere. And what should be at the forefront of any debate is how China's working people, in the cities and in the countryside, fare under a tightly controlled system that promises to bring about a "moderately prosperous society."
Setting out to examine China from that last perspective is a new book, The Communist Road to Capitalism: How Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China's (R)evolution since 1949. As you might guess from the pungent title, Communist Road, authored by activist Ralf Ruckus, is not only critical of the Chinese Communist Party, but comes squarely down on the proposition that China has become a capitalist society. Despite China's increasing integration into the world capitalist system, the increasing emphasis placed on markets and widening inequalities, the proposition that China has moved to capitalism is quite controversial for many people on the Left.
Mr. Ruckus begins his argument by suggesting that a more gradated approach to Chinese history since the 1949 revolution better captures the stages of China's development. He presents four different ideas commonly put forth that attempt to define the nature of China's economy. These four concepts are capitalist from 1949 to now; socialist from 1949 to now; socialist and then capitalist; and a four-stage approach of transition to socialism, socialism, transition to capitalism and capitalism. There is a fifth conception not mentioned by Mr. Ruckus — that China is not classifiable as capitalist or socialist, a perspective put forth by the Marxist economist Samir Amin. Dr. Amin, in his The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism, argued that asking if China is socialist or capitalist "is badly posed" because it is "too general and abstract." Dr. Amin wrote that although "the Chinese project is not capitalist does not mean that it is socialist, only that it makes it possible to advance on the long road to socialism" but added that China could also "end up with a return, pure and simple, to capitalism."
Thus there is more than one nuanced perspective. The last of Mr. Ruckus' four offered ideas (the four-stage approach) and Dr. Amin's hybrid approach appear the most viable among the five theories in our struggle to understand the contours of Chinese development. It is the four-stage approach that provides the spine for Communist Road. Whether or not we are in agreement that China has become capitalist (on its own terms) or is moving toward capitalism, that China is in danger of a long-term, or even permanent, turn to full-on capitalism shouldn't be a source of heated dispute. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its Central European satellites, and their return to capitalism on disadvantageous terms, provides proof, even for those who believe China remains a socialist country, that capitalism could be its future. Nor should it be expected that deepening entanglement with the world capitalist system doesn't present its own dangers.
Social confrontation across four periods
Early on, in the opening pages, Mr. Ruckus states that his "main focus lies on social confrontation and the ruptures and continuities they produced in the PRC since 1949," and he does not waver from that focus in discussing his four periods (transition to socialism, socialism, transition to capitalism and capitalism) of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. The coming tale of urban and rural unrest is set early when the author writes, "[T]he actually existing socialism constructed [in the first two periods] was very different from both the preceding and the following economic, political, and social systems. Furthermore, actually existing socialism was largely distinct from the socialism desired by proletarians, peasants, and women* who had been involved in revolutionary organizing since the 1920s." [page 7]
Continuing to set out his thesis in the opening pages, Mr. Ruckus argues that "the overall character of the system qualified as capitalist from the mid- to late-1990s onward, because the main driving force of the economy was capital accumulation and the generation of profit, and because the CCP leadership and other sections of the 'elite' formed a reconfigured capitalist ruling class that appropriated a large part of the wealth produced through the exploitation of workers and peasants." These reforms were successful because "they could build on the foundations socialism had created and, second, because so-called globalization, with new industrial production clusters and supply chains … offered a historical opportunity for attracting foreign capital and for developing the PRC economy the CCP regime made use of." [page 9]
The reference to CCP cadres as a "ruling class," and a capitalist ruling class no less, is bound to set off significant controversy. That is perhaps a technical side issue we can sidestep here. A larger issue for the reader of Communist Road is whether the author makes his overall case effectively. The four core chapters of the book cover the four defined periods, starting with the transition to socialism. In these first years after the 1949 revolution, substantial improvements were achieved in social conditions, including life expectancy, child mortality, health care, income equality and literacy.
Shanghai (photo by dawvon)
At first, the CCP followed the model of the Soviet Union with an accumulation and industrialization strategy with similarities to "authoritarian capitalist late comers" using Taylorist and Fordist production techniques; the form of technology and work organization was seen as neutral. As with the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, the capital and labor power for industrialization could only come from internal sources. In the countryside, the peasant economy was left intact until the mid-1950s, with land reforms benefiting poor and middle peasants. There were benefits for women, too — a 1950 marriage law granted them equal rights with men, although full equality did not come as women workers tended to be relegated to "softer" work with lower pay and fewer work points.
With the onset of nationalizations in the mid-1950s, a brief political opening up, the "Hundred Flowers Campaign," widened the spaces for criticism, but the window was soon shut when criticism was deeper than the CCP had anticipated. Nonetheless, the party retained significant sources of support as it launched the Great Leap Forward, a collectivization and industrial drive. The Leap failed, leading to acute shortages of food as a decline in the size of the rural workforce as urban industries rapidly expanded, mismanagement, poor weather and false reports filed by local authorities combined to create a disaster. Millions would die.
Conflicting currents in the Chinese Communist Party
Communist Road places the blame squarely on Mao Zedong. But perhaps the situation was not so clear-cut. Minqi Li, for example, in his book The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, flatly states "it was Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi who were responsible for the Great Leap Forward," and quotes Liu as praising officials who reported implausible, wildly inflated crop yields as "having overthrown science." At the same time, Mao cautioned against the "exaggeration wind" but party leaders, following the leads of Deng and Liu, who were in charge of party propaganda, continued to agitate for ideas to be "liberated." (As an aside, Dr. Li's research found that the peak of the death rate during the Great Leap Forward was lower than the normal death rate during the 1930s; by the 1970s, the death rate was about one-fourth what it had been in the 1930s.)
Dr. Li concludes his analysis of the Great Leap Forward by stating "a privileged bureaucratic group" had taken control of the party; now no longer a party committed to revolutionary ideals and willing to self-sacrifice but rather "one that included many careerists who were primarily concerned with personal power and enrichment."
That is not different from Mr. Ruckus' overall conclusion, although he asserts that Mao "was held responsible" for the Great Leap Forward and "pragmatic leaders" like Deng and Liu "instituted reforms that were supposed to deal with the fallout of the GLF." [page 56] During the next period of upheaval, the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, is, consistent with the book's perspective, examined from the standpoint of workers and peasants by Mr. Ruckus. Separate from the struggles within the party hierarchy, he writes that the Cultural Revolution was a series of mass outbreaks for better working conditions and permanent jobs as part of a struggle against the "red bourgeoisie" (a term used by some Cultural Revolution participants) and the CCP that was "exploiting workers."
Forbidden City, Beijing (photo by Adamantios)
Unrest continued across the 1970s, with workers demanding more egalitarian wages and bonuses, a say in decision-making and work conditions, and fewer privileges for party cadres; the experiences gained during the Cultural Revolution were put to use by grassroots organizers. This was also a period where investments in education and health care paid off — literacy, life expectancy and child mortality all continued to improve. Unrest was met with a mix of responses, including repression, concessions, co-optation and reforms.
China, as can now be seen in hindsight, was on the brink of dramatic changes as Mao and much of the revolutionary generation were approaching their deaths. Separate from that, China had opened relations with the United States in an effort to ease its isolation and gain access to technology; the split with the Soviet Union also played a role in this development. The Deng faction would win the power struggle following Mao's death, and then use the democracy movements to defeat their party opponents before suppressing the movements, Mr. Ruckus writes. The commune system was dismantled, farmland was leased, collective structures disappeared and local governments began to rely on taxes, fees and enclosures. Wages were increased, but the "iron rice bowl" of benefits was attacked and associated with the ousted Mao-aligned Gang of Four. The right to strike was abolished, more workers became temporary hires and rules restricting migration were eased to encourage an exodus into the new special economic zones where foreign capital could set up.
Here, Mr. Ruckus is on firm ground in characterizing the period from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s as a transition to capitalism. He writes that hopes that the Deng reforms would lead to improvements were disappointed. Changing labor relations and less job security led to continuing worker unrest and student mobilizations. The death of a prominent party reformer, Hu Yaobang, sparked mass demonstrations and the Tiananmen Square occupation of 1989, by any standard a crucial turning point.
Tiananmen Square as a turning point in Chinese history
Here, perhaps more than at any other point, is where Communist Road must make its case. The Tiananmen Square occupation "ended in failure," Mr. Ruckus writes, because "CCP leaders were determined to keep their grip on power" and because of the movement's weaknesses, "above all, the division between students and workers. Student leaders did not want to involve the working class." That was, in part, because of a fear that "working class involvement would necessarily lead to a harsh response from CCP leaders." [page 109]
One of the leaders of Tiananmen, Wang Chaohua, who wrote a series of essays on the event after escaping China, said the more important mistake was to not develop a political agenda and thus "failed to propose a political agenda that could have reflected the scale of popular engagement — and thus missed the opportunity to transform the protest into a constructive political movement," in the words of J.X. Zhang, who reviewed in New Left Review Dr. Wang's Chinese-language collection of Tiananmen essays. Dr. Wang laments a "lack of independent political consciousness among Chinese workers" who "as a whole still partly identified their collective interests with those of the ruling party, which claimed to be 'the vanguard of the working class.' "
Activist workers who did participate nonetheless would bear a heavy share of the crackdown that followed the military attack that put an end to the occupation. It is possible that thousands were killed in the military crushing of the occupation and a certainty that thousands more landed in prison. What was to come next?
"At this point," Mr. Ruckus writes, "the PRC was just a final step away from its transition from socialism to capitalism. This step might not have happened if not for the global transformation of the Cold War confrontation between the capitalist West and the socialist East and the dialectic of economic crisis, investment relocation, and industrial development that had shifted the global manufacturing center to East Asia over the course of the 1980s and 1990s." [page 110]
Tiananmen Square (photo by そらみみ (Soramimi))
Similarly, Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, argued that as the Tiananmen Square protests were getting underway, the Chinese government "was pushing hard to deregulate wages and prices and expand the reach of the market." She even reported that Milton Friedman, the notorious godfather of Chicago School economics, was invited to China in 1980 and again in 1988 to provide advice! Ms. Klein quotes another Tiananmen leader, Wang Hui, who said popular discontent against Deng's economic changes that included lower wages, rising prices and "a crisis of layoffs and unemployment … were the catalyst for the 1989 social mobilization." The violent end to the occupation, according to Professor Wang, "served to check the social upheaval brought about by this process, and the new pricing system finally took shape."
What were the results once the Deng-led CCP was able to resume its restructuring? Mr. Ruckus doesn't hold back from a catalog of negative changes: The use of special economic zones to draw in foreign direct investment (FDI), job security guarantees replaced with contracts, welfare provisions scrapped, privatizations, state-run companies converted to state-owned enterprises expected to maximize profits, 50 million laid off and an intensification of work. "Growing job insecurity, unemployment, low wages, the loss of welfare protection, and higher work pressure led to discontent," he wrote. "[State-owned enterprise] workers started organizing a wave of protests against the restructuring of the state sector that would last into the 2000s. Moreover, the deterioration of living conditions in the countryside triggered peasant unrest in the mid- and late-1990s. These two cycles of struggle marked the beginning of the capitalist period in the PRC," which the author dates from the mid-1990s. [page 114]
"Crossing the river by feeling the stones"
This transition need not be seen as either inevitable or the result of a plot by some party leaders, according to Communist Road. "This transition was not the result of a detailed master plan or blueprint but of a series of — often experimental — reform steps taken to improve the country's economic performance, save the socialist system, and stabilize CCP rule. This is the meaning of the phrase 'crossing the river by feeling the stones' that Deng Xiaoping allegedly used to describe his understanding of the course of reform." [page 115]
Restructuring of state-owned enterprises would further develop as the 1990s drew to a close and China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Another crucial milestone in China's path toward capitalism Mr. Ruckus could have explored further is Jiang Zemin's "theory of the three represents." Only a passing reference to then-President Jiang's allowing private capitalists to become party members in 2001 hints at this development. But this development went beyond a mere widening of party intake. The "Three Represents" reference is an official line announced in 2001 the party should represent the most advanced productive forces, the most advanced culture and the broadest layers of the people. Promulgated by President Jiang, it is a declaration that the interests of different classes are not in conflict and that the party can harmoniously represent all classes simultaneously. One can of course enunciate such a program if one wishes, but such a theory has nothing in common with Marxism.
