Teoría, Cultura y Género
Debate: ¿Del anticapitalismo al socialismo revolucionario?
Autor:
Alex Callinicos y Michael Albert
Fecha:
6/2/2004
Traductor:
Guillermo Crux, especial para PI
Fuente:
Z Net
ZNet | VisionStrategy
The Case For Revolutionary Socialism
by Alex Callinicos; December 07, 2003
It’s a media cliché that the anti-globalization movement is purely anti – that it knows what it is against, not what it is for. In fact, to be against neo-liberalism, corporate globalization, and imperial war is already to stand for quite a lot. This is reflected in the slogan of the World Social Forum – ‘Another World is Possible’: in other words, we can live in a world that isn’t ruled by the market. In France the movement is now known as the altermondialistes – the people who want another world. But what is the nature of this other world and how do we get to it? Here indeed there is no equivocal answer, partly because people have different visions of the alternative to neo-liberalism, but also because many just aren’t sure or because they think it would be divisive to be too explicit.
This uncertainty and disparity are unavoidable in a movement as diverse as ours, and in lots of ways it isn’t a problem. It would be foolish and undesirable to strive for a uniformity of view that could only be achieved by draining the life out of the movement or splitting it. But that doesn’t mean that discussion that seeks to achieve greater clarity about alternatives and strategies isn’t both necessary and productive.
What do we want?
One way of getting a handle on such debate is to ask what our values are. Even if we disagree or are unsure about what we want to achieve, what we say and do may still reveal what we hold to be of value. These values in turn set the standard by which alternatives to neo-liberalism can then be appraised.
In my view, the movement for another world is committed to four main values – justice, efficiency, democracy, and sustainability. Before discussing them in any detail, let me emphasize that in picking out these values I am making a judgement that other people may want to contest (Michael Albert, for example, has a different list of values governing the kind of self-managing society he advocates). I am drawing inferences from what activists and intellectuals involved in the movement say and do, but I think my interpretation is a reasonable one.
1. Justice: One of the movement’s names is the global justice movement. We constantly – and rightly – denounce the injustice of the present world, with the vast inequalities that it involves. But what is justice? This is a vast subject in its own right, but it seems to me that the movement is committed to an egalitarian conception of justice. This might mean, for example, that everyone is entitled to equal access to the resources that they need to live the life they have reason to value.
2. Efficiency: This may seem surprisingly technocratic a value, but consider the criticism that we make of neo-liberal capitalism for its wastefulness – the resources squandered on packaging, advertising, etc., the failure of market prices to register the real costs (for example, to the environment) of economic processes, and so on. The implication is that any alternative society should seek to make the best use of the resources available, where ‘best’ doesn’t mean (as at present) ‘most profitable’ but rather reflects both all our values and the constraints imposed on us both by nature and by the need to live together cooperatively.
3. Democracy: We criticize contemporary capitalism for its lack of democracy, for the way in which the financial markets and the multinational corporations tyrannically rule the lives of most people on the planet. Moreover, the ways in which we organize seek to reflect the democracy for which we are striving. There is much debate over what democracy involves – representative vs. direct democracy, consensus vs. the majority principle, and so on. But we are agreed on the need for a radical extension of the scope and content of democracy.
4. Sustainability: One of the main motivations informing the movement is horror at the environmental catastrophes that the present economic system is not merely driving towards but is already producing. Experts on climate change are beginning to suggest that – to judge by, for example, last summer’s heat wave in the Northern hemisphere – the temperature rises caused by greenhouse gas emissions are likely to be at the higher end of their projections, with potentially appalling consequences with which the planet will have to live for decades even if radical changes were to take place now. We need a drastic reorientation in patterns of production and consumption, settlement and transportation to achieve sustainable forms of development.
Beyond capitalism
Realizing these values necessitates a challenge not just to neo-liberalism, but to the capitalist system itself. I follow Marx in maintaining that capitalism has two fundamental features:
1. It is based on the exploitation of wage labour – that is, on depriving people of the resources they need to live independently and thereby giving them no acceptable alternative to working for a capitalist on terms that lead to their exploitation;
2. It is driven by a blind process of competitive accumulation: the rival firms that jointly control most productive resources invest in the hope of winning greater market share and increased profits.
These features are more deeply entrenched than some of the things that have been at the focus of anti-globalization critiques – e.g. financial market speculation. The achievement of neo-liberalism has been to remove many of the restraints imposed by efforts to regulate capitalism in the mid-20th century. We now live under a relatively ‘pure’ version of capitalism.
Given the nature of capitalism, it’s hard to see how any version is compatible with the values set out above. Not merely is capitalist exploitation unjust, but the present system involves a kind of lottery under which individuals’ life chances can be changed radically for the better or the worse as a result of market fluctuations entirely beyond their control. Capitalism is a wasteful system: as I pointed out above, the price system doesn’t reflect real costs; economic crises involve human and material resources going unused on a huge scale; at the global level, billions of people are surplus to the system’s requirements, and therefore are left to rot in the most abject poverty.
Capitalism is necessarily undemocratic since economic decisions are vested in the hands of small groups of corporate executives who are not accountable either to their employees or to the wider public. Finally, the very logic of competitive accumulation is inconsistent with sustainable development since the system is driven forward by a blind process in which firms and markets allocate resources on the basis of bets on what will prove to be profitable with no account taken of the environmental impact of these choices.
It’s also hard to see how any attempt to return to a more regulated version of capitalism can remedy these faults. Many activists and intellectuals hope at best to humanize capitalism. This is, for example, a powerful motivation behind the Tobin Tax on international financial transactions. Its originator, James Tobin, believed that such a tax would slow down financial speculation, thereby restoring economic power to the nation-state and allowing a return to the Keynesian era after the Second World War. Such reasoning dovetails with a feature of the anti-globalization movement in its early phases, when it was common to accept the idea central to mainstream discourse in the 1990s that globalization was weakening the power of the state. But whereas neo-liberal boosters welcomed this development, activists and intellectuals argued that it was necessary to rebuild the power of the nation-state. This was one reason why the movement was baptized the anti-globalization movement.
It is much more difficult now, after 9/11, to see the state as part of the solution and not part of the problem. The ‘war on terrorism’ has reminded us that capitalism is also imperialism, that it involves geopolitics as well as economics, competition among states as well as competition among firms. Some leading figures in the movement (for example, Bernard Cassen and George Monbiot) have reacted to the conflict over Iraq by supporting the idea that the European Union should be strengthened to become a counterweight to the American ‘hyperpower’. But the emergence of a rival superpower to the US could unleash a new arms race, with all the waste of resources and threat to human survival that the old Cold War represented.
Refusing to see a more regulated capitalism as the solution doesn’t mean that we should never make demands on states, whether our ‘own’ one or groups such as the EU. When public services are attacked, we should defend them; moreover, we should put pressure on the state to extend and improve the services that it currently supplies and to finance them through a system of progressive taxation that redistributes wealth and income from the rich to the poor. But, while it is right to strive for reforms of the present system, the values set out above – and indeed humankind and the planet itself – cannot safely coexist with capitalism. The logic of competitive accumulation means that the restraints imposed on capitalism by reform movements are always liable to be thrown off with they conflict with the requirements of profitability: such is the lesson of the progressive dismantlement of the Keynesian welfare state over the past quarter century.
The implication of all this is that we need to develop an alternative social logic, a non-market alternative to capitalism. When I say ‘non-market’ I’m not advocating banning all economic exchanges among individuals. What I’m rejecting is a market economy as it is understood by two great Karls, Marx and Polanyi – that is an economy where resources are allocated as a result of the competitive struggle between rival capitals that jointly control these resources. Such a system, as Polanyi shows in The Great Transformation, seeks to commodify everything: we can see this today with neo-liberalism. This system also rules out in principle any democratic process to decide what overall outcomes production should aim to achieve and the appropriate means for achieving these outcomes. In other words, it rules out planning. But this is crazy: how can we address problems like global poverty and climate change without some sort of democratic political process to determine, among other things, how resources should be allocated in order to solve them?
