Catalyst: "Socialism for Realists" by Sam Gindin

This is a very long essay, in three parts. I'm going to post the introduction and first part for discussion and then, if there is interest, the second and third. In its entirety, the link for "Socialism for Realists" is https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no3/socialism-for-realists - in case you want to read it all at once or access the footnotes. 

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For socialists, establishing popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society has become an existential challenge. Without a renewed and grounded belief in the possible functioning of socialism, it’s near impossible to imagine reviving and sustaining the socialist project. This essay picks up this challenge by presenting a set of illustrative institutional arrangements and social relations that advance the case for socialism’s plausibility. 

When, some four decades ago, Thatcher arrogantly asserted “there is no alternative,” a confident left might have turned that declaration on its head by adding “yes, there is indeed no real alternative — under capitalism.” But no such left existed. The radical left was too small to matter, and social-democratic parties had by then long retreated from advocating socialism as a systemic option. Over the intervening decades steps towards a radically egalitarian and democratic transformation of society have, in general and in spite of the advent of a vague “anticapitalism,” further receded.

Of the two central tasks the making of socialism demands — convincing a skeptical populace that a society based on public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and communication could in fact work, and acting to end capitalist rule — the overwhelming focus of those still committed to socialism has been on the political battle to defeat capitalism. What the society at the end of the rainbow might actually look like has, with some notable exceptions, tended to receive only rhetorical or cursory attention. But in the gloomy shadow of socialism’s marginalization, the cavalier assertion of socialism’s practicality will no longer do. Winning people over to a complex and protracted struggle to introduce profoundly new ways of producing, living, and relating to each other demands a much deeper engagement with socialism’s actual possibility.

For socialists, establishing popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society is now an existential challenge. Without a renewed and grounded belief in the possibility of the goal, it’s near impossible to imagine reviving and sustaining the project. This, it needs emphasis, isn’t a matter of proving that socialism is possible (the future can’t be verified) nor of laying out a thorough blueprint (as with projecting capitalism before its arrival, such details can’t be known), but of presenting a framework that contributes to making the case for socialism’s plausibility.

When Hope “Rings Oddly in Our Ears”

The Communist Manifesto’s famous rebuke of the utopians for spending their time on “castles in the air” went beyond the tension between dreaming and doing, though it of course spoke to that as well. In underscoring that one’s visions and corresponding actions need to be grounded in an analysis of society and identification of social agency, Marx and Engels introduced what amounted to an early exposition of historical materialism. Without a historical lens, they argued, the utopians simultaneously lagged and yet prematurely raced ahead of history: lagged in missing the significance of a newly emerging revolutionary actor, the proletariat; rashly raced ahead in absorbing themselves with detailing a distant world that could then only be imagined in the most general and abstract terms.

This deeper critique of utopianism discouraged future generations of revolutionary socialists from serious engagement with the feasibility of socialism — a reluctance that, as noted, largely persists today. The orientation of socialist politics turned to analyzing the political economy of capitalism, grasping its dynamics and contradictions, and facilitating the formation of the dispossessed into a coherent class with the potential to remake the world. Only in the process of fighting to transform capitalism, Marxists insisted, could the collective capacities for building socialism emerge, and only in the process of confronting the new dilemmas thrown up, might institutional solutions surface.

Such an orientation is clearly indispensable to the socialist project. The intent here is certainly not to belittle it. Yet it doesn’t justify, especially in the current conjuncture, the common Marxist disdain for utopian contemplations. In the wake of the profound defeat of the socialist left and the consequent widespread fatalism over transformative alternatives, it’s not enough to focus on getting there. It is now at least as important to convince prospective socialists that there really is a “there” to get to.

Looking back, the warnings of Marx and Engels against fixation on an unknowable future have a convincing air about them. At that early stage of capitalism, the car — never mind the airplane, electronic computer, and internet — had not yet been invented. Trade unions were just appearing, universal suffrage was still an epoch away, the modern state wasn’t yet recognizable, and above all the Russian Revolution and the new questions it posed had not yet burst onto the political stage. To have debated then what socialism might later look like certainly does, in retrospect, confirm how presumptuous it would have then been to devote much attention to the workings of a socialist society.