Another piece of evidence that the book could have cited but didn't is the party's increasing stress on the use of markets. The Communist Party leadership switched the role of the market from "basic" to "decisive" in 2013 at a key Central Committee plenum, and continuity with this course was laid down by the party at the October 2017 party congress that again stressed the "decisive role" of the market. Communist Road focuses on social movements and grassroots activities, and spends little time on party developments, and although not discussing these party declarations is perhaps consistent with the intent of the book, more reportage of party debates would have enriched the text and provided further underpinning for its central thesis.
The book does document continuing unrest across the 2000s; much of the strikes during this period were wildcat actions as organized actions were prohibited. Since Xi Jinping became party general secretary and president in 2012, the party has tightened control and increased surveillance, and although unrest and wildcat actions have not ceased, there is support for the government from the middle class, which has seen benefits from the reforms, and wages have increased.
Conceptualizing socialism beyond a narrow definition
In trying to unravel the complexities of how the Chinese economy might best be conceptualized, a basic question that should be asked is: What is socialism? Is socialism merely the absence of capitalism? Or is it something more? A definition frequently put forth by socialists (and not only them) is that state ownership of the means of production constitutes socialism, understood as a transitional stage toward communism, to use the classical formulation of Karl Marx. This was the foundation on which the Soviet Union, from the 1930s on, could proclaim itself a socialist society, updating that to referring to itself as a "developed socialist society" in the Brezhnev years as an additional developmental step.
But is that all there is? I would argue that the elimination of a bourgeois social class as the owners of the means of production and the replacement of that social relation with common or state ownership is a pre-condition of socialism, not the actual content. Nor does it have to mean state ownership of all enterprises, although it is inconceivable for a socialism to exist that doesn't place in state hands banking and a few, large key industries. If socialism means political and economic democracy in a society where everybody has a voice in the decisions that affect them, their communities and/or the enterprises in which they work; wages and other compensation reflect contributions to the work performed; and there are no centers of power built on the accumulation of capital, then neither China nor any other country can be classified as achieving socialism.
In his writings on the Soviet Union, the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher developed the term "post-capitalist" for the Soviet Union and its Central European satellites. This provides a neutral term that acknowledges that capitalist economic relations had been abolished without suggesting a transition to a higher state had been completed. That has long seemed to me to be a highly useful way to conceptualize the Soviet economy. It certainly wasn't capitalist, or the United States and other Western capitalist powers wouldn't have poured so much time, energy and money into attempting to defeat the Soviet bloc with such sustained intensity.
People's Grand Hall in Chongqing (photo by Chen Hualin)
It is reasonable to draw some parallels with Dr. Amin's conceptualization of China as neither capitalist nor socialist. He pointed to the communal nature of land in rural China, which is not a commodity that farmers can sell, as "absolutely prevent[ing] us from characterizing contemporary China (even today) as 'capitalist,' because the capitalist road is based on the transformation of land into a commodity." Other commentators point to the fact that banking and finance remain firmly in state hands to buttress their arguments that China is not capitalist. Dr. Amin in his analysis noted that transnational capital can't pillage China's natural resources and China's integration into the world system is "partial and controlled." Land, however, is frequently taken by city or other local governments and sold to commercial interests; one estimate made in 2017 is that 4 million farmers were losing land annually. Moreover, that China is one of two countries large enough to enter the world capitalist system on its own terms (India being the other although neither the Hindu fundamentalist neoliberal BJP nor the ever rightward-moving Congress chooses to do so) doesn't mean capitalist relations are absent from the workplace.
The analogy with the Soviet Union is not a snug fit, given that Soviet Union retained a post-capitalist, or at any rate, a non-capitalist, form of government through the early years of Mikhail Gorbachev, not beginning to introduce elements of capitalism until a series of reforms rammed through the parliament in 1990.
On balance, then, although Dr. Amin presented a learned and serious interpretation (and who was clear about the danger of a return to capitalism even while believing market openings were justified), Mr. Ruckus' four-stage conception gives us the best understanding of the Chinese economy and where it, at least for now, is going. One more opinion popularly floated that we haven't discussed is that China has indeed moved to capitalism, but only as a temporary expedient to develop faster, and will one day expropriate private capital and become a socialist power strong enough to fend off the capitalist powers. Given the opaqueness of the CCP, none of us outside the party are in any position to know with authority its leadership's long-term intentions.
What we can do is analyze the actions and words of CCP leadership, which has carried out a slow progression toward capitalism. President Xi has recently begun taking steps to reign in certain Chinese capitalists and has more frequently talked about Marxism, but whether these are the opening moves of a reversal of policies or simply an assertion of party rule will not be known for some time. And even if it were true that the moves toward capitalism are intended to be a temporary expedient, becoming more deeply entangled in markets and the capitalist world system carries its own momentum, a drift not at all easy to check. There are industrial and party interests that favor the path China has been on since the 1990s, and those interests represent another social force that would resist structural moves toward socialism.
An ambivalent and contradictory path
In its summation, Communist Road acknowledges that the four-stage conception "has its limitations." There are not clear borders between the stages nor is there a straight historical direction. "The long transition from socialism to capitalism in particular was not only gradual and intermittent but also ambivalent and contradictory," Mr. Ruckus writes. "[M]any of those subperiods [within the stages] overlapped, as unrest from below was often vibrant and erratic and took years to develop and grow, while containment measures and reforms from above were also staggered and long-lasting." [page 166]
A corollary is a rejection of the idea that "so-called capitalist roaders in the CCP leadership" executed a master plan. "There is no evidence for such a master plan, and blaming the transition mostly on deviant CCP leaders ignores structural factors, both domestic and global. … [I]t was the result of structural features of the form the CCP regime took in the 1950s and 1960s and of social, political, and economic dynamics that made the transition to capitalism in the following decades possible and likely (though not inevitable)." [page 173]
The book concludes with "lessons for the left" that offers "elements of a left-wing strategy." Two necessities, the author writes, are analysis of the process of class recomposition from the perspectives of proletarians and other oppressed peoples, and forms of organizing that break down divisions among proletarians, activists and intellectuals. Open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of movements, resistance and organization, and of socialist governments, are vital as well as that movements should be in the hands of those struggling and should represent themselves. Finally, movements must organize globally; the social struggles around the world of recent years occurred simultaneously but were "divided along North-South lines and by national markets, sexism, racism, and migration regimes. These divisions can be overcome, and it is one of the tasks of left-wing organizing to provide resources and create bridges that connect struggles."
We must base analyses on material reality, not on what our hopes or dreams wish nor on the name of the organization presiding over a country. No single book can be the last word, and some of the conclusions of Communist Road are sure to draw some strong disagreements. Regardless of where you stand on the central questions under discussion, Ralf Ruckus has provided a strong argument, backed by ample evidence, for the thesis that China has become capitalist, as well as a useful, brisk history from below of China since 1949. Both are welcome contributions.
3 Comments Posted in Book review, China Tagged books, economics, history, longreads
Predictions are difficult to make, especially, as the old joke goes, when they are about the future. Particularly fraught have been predictions of the demise of capitalism. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that because capitalism remains the world's dominant economic system, predictions of the system's demise are not only wrong, but destined to be wrong in the future.
"Conventional wisdom" here, of course, is nothing more than a display of the axiom that the intellectual ideas of a society are those of the dominant class. Certainly, both industrialists and financiers would like us to believe that nothing fundamental can change. Bourgeois ideology proclaims that through every possible channel every day.
Yet what is of human creation is not permanent; everything of human creation has an expiration date. Capitalism will be no different.
When will capitalism be transcended and what will follow? That central question has been asked for two centuries and, given the increasing intensity of economic crises, mounting inequality and looming environmental catastrophe, is as important as ever. The unending series of protests, uprisings and movements dedicated to either forcing systemic reform or outright replacement are eloquent testament to how capitalism fails most of the world's population.
Night view of the Gate of Enlightenment in Madrid (photo by Luis García (Zaqarbal))
Nonetheless, there is no arguing that capitalism remains firmly in the saddle, with no existing social movement anywhere near strong enough today to put the system at risk. Does that mean we should regard past predictions of capitalism's demise as mistaken or wishful thinking? Perhaps only an ambiguous answer, at least preliminary, is appropriate. For those who wish to see capitalism continue indefinitely — those who benefit and those so frightened by propaganda that anything else is literally unimaginable — there is an easy answer: Yes. For those who wish for a better world, an economic system based on human need and in harmony with the environment, the answer is no.
Whether yes, no, maybe or let's wait and see, an examination of why predictions of capitalism's demise are thus far off the mark is a healthy exercise. I thus was interested in a new book wrestling with these issues, Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx by Francesco Boldizzoni. Foretelling is a curious hybrid as the author is quite critical of capitalism but also has a pessimistic outlook regarding its replacement; it is rare for a book to receive praise from a Wall Street Journal reviewer and New Left Review contributor Wolfgang Streeck. Foretelling provides a strong challenge to the thinking of critics of capitalism and those who subscribe to leading theories, particularly Marxist, of the end of capitalism.
Such a challenge is healthy, and those who are interested in a basic history of economic thought for the past 200 years would do well with this book. Whether it succeeds in its core intention, however, is a separate matter, although any conclusions will partly depend on a reader's perspective.
Capitalism will end, as do all products of history
We get a good sense of Professor Boldizzoni's perspective in his introduction, where he writes that capitalism will end, or slowly turn into something new, like all products of history, although there is no guarantee it will be something better. The brutality of prior systems lives on in capitalism. The slow growth rates of a more service-oriented economy has led to more "distributional conflicts," and the Left must find effective tools to deal with it or the "populist right" will take its place. To all but capitalism's more fervent apologists, this can hardly be considered controversial. But we also read here a foreshadowing of pessimism with a passage declaring "this battle to 'overthrow the system' is lost from the start" — believing it raises false hopes and thus "does not do progressivism any service."
Capitalism isn't going anywhere in the near future and past predictions have not been borne out, so a hard look, if we are intellectually honest, is warranted. It is healthy to have ideas challenged, so let us engage with these ideas.
Before getting to the heart of its argument, the first four of the six chapters of Foretelling the End of Capitalism are a wide-ranging survey of thinkers from the early 19th century to the early 21st, across the full political spectrum. These are not deep excavations but do provide basic understandings. These are mostly solid introductions to the evolution of thinking on the topic of political economy and important theories that have arisen, except for weaknesses with some Marxist writers. For example, a brief discussion of fin de siècle German social democracy — Eduard Bernstein vs. Karl Kautsky vs. Rosa Luxemburg — is shallow; the author only sees the surface of Kautsky's writings and does not grasp what lies below the surface, nor how to interpret the evolution of Kautsky's thinking, without which it is impossible to understand why Kautsky would come to draw close to Bernstein, an outcome the book entirely misses.