We need planning. But it has a terrible name these days, as a result of the experience of Stalinism. Several reviews of my Anti-Capitalist Manifesto dismissed it out of hand on the grounds that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the theoretical critiques of Friedrich von Hayek proved that planning is impossible. But, when you think about it, this is a somewhat bizarre way of reasoning. Because one kind of planning – in fact a bureaucratically centralized command economy than many experts argue didn’t merit the label ‘planned’ – failed, for reasons that are a matter of enormous historical debate, does it follow that any form of planning must fail? Surely not – unless we really think that history ended when the Berlin Wall came down and humankind’s future will unfold within the horizons of market capitalism (in which case history probably would come to an end pretty soon thanks to war and environmental degradation).
There are various models of a democratically planned economy. Here resources are allocated on the basis of a democratic process that involves horizontal relations among networks of producers and consumers – a radically different form of economic coordination from either capitalism (where allocation is the outcome of competition) or a Stalinist command economy (where resources are allocated dictatorially). One of these models is Parecon, developed by Michael Albert. Another, somewhat more centralized model is Pat Devine’s ‘negotiated coordination’, first outlined in his book Democracy and Economic Planning (1988). The relative merits of these and other models are a matter for discussion. Nevertheless, their existence indicates that serious and concrete thinking is going on about what a systemic alternative to capitalism would look like. A democratically planned economy conceived along these lines represents, in my view, the best way of realizing the values to which the movement is committed.
I think this alternative is best called ‘socialism’. It is true that this word has been devalued by the Stalinist disaster, but the Bush administration daily debauches words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ that it would be mad for us to surrender. There are two positive reasons for sticking by the term socialism. First, I think that the models referred to above embody what the best in the socialist tradition has aspired to – for example, the tradition to which I belong, what Hal Draper called ‘socialism from below’, the red thread of revolutionary Marxism that runs from Marx and Engels, through Lenin and Luxemburg, to Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
Secondly, one important component of the idea of socialism is the proposition that material productive resources should generally be socially owned. Currently, the movement is involved in countless struggles against privatization, but these are usually couched defensively. The other side – the big corporations and their lobbyists – have a much clearer grasp of the importance of economic ownership: look at how aggressively they fight for intellectual property rights, for example. We shouldn’t be afraid of saying that in the kind of economic system that would realize our values the main productive resources would be socially owned, on a democratic and decentralized basis.
How to we get there?
It’s simply a recognition of reality to say that achieving a democratically planned economy means a revolution. Indeed, in one sense this is just a tautology. Replacing capitalism with an economic system consonant with our values requires a radical social transformation – a revolution, in other words. But to say this is not to settle the means by which this revolution would come about. Central to the tradition of socialism from below is, as the name suggests, the idea that revolution cannot be imposed from above: only the vast majority who are exploited and oppressed by capitalism can liberate themselves. As Marx put it, socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class.
The common sense understanding of revolution equates it with violence. The conception of revolution that I have just set out is very different. It’s about people freeing themselves and creating a new form of society. This doesn’t mean that violence doesn’t figure in the equation at all. There is – to put it mildly – a very high probability that those who currently dominate the world would violently resist any serious attempt to remove their power and privileges. Look at the ferocity with which the Bush administration and allies like Tony Blair are waging the ‘war on terrorism’, not just invading Afghanistan and Iraq, but systematically trampling on civil liberties. And al-Qaeda is many ways a socially conservative movement, one with no beef against private property. What would the rich and powerful do if there were a really serious threat to their economic power? The ‘other 11 September’ – the US-backed military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile in 1973 – gives a hint of the answer.
What this means is that any revolutionary movement has to be prepared to overcome the violent resistance of the other side. This doesn’t mean engaging in military conspiracies or terrorism. The strength of any movement for radical social change depends on two factors: (1) the extent of its mass support; (2) how much that mass support is self-organized. The more that a movement consists of networks of workplace and community organizations that have the capacity both to resist repression and, if necessary, to take on the management of society in their own locality, the stronger it is. This means that there is an organic connection between the kind of society that we want to achieve, a self-managing society where people organize at work and in their communities to run their own lives on the basis on democratic cooperation, and the way we need to organize to achieve that society.
We’re still a very long way from being able to challenge for power. Bernard Cassen, founder of ATTAC, the initially French movement against financial speculation, recently posed what he calls ‘the 20 million person question’: the European Social Forums, along with the trade unions and the left parties don’t connect with ‘those 20 million people – unemployed, poor blue- and white-collar workers, small shopkeepers wiped out by the big chains, one-parent families, people in casual jobs, immigrants, etc. – who are “without” access to the effective exercise of citizenship’ in France. [1]
This is a good question, and not just in France, even if Cassen’s answer, which is to confine the Social Forums to education and propaganda, is manifestly the wrong one. The movement needs to sink itself much more deeply into the grain of working-class life than it does at present. This requires a lot of things. Let me mention just three. First, we need to learn how to link the ‘big picture’ – global resistance to neo-liberalism and war – to the everyday struggles against the effects of corporate globalization that are going on everywhere all the time. Secondly, we have to make the connections between the movement and the organized working class much more systematic than they are. In Europe there has been progress in this direction: with every successive European Social Forum the trade unions get more involved. People from both sides – anti-capitalist activists and trade unionists – have to learn to live with the differences in political cultures and organizational styles involved and to make the compromises required to achieve a stronger and more united movement.
Thirdly, and perhaps more controversially, we shouldn’t be afraid of engaging in electoral politics. The war in Iraq dramatized the broader crisis of political representation. In countries like Britain, Italy, and Spain an enormous gap opened up between the movement on the streets and the official political system, where governments supported Bush in defiance of public opinion. This is a symbol of the more fundamental gap between political elites who are unanimously neo-liberal and the very large numbers of people who, seeing their views and interests completely ignored by official politics, either withdraw from voting or support candidates of the far right who pretend to be against the system. In some European countries the radical left is beginning to mount electoral challenges that seek to give a voice to the excluded. I don’t know what the implications are for the US (though I’m sure it’s a mistake to vote Democrat, even against Bush).
In everything that we do we should be trying to knit together a movement that has three characteristics; (1) it’s as broad and united as possible; (2) it has the social weight that can only come through the involvement of organized workers with the collective economic strength that they can deploy; and (3) it has a radical vision of profound social transformation. This may sound like a tall order, but think about the enormous distance that we have come, as a global movement, in the barely four years since Seattle. We’ve got a long way to go, but another world really is possible.
Much more supporting argument will be found in my two most recent books, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto and The New Mandarins of American Power, both published by Polity this year, and in The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, recently reissued by Bookmarks.
[1] B. Cassen, Tout à commencé á Porto Alegre …(Paris, 2003), pp. 139-40.
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ZNet | VisionStrategy
Values, Visions, and Strategy
by Michael Albert; December 09, 2003
Alex,
I like that you start with values. I think creating vision requires a small set that covers our central aspirations while being specific and demanding enough to orient our analyses.
You start with justice. I am for justice too, but so is everyone left of Attila the Hun. You suggest it might mean equal access to the means of a good life – but what about outcomes? What if some people work harder or work less hard? Should they get the same income? Property owners think they have equal access but do more with it and likewise for people with above average or remarkable talents. If surgeons shouldn’t earn ten times assemblers and quarterbacks shouldn’t earn a hundred times postal workers, why shouldn’t they? I think by justice you have in mind how much we each get, but I don’t know what specifically you favor, and I don’t see how highlighting justice can help guide vision unless it’s meaning is more precise.