That is no more than a minor point. More serious is what this reviewer considers among the most bizarre interpretations of fascism he has ever come across. Professor Boldizzoni writes that fascism, or more specifically, Nazism, was "the middle ground between the liberal and Soviet worlds." He presents the ideas of several writers on fascism, but all but one are hopelessly confused and serve only to obfuscate. Incredibly, there is not one word from Leon Trotsky, the preeminent analyzer of Nazism during the 1930s — an inexcusable omission. Nor is the orthodox communist conception as handed down by Josef Stalin presented. Although that conception was badly mistaken with tragic circumstances, it should have been discussed, given the consequences of that line being put into action.
It is true that fascism is notoriously difficult to diagnose, but if approached from a class standpoint, it becomes understandable. At its most basic level, fascism is a dictatorship established through and maintained with terror on behalf of big business. It is a phenomenon squarely at the far right of the political spectrum; it is not an ersatz "third way" precursor. Fascist movements have a social base, which provides support and the terror squads, but which is badly misled since the fascist dictatorship operates decisively against the interest of its social base, rooted in middle class white-collar professionals and small business owners. (That is still true today; look at the profile of the Trump followers who have been arrested for participating in the January 6 attack on the U.S. capitol building.)
"In National Socialism, everything is as contradictory and as chaotic as in a nightmare," Trotsky wrote in a vivid 1932 essay, using the intentionally misleading formal name for the Nazis. "Hitler's party calls itself socialist, yet it leads a terroristic struggle against all socialist organizations. It calls itself a worker's party, yet its ranks include all classes except the proletariat. It hurls lightning bolts at the heads of capitalists, yet is supported by them. … The whole world has collapsed inside the heads of the petit bourgeoisie, which has completely lost its equilibrium. This class is screaming so clamorously out of despair, fear and bitterness that it is itself deafened and loses sense of its words and gestures."
Militarism, extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats, and, perhaps the most critical component, a rabid propaganda that intentionally raises panic and hate while disguising its true nature and intentions under the cover of a phony populism, are among the necessary elements. Despite national differences that result in major differences in the appearances of fascism, the class nature is consistent. Big business is invariably the supporter of fascism, no matter what a fascist movement's rhetoric contains, and is invariably the beneficiary even though its beneficiaries will not directly control the dictatorship; it is a dictatorship for them, not by them. The massive profits pocketed by industrialists in Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere speak volumes, as do the draconian anti-labor laws implemented. Fascism is capitalism stripped of all democratic veneers.
Are the reasons behind capitalism's staying power psychological?
Nonetheless, these early chapters are useful for other theorists who are discussed, including John Stuart Mill, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Jürgen Habermas and several writers of the late 20th century. The author skillfully dismantles the apologia for capitalism's inequality offered by publicists masquerading as economists. In the final two chapters, Professor Boldizzoni explicates his core arguments. Here we find no illusions about the nature of capitalism nor misunderstandings of its social relations. Capitalism is a socio-economic system, not a type of economic activity, imposed by force; an "institutionalized social order" in which even human labor is reduced to a commodity. Capitalism is kept together through hierarchy and individualism, upholding new forms of previous master/slave and lord/serf relations.
So why have forecasts of capitalism's demise been so far off the mark thus far? Or, perhaps, we might better phrase this question as: Why does capitalism persist despite the misery and opposition it continually spawns? Foretelling the End of Capitalism begins to answer this question by offering three factors — "cognitive distortions that affect the forecasting process," faults in the construction of social theories and, decisively, "the faith in progress that underlies modern thought." This is further teased out through two mistakes — overgeneralization through drawing overly broad conclusions or magnifying specific events and "black and white thinking," an example of which is ignoring that there are "many varieties" of capitalism. Seeing the next system only in terms of the negatives of capitalism and, finally, a misunderstanding of culture underlie mistaken forecasts, the book asserts.
All this comes down to "cognitive distortions" and "theoretical flaws," working together and in conjunction with "a more general mental disposition" common to those who attempt to predict what may happen in the future. "The entire history of social forecasting and its mistakes is intertwined with faith in progress," Professor Boldizzoni writes. All of his reasons are psychological. There is nothing material!
A garment factory (photo by Fahad Faisal)
This is the reasoning of someone who believes the current world is the only possible world that can be, whether that belief is conscious or hidden in the unconscious. Capitalism has not fallen; therefore those who forecast its eventual end are dreamers outside reality. It is as if there are no material reasons for the continued life of capitalism, some of which have to do with the very pillars of capitalism that the author himself explicates well.
It is certainly possible to draw up a list of theoretical failings far more specific than flawed enlightenment thinking. No single or small group of developments can possibly encompass all the factors that have kept the world economic system in place. I have previously written that no serious discussion of this question, however, should exclude these factors:
The early pioneers of the socialist movement seriously underestimated the ability of capitalism as a system to adapt and therefore did not foresee the ability of working people to extract concessions for themselves.
The early pioneers failed to understand the buoying effect that would be provided by imperialism (for the leading capitalist countries).
Many of the early pioneers clung to an overly mechanical (mis)understanding of social development that led to a passive belief in an automatic unfolding of revolution that implied, incorrectly, that powerful capitalists would simply sit back and allow themselves to be overthrown. (Kautsky and Bernstein are emblematic here.)
Many leaders during the Soviet era continued to hold to a similar overly mechanical belief in future revolution while at the same time failing to grasp the nuances of capitalist development.
An overly centralized world movement that retarded the theoretical developments needed for local conditions, blocking the creation of innovative leadership while at the same time discouraging existing local leaderships from attempting revolutions.
A too narrow conception of "working class" or "working people" — a tendency to visualize only blue-collar manual workers as working people, a declining percentage of the population in increasingly technological capitalist societies. Such narrow horizons served to exclude a large proportion of wage workers, with the result that movements purporting to be organizations of working people instead divided them at the start.
I am under no illusion that the above list exhausts the catalogue of factors. Obviously, the ability and willingness of the governments over which capitalists hold decisive sway to use violence to keep industrialists and financiers in power; the ability to disseminate propaganda in a variety of forms through an array of media, schools and institutions; and the willingness to invade, overthrow and impose military violence and sanctions against any country that challenges capitalism's masters so as to make life there difficult are indispensable factors as to capitalism's staying power. The last of this paragraph's factors goes a long way in itself as to why alternatives to capitalism have faltered.
Every attempt at constructing a post-capitalist economy has been met with overwhelming military, financial and other forms of force, putting them on a war footing. We can not know what might have been created if those countries had been allowed to peacefully develop, and this factor is indispensable if we are to seriously ponder the acceptance of "there is no alternative" propaganda. Despite the acknowledgements of bourgeois culture's orientation toward wealth accumulation and cultural processes, Foretelling the End of Capitalism offers lectures on the weaknesses of enlightenment thinking rather than analyzing material conditions.
Culture as the glue holding together capitalism
Professor Boldizzoni puts forth the thesis that political, economic and social structures are all held together by "a powerful glue": culture. Capitalism, he writes, is the product of a particular Western family of cultures, with hierarchy and individualism the most important factors. Behavior standards "change slowly"; it "may take several centuries" for culture to transform. He writes, "The emergence of a new system will be possible when the circumstances under which the old one was formed have eventually ceased to exist. It will reflect the changes in the material circumstances as well as in the culture sphere that are to occur over the next few centuries. The transition, however, will be so gradual that it will be barely noticeable."
There is plenty to unpack in the preceding paragraph. That culture is a "powerful glue" keeping capitalism is indisputable, and that changes in "material circumstances" will facilitate a transition to a new system is also not in dispute. But these assertions, which certainly would not be controversial to a Marxist, are odd in light of the author's criticisms of Karl Marx. It is unavoidable to note that those criticisms are rooted in a shallow understanding of Marx's body of work. The author makes the common mistake of seeing Marxism as overly mechanical, teleological and offering a "perfect society," nor does he grasp the subtlety of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," admittedly a confusing phrase that might better be retired. ("Dictatorship of the proletariat" simply means the predominance of working people, the vast majority of people in capitalist society, without reference to any particular governmental form. All capitalist societies constitute a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie," the predominance of industrialists and financiers, which has taken many forms, including formal democracy and fascist.)
Meeting at the Putilov Factory (1917)
These misunderstandings are possible because Marxism's 20th century practitioners in the Soviet bloc presented it in overly simplified terms, seeing it themselves in a mechanical manner. And that was not new. Friedrich Engels, in an 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch, lamented that he and Marx had put so much emphasis on economics. "Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that younger writers sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it," Engels wrote. "We had to emphasize this main principle in opposition to our adversaries, who denied it, and we have not always had the time, the place or the opportunity to allow the other elements involved in the interaction to come into their rights. … Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have mastered its main principles, and those even not always correctly."
We can conceptualize Marxist materialist philosophy like this: The flow and movement of any phenomenon or idea takes varying directions, and far from always in an expected direction. As the concept of "flow" implies, history and social development do not consist of discrete steps or stages. Philosophical, political and religious ideas (which are built on the materials of their predecessors); the prevailing culture (which include traditions shaped in the conditions of the past that have survived into the present); and local geographic factors influence not only each other but also influence economic conditions. What was a cause can become an effect, and an effect can become a cause. These forces are given concrete form within a state, the form of which (including its legal structure) is based on the material conditions of life — the economic structure is the foundation on which society is built and which therefore shapes social consciousness.
Properly understood, Marxism is not, and has never been, a reach for utopia; its founders were scornful of the utopians of their time. Still more puzzling is Professor Boldizzoni's bizarre aside that Swedish social democrats were "seeking the achievement of a perfect society." That would certainly be news to them. The post-World War II Swedish model sought full employment, equality and the transfer of excess profits to the collective ownership of employees. Better than ordinary capitalism and envisioned as an evolutionary route to a future socialist society, but hardly nirvana.
How high should movements aim?
Nordic social democracy is what the author seems to have in mind when he references "many varieties" of capitalism. Yes, there are national differences in capitalism, sometimes significant, but given the domination of the United States and its ability to dictate to the rest of the world, it is unrealistic to see that there is anything other than a single world system. And Swedish capitalism is far removed from any "perfect society" — dominated by corporate power and subject to the pressures of corporate globalization the same as other small or midsized capitalist country, Sweden today has inequality and poverty levels above the European Union average.
Sweden's failure to institute even the most rudimentary beginnings of an evolutionary path to a socialist economic democracy under the 1970s "Meidner plan" of forcing companies to issue stock to public agencies until the public had majority control succumbed not only to the might of local capitalists and the pressures of corporate globalization, but because of the failure of working people to organize. Without a massive movement, no project of socialism, or, if you prefer, economic democracy, can succeed.
If we are dwelling on disagreements here, it is because these areas of dispute are central to the author's thesis. What should be done? Professor Boldizzoni forecasts that although capitalism will be replaced, it will last for centuries to come. No mention of the environmental crisis — humanity doesn't have one full century, never mind several, to wait! There is also the matter of the inability to achieve endless growth on a finite planet, and capitalism's need for continual growth in a world into which it has expanded to almost every corner. (But it should be acknowledged that he has the intellectual honesty to make his own forecast and thus risk being as wrong as those he's discussed.) He concludes by lamenting "we must come to terms with the limits of the possible" and declaring "the social democratic experience" the height of achievement. This conclusion brings into sharper relief why he is so insistent on seeing any attempt to move past capitalism as utopian.
What is the possible? A standard list of social democratic reforms, such as the "power to tax," the power to pursue industrial policy and "monetary sovereignty," offered as counters to European Union policy and centralization. Public ownership of infrastructure and banking is also put forth. These would be welcome reforms, but more than a century of working for reforms within capitalism rather than overcoming it has put the world in precisely the place it is today. Reforms can be won through social struggle, but once movements stand down, the reforms are taken back. Movements must aim higher.
If we believe the world can't be better, that it can't be meaningfully changed, that we have no choice other than tinkering around the edges as capitalism destroys the environment, then nothing will get better. Our conditions will actually get worse because there is no stasis. A better world is possible and speculating on what some basic concepts of a better world might look like is necessary if we are to get there. Giving up is not an option. Study of material conditions and the multitude of factors as to why predictions of capitalism's demise have yet to come to pass — or, to put it in a better way, why capitalism has proven so resilient — are indispensable to achieving an understanding of our present and providing ourselves with the tools necessary to build the movement of movements, working across borders, that is the path toward any possible better world. Lamenting the weight of enlightenment thinking isn't that route.
Foretelling the End of Capitalism is correct that there won't be a sudden collapse of capitalism. If no social movement intervenes, capitalism has several more decades of life and would likely be followed by something worse, in a world of environmental disaster, rising seas and dwindling resources. Decades, not centuries — the present path of humanity is unsustainable. There is no substitute for a post-capitalist future, and the past need not dictate the future.
As always, the value of a book isn't measured by whether we agree with everything in it. If Foretelling didn't have much of interest to offer, I wouldn't have written this essay. The question the book attempts to answer is a challenge that must be confronted because it is a question that remains all too relevant. But although the author in good faith sought to interrogate the predictions of the past to provide an understanding of today, he instead produced a cry of defeat and despair.
18 Comments Posted in Book review, Future of capitalism Tagged books, capitalism, longreads
Work is inevitable but its organization is not
All human societies, from the most primitive to the most modern, have an important commonality — the need to work. Water, food, shelter and other basics of life don't arrive as gifts. Work is required to secure them and to raise the next generation.
So fundamental is this basic principal of human life that generations of Marxist theorists have based analyses of social societies and structures on the economic base of a given society. The base-and-superstructure framework is controversial to most other schools of thought, although it ought to be obvious that capitalist organization of an economy puts strong parameters on how that capitalist country can organize itself politically and culturally. Nonetheless, can traditional Marxist understandings be stretched to wider interpretations?
Computer engineer Paul Cockshott, in his latest book, How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor From Prehistory to the Modern Era,* answers with an emphatic yes. His premise is that Western Marxism has been too dominated by "people with a training in the humanities or social studies" who have a "reluctance to use mathematical quantitative analysis." He intends to infuse the term "mode of production" with a "much more technological interpretation." In other words, a study of technology is a better basis for understanding the organization of labor in the various modes of production over the course of human history.
This stress on technology is a strength of the book, but also, at times, a weakness. This perspective does enable fresh thinking about subjects as disparate as why agriculture supplanted the hunting-gathering stage, the inefficiency of capitalism and the cause of the weaknesses of the Soviet Union that culminated in its collapse. How the World Works is a book full of interesting ideas — I took double the amount of notes I ordinarily take to review a book, a good measure of its content.
How the World Works takes the reader through all the basic modes of production of human history — lengthy chapters each on "pre-class society," slave economy, peasant economy, capitalist economy and socialist economy, plus a final brief chapter on "future economy" that revolves around the impending exhaustion of fossil fuels and the decrease in available energy that post-fossil fuel societies will likely face. Crucially, the book argues that the "idea of abstract labor" applies to all economies, not only capitalist ones.
Transitions to agriculture despite the extra work
Professor Cockshott demonstrates that agriculture required more work hours than did hunting-gathering, and asks the question: Why was the transition made? He argues that hunters wiped out big game and the population of hunter-gatherers became too large for available land to support. Although agriculture required more work, more food per unit is also produced. This change came with a crucial development — there was now a surplus. Hunter-gatherers had no storage facilities and had to be mobile; what was taken was quickly eaten. These were often egalitarian societies (although not always, based on studies of isolated societies that survived into the 20th century).
With the new phenomenon of surplus, the ability and, given the cyclical nature of agriculture, the necessity, of storing food for future use enabled the rise of hierarchy and significantly deepened the subordination of women that had its roots in hunting-gatherer societies' tendency for women to move to other settlements for marriage, putting those young women, cut off from their original community, in subordinate positions to their husbands and mothers-in-law. But although a surplus is necessary for a nonproductive elite to arise, the book argues that a surplus on its own is insufficient to develop the social stratification that would develop:
"A class society requires a surplus, but the converse does not hold. A food surplus does not necessitate an exploiting class. Establishing that seems to have required other misfortunes: war, patriarchy, and religion." [page 45]
Authoritarian ideologies must be developed to justify unequal status, and human sacrifice fuels high social stratification. Ideologies of superior and inferior human beings justified slavery, but Professor Cockshott additionally argues that slave economies were dependent on transport and urban markets. Labor is the source of value in slave economies. The next stage, feudalism, also featured exploitation but in a different form. A lack of transport and limited circulation characterized feudalism. Lords did not have to engage in systematic trade and peasants were self-sufficient; coercion was the glue that kept this economy in place.
The shift from feudal farming to capitalist farming required that peasants "be deprived both of security of tenure and access to communal lands" [page 93]. And that brings the book to its longest chapter, the discussion of work in a capitalist economy. Here is where the author's technological perspective more fully comes into play. The price of labor regulates product pricing and profitability, and, crucially, if workers were paid the full value of their work in a capitalist enterprise there would be no profit for the capitalist — "in a capitalist society, there will be a markup" [page 111].
Advance of mechanical energy under capitalism
Where capitalism differs from feudal and slave economies is far greater use of mechanical energy and scientific research. In contradiction to a commonly accepted theory that the use of slave labor in the Roman Empire prevented the primitive steam engine that was developed then from being introduced into production because using machines would have been much more expensive than continuing to use slave labor, Professor Cockshott argues that Hero's turbine was vastly inefficient to be of any industrial use. Even the first steam engines of the 18th century were exponentially more powerful and could greatly expand industrial capacity. He argues that it was this new capacity that was the catalyst for industrial capitalism: "Existence of commodity relations and wage labor would not have been sufficient to generate the capitalist mode of production" [page 123].
Limitations on productive capacity were overcome with the rise of fossil fuels and in turn advances in technology arising from more efficient fossil fuels led to innovation and new products that beget more new products. In turn, the capital required to build and operate large industrial factories was beyond the reach of workers and previously independent artisans, forcing small independent producers out of business due to the scale of competition. "[T]he application of powered machines and fossil fuels allowed rising labor productivity that closed off whole branches of production from the self-employed artisan" [page 128].
An English watermill (photo by Martin Bodman)
The capitalist who innovates early reaps an increased profit, but such benefits are always temporary as competitors will soon adopt the innovation. Perpetual competition forces increased reliance on technology, although the author argues that innovation for a capitalist is only worthwhile when wages are high. An example not examined in the book that also serves as a partial explanation for why so much production has been shifted to low-wage, developing countries is the ability to pay drastically lower wages. That is an "innovation" that competition dictates be swiftly copied. The book argues that the ability of capitalists to innovate "shouldn't be overrated," but the continual shifting of production and the development of global supply chains is grim evidence of considerable capitalist innovation, one of course deeply negative for working people. Control of the means of production also gives capitalists control of the technology necessary to make these transformations in production possible — yet more innovation that is bad for working people.
The mathematical approach of How the World Works does serve the author well in his theory of why the wage gap between men and women persists: Professor Cockshott argues that it is because women work fewer hours then men and as a consequence are less likely then men to be the sole wage earner in a family; he believes the wage gap won't be closed until it is equally likely that women will be the sole family wage earner as men. The level of such a wage earner can't fall below starvation level for the basic reason that mortality rates would skyrocket; it is the ensuing shortage of workers that would occur rather than any morality that put an ultimate lower limit on wages.
That natural lower limit of course does not prevent wages from falling to deeply exploitative levels. On top of that, finance produces still more inequality — it is not only unproductive but a huge drain of money. "Since so little finance goes into increasing real production, these rents [windfall profits] can only be sustained by depressing the real living standards of much of the population" [page 196]. Concomitant to that is the ever increasing cost of housing, which is a product of inefficiency. Because housing is an asset subject to speculation, it appreciates in price and thus speculation becomes more profitable than engaging in productive activity, which in turns draws in more speculative capital, further fueling the process. Loans by banks in turn go disproportionally to real estate. Yet more exploitation.
Judging socialism by actual conditions, not ideals
The chapter on "socialist economies" is likely to be the most controversial for many readers; certainly is was for myself. The chapter opens by noting, quite correctly, that there is no uniform definition of socialism. How the World Works argues that "as social scientists, we cannot judge the real world by the standards of an ideal one. It is not the job of reality to materialize our ideals. Reality just is in all its glories, horrors, and contradictions" [page 209]. To that, there is nothing to do except agree. Material reality is what we have to go by.
Interpreting that reality, on the other hand, leaves room for debate. How the World Works shoots down various theories of why the Soviet Union and the model it imposed on Central European countries wasn't socialist, including that is used money, you can't have socialism in a single country and there was scarcity rather than the plenty that socialism is supposed to provide. So far so good, although these arguments are presented in a somewhat cartoonish fashion rather than in their full complexity. Having ably dispensed with these arguments, and reiterating that there was a "common understanding" that those countries were socialist, the author offers his concept of what socialism actually is, based on what did exist.
Although he writes that "What distinguishes them are the forms of property and the way in which the surplus product is determined," he concludes that socialism is characterized by machine industry and agriculture, the same as capitalism. His definition rests on, inter alia, a mix of technical achievements such as "widespread use of electricity" and "widespread use of machinery and applied science" interspersed with social relations such as "the absence of a class of wealthy private proprietors" and "public or cooperative ownership of most of the economy" [pages 209-201].
German hydroelectric power plant
To be sure, claims that the Soviet Union was "capitalist" is ultra-left phrase-mongering that sheds little light. But is socialism simply expropriation and building industry? If so, then one would have to agree with Josef Stalin's boast in the 1930s that socialism had been built and Nikita Khrushchev's follow-up boast in the 1950s that the Soviet Union was in the process of building communism, the successor to socialism. But is that all there is? A fuller definition of socialism mandates that democracy be extended to economic matters and strengthened in political matters, beyond what is possible in capitalism. It would follow then that expropriating capitalists and establishing state or cooperative ownership of most of the economy is a precursor to socialism, not the actual content in itself.