I think favoring efficiency, your second value, means we favor attaining our aims while conserving assets that we value. So I also favor efficiency, and meant this way, so does everyone else. The issue of dispute is about what ends are sought and what conditions are valued. For capitalists, profits are sought and means of attaining profits are valued, and the rest is peripheral. Coal baron profits, black lung for workers, and pollution for neighbors is capitalistically efficient. Capitalist efficiency means whatever else makes owners rich at our expense. So I favor efficiency in attaining our social values, not theirs. In other words, I think that if favoring efficiency to help us envision a better economy, it must be linked with other values.
You propose democracy as your third value. But again, what does it mean? Should everyone have equal say in everything economic and in other dimensions of life as well, with majority plus one ruling? I assume you don’t think that…but, if not, thenwhat is the principle that democracy connotes? Is your desired value for decision making something we can further describe for the economy? If we can’t, I don’t see how saying we are for democracy can guide us to institutional vision. If we can, I agree it can help us greatly.
Your fourth value, sustainability, I also find worthy. But the economic issue is how does an economy properly account for the ecological impacts of production and consumption – and how do decisions about what to do then get made. I agree that we need to reorient production and consumption to not run out of critical non-renewable resources and not pollute our environment to our detriment. But I think the issue specific to sustainability is respect for future generations, and I am not sure there is any way to have future citizens’ interests impact current economic decision making other than by current generations coming to care for their immediate and distant offspring more consciously, and having the information and decision-making influence to act on that commitment.
In sum, regarding the values you propose, I find them congenial, but I suspect they are too vague to effectively inform liberating alternatives.
Regarding capitalism you emphasize wage labor and a blind process of competitive accumulation. I agree on both counts. But in addition, for me capitalism is private ownership of productive assets, competitive markets, corporate divisions of labor, and remuneration for property and power. As a result, I think capitalism has three rather than two primary classes: capitalists and workers as you identify, but also, in between those two, what I call the coordinator class. It seems to me that somehow your (and Marxism’s) priority focus on the wage labor relation and on the accumulation process but not nearly as much on the implications for workers of their particular positions in the division of labor, fails to sufficiently highlight the third class that exists between labor and capital and that gains its advantages largely from having a relative monopoly on empowering work compared to workers who endure overwhelmingly rote and obedient labor.
Like you, I reject markets as a mode of allocation. Markets produce anti-sociality, misvalue labor and consumption that has impacts beyond the buyer and seller (with catastrophic implications for the environment), violate self-management, commodify and commercialize nearly everything, induce remuneration for bargaining power, and impose class division between coordinators and workers. And of course markets are even worse when coupled with private ownership of productive assets. So we agree about rejecting markets, and we also agree that central planning violates values having to do with apportionment of decision making power and class relations. We agree as well on the positive need to have “horizontal relations” by which economic actors cooperatively negotiate outcomes, presumably with appropriate levels of influence, but I think these relations need to be spelled out a good deal more than you attempt.
What I wonder, however, is why in talking about a new economy, even very broadly and briefly, you don’t address distribution and power more explicitly, both in the workplace and in the broader economy. Can’t we say more about the conditions that facilitate workers and consumers expressing their preferences? And about where and how they have their say, and also how much say they have? I wonder if you see workplace organization being another locus of needed change, and, if so, what kind? And ditto for norms of remuneration.
We disagree about the word “Socialism.” You note that the word has been devalued by a Stalinist disaster and you indicate that the fact of that disaster would no more warrant getting rid of the term socialism than the failure of an instance of democracy, or religion, or anarchism, or anything else would warrant saying all instances would have to be rejected. I think your point is right if we assume that Stalinism was a disastrous violation of what socialism was supposed to be. The trouble is, however, it isn’t just Stalinism that causes me to feel that while the word socialism is often meant to connote lots of fine values like equity and participation, institutionally it obstructs those very same values. Beyond Stalinism, what indicates this is the entire legacy of actually implemented socialist visions and even the entire library of socialist economic models (with, arguably, a very few exceptions). What has been enacted or described as socialism, whenever socialists have had power or have seriously put forth a full model, has virtually universally been public or state ownership, corporate divisions of labor, and markets or central planning. Since I reject all of that, not just the Stalinist state, I don’t see a reason for using the label socialism.
We agree that getting rid of capitalism will be a revolution – and I think the same holds for getting rid of patriarchy, racism, and authoritarian political structures. We agree also that overcoming the power of the state and other centers of power depends on, in your words, “(1) the extent of its mass support; (2) how much that mass support is self-organized.” I hope we can also agree that it follows that there should be large movements with grass roots control, plus direct local vehicles of organization and struggle in workplaces and communities. You make no mention, however, of a political party, much less of a Leninist one, and I wonder why not.
I think you are right about the need of movements to relate to working class life and aspirations. But here I think we have another difference. I think the obstacle to movements making greater headway in reaching out to working people resides partly, as you indicate, in our program and issues – but I think that it resides more basically in movement social relations and structure. Our movements tend to be more congenial to and to reflect more in their structures, tone, preferences, and language the coordinator class’s structures, tone, preferences, and language. I think that what leads to this impasse is our relative paucity of attention to transcending coordinatorist inclinations and attaining in their place classless ones.
An analogy with racism or sexism can help explain, perhaps. When our conceptual toolboxes are weak on racism and sexism we have no guard against the weight of these oppressions in our lives and in society causing our movements to become racially and sexually off-putting to women and people of color. Similarly, the fact that our conceptual toolboxes are weak regarding the relations of the coordinator and working classes to one another leaves us largely unable to prevent the weight of classism in our lives and in society from making our movements uncongenial to workers. Tirelessly repeating that we are for the working class or for classlessness, absent real internal indications that it is the full truth, will rarely convince a working person who is put off by the real material evidence of the tilt toward coordinator attitudes, divisions of labor, and preferences evident our movements.
Another sentence would take me over 1500 words – I will stop here.
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Rejoinder To Albert 1
by Alex Callinicos; December 11, 2003
Dear Michael,
Thanks for your comments. In response I'll try to deal with the main issues that you raise, but also to move the argument on a bit:
1. Justice and other values: Of course you're right that everyone claims to have justice on their side, but the conception of egalitarian justice that I advanced is more precise than you suggest. According to this conception, everyone is entitled to equal access to the resources that they require in order to live the life they have reason to value. Three points about this:
(i) Those who inherit wealth or natural talents may sincerely believe that they had equal access to society's resources, but this doesn't alter the fact that this belief is false - and indeed if used to justify rewarding property or genetic endowment a pretty obvious rationalization. 'Equal access' means equal access.
(ii) The form of equality advocated here precisely does not seek to equalize outcomes. It is a radical version of equality of opportunity. Everyone should have equal access to resources but it is up to each individual how much he or she makes of this opportunity. So this conception of justice is consistent with (though it doesn't mandate) remunerating work according to effort, as you propose.
(iii) The idea that people should have the same chance to live the life they have reason to value introduces what philosophers call a 'perfectionist' element. Not all life-plans are of equal worth: the arms-dealer or the racist or the paedophile can't claim resources from society in order to pursue their particular projects.
As to the other values, I've already said that your value of self-management is an important specification of the content of democracy. I particularly like your argument that the norm that people should participate in decisions to the extent that the outcome of these decisions affects them does not uniquely favour any one decision procedure: according to circumstances, consensus, the majority principle, or dictatorship (in the sense that my preferences should trump everyone's else's preferences on matters like what I wear or believe) is the right procedure. I draw effectively the same conclusion, but without the principled justification you provide, on pp. 122-3 of my Anti-Capitalist Manifesto. As to my other values, efficiency and sustainability, what you effectively say is that the content of each value is partially determined by the other values that are jointly affirmed with it: 'efficiency' means something different depending on whether it is shackled to profitability. That's true, and is a point that I make in my Manifesto.
2. Capitalism and Socialism: You agree that capitalism involves 'wage labour and a blind process of competitive accumulation' but argue that it also includes 'private ownership of productive assets, competitive markets, corporate division of labour, and remuneration for property and power'. Without being too pedantic, I think that what's correct in your additions is entailed by the two fundamental separations - of labour-power from the means of production and of competing capitals from one another - that I hold to be constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. Let's run quickly through your list.
'Private ownership of productive assets' is neither a necessary or sufficient condition of the existence of capitalist relations of production. Leaving aside the question of Stalinism (which I have already claimed was a case of bureaucratic state capitalism), there have been plenty of capitalist enterprises that are (or perhaps better, in these days of privatization, were) state owned. What is a necessary condition is that a minority gains effective control of the means of production and is able to exclude the direct producers from direct access to these means, irrespective of whether this control is legitimated through property titles. What is also necessary is that this minority is subject to competition, which may take the form of market competition but may also consist in geopolitical rivalries that compel rival states to invest in the industries required to support advanced military technologies. Imperialism in its modern capitalist sense happens when these two forms of competition fuse. 'Remuneration for property and power' is a feature of all class societies, not just capitalism.
'Corporate divisions of labour' raise more complex issues connected to the question of social transformation. I would say that the division of labour under capitalism is the combined effect of the demands of exploitation and of technical requirements that are themselves a reflection of the competitive processes that impel technological change. You imply that Marxists are inattentive to the plight of workers in production, but this doesn't really stand up. Marx himself in Capital shows how to gain effective possession of the means of production capitalists have to transform the production process itself, reducing workers to appendages of the machines they tend. This theme of what he calls 'the real subsumption of labour under capital' has been pursued by many 20th century Marxists - Harry Braverman, the Italian workerists, and so on.
The foregoing should answer the question you pose about whether I see 'workplace organization being another locus of needed change'. Of course I do! The particular tradition I come from - the International Socialist Tendency - has always laid great stress on the significance of rank-and-file movements through which workers are able to resist the bosses independently of trade-union officials. Comrades of mine played a leading role in a very important wildcat strike by postal workers here in Britain six weeks ago. Any serious challenge to capitalist domination would involve the development of forms of workers' control of production - forms that would be a key constituent of the new society.
You ask for more detail on how I conceive the new society, but, as I have already made clear, I agree with much of what you say in expounding 'parecon'. You resist calling your alternative 'socialism' on the basis of what seems to me just a stipulation that socialism can't consist in the kind of council democracy you advocate. All I can say is that council democracy is what I have understood by 'socialism' every since I first became politically active over 30 years ago.
3. Leninism: You note that I 'make no mention … of a political party, much less of a Leninist one,' and 'wonder why not'. I wasn't trying to hide anything, as my inclusion of Lenin in the revolutionary Marxist tradition in my opening statement indicates. I knew we'd come to the question of the party soon enough. I wouldn't call myself a 'Marxist-Leninist' because this implies adhesion to some version of the Stalinist orthodoxy that became institutionalized from the mid-1920s onwards. But I have no qualms about calling myself a Leninist when it comes to revolutionary organization. So what does it mean to be a Leninist in the 21st century?
The starting point has to be Cassen's '20 million person problem': the gap between the committed activists and the mass of working-class people who are the main victims of capitalism (at least in the advanced economies). You're right to say that there are social reasons why this gap exists, though I don't think the key problem here is the prevalence of 'the coordinator class's structures, tone, preferences, and languages'. If by coordinators you mean managers, then I don't see many of them in the movement. People tend to come from more qualified white-collar backgrounds, I would say, which can certainly encourage self-indulgence and elitism, but the strongest conservative pull comes from the bigger NGOs and the trade unions, with their bureaucratic structures and vested interests.
Don't get me wrong: I'm in favour of involving the unions and the NGOs because through them bigger social forces get involved in the movement. But the radical wing of the movement needs to act in a concerted weigh to counteract the pressures towards moderation that trade-union officials and the like can exert. Over the past couple of years a more distinctive left has emerged within the movement: it is thanks to this development that 15 February happened. But this left is itself politically heterogeneous. It embraces, among others, people like you, the leadership of the Italian Social Forums movement, Walden Bello and Focus on the Global South, the British Socialist Workers Party and its allies in the Stop the War Coalition and Globalise Resistance. It's really important that this left works together and pursues dialogue (these exchanges between us are an example). But I don't think this is enough.
The basic idea behind Leninism is that those on the left who share a revolutionary socialist perspective should form a common organization with the aim of winning over the majority to the idea of overthrowing capitalism. The aim is an important constraint: as I have already argued, socialist revolution is a process of self-emancipation. The role of a revolutionary party is, then, not to substitute itself the different forms of democratic self-organization that emerge in the course of mass struggle but to help them to develop the strategic focus required actually to replace the existing structure of society with a better one.
But won't such a strategic focus emerge naturally as the movement develops? History suggests not. Not simply will any living movement generate a variety of different strategies and programmes but, the stronger we get, the more the capitalist class will try to divide us, to encourage the dominance of moderate leaders who seek compromise solutions, to isolate the radicals, etc. We need to organize against them, without reproducing the hierarchical and authoritarian structures characteristic of capitalism.
Revolutionary organization needs to be ideologically coherent. Leninists believe that the Marxist tradition is the best basis on which to achieve this coherence. This is partly because Marx's critique of political economy inaugurated far and way the most powerful analysis of the economic dynamics of capitalism. Moreover, Marxist political writing constitutes an enormously rich archive of reflection and argument on the great revolutionary experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries. Anyone interested in revolution in the 21st century would be well advised to start here - even though these writings should not be treated as sacred texts or to the exclusion of thinking from other backgrounds, but read critically as contributions to an evolving tradition that has constantly to renewing itself by engaging with the present.
Finally, there's the question of democratic centralism. As it is practised in the organizations in the IS tradition (as opposed to the bureaucratic centralism characteristic of Stalinist parties), democratic centralism comes down to a rigorous application of the majority principle. Thoroughgoing discussion is necessary to assess how well a revolutionary party is actually engaging in the present and to work out its strategy for the future, but this discussion must conclude in a decision that is taken by majority vote and that is binding on all members of the party whatever the position they took in these debates.
These are two rationales for this procedure. First, the point of a revolutionary party is intervention in larger struggles in order to help shape the movement. Discussion therefore isn't an end in itself, but must terminate in decisions. Secondly, a Leninist organization has a high degree of ideological cohesion because of its roots in the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Given this consensus on political principles, it is rational for party members to agree to make decisions on how to apply these principles in practice on the basis of the majority principle.
This method of organizing is perfectly defensible on democratic grounds. I accept that the practical effectiveness that Leninist organizations can have thanks to this combination of ideological cohesion and the disciplined application of majority decisions can create suspicion. So let me use my last few words to emphasize that revolutionary socialists in my tradition don't see democratic centralism as the organizational model either for the present movement or for the future society as it emerges from anti-capitalist struggles. The Leninist party is an instrument in the process of self-emancipation that will make it obsolete.
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Albert Reples to Callinicos 2
by Michael Albert; December 11, 2003
Alex,
About values, your criteria for remuneration still confuses me. Who decides whether my estimate of what I “have reason to value” is right? What stops me from saying I value a rich existence with lots of leisure to justify working way below average and consuming way above average?
You say, “everyone should have equal access to resources but it is up to each individual how much he or she makes of this opportunity.” I and Mozart can have the same access to a piano and lessons, but not to talent. Likewise, we can’t all be producing the most valuable items. We can’t all be using the best technology. We can’t all be farming the most abundant land. Does equal access mean we have a mad dash with equal odds of success for the best farmland and tools, and from there on we get what we make? Does it mean Mozart will earn way more than me, or someone using better tools, or farming better land? Or do we agree remuneration should be for only effort and sacrifice?