An alternative theory, not discussed in the book, is that the Soviet model represented a post-capitalist economy (certainly not capitalist) in transition to socialism, a transition never completed. Perhaps this can be seen as edging toward idealism and in contradiction to the agreement above that those countries had to be judged based on their material reality, which obviously included the fact that they had to expend so much of their resources on defense against never-ending attacks from the capitalist world. But to put forth this position is not to dismiss those experiences but rather to lament what could have been. The grassroots movement in late 1960s Czechoslovakia to keep the economy in state hands but have it managed by the workers through councils and coordinating bodies in a system of democratic social accountability was the advancement to socialism that never developed because of the Warsaw Pact invasion. That invasion was a function of closed-minded ideological prescriptions that had become calcified in one particular form, which evolved in chaotic fashion in one country (the Soviet Union) that cannot be extricated from the specific absolutist cultural heritage of that country's dominant nation (Russia).
Socialism should be not only industrial development and an end to private capital but a democratic system that grows, develops and changes with the rise in consciousness and development of a society's members, not a rigid formula.
Fiscal imbalances through imbalanced taxation
The term "actually existing socialism" was often used for the Soviet bloc, and despite the clumsiness of the term, perhaps that is a reasonable compromise. Those countries have reverted to capitalism, and so a discussion of their economies inevitably moves toward determining the reasons for why. Professor Cockshott puts forth an original theory on this: the system of taxation. Specifically, he argues that reliance on sales taxes and taxes on enterprise revenue rather than assessing income tax on wages hid the cost of free social services, forced up the cost of machinery and thereby discouraged mechanization and made the relative cost of providing free services more expensive. As a result, managerial hoarding of labor was encouraged with concomitant overstaffing and lack of efficiency measures. This thesis is related to his belief that the Soviet use of money was a mistake; rather, people should have been paid in "labor hours." To this last point, we will return.
Mathematics are used to explain this theory. The economy is divided into three parts — production of the means of production (or what are called producer goods), production of consumer goods and the provision of uncharged services, such as education, health care and public infrastructure. The money for the third category has to come from some revenue stream, and the need to pay for those and the necessity of the first category of producer goods constrains what is available for consumer goods. Assuming that what is available for consumer goods must be limited to the money-equivalent of the hours spent producing consumer goods, the author suggests there were three possible methods of taxation: an income tax on employees, a sales tax or VAT, or by pricing all goods at a markup or profit.
Because there was no income tax in the Soviet Union, revenue for social services was raised from taxes on enterprise revenue, those producing for consumer goods and those producing for producer goods, and from sales taxes. Because of that, the costs of machinery is much greater, thereby making the provision of social services far more expensive that it would have been. It was "short-term populism that hampered efficiency" [page 256] and made labor cheap and machinery expensive.
Concomitantly, the author argues that Soviet workers should have been paid in labor hours rather than rubles. This would have been a fairer way of paying people and would have made any imbalances easier for all to see; money was necessary to disguise that, for example, that collective farmers were underpaid relative to their labor. In essense, the argument is that one hour of work should have been compensated by one hour of labor credit. Doing so would have immediate egalitarian effect:
"The significance of labor tokens is that they establish the obligation on all to work by abolishing unearned incomes; they make the economic relations between people transparently obvious; and they are egalitarian, ensuring that all labor is counted as equal. Is it the last point that ensured labor tokens were never developed under the bureaucratic state socialisms of the twentieth century. What ruler or manager was willing to see his work as equal to that of a mere laborer?" [page 263]
This arrangement would also eliminate black markets because the labor credits could not be circulated or transferred to someone else; they could only be used at communal stores. But "it is absolutely essential" that prices reflect the work value put into them to avoid imbalances. This would in turn make planning more responsive because deviations of sales from actual production would send a signal that production levels should be adjusted to real demand.
What caused the Soviet Union to collapse?
The foregoing were serious weaknesses in the Soviet economy, Professor Cockshott argues, in addition to the most skilled technical and professional employees becoming dissatisfied because their gains were not comparable to elites in the capitalist West. That social group's dissatisfaction mattered because it was disproportionally represented in the Communist Party. The structural changes made by Mikhail Gorbachev had the effect of disorganizing an economy in which enterprises were strongly interlinked and enabling the rise of black-market criminals as state revenues plunged because declines in production resulted in less revenue due to the reliance on taxes on enterprises and sales taxes.
The author makes a strong case for his thesis that the taxation system underlaid Soviet economic crisis. I found much merit in it and considering it enriches our understanding of Soviet economics. But this is an instance where a heavy reliance on mathematics and technology leaves out some of what is a bigger picture. Left out is the over-centralization of the economy, the inability of central planners and the distribution system to have the knowledge necessary to ensure that raw materials and supplies were delivered properly and a rigid production quota system based on physical output. Base wages in the Soviet Union were low; workers counted on the bonus to be paid for fulfilling quotas. Managers and directors were responsible for fulfilling quotas handed down from ministries and their jobs were on the line if they didn't. Thus both management and floor workers had incentives to hide capacity and keep quotas as low as possible, and keep extra materials and personnel on hand to "storm the plan" if they had fallen behind.
Surpluses of material somewhere meant shortages somewhere else; the difficulties in distributing sufficient supplies enhanced these tendencies. And because quantity and not quality was what mattered, shoddy products could be produced without real penalty. A full description of the Soviet economy can't exclude these factors. Although the author dates the start of the imposition of capitalism to 1986, which should properly be dated to 1990, when General Secretary Gorbachev rammed through the legislature a series of measures that introduced elements of capitalism, including laws that ended working peoples' limited ability to defend themselves and mechanisms to enable privatizations, that is a minor technical point. Reforms instituted from 1986 did place the burdens squarely on workers because of their one-sided implementation, and Professor Cockshott is entirely correct in writing that Gorbachev's reforms ultimately disorganized the economy, precipitating a collapse.
Ultimately, the measure of a book isn't whether we agree on all points; disagreement with some points of a book with such a large volume of interesting theories and analyses is inevitable. What is pertinent is stimulation of thought and the challenge of worthy ideas. A book that intends nothing less than to reveal the workings of the world from the earliest prehistory to the present day and beyond has set itself a sweeping goal. How the World Works succeeds marvelously.
* Paul Cockshott, How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor From Prehistory to the Modern Era [Monthly Review Press, New York, 2019]
12 Comments Posted in Book review Tagged books, capitalism, economics, history, longreads, socialism
Reversing past oppression, Cooperation Jackson builds a better future
If thinking big were all it took to be a success, then Cooperation Jackson would be one of the biggest successes ever seen. It is far too early to know what the future will hold for what must be the most thorough-going experiment in economic democracy in the United States today, but no one can possibly accuse Cooperation Jackson of not having a clear vision nor of not being serious students of history.
The experiment in Jackson, Mississippi, is the intellectual product of many years of experience by seasoned activists and a mobilized community drawing lessons from centuries of enduring racism and state terror, and the communal traditions used to survive the slavery, feudalism and apartheid of the United States South, while at the same time integrating concepts from progressive thinkers across several continents. Cooperation Jackson faces long odds, not least because of the extreme hostility of Mississippi's conservative state government and the forces of gentrification that are taking aim at their impoverished city, in particular the organization's neighborhood base.
The history, intentions and current struggles of this most interesting project are laid out in detail in the book Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.* And although the untimely, sudden death of one of the project's leaders, Chokwe Lumumba, was a significant blow, by no means has the project come to a halt. That is one of the consistent messages of Jackson Rising, which contains essays by several writers, both participants and sympathetic journalists. It also a project intended for replication elsewhere, for socialism in one city is not possible, of which Jackson's cooperators are acutely aware.
This is a project rooted firmly in Black struggle. The concept of the People's Assembly, a core institution of Cooperation Jackson, is drawn from prayer circles organized clandestinely by enslaved Africans and the "Negro Peoples Conventions" that convened during Reconstruction. Black communities struggling for community control and economic self-sufficiency were built during the early 20th century, although these fell victim to continual violence directed against them, and cooperatives were frequently used forms across the 19th and 20th centuries. Traditions of resistance were renewed during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; peoples assemblies were a common form of organization during that time.
Other historical projects were simply organized to find paths out of deep rural poverty. Two cooperative farms in Mississippi were begun in the early 1970s; local Whites responded by poisoning the Black farmers' water supply and killing their cows. In Alabama, Black farmers found a market in New York that would pay three times what they had been getting for their cucumbers. The growers' cooperative rented a truck to deliver the produce, only to have state troopers pull the truck over and hold it for 72 hours; racist Governor George Wallace had declared he could impound any vehicle for 72 hours without explanation. When the farmers got their track back, the cucumbers had been ruined.
Repression is what the activists of an organization calling itself the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika faced. An agreement had been made to buy land from a Black farmer west of Jackson. As hundreds of people walked the road to their new land, they faced an armed phalanx of local police, state police, the FBI and the Ku Klux Klan, telling them they would not be celebrating that day, punctuating their threats with racial slurs. The crowd decided to go ahead anyway, and in a story often told by Mayor Lumumba, the roadblock "opened up just like the Red Sea." Nonetheless, heavy government repression, including mass arrests, brought this effort to build an egalitarian community to an end.
Building community organizations
Years later, some of these organizers, including Mayor Lumumba, would return. In 2005, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) organized the Mississippi Disaster Relief Coalition in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and in subsequent years the coalition transformed into the Jackson People's Assembly. The Assembly, according to one of the lead organizers, Kali Akuno, was "organized as expressions of participatory or direct democracy," guided by committees organized by it but in a non-hierarchal arrangement [page 74]. Doing so was part of an "inside-outside" strategy in which the movement would be based on the widest possible grassroots and community participation while at the same time seeking to gain a foothold in local government. Mr. Akuno wrote:
"MXGM firmly believes that at this stage of the struggle for Black Liberation that the movement must be firmly committed to building and exercising what we have come to regard as 'dual power' — building autonomous power outside of the realm of the state (i.e. the government) in the form of People's Assemblies and engaging electoral politics on a limited scale with the expressed intent of building radical voting blocs and electing candidates drawn from the ranks of the Assemblies themselves. … [W]e cannot afford to ignore the power of the state." [page 75]
The goal of engaging in local elections is to lessen the repressive power of the state and contain the power of multi-national corporations:
"We also engage electoral politics as a means to create political openings that provide a broader platform for a restoration of the 'commons,' create more public goods utilities (for example, universal health care, public pension scheme, government financed childcare and comprehensive public transportation), and the democratic transformation of the economy. One strategy without the other is like mounting a defense without an offensive or vice versa. Both are critical to advancing authentic, transformative change." [page 75]
The Jackson activists believe that assemblies should engage a minimum of 20 percent of the people of a given geographic area. This minimum level of participation ensures that there are sufficient numbers of people to have the capacity to implement decisions and achieve desired outcomes. There exist three different types of assemblies — united front or alliance-based in which the participants are mobilized members of organizations; constituent in the form of a representative body; and mass assemblies of direct participation by the widest number of people. Jackson's assemblies tend to be the second (constituent) form but can act as mass bodies during periods of crisis [pages 87-89]. Mass assemblies (such as what was seen at Occupy Wall Street) require vast amounts of time and thus tend not to be sustainable.
Jackson activists have found sustained success with their more constituent model. Work centered in Ward 2, where MXGM and other activists did much of the organizing, although students also played a role and neighborhood churches provided meeting spaces and participants. The Ward 2 assembly began having a positive impact on city issues, and from this work participants decided they wanted an ally on the city council. Chokwe Lumumba was asked to run for the ward's council seat. He won, and in turn the assembly deepened its inside and outside work. For the next election, he ran for mayor, and won that office in a landslide, replacing a three-term incumbent closely tied to regional business elites seen as unresponsive to community needs.