About capitalism, we disagree. You feel that the term “capitalism,” should apply to any economy in which the means of production are controlled by a minority while the majority works for a wage subject to that minority’s control - and firms compete. I use the same term, capitalism, only for the economies you call capitalist that also have private ownership of the means of production.
Your choice leaves you calling today’s U.S. and the old Yugoslavia capitalist, and apparently also the old Soviet Union. To me this conflates different systems under one label.
If a class exists between labor and capital that monopolizes empowering work and can become a ruling class via anti-capitalist struggle leading to coordinatorism - then your terminology is misleading because it pushes important reality out of view. If you are right that all of that is non-existent, then your choice is viable.
On vision, you say ”I agree with much of what you say in expounding parecon,” but then add that you think I resist calling participatory economics ‘socialism’ “on the basis of…just a stipulation that socialism can’t consist in the kind of council democracy.” In fact, I resist calling participatory economics socialism because socialism in practice and in textbook models also, has always had defining institutions that I reject, and those institutions (and worse) are what the word connotes to virtually everyone who hears it.
Regarding strategy, as to our movements not being congenial much less empowering to working people, you reply to my claim that it is because our movements are more coodinatorist than working class in their internal culture and structure, that “If by coordinators you mean managers, then I don’t see many of them in the movement.” I do mean managers, but I also mean lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the whole set of people that monopolize empowering tasks, as well as young people aspiring to such positions and even workers, who, by virtue of their position in the movement (or in unions) come to identify as coordinator. Mostly, however, I highlight movements embodying coordinatorist attitudes and structures as the culprit, not their having coordinator members.
Regarding strategy, you say, “the basic idea behind Leninism is that those on the left who share a revolutionary socialist perspective should form a common organization with the aim of winning over the majority to the idea of overthrowing capitalism.” Given your meaning of the word socialist, this would make most anarchists Leninists. It would make me a Leninist. It would make coordinators seeking to elevate themselves to ruling status Leninist. In other words, the feature you indicate is certainly common to Leninists, but it isn’t what distinguishes them.
Saying the aim is overthrowing capitalism rather than overthrowing capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism -harks back to my concerns about over-emphasizing the economy and under-emphasizing everything else.
You say the party should help movements “develop the strategic focus required actually to replace the existing structure of society with a better one.” This sounds okay -- a group coming together to try to provide useful insights and other assistance -- but again, it seems to miss what distinguishes Leninism from other approaches. If a Catholic says they pray, he is certainly describing an aspect of being Catholic, but not the distinguishing aspects.
You say we need to organize against [elites], “without reproducing the hierarchical and authoritarian structures characteristic of capitalism.” I agree with you about this and so do anarchists, feminists, etc. But they aren’t Leninists, nor am I. And I don’t think Leninists, in practice, have your view.
Then you say “revolutionary organization needs to be ideologically coherent.” I agree that we need movements that have shared vision and strategy, but at the same time I think our movements need healthy internal debate or they will most certainly stagnate. Does desirable coherence come about and continually get replenished by having a tight knit party that imposes positions on its members and then on movements? I expect you will agree, no, of course not. But I think Leninism operates in just such ways, at the expense of diversity and self management.
“Leninists believe that the Marxist tradition is the best basis on which to achieve this coherence.” You know my problems here. I think that the Marxist tradition doesn’t provide us the concepts we need for understanding racial, religious, gender, sexual, ecological, and power issues in their own right (which points to a need to augment Marxism). And I think the Marxist tradition saddles us with concepts that deny the existence of the coordinator class while generating coordinatorism (which points to a need to transcend Marxism).
You say “democratic centralism comes down to a rigorous application of the majority principle.” Really? This is what you think Lenin was doing? And Trotsky? And communist parties through history? Even if it were the case, what happened to the more flexible logic of self management?
You say your tradition doesn’t “see democratic centralism as the organizational model either for the present movement or for the future society.” In that case, I think you are in a small tradition whose desires get trampled the minute Leninist movements have the wherewithal to act consistently with their inclinations.
I hate to do this - because it is not what I wish to focus on - but -- how do your claims square with the following quotes?
Leon Trotsky, says that the social rule of workers over society "is expressed ... not at all in the form in which individual economic enterprises are administered." That is, Trotsky felt it would be fine to leave the usual factory hierarchy in place so long as central administrators like himself ruled "in the interests of workers."
As to why Trotsky championed "one-man management" in the factory we need took no further than his cynical view of human nature: "It is a general rule that man will try to get out of work. Man is a lazy animal." Naturally comrades at the apex of society must sometimes coerce "lazy animals" for their own good.
Finally, Trotsky added: "I consider that if the Civil War had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management much sooner and much less painfully."
In other words, Trotsky didn't reluctantly accede to coordinator structures out of necessities compelled by the Civil War, as his admirers maintain, but because he preferred them. These sentiments defined Trotsky's coordinator agenda in which central administrators would appoint "one-man managers" who would rule over "lazy workers" in the workers' own interests, of course.
Lenin evidenced his own coordinator orientation when he argued: "It is absolutely essential that all authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management." He followed this logic to its conclusion, noting that "any direct intervention by the trade unions in the management of enterprises must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible."
Whereas Trotsky appealed to a cynical view of human nature to justify coordinatorism, Lenin appealed to technological necessity. "Large scale machine industry which is the central productive source and foundation of socialism calls for absolute and strict unity of will... How can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one."
Apparently for Lenin, like Trotsky, it was sufficient that the "will of one" be well motivated, an analysis Stalin no doubt appreciated and which in my view paved the way for him.
In response to workers who didn't accept his self-serving analysis and demanded more say over economic policy, Lenin thundered: "A producer's congress! What precisely does that mean? It is difficult to find words to describe this folly. I keep asking myself can they be joking? Can one really take these people seriously? While production is always necessary, democracy is not. Democracy of production engenders a series of radically false ideas."
Why, I wonder, would a person who advocates self management want to identify with this heritage?
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REPLY TO ALBERT 2
by Alex Callinicos; December 16, 2003
Dear Michael,
I've responded in my latest comment on your opening statement (and rejoinders) to your queries about my proposed principle of egalitarian justice: I hope this leaves you less confused. I want to concentrate here on the questions of Leninism, strategy, and state capitalism.
1. What is Leninism? Your response to my account of Leninism is similar to your comments on socialism: that is, you simply stipulate a meaning of Leninism inconsistent with my description. Thus when I call democratic centralism 'a rigorous application of the majority principle' you comment derisively: 'Really? This is what you think Lenin was doing? And Trotsky? And communist parties throughout history?'
I'll come back to Lenin and Trotsky below, but surely I'm entitled to recognition that I belong to a variant of Leninism that has contested the theory and practice of the Communist Parties from the mid-1920s onwards. People in my tradition - that of the Trotskyist movement - were massacred in their thousands when they went on hunger strike in the Gulag in 1936-7. In a very real sense, a river of blood divides my tradition from all versions of orthodox Communism. I know that you can reply by citing the mass violence practised by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, a subject that I will touch on a bit later. Nevertheless, it simply isn't on to present Leninism as a monolithic set of doctrines and practices, rather than - like Marxism and socialism more generally (and anarchism?) - a contested tradition.
To reassert my position: I stand for a version of Leninism that isn't simply consistent with democratic forms of mass self-organization but that is necessary for self-emancipation to triumph. You assert that this is an impossible position to sustain; I disagree. History will show which of us is right.