Organizing for a city government that will be responsive
Kamau Franklin, a veteran activist with MXGM, noted that electing Black officeholders in itself does not necessarily translate into community empowerment. He wrote:
"[T]he majority Black centers in the south are dominated by moderate Black Democratic Party careerists. The political void left by the retreat of the Black social movements in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was filled by 'safe' politicians who did not do much to upset the economic balance of power that favored white power brokers and embraced moderate Democratic Party rhetoric and positioning on governing. As a result, Jackson is in many ways like post apartheid South Africa, where Black electoral power never translated into actual political power, and in the main only supported the Black petty-bourgeois class happy to live off the scraps of the minority white capitalist class that really calls the shots." [page 70]
Mayor Lumumba, upon taking office, did not forget who he was nor who put him in office. Not only did he pledge "the highest provision" of public services, including economic development, education and transportation, but he also declared a goal of building a "dynamic 'new economy' rooted in cooperative development and anchored by green jobs, living wages and strong worker protections. His administration's policies would be rooted in human rights and driven by community groups that would have a say in city budgeting. [page 99]
The new administration faced serious challenges, including finding the money to rebuild a crumbling and out-of-date water system that was under a federal order to be fixed. The city's infrastructure was sub-standard and the previous administration had sought to cut an already limited bus system; Mayor Lumumba worked with city residents to secure a one percent city sales tax to help raise necessary revenue. He also gave full city support for a conference at which the grassroots project Cooperation Jackson would be formally launched.
Jackson city center (photo by A W A)
These activities were part of an inside-outside strategy, taking advantage of opportunities, wrote educator and organizer Ajamu Nangwaya:
"More often than not, we are likely to experience betrayal, collaboration with the forces of domination by erstwhile progressives or a progressive political formation forgetting that its role should be to build or expand the capacity of the people to challenge the structures of exploitation and domination. I am of the opinion that an opportunity exists in Jackson to use the resources of the municipal state to build the capacity of civil society to promote labor self-management. … As revolutionaries, we are always seeking out opportunities to advance the struggle for social emancipation. We initiate actions, but we also react to events within the social environment. To not explore the movement-building potentiality of what is going on in this southern city would be a major political error and a demonstration of the poverty of imagination and vision." [pages 110-111]
Tragically, Mayor Lumumba would die suddenly from heart problems less than a year into his term and on the eve of introducing more radical measures for city council approval. The establishment Democrats retook city government, withdrawing all support for the cooperation project and the conference. Nonetheless, the Jackson State University president supported the conference despite the new mayor's hostility, and during it organizers formally announced Cooperation Jackson.
The vision of Cooperation Jackson
Cooperation Jackson is a product of the MXGM and New Afrikan People's Organization, and is "specifically created to advance a key component of the Jackson-Kush Plan, namely the development of the solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi, to advance the struggle for economic democracy as a prelude towards the democratic transition to eco-socialism" [page 3]. ("Kush" is a designation for 18 contiguous counties forming a Black-majority region along the Mississippi River and west of and adjacent to Jackson.) Organizers stress that all people are a part of this project, that the resources of society should be equally available to all residents, but as a Black majority region, that majority is entitled to a exercise a majority of political and social power [page 128]. Black residents comprise 85 percent of Jackson's population but prior to Mayor Lumumba's administration, Black businesses received only five percent of regional contracts.
Cooperation Jackson has four fundamental ends:
To place ownership and control over the primary means of production directly in the hands of the Black working class of Jackson.
To build and advance the development of ecologically regenerative forces of production in Jackson.
To democratically transform the political economy of Jackson, the state of Mississippi and the Southeast U.S.
To attain self-determination for people of African descent and the "radical, democratic transformation" of Mississippi as a prelude to a national transformation.
As Mr. Akuno wrote in outlining the program in Jackson Rising's opening chapter:
"A population or people that does not have access to or control over those means [of production] and processes cannot be said to possess or exercise self-determination. The Black working class majority in Jackson does not have control or unquestionable ownership over any of these means or processes. Our mission is to aid the Black working class, and the working class overall, to attain them." [page 5]
The project seeks to build productive forces, break the status quo of an economy based on resource extraction and commodity agriculture for export, and replace that failed economy with one that stimulates self-organization and is environmentally sustainable. Instead of capitalist development by and for elites, Cooperation Jackson instead seeks to enable communities to take the central role in development through autonomous organizations and control over local governments.
Jackson is envisioned as a "hub of community production," anchored by 3-D print manufacturing for community consumption. There is no short cut in a process that has only begun and has a long way to go, Mr. Akuno writes:
"In the Jackson context, it is only through mass organization of the working class, the construction of a new democratic culture, and the development of a movement from below to transform the social structures that shape and define our relations, particularly the state (i.e. government), that we can conceive of serving as a counter-hegemonic force with the capacity to democratically transform the economy. …
We strive to build a democratic economy because it is the surest route to equity, equality, and ecological balance. Reproducing capitalism, either in its market oriented or state-dictated forms, will only replicate the inequities and inequalities that have plagued humanity since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. We believe that the participatory, bottom-up democratic route to economic democracy and eco-socialist transformation will be best secured through the anchor of worker self-organization, the guiding structures of cooperatives and systems of mutual aid and communal solidarity, and the democratic ownership, control, and deployment of the ecologically friendly and labor liberating technologies of the fourth industrial revolution." [pages 6-7]
The core institutions of Cooperation Jackson
Four interconnected institutions form the base of Cooperation Jackson:
A federation of cooperative businesses and mutual-aid networks.
A cooperative incubator that will provide basic training and business plan development.
A cooperative school and training center to teach economic democracy.
A cooperative credit union and bank.
Vertical supply chains are planned to be created through these networks. As one example, a cooperative farm would supply a café and catering business, the waste from the café would be sent to a yard-care and composting cooperative, which would in turn supply the farm, socializing the production process.
Key to creating this federation of cooperatives is staving off gentrification. The neighborhood where Cooperation Jackson is based has large amounts of vacant lots and abandoned buildings, but because it is near downtown, real estate developers and the city capitalist elite are hungrily eyeing the area. The backers of Cooperation Jackson are buying land to create an "eco village" that is intended to include quality, "deeply affordable" cooperative housing, a grocery and the other coop projects, all powered by solar energy. The larger goal is for the city of Jackson to become self-sustaining through comprehensive recycling, composting, local food production, links to regional organic farms, a city solar-power system and zero-emission public transportation.
Fannie Lou Hamer statute
Integrated with this project is a community-production initiative that will feature education and training to use 3-D print manufacturing technology and other new technologies. Envisioned are development programs to create employment; commercial manufacturing to provide 3-D-printed products, specialty products and tools; and community production to directly fill local needs and further develop technology. None of this will be done in a political vacuum — also envisioned are union-cooperative initiatives to train the "future generation of working class militants"; the formation of a class-based union encompassing all trades; movements to boost worker rights; the unionization of existing businesses; and the building of democratic unions in the cooperatives, in Jackson and across Mississippi.
This can't be a Jackson-only project in the long run. There cannot be "socialism in one city," of which the Cooperation Jackson organizers are acutely aware. Organizers hope for this project to be replicated in other cities of the Southern U.S., and for strong links to be developed between urban centers and farms. "We do not believe that socialism, or economic democracy, can be built in isolation on a local level, as it is neither economically viable or ecologically sustainable," Mr. Akuno noted [page 33]. Economic transformation is a necessity, founded on an explicit rejection of capitalist social relations.
To that end, cooperatives serve an additional function as training grounds for working people to manage without bosses. The relationship among cooperatives in turn must be based on building an integrated system, not competition. As Mr. Akuno and Dr. Nangwaya summarize in a separate article discussing the principals of economic democracy:
"Our character and psychological predisposition have been shaped under undemocratic, authoritarian relations and processes and our possession of the requisite knowledge, skills and attitude of self-management and participatory self-management is uneven. As a result, we tend to demonstrate behaviors that are not unlike our oppressors and exploiters. Critical education is essential to the process of exorcising the ghosts of conformity within the status quo from the psyche and behavior of the oppressed to enable the development of a cultural revolution. … [T]raining and development programs, the constant dissemination of critical information, and mass educational initiatives are central to the goal of preparing the people for self-management and self-determination." [page 53]
Spaces in a "weak link" of capitalism but difficulties persist
Mississippi is the poorest state in the United States, with one-third of its children living below the poverty line, a line set very low. The state is at or near the bottom in a variety of economic indicators. Top-down economic development may have made a few capitalists rich, but it has done little for the working people of Jackson — almost one-third live in poverty and median household income is barely more than half the U.S. average, according to U.S. Census data.
Yet it is Mississippi's status as a "weak link" in capitalism that provides the space for a project like Cooperation Jackson, organizers argue. Agricultural and industrial production are constrained by White elites who pursue a strategy of containment to fetter the Black population by curtailing its access to capital and living wages. The long memory of Black repression makes the population in the Black-majority "Kush" region willing to take actions to reverse their situation. A combination of favorable demographics, a mobilized population and elevated political consciousness make the area ripe for a project like Cooperation Jackson, organizers say [pages 229-230].
And although that organizing work primarily takes place at the grassroots level, there will remain the electoral component. Taking office with open eyes, Mayor Lumumba stated that with his election the movement would be engaging with, not wielding, state power. The electoral side of the movement has three components: mass education, preparatory battles (picking issues that can be framed in ways that resonate for multiple communities), and building "operational fronts" that are coalitions in differing combinations depending on circumstance. Thus electoral work is to support movement work, not the reverse. Through continued organizing, the movement was able to retake the mayor's office in June 2017 when Chokwe Antar Lumumba, son of the former mayor, was elected handily.
But foothold in City Hall or not, Cooperation Jackson remains in its earliest stages. Progress has been slow — as of early 2017, the cooperative café has struggled to get its permits, legal problems have delayed the buying of a building for 3-D manufacturing, raising money has been difficult, and land for the urban farm is polluted and in need of cleaning [page 278]. And the state government remains hostile.
Jackson Rising provides an excellent tool for understanding this extraordinary program, providing several voices, mostly of those involved in the work, and although a work of optimism the book is frank in discussing the problems and obstacles Cooperation Jackson faces. The book suffers from insufficient editing at times; typos proliferate in some articles and that is an unnecessary distraction. But do not let that deter you. Readers wanting to gain a firm understanding of the project, and the breathtaking range of influences it blends, should read this book.
Yes, the odds are against its success. At one point, an organizer acknowledges that criticisms that the project might be "overreaching" might contain some truth. Yet what else can be done but to attempt the impossible? Everybody who believes a better world is possible should be rooting and providing support for Cooperation Jackson.
* Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya (editors), Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi [Daraja Press, Montréal 2017]
2 Comments Posted in Book review Tagged books, Cooperation-Jackson, cooperatives, economic democracy, longreads, socialism
Creating a participatory system of economic democracy in Rojava
Out of repression has emerged one of the world's most interesting experiments in democracy. And by democracy, what is meant is not the formal capitalist variety of elections every few years in which consumption of consumer products is substituted for participation in societal decisions.
Surrounded on all sides by hostile forces intent on destroying them, in a part of the world that Western pundits claim can only be ruled by dictators, the Kurds of Syria are intent on creating a society more democratic than any found in North America or Europe. This is not simply a matter of creating institutions of direct and communal, as opposed to representative, democracy but, most importantly, democratizing the economy. In the words of the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, "In self-government, an alternative economic system is necessary, one that augments the resources of society rather than exploiting them, and in that way satisfies the society's multitude of needs."