2. Strategy Today: You brush aside my claim that 'the basic idea behind Leninism is that those on the left who share a revolutionary socialist perspective should form a common organization with the aim of winning over the majority to the idea of overthrowing capitalism' with the comment: 'Given your meaning of the word socialist, this would make most anarchists Leninists. It would make me a Leninist.' This is too quick, just as you have in these exchanges been generally sped past the strategic problems currently facing the movement.
I know that you share my preoccupation by how to win over the majority to a radically emancipatory project. I don't think this by any means true of all anarchists. It's certainly not true of many anti-Leninists in the contemporary European anti-capitalist movement (because of the influence of Toni Negri and the Italian disobbedienti they tend to call themselves autonomists these days rather than anarchists or libertarian socialists).
In my experience (and I write from very recent experience of the efforts of a broad coalition to organize the next European Social Forum in London) many autonomists are completely uninterested in winning over the majority. They have a principled hostility to trade unions that can merge into outright contempt for working-class people (here what you say about 'coordinatorist' attitudes within the movement does hit home). This stance is rationalized through a conception of the movement as the self-assertion of the subjectivity of the existing activists that in turn legitimizes an obsession with process to the exclusion of any consideration of either principles or outcomes. In practice this can lead to a manipulation of decision-making by consensus in which very small groups of people with very little interest in taking the movement forward hold everyone else to ransom.
One reason why Hardt and Negri are so influential is that Empire provides a very abstract, apparently profound philosophical language that, particularly in the way in which it stretches concepts such as 'labour' and 'exploitation' to the point of meaninglessness can be used to represent the kinds of practices that I have described as not merely revolutionary but as actually creating an emancipated society in the present. But what is striking is how often, in reality, this kind of stance can be very close to the positions taken by people on the right of the movement like Bernard Cassen in France.
In Europe this right wing is perfectly happy to adopt the language of 'counter-power', for example, because they see the movement as a pressure group to squeeze policies like the Tobin Tax out of actual or potential social-democratic governments. Like many autonomists they want to keep the Social Forums as pure 'spaces for discussion' and not, also, as means of mobilization in the way in which the ESF in Florence and the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre provided the launching pad for the global day of anti-war protest on 15 February.
So I don't think that my definition of Leninism is merely platitudinous. The idea that we should build the movement through a dynamic process of mobilization that seeks to draw in wider and wider layers of those exploited and oppressed by capitalism is strongly contested from both the right and what purports to be the extreme left of the movement. Of course, you don't have to be a Leninist to accept this idea. As I have already argued, there is a relatively broad and heterogeneous left including your kind of anarchist that does accept it. But I would argue that Leninists in my tradition pursue this approach is a relatively focused and strategically oriented way. I would believe this is to the credit of the revolutionary Marxist tradition and democratic centralist organization.
3. Bolshevism and state capitalism: But, you protest, how can you call yourself a Leninist given the terrible things that people who I accept are central to this tradition did and said? To hammer this point home you cite mainly some terrible things that Trotsky wrote. I haven't had time to look them up, but they are pretty familiar: I would say that they come either from Terrorism and Communism (1920) or from Trotsky's contributions to the associated debate in the Bolshevik Party in 1920-1, when he argued that trade unions should be strictly subordinated to the state (a debate in which, incidentally, Lenin strongly opposed him, arguing that workers needed their own organizations to defend themselves under a state that, though originating in the soviets, had developed 'bureaucratic deformations').
I have no intention of defending what Trotsky says in these passages. Terrorism and Communism is an awful book. How, then, can I consider myself, not only a Leninist, but also a Trotskyist? Because what he wrote there doesn't exhaust Trotsky's achievements as a revolutionary socialist over more than 40 years. More specifically, because Trotsky died at the hands of the state that he helped to create - and not just, like millions of others, a bewildered victim, but a clear-eyed opponent on a principled basis that included a serious attempt to discover the social roots of Stalinism. There is plenty in The Lessons of October, The Revolution Betrayed, and Trotsky's voluminous political writings - for example, on the rise of National Socialism in Germany - that I would be happy, indeed proud, to defend.
What this highlights is that central to any serious assessment of Trotsky - and Lenin - has to treat them as the protagonists of an enormous historical tragedy, as political leaders whose pursuit of what they conceived to be a radically emancipatory project lead to an outcome profoundly different from what they had intended, an outcome that destroyed Trotsky and that left Lenin in his final months of self-conscious existence struggling despairingly against the monster that he had helped to create? This then poses three questions:
(i) Was this outcome built into their political project from the start?
(ii) Were the measures that they took that helped to produce this outcome - the Red Terror, the more general centralization of economic and political power, the militarization of social relations, etc., etc. - dictated at least in large part by the necessities of resisting counter-revolutionary forces in a disintegrating, predominantly agrarian society?
(iii) Even if the answer to (ii) were 'Yes', did Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders make a virtue of (what they perceived to be) necessity, producing, as the passages you cite might be taken illustrate, theoretical rationalizations of practices that were in fact evolved pragmatically in the course of consolidating a revolutionary regime?
Now I know perfectly well that we're not going to agree in our answers to these questions. (Mine are No to (i), and Yes to (ii) and (iii).) Nevertheless, implicit in these questions is the more general problem of the respective roles of objective context and subjective projects in producing historical outcomes. One way of summing up our disagreement about Leninism is that we differ in the relative weight we give to these two elements in the emergence of Stalinism. You attach more importance to the Bolsheviks' political intentions, I to their historical circumstances. But we differ also about how to characterize the objective context.
For you Stalinism represents the triumph of the coordinator class whose 'agenda' Trotsky articulated in the passages you cite. Sociologically this is enormously implausible. The Bolsheviks were an overwhelmingly working-class party at the time of the 1917 Revolutions; whatever we say about the 'Stalin revolution' of the 1930s (I would prefer to call it a counter-revolution), it was an engine of enormous social mobility as industrialization and the Great Terror swept hundreds of thousands of worker and peasant lads into managerial positions. Of course, once the bureaucratic structures of power had emerged by the early 1920s, powerful social interests worked to maintain and strengthen them. But I don't think this enough to explain the huge economic and social upheavals the USSR underwent in the 1930s.
The correct explanation takes us back to the question of how to characterize capitalism. You allege that my insistence on describing the Stalinist societies as state capitalist reflects the theoretical poverty of Marxism: we only have concepts for capitalism and socialism. This isn't true, actually: there is plenty of theoretically and historically sophisticated work on pre-capitalist modes of production. But in any case capitalism, I have argued, has two defining features: the separation of labour-power from the means of production and the accumulation of capital impelled by the competitive struggle between rival capitals.
In the USSR in the 1930s we have the separation of the direct producers from the means of production on a vast scale, as the peasants were brutally expropriated and driven in their millions as wage-labourers into the new industries. And what drove this process on? We have Stalin's own answer in a famous speech of 1930: the need to catch up economically with the West in ten years by building up the industrial base to provide the military technologies required to face the other Great Powers on equal terms. Competition - in this case military - imposed the dynamic of capital accumulation on the USSR and continued to do so for the next 50 years.
You reject this explanation because, among other reasons, you make private ownership and competitive markets necessary conditions of the existence of capitalist economic relations. But then you have the problem of explaining the enormous role played by geopolitical competition and the highly statized military-industrial complex in Western capitalism - not least, of course, in the contemporary United States.
Irrespective of these important disagreements, we both want to make sure that nothing like Stalinism happens again. I believe that that the twists and turns of 20th century history indicate that there can be no absolute guarantees. All we can do is work together to build an anti-capitalist movement that is as broadly based, as democratically self-organized, as socially powerful, as theoretically self-conscious, as globally united as possible. That's why the problems of strategy that I've tried to highlight matter so much.
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Albert Reply to Callinicos #3
by Michael Albert; December 17, 2003
Alex,
I agree that your party has differed even to the point of violent conflict with other Leninist parties. Leninism isn't one phenomenon, of course. And I agree with you that neither of us should arbitrarily stipulate what Leninism is. We should see what distinguishes Leninists from others on the left and also what all Leninists have broadly in common.
I don't think that "rigorous application of the majority principle" fills that requisite. A better common denominator might be acceptance of Marxist analysis, plus democratic centralism, plus advocacy of one or another socialist economic vision.
I agree that we should agree to disagree about Leninism, but I doubt that history is going to help us judge whether the SWP or any other Trotskyist Party would devolve into defending botheconomic coordinatorism and political authoritarianism under the pressures of a revolutionary situation because I think no such Party is ever going to win power in an industrialized country. Winning here will instead require a multifaceted movement that pays priority attention to race, gender, class, and power and that is highly anti-authoritarian including building its own infrastructure of self-management even before winning large-scale change.
You are right that some leftists disavow reaching a majority of the population. But I think nonetheless, if the desire to build bigger movements really defined Leninism, most anarchists in history would fit under the umbrella, and certainly folks like Kropotkin and Goldman, etc. I don't think that saying this speeds us past current problems facing the movement. Such problems of course include understanding the need for a large majority, but they also include combining attentiveness to race, gender, and class without subordinating any one to the others, finding diverse means to reach out very widely, finding ways to retain membership rather than people joining and later leaving, building infrastructure that not only sustains and strengthens us, but also prefigures and prepares institutions for the future, giving attention to singular issues without becoming single-issue oriented, winning reforms without becoming reformist, being strategic without becoming sectarian, and opposing capitalism without becoming coordinatorist. But regarding all this, we should ask whether Leninist or Trotskyist or for that matter Marxist formulations help or hinder our dealing with the problems.
Though peripheral to our debate, since you raised it, I think the WSF cannot as a whole have activist program because it encompasses too many conflicting viewpoints. However, I think the WSF can and should be a venue not only for people meeting and learning from one another, but for people allying and generating shared programs that aren't taken up by the entire WSF but are pursued by subsets of that community.
I agree with the importance of being strategic but I have to say that I think something about Leninists way of being strategic makes it problematic. I don't mean to trivialize or paint with a too wide or undiscerning brush, but for me Leninist parties call up images of people selling newspapers who can't even see the utter disdain of the people they are shoving them at, and who do it beyond human connection, even robotically. I have seen it from ML group to group for decades, and of course not just regarding newspapers, but the line, and so on. Interestingly, most members of Leninist groups see it too, when they look at the practice of a group other than their own.
When I was speaking in England I kept wondering how the SWP people I encountered trying to sell me the newspaper could be in the same organization as you. I mean that seriously, and I think it is something to think hard about. It isn't genes, or long standing personality traits -- it is something about the rank and file practice of Leninist and Trotskyist parties that drags members at the base into this robotic style and content. Meanwhile, other members, nearer the top of the apparatus, don't have the robotic problem, but as power nears instead develop an authority problem.
I think one of our big differences is that you want to see everything that is worst in your heritage as flowing from Stalin, and since Trotsky opposed Stalin, he is redeemed. For me, not only did the early Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky and not Stalin obliterate bottom-up movements in Russia, they also imposed an economy and polity that I reject as horribly oppressive. Of course Lenin and Trotsky didn't intend for Stalinism to reign. But when they left what was in place was a coordinator economy and authoritarian state. Some of the quotes I offered earlier are evidence. One could easily produce more.
Perhaps I have a "fetish" with dumping on Leninism and Trotskyism that causes me to miss the complexity that gives them excuses or makes their behavior contextually reasonable. Or perhaps you have a "fetish" with redeeming Leninism and Trotskyism that causes you to miss a different complexity that makes their actions horrendous. We can't resolve that now.
Can we agree, however, on some points that are relevant to us today? Can we agree that movements and parties should be multi-focused, highlighting race, gender, class, and power, and understanding each in their own right and as they all interact? Can we agree movements should be committed to incorporating self management not only for the future economy and society, but also in their current institutions? Can we agree that we need to reach out widely to build majoritarian movements and also that we need to build movements whose structure, culture, style, divisions of labor, and modes of decision-making are congenial to and empower people at the low end of race, gender, and class hierarchies? And can we agree that our movements should not only criticize what is, but also offer institutional vision that manifests solidarity, justice, diversity, efficiency, equity, and self management? And, finally, can we perhaps also agree that if parecon is viable and operationally sound, it fulfills those criteria for the economy?
You say "one way of summing up our disagreement about Leninism is that we differ in the relative weight we give to these two elements in the emergence of Stalinism. You [Michael] attach more importance to the Bolsheviks' political intentions, I [Alex] to their historical circumstances." But I don't think the key factor is intentions near as much as I think it is conceptual and institutional commitments. I suspect most Bolsheviks would have been horrified had they seen a preview picture of what destroying the soviets would lead to.
Intentions matter, of course, but intentions arise in context, and for me the Bolsheviks context wasn't just the state of their nation or the world - but also and even more so the institutions that the movement had adopted, and the conceptualizations it used. There were many in Russia who had agendas quite different than the Bolshevik leadership, including not only anarchists and peasant movements, but many rank and file activists inside the Bolskevik party itself -- but the leadership had a very different objective context than all those rank and file folks - largely because of its conceptual framework and organizational roles and conditions.
You say: "For you Stalinism represents the triumph of the coordinator class whose 'agenda' Trotsky articulated in the passages you cite." Nowhere have I said that. I would say it is you, not me, who thinks the problem we are discussing is Stalinism. I have only addressed Stalinism in reply. I think the problem we need to understand and avoid predates Stalin's major role. If you take the revolutionized Russia and impose on it a democratic parliamentary government rather than Stalin's, I would still oppose the economy.
I agree that there was a real dearth of coordinator class members in Russia after the revolution because Russia had had insufficient development for them to grow to anything like 20% of the population. The vacuum was filled by the political bureaucracy. In other words I don't think Stalinism is a phenomenon induced by an evil individual, but, rather, that it is what tends to happen when you create a coordinator economy with a one party authoritarian state but you don't have a coordinator class to fill the coordinator economic slots. The ruling party then stands in for the largely missing class and its cadres therefore not only run the polity, but the economy as well.
Still, you are right that whatever labels we opt for and however we define them, if we can "work together to build an anti-capitalist (and I would add anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-authoritarian) movement that is as broadly based, as democratically self-organized, as socially powerful, as theoretically self-conscious, and as globally united as possible" then choices between our views will be made based on the experience that unfolds and hopefully we will both be elated at the progress that ensues, regardless of whose views turn out to be more valid - or even if views entirely unknown to us prove most valid.
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Closing Statement
by Alex Callinicos; December 25, 2003
Dear Michael,
1. Summing Up: I suppose one function of these closing statements is to establish whether we seem closer or further away at the end of these exchanges than we were at the beginning. In some respects, I feel vindicated in my prior impression that we aren't too far apart on many of the most important questions. This is true, for example, at the level of values. Perhaps our biggest difference here is that I think that it is possible (in principle at least - I'm not saying I've done it) to formulate a comprehensive egalitarian conception of justice with quite specific distributive and institutional consequences. You seem sceptical about this, but I'm not sure how much practical difference this makes.
There are also other important points of agreement. We are both revolutionaries who seek a systemic alternative to capitalism. Moreover, we share a similar view of the content of this alternative as a self-governing, decentralized network of producers' and consumers' councils. I have questions about the precise form that participatory planning should take, and I feel that you have been a bit vague or evasive in your responses to these questions, but I don't think that this is a big deal. Economic coordination in a non-market, democratic, modern society involves complex issues that need to be discussed in an open-minded way whose aim is mutual clarification. Maybe your caution in responding to my questions reflected the fear that I was out to trash parecon in the name of some version of a centralized command economy (with which you mistakenly equate socialism), but this really hasn't been my aim at all.