The many sides of that equation are explored in detail in Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan,* a study of Rojava's experiment in radical democracy by three activists who spent months in Rojava studying the society being constructed, and who themselves have been involved in Rojava in various capacities. One of the authors, Anja Flach, spent two years in the Kurdish women's guerrilla army. Her co-authors are Ercan Ayboga, an environmental engineer, and Michael Knapp, a historian. Although the three authors make clear their sympathies for the Rojava revolution, their book is not hagiographic, but rather a serious analysis of a developing process.
The Kurdish people are split among four countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey — and have long suffered persecution in each of them. Their persecution in Turkey is well known; successive Turkish governments have attempted to disrupt organizing, obliterate Kurdish culture and ban the Kurdish language through waves of lethal military crackdowns. Mr. Öcalan escaped Turkey after a military coup that led to hundreds of thousands of Kurds thrown into jail; he and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) he leads were granted asylum in Syria. In the late 1990s, under Turkish pressure, Syria expelled the PKK, and a year later, Mr. Öcalan was abducted from a Greek consulate (a kidnapping believed to be a CIA operation) and has been imprisoned in Turkey since.
But that the Syrian régime found the PKK a useful lever against Turkey for a time did nothing to ameliorate ruthless repression against the Kurds of northern Syria. The Ba'ath Party of the Assad family implemented a policy of "Arabization" against Kurds and the other minority groups of the areas now comprising Rojava. Kurds were routinely forcibly removed from their farm lands and other properties, with Arabs settled in their place. Bashar al-Assad, in contrast to the misplaced hopes that he might institute a thaw upon succeeding his father in 2000, instituted a harsh neoliberalism. Mass privatization, suppression of unions, the shredding of the social safety net and a channeling of investment capital into tourism and away from production had a particularly devastating impact on Rojava.
After the uprisings in Syria against the Ba'ath régime began in 2011, the struggle quickly became militarized. The Kurds avoided being overrun by the Syrian army or the various Islamist forces because of their own organization. Grassroots organizing had been done steadily since the 1990s, and when local government collapsed following the 2011 uprisings, that organizing, a nascent council system and the formation of militias enabled the carving out of an autonomous territory. People surrounded government buildings, demanding the surrender of all arms while guaranteeing the safe passage of all Syrian government officials. This tactic worked, quickly sweeping through all three "cantons" of Rojava. (A canton is a portion of a province, perhaps bigger than a U.S. county or French department but smaller than a U.S. state or a French region.)
The aim here was to create a democratic territory through peaceful means. This takeover was accomplished nearly without bloodshed, although Rojava's militias have had to repeatedly repulse attacks from Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other hostile forces, as well as fend off the sometimes active hostility of the Turkish government, which has allowed Islamic State terrorists to freely cross the border and re-arm themselves. Sadly, Rojava has also been subjected to periodic blockades and political harassment from the two corrupt parties that control Iraqi Kurdistan, which borders Rojava to the east.
The system of democratic autonomy
The basic units of Rojava's organization are councils and commissions. These constitute the building blocks of Rojava's system of "democratic confederalism." The authors of Revolution in Rojava explain this concept in this way:
"Democratic Confederalism aims at achieving the autonomy of society, that is, a society that administers itself through small, self-governing decentralized units. It entails a permanent social revolution, reflected in every aspect of social structure. All institutions are self-organized and self-administered." [page 44]
Concurrent with that concept is "democratic autonomy," which is defined as "the autonomy of the commune" in an "anti-centrist, bottom-up approach." The commune is the basic unit of self-government, the base of the council system. A commune comprises the households of a few streets within a city or village, usually 30 to 400 households. Above the commune level are community people's councils comprising a city neighborhood or a village. The next level up are the district councils, consisting of a city and surrounding villages. The top of the four levels is the People's Council of West Kurdistan, which elects an executive body on which about three dozen people sit. ("West Kurdistan" is the portion of Kurdistan that lies within Syria.)
Integrated within the four-level council system are eight commissions — women, defense, economics, politics, civil society, free society, justice and ideology — that work with councils at all four levels; in turn commissions at local levels coordinate their work with commissions in adjacent areas. There is also a ninth commission, health, responsible for coordinating access to health care (regardless of ability to pay) and maintaining hospitals, in which medical professionals fully participate. Except for the women's commission, all bodies have male and female co-leaders.
Taking with upmost seriousness the full liberation of women (also expressed in the all-women's militias that fight on the front lines the same as men's units), the women's commissions are tasked, inter alia, with adjudicating cases of patriarchal violence and forced marriage. An umbrella women's movement organizes women across Rojava, taking on activities including educational work, publishing a newspaper, pushing for legislation, and investigating and documenting domestic violence. This work has roots in the 1990s, when PKK women organized door to door. When organizing by men was heavily suppressed after 2004, women organized clandestinely, giving them experience.
Making women's participation central is of course a glaring contrast with the Islamist groups and the so-called moderate groups of the Free Syrian Army. Every organization in Rojava must include at least 40 percent women. Asya Abdullah, co-chair of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, Rojava's largest party, said the revolution is conscious of not repeating the mistakes of the past, in which women's liberation was often put on the back-burner. She said:
"We're a still long way from achieving our goals. … But we've learned from the failed revolutions in the past. They always said, 'Let's carry the revolution to success, and then we'll give women our rights.' But after the revolution, of course, it didn't happen. We're not repeating that old story in our revolution." [page 70]
Creating a new justice system
As with many governmental functions, the judicial system has had to be rebuilt from scratch. Peace committees seek consensus through dialogue at the commune and neighborhood levels. The goal is rehabilitation rather than punishment. Most cases are settled in peace committees, but felonies and those cases not adjudicated in the peace committees are assigned to district-level people's courts. There are separate women's peace committees that handle cases of male violence against women in which all-women panels hand down decisions.
Parallel to these systems of democratic self-activity is the Democratic-Autonomous Administration. This is essentially a dual government, created primarily for foreign governments. Because Rojava's councils have been ignored elsewhere, the DAA was created so that world's governments would have a government they could recognize. Each of three Rojava cantons has a DAA, which includes an elected parliament and ministries that are distributed among the various political parties so that each has at least one minister. These, however, rely on the earlier-established council system and work with the councils. The division of labor between the councils and the DAA has yet to be worked out, nor how to reconcile a dual-government structure.
Civil society associations also play large roles in Rojava. These groups perform educational work, organize grassroots activity and place representatives on the councils. Many of these associations are occupation groups. In contrast to what the Kurdish movement sees as the state existing as a means of extracting profits for favored social groups or classes and inculcating a fixation on authority, civil society is substituted for a state. The authors write:
"The Kurdish movement, in its anti-statism, thus draws on [Antonio] Gramsci's concept of civil society in proposing to strengthen civil society for the purpose of overthrowing the state. In contrast to the abortive Bolshevist strategy of seizing state power, Öcalan posits, like Gramsci on the ideological, political struggle for civil society, a 'war of position' beyond military confrontation. Through empowerment, a civil society tries to free itself from the hands of the state and its religious, economic and administrative structures and so to build a counter-hegemony and to activate individual parts of the society to represent civil society in councils and communes." [pages 122-123]
Economic development on a democratic basis
This democratic concept extends to the economy. Food and fuel prices are controlled, working conditions are negotiated among several interest groups, workers' rights are defended and the pursuit of profit maximization is blocked to avoid the destructive tendencies of capitalism. The principals of the "communal economy" are described in this way by the Union of Civil Society Associations:
"The state system exploited the society's labor power and trampled the rights of workers. Under Democratic Autonomy, civil society associations solve problems according to principles of moral politics and an ecological society. The unity of society is the foundation. These associations hold society together. They ensure the unity that is needed to satisfy everyday social needs. Of course, they do this as part of democratic, communal life. They are how society organizes itself." [page 124]
Rojava, the authors write, was a "quasi-colony" under the Ba'ath régime. There was an enforced agricultural monoculture with no local production allowed. Oil, gas and agricultural products were shipped out, and canned food and finished products from elsewhere shipped in. Not even trees were allowed to be planted. So although there is much productive farmland, Rojava could not come close to self-sufficiency in food as all farmers were forced to raise wheat or cotton. Farming is now being re-oriented toward local needs so that a much higher percentage of food can be produced locally; this is partly a necessity as the area is often blockaded by neighbors.
The city of Qamishli in Syrian Kurdistan
The councils, already in existence, organized the economy to prevent a collapse after Rojava's liberation. Price controls, measures against hoarding food and medicine, agricultural diversification, planting fruit trees, and building grain mills and industry were implemented and are ongoing projects. Rojava's economic underdevelopment is seen locally as a disadvantage and an opportunity. It is the latter because, the authors write, it "allows the traditional social collectivism of the Kurdish people to be channeled positively to build a new, alternative economy." [page 197]
Much of this new economy rests on cooperative enterprises. Cooperatives are required to be connected to the council system; independence is not allowed. Cooperatives work through the economics commissions to meet social needs. Much of this cooperative production is in agriculture or small shops but there are plans to create more industry to meet local needs. Thirty percent of all coop proceeds must be given to local self-government administrations. And this is seen as a route to eliminating unemployment. The authors write:
"The cooperative system is solving the problem of unemployment. 'Through the communes and cooperatives and the needs-based economy,' explains [Afrin University chair] Dr. [Ahmad] Yousef, 'each person can participate in production in his own way, and there will be no unemployment. Where communes are established, it will become clear that unemployment is a result of the capitalist system itself.' " [page 206]
Such a system can't work without an educated population:
"To ensure that society is able to make decisions about the use of water, soil, and energy, information about the society's needs are taken out of the hands of the experts and socialized. Education is critical for this purpose. 'We school the people in how cooperatives can form a social economy,' says [Union of Kurdish Communities leader Cemil] Bayık. 'We are establishing economics academies to advance this.' " [page 207]
Surrounded by a hostile world
All this is at odds not only with the existing institutions and state organizations surrounding them, but with the capitalist powers as well. How can Rojava's experiment possibly survive in a such a hostile world? The authors of Revolution in Rojava strongly urge the building of Left support sufficiently strong to influence North American and European governments. The people of Rojava, the authors stress, are in need of material support from the West at the same time they are acutely aware of the dangers of a U.S. embrace.
The idea that Rojava's acceptance of Western aid is a "betrayal" is called "naïve" by the authors, drawing parallels with Republican Spain of the 1930s. Describing Rojava as an "anti-fascist project," they note that the capitalist West turned its back on the Spanish Revolution, allowing fascism to triumph.
The danger of U.S. material support, of course, can't be underestimated, given that a communal economy oriented toward people's needs rather than private profit is anathema to U.S. corporate and government power, which have teamed up to throttle many a revolution attempting to transcend capitalism or simply assert independent development. Moreover, the U.S. wrongly classifies the PKK, which seeks to implement the same system as their fellow Kurds in Syria, as "terrorists" and has long supported Ankara's scorched-earth repression of Kurds.
In the short term, material support from the West is needed if Rojava is to successfully defend itself from Islamic militants and the Turkish government. Syrian (and Turkish) Kurds, who see their model as one that can be expanded across Syria and the entire Middle East, have their eyes open to the narrowness of the path that must be thread through these contradictions. Nor are their eyes closed to their unsolved problems of pollution, water, waste management, and the stop-gap use of diesel generators that is causing serious environmental problems.