Of course, there's more to life after capitalism than how we would plan the economy. We haven't really discussed revolution as a political process. Maybe if we had more disagreements would have emerged. At the very least, we need to take into account that capitalism involves a system of states whose specific dynamics - central to which is geopolitical competition - creates great costs and dangers to humankind. I'm an orthodox Marxist in seeking a world without states but believing that we can't ignore the state while it exists. This means being prepared to put demands on the nation-state (or inter-state institutions such as the European Union), and to build movements whose immediate aim is to secure specific reforms but the logic of whose struggle can develop into a challenge to the system. And - when we do confront the system - we need to have a strategy for confronting the centralized coercive power of the state and for protecting the infant alternative society once we have begun to break down that power in parts of the world. I believe that, when approached in a critical but open-minded way, the revolutionary Marxist tradition has much to offer on all these subjects.
2. A Cheap Shot: In broaching these questions, I've begun to touch on what, not surprisingly, turned out to be our biggest disagreement, namely Leninism. (Incidentally, I equated democratic centralism, and not, as you suggest, Leninism, with 'rigorous application of the majority principle'. I'm quite happy with your definition of Leninism as 'acceptance of Marxist analysis, plus democratic centralism, plus advocacy of one or another socialist economic vision'.)
I know we're not supposed to be replying to each other in these closing statements, but I can't ignore in this context the following passage in your last reply to me:
When I was speaking in England I kept wondering how the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] people I encountered trying to sell me the newspaper could be in the same organization as you. I meant that seriously, and I think it is something to think hard apart. It isn't genes, or long standing personality traits - it is something about the rank and file practice of Leninist and Trotskyist parties that drags members at the base into this robotic style and content. Meanwhile, other members, nearer the top of the apparatus, don't have the robotic problem, but as power nears instead develop an authority problem.
I think this is a pretty cheap shot. Underlying it is a contrast that has been used to trash collectivist alternatives to capitalism at least since Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor - between 'robotic' uniform masses and intellectuals who may be more subtle but are driven by an urge to dominate. One of the things that is distinctive to Marx's conception of communism is that he insists that a society based on solidarity doesn't have to - indeed must not - suppress individuality. A revolutionary socialist party can't just mirror the future society to which it aspires, since it is shaped by the struggle against the present society. All the same, those whom you call 'rank and file' SWP members aren't robots. They are activists spread out across the workplaces, the neighbourhoods, the universities and schools of Britain, who organize together to help build effective resistance to capitalism.
One of the places you spoke at earlier this year was, I remember, Bristol. A few days ago I stayed after a meeting in Bristol with a long-standing SWP member. He works nearby in Gloucester, where some weeks ago there was a huge police 'anti-terrorist' operation directed at the Asian community that forced people living in several streets to leave their homes and let to one young Muslim being charged. The SWP member is well known and respected in the neighbourhood because of his work against racism and against the war. He helped at short notice to organize a large, angry protest meeting attended by 600 Asians - a tenth of the local community - that the local Labour MP was forced to attend and that attracted national media coverage.
This particular SWP member isn't exceptional - there are thousands more like him around Britain. The great anti-war demonstrations in London this year - immortalized in all those photos of huge clumps of people filing along holding placards and banners - didn't just happen. They had to be organized by local activists all over the country. The SWP are only a minority among these activists, but most people involved in the anti-war movement in Britain would concede that we have played an important role. This reflects the concentrated impact that precisely the features you list - Marxist analysis, democratic centralist organization, and socialist vision - can have. Selling Socialist Worker weekly is part of the same process. It organises us to engage in a regular political dialogue with the people we encounter in our activities. Sure it can be done badly, even robotically (I'm notoriously bad at it), but the contempt that you show for socialist paper-sellers reflects more on you than on them.
Of course, revolutionary socialist organization has its pathologies - sectarian hostilities, petty authoritarianism, heresy hunting - and I don't claim the SWP has always escaped these. But are they unique to Leninists? From my - admittedly long-distance - observation of the anarchist movement, I've seen enough to suspect that these and other qualities are to be found there as well. I don't think this is surprising. If you read Christopher Hill on what happened to the Puritan revolutionaries of the 17th century, particularly after the Stuarts had been restored, you will find very similar patterns of behaviour. I think they are particularly a feature of revolutionary movements that aspire to change the world when they are marginalized and reduced to political irrelevance.
Since Seattle we have found ourselves in conditions where radical ideas begin to connect with real movements. It is a challenge to all revolutionaries - not just the Leninists - to unlearn the bad habits we developed when times were harder and to engage with a new generation that is being drawn into resisting capitalism. But the presence of survivals of these patterns inherited from the past can't be used as knock down proof that one particular kind of revolutionaries can't engage - especially when we manifestly are engaging.
3. Avoiding Disaster
Implicit in all the arguments about Leninism is, of course, the question of Stalinism. You don't like putting it in these terms. Let's not quibble about words: the problem is how to prevent a revolution driven initially by a self-emancipatory thrust from below turning into a tyrannical monstrosity. As I understand it, your argument is that capitalism has a trichotomous class structure - capitalists, workers, and coordinators - and that consequently 'there are two types of post-capitalist economy'; instead of the workers taking control, the coordinators can instead, typically by putting themselves at the head of a mass movement most of whose members are seeking a more authentic liberation.
Here our debate has taught me something. I now understand better why you place such an emphasis on balanced job complexes. I had thought of them as an interesting idea for reconciling the need of any modern economy for complex specialization with individual self-fulfilment and for addressing at the same time the hardy perennial of who would do the lousy work in an emancipated society. Now I see more clearly than I did before, that balanced job complexes are intended, through performing all these functions, to prevent a class of privileged coordinators from constituting itself within, and usurping the self-governing councils.
I see the attraction of such a device, but I think it's important to stress that (as I'm sure you would agree) on its own it would not prevent the triumph of a new ruling class. Essential to the stabilization and expansion of a self-managing society (what I call 'socialism') would be two other factors; (i) to what extent the material context - which ultimately could only be global - facilitated the consolidation of council democracy; and (ii) how far the councils themselves developed from instruments of struggle into institutions of self-government. Economics, politics, geopolitics - all of these would be decisive in determining whether or not the new society took root, as they were in settling the fate of earlier revolutions.
I suppose I just think that the more we are able to extend council democracy on a global scale, the easier it will be to make the new society work. No doubt we will need institutional devices like balanced job complexes but I can't see them as playing the decisive role in preventing a regression to class domination. No doubt this does reflect our theoretical differences - I don't see the coordinators as a coherent class with a place in production relations comparable to those of capital and labour: moreover, should some group of coordinators manage to take power, then the historical record suggests that what they would preside over is not a new form of class society but a version of capitalism. But I don't say any of this in a spirit of complacency. The 20th century has shown what monstrosities even the most idealistic struggles can harbour. Who knows had new horrors produced by mixtures of unfavourable circumstances and subjective error the future may hold? That's why debates such as this one matter - not just to understand each other better, but to produce better theory and strategy that we can use to avoid repeating the disasters of the past.
4 Marching and Talking Together: A few months ago I was involved in a debate with a member of the dissobedienti from southern Italy. He had a very nice way of describing such debates. He said that while marching in the same direction we should talk in order to learn from one another. I think this is exactly what we have been doing. We share the same enemies, and we seek the same goals. We have quite big disagreements about history, theory, and strategy. These matter because they play an important role in shaping how we practically address the political problems that confront us. But there is enough agreement at the level of vision and even of strategy to continue marching together - for it to be productive for us to carry on cooperating, not avoiding our disagreements but not making them a barrier to cooperation either, and remaining open to the surprises that history no doubt has in store for us all.
With best wishes for the New Year,
Alex
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