The book ends on an optimistic note, readapting Rosa Luxemburg's famous phrase to declare the future is "communalism or barbarism." Although brief discussions of Thomas Jefferson, Luxemburg and Gramsci (who was no opponent of the Bolsheviks) are poorly argued and their views misstated, this is at most a minor irritant in a work ably presenting the first comprehensive study of Rojava's inspiring experiment in mass-participation democracy. Revolution in Rojava is an excellent introduction to a revolution that is not yet well known but should be.
* Ercan Ayboga. Anja Flach and Michael Knapp (translated by Janet Biehl), Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan [Pluto Books, London 2016]
16 Comments Posted in Book review Tagged books, cooperatives, economic democracy, economics, feminism, longreads, Rojava, socialism
Analyzing the failures of Syriza
So many put their puts hopes into Syriza; so many were bitterly disappointed. Greece's Coalition of the Radical Left proved wholly unable to resist the enormous pressures put on it and it is Greek working people who are paying the price, not excepting those who voted for Syriza.
How should we analyze the depressing spectacle of what had been a genuinely Left party, indeed a coalition of leftist forces from a variety of socialist perspectives, self-destructing so rapidly? The simplistic response would be to wash our hands and condemn Syriza as "opportunists," but we'll learn exactly nothing with such an attitude. If we are serious about analyzing Syriza's spectacular failure — including those who expected this outcome in advance — digging through the rubble is unavoidable.
There were many currents coursing through Syriza, in addition to other Left tendencies outside. Nor were there shortages of people who feared what the fate of Syriza might become, including leaders inside it, before it took power, reminds Helena Sheehan in her new book The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left.* Written in exhilaration and sorrow, Professor Sheehan, a veteran of solidarity work with the Greek Left, rides those tides as she recounts the anticipation and optimism before, and the depression and shock afterward, inside Greece and among Syriza's allies across Europe.
The prologue to this failure is well known, but Professor Sheehan takes us through it in a "you are there" style reflecting what was happening then and her own optimism. That we know how this story will end does not detract from this writing style; rather it heightens the emotions as we re-live what at the time appeared to be the imminent first serious blow against global austerity and the ever tightening grip of finance capital. This was not a pollyannaish optimism, for no one serious had doubts about the immense task facing Syriza should it be elected. Certainly Greece could not be a small socialist island in an immense sea of capitalism — Greece's problems then and now can have only European and international solutions.
Still, someone has to go first. The international Left saw hope in Syriza, and Syriza economists worked on solutions. There was much political seriousness as Syriza was seen as the last hope; that fascism might well be next given the growing menace of Golden Dawn focused minds.
Professor Sheehan sets this stage, opening her book in 2012, a year in which a second memorandum is signed, forcing more harsh austerity on Greeks, and in which Syriza rose from a minor parliamentary presence to finishing a close second to Greece's main party of the Right, New Democracy. Providing the analyses, hopes and fears of a variety of Greek activists gathered on repeated visits, she recounts Syriza's strong efforts to engage social-movement groups (in contrast to the Greek Communist Party's sectarianism) and for Syriza to be inter-generational in its leadership.
Tip-toeing to the election by backtracking?
Nonetheless, there was Left criticism that Syriza was "watering down its wine" or wanting only to manage capitalism instead of creating socialism. Syriza officials vigorously denied this, saying they would reverse austerity cuts, restore wages and pensions, and re-distribute wealth and power. This would not yet be socialism, but "was intended to open a new path to socialism for the twenty-first century." One danger sign, however, was that the party was split on whether to remain within the eurozone, even if the euro and the European Union as a whole were seen as a site of struggle. Some within Syriza, such as Costas Lapavitsas, argued that Syriza should be prepared for a break with the European Union. Despite these warnings, no systematic preparatory work on any "Plan B" was formulated.
Austerity might have been coming down harder on Greeks than elsewhere in Europe, but this was no aberration specific to one small country EU officials saw as easy to bully. This was not a local battle, Professor Sheehan writes:
"These cuts to pay, pensions, and public services, this privatization of public property, this redistribution of wealth from below to above: these were not temporary contingent measures. These were integral to a systemic restructuring of capitalism. … Where there were once experiments in socialism in the east, there were now oligarchies. Next on the agenda: advances achieved by the labor movement in the west were to be stripped." [page 58]
Yet no success in a single European country will be sustainable unless it is followed by similar successes in other countries.
"Yiannis Tolios, an economist, also elected to the [Syriza] central committee, articulated the problem starkly, but with a different stress: 'If having socialism in a single country is considered hard, having socialism in all countries at the same time is nearly impossible.' Greece needed to forge ahead, whether the rest were ready or not, but it was perilous path." [page 59]
Syriza would reconstitute itself as a unified party, with its previous constituent groups, including its largest, Synaspismos, dissolving themselves (although some remained outside). One-quarter of the central committee were members of Left Platform, an organized faction advocating reversing austerity by any means necessary, with the central committee majority heterogeneous but pro-Alexis Tsipras. Internal critics complained that too much power was being concentrated in the hands of the party leader and his inner circle, nor was concern that Syriza was moving too far toward the right confined to the Left Platform.
Most active members of Syriza believed capitalism was the problem and socialism the solution, the author writes, but had "stopped dreaming of storming winter palaces." She writes:
"They were not holding out for an all-encompassing insurrection, which would destroy capitalism one day and inaugurate socialism the next day. They were planning for a protracted process, which would include winning multiparty elections, entering into difficult negotiations, agreeing to unattractive alliances, undoing damage done, building the new inside the shell of the old." [page 85]
Winning an election, but not necessarily power
Anticipation grew as Syriza prepared to take office, but the party's 2014 Thessaloniki Program was seen by many as a significant retreat. Was Syriza watering down its wine even before the next election? Whatever the strength of the wine, Syriza won the election of January 2015. The "troika" of EU institutions and the International Monetary Fund that had been dictating austerity to the previous Greek governments wasted no time in tightening the screws on the new government in what was seen as an outright attempt to humiliate Syriza. Negotiations dragged on, and amidst much international solidarity, Prime Minister Tsipras called a referendum that summer to supposedly buttress his negotiating position.
Greeks responded by heavily voting "no" to further austerity. The Syriza government then did a remarkable about-face. Eight days later, Prime Minister Tsipras signed an agreement even more unfavorable that what had been demanded by the troika. More than half of Syriza's central committee signed an opposition letter and most Syriza members were furious. This was ignored.
View of Vikos Gorge, Greece (photo by Skamnelis)
Some Syriza officials offered public justifications for this turn of events, arguing that the party was in a marathon and not a finished race, and that the party retained scope for maneuver and to continue to be a Left party through links with solidarity networks. Others, however, argued that the new agreement was a disastrous capitulation. One alternative path to austerity was to exit the eurozone. The counter-argument was that the analysis supporting a eurozone withdrawal was correct but nonetheless such a road should not be taken due to the balance of forces tilted heavily against the Greek economy.
There were arguments both for remaining in and for leaving the eurozone, but anti-austerity advocates on both sides recommended strong steps such as renouncing the debt, nationalizing the banks and imposing capital controls. These were not considered — Syriza never had a "Plan B."
Staying in the eurozone was favored by a majority of Greeks, a factor undoubtedly an influence on the party. But by taking office without an alternative plan to negotiating with the troika, in particular EU officials completely cold to any Greek argument, Syriza had boxed in itself. Excuses by Syriza officials for why, rather than reversing austerity, they had agreed to its intensification were just that, excuses. Professor Sheehan challenges those excuses sharply:
"It was one thing to allude to a gun to the head and to admit to defeat, but another to turn around and to claim a great moral victory and to aim the attack on anyone who said otherwise. There was much violation of elementary logic, evasion of empirical evidence, and denial of ethical culpability. … The point about conceptualizing contradiction is not to affirm it and to wallow in it, but to struggle to resolve it, to transcend it, to create a new synthesis from it. As if intensified economic expropriation and political capitulation were not bad enough already, they added intellectual obfuscation and moral degradation to the dreadful reality unfolding. … You cannot build a left when you trash the very basis of our beliefs. It came from a mix of blatant opportunism, genuine confusion, psychological distress, and postmodernist sophistry." [pages 133-134]
Syriza, despite all the bustle of the previous three years, had taken office unprepared. And, bizarrely, holding a belief that the troika could be reasoned with.
A suicide mission followed by a purge
Next was a "suicide mission for the Left" — Syriza introduced into parliament a 977-page bill to be voted on immediately with no time to be read. The Left Platform voted no as a unified faction and a separate Syriza parliamentary faction, the 53+ Group, complained about the stifling of party democracy, yet Syriza overall voted yes and the new agreement was approved with support from most other parties. "I do not believe that you can do bad to do good," is the author's succinct appraisal.
In the wake of shameful capitulation, rather than call a party congress, Prime Minister Tsipras decided to call a snap election, which he would use to purge Syriza of its left wing. He distinguished this campaign by attacking the Left and international supporters. The Left Platform members of parliament resigned to form a new party, Popular Unity, but with little time and no resources it failed to reach the 3 percent vote threshold. Syriza won again.
Defections from Syriza and attempts to build a new Left party have continued since as not only is no debt relief in sight despite one humiliating concession after another but Syriza lurches right in foreign policy and the prime minister falls to his knees in front of the church. It had taken Syriza only six months to travel the path that the former socialist party, Pasok, had traveled in 20 years but without the genuine reforms that Pasok had implemented early in its time in government. Implementing and expanding expropriation in order to end it is not dialectical; it is nonsense, Professor Sheehan points out.
So why had Syriza taken such a road? No one answer could suffice, but the author, in a wide-ranging survey, explores several opinions offered by various Greek activists. In short form these include:
That Syriza's actions constitute a retreat, not a betrayal, as transformation is a painful marathon with many retreats.
Syriza had no coherent program but its left was too focused on a transformation of the state.
Syriza failed to contest the narrative of "there is no alternative" and should have renounced the debt, nationalized the banks and elaborated an anti-capitalist narrative.
Syriza's failure is rooted in its class compromises and constant reassurances to the Right since 2012.
Popular Unity has a future despite "messing up" its first election.
It is impossible to control the economy inside the eurozone.
The power of money destroyed Syriza.
Helena Sheehan has written a most useful study of Syriza and in particular the range of platforms and outlooks, and the evolution of these, as the party prepared to take power and then found itself unable to manage, let alone solve, internal and external contradictions. That this is a "you are there" document from a personalized standpoint does not at all mean that The Syriza Wave is anything other than a serious political analysis. The work could have been strengthened in two ways: one, a deeper discussion of the economic issues, including the ramifications of staying in (or exiting) the eurozone, and, two, a discussion of how virtually every euro of the troika loans are going to creditors and banks rather than to the Greek people, a topic barely mentioned in passing only once. These are topics that would have added to the narrative.
Nonetheless, a reader wishing political analysis and to understand what activists and leaders in Syriza were thinking and doing, including ministers before and after taking up their posts, would do well to read this book. Professor Sheehan, despite the appropriately bitter denouncements of the party's performance in office in contrast to her earlier support, ends on an optimistic note. We are, after all, supposed to learn from defeat so we can do it better in the future, yes?
* Helena Sheehan, The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left [Monthly Review Press, New York 2016]
3 Comments Posted in Book review Tagged austerity, books, capitalism, Greece, Syriza