Moreover, capitalism’s relative youth at the time of the Manifesto left that period comparatively more open to envisioning its rejection: the barriers of traditional cultural, religious, and family ties blocked capitalism’s full sway and the absorption of the working class into the new social system remained incomplete. In the decades after 1873, the year that Marx coined the derisive catchphrase “writing recipes for the cook shops of the future,” socialism was in the air in a way that it no longer is today. Socialism was widely discussed among workers, and in London it was “fashionable for even West-end dinner parties to affect an interest in and knowledge of it.”¹ Mass socialist parties were emerging across Europe and this was widely followed, whether anxiously or hopefully. In the US, though a mass socialist party never took hold, the second half of the nineteenth century ushered in a “long era of anti-capitalism” that included an “urge to overthrow the new order of things.”²

This openness to socialism persisted after World War i. As the preface to a newly translated work of Karl Polanyi on socialist accounting notes, in the early 1920s Polanyi was “just one of many social scientists who found accounting, prices, and socialism to be the most exciting topic of the day.”³ Surprisingly, this attitude existed even within neoclassical economics, which had emerged in the shadow of the Paris Commune essentially as a counter to Marx.⁴ At the end of the 1920s the president of the prestigious American Economic Association began his keynote by declaring that “Like most teachers of economic theory, I have found it quite worthwhile to spend some time studying any particular problem at hand from the standpoint of a socialist state.” In going on to address how a society without private ownership of the means of production might determine prices and allocate resources, he confidently asserted that its authorities “would have no difficulty finding out whether the standard valuation of any particular factor was too high or too low,” concluding that “this much having been learned, the rest would be easy.”⁵

Later, Murray Rothbard, a lifetime disciple of the archconservative Ludwig von Mises, lamented that when he entered grad school after World War ii “the economics establishment had all decided, left, right, and center, that … socialism’s only problems, such as they might be, were political. Economically, socialism could work just as well as capitalism.”⁶ With socialism carrying such a degree of economic credence, the elaboration of the details of a functioning socialist society seemed decidedly less pressing for socialists than developing the politics of getting to it.

But such openings to a different world, however qualified, have today strikingly contracted. Erik Olin Wright begins his monumental treatise on “real utopias” by wistfully recalling that “There was a time, not too long ago, when both critics and defenders of capitalism believed that ‘another world was possible.’ It was generally called ‘socialism.’” Wright continues on to lament that “Most people in the world today, especially in its economically developed regions, no longer believe in this possibility.”⁷

The oft-noted paradox of our time is that even as popular frustrations with capitalism intensify, belief in transformative alternatives continue to languish. There is clearly an appetite for change and the discourse of “anticapitalism” pervades protests, but the elevated language of hope in a systemic alternative “rings oddly in our ears.”⁸ The persistence and even strengthening of capitalism through great crises seems to further verify its permanence. The Manifesto’s faith in “capitalism’s grave diggers” comes up against the atomization of workers, the depth of their defeats, their multidimensional integration into capitalism, and their painful inability to defend past gains — never mind advance radical agendas. The overwhelming prospect of taking on a global capitalism that seems beyond the purview of any particular state seemingly leaving us with no tangible target, reinforcing the now pervasive cross-generational sense that “there is no alternative.”

If we add the betrayals of Third Way social democracy, the fateful collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese road to capitalism, the failures of other twentieth- and twenty-first-century revolutions that occurred in the name of socialism, and the recent political reversals in Latin America and Europe (Corbynism perhaps being an exception), it becomes clear that “radical change” is more often than not a calling card of the Right. Today the zeitgeist that no alternative to capitalism is possible seems, some stubborn pockets aside, settled. The liberatory confidence that the Manifesto radiated has been replaced with a ubiquitous skepticism of transformative possibilities.

In these dispiriting times the need for structures to more effectively organize and mobilize struggles is clear enough, but transcending pessimism and reviving revolutionary hope needs an animating vision as well, a utopia that is both dream and possible reality.⁹ A good number of Marxists have indeed increasingly argued that far from seeing the preoccupation with alternatives negatively (a diversion), it is the very absence of alternatives that contributes to the Left’s marginalization. This has led them to mine Marxist political economy for insights to the “concept of alternatives.”¹⁰ Yet as insightful as such work is, in today’s discouraging context it remains too conceptual to revive and popularly spread the socialist idea. Going beyond the frustrations and demoralization wrought by capitalism demands a more expanded and convincing defense than we currently have of socialism’s practical possibilities. However valid Marx and Engel’s historical criticism of the utopians may have been for their era, there is a compelling case — equally historically driven — to take a different turn in our times.

Developing a more systematic consideration of socialism’s possible functioning, even if what we offer remains relatively general, incomplete, and even speculative, has today become a requirement for reviving a receptivity to achievable utopias and the willful action to achieve them. As Robin Hahnel recently asserted, without a plausible alternative “we cannot expect people to take the risks necessary to change things” nor “forge a strategy of how to get from here to there.”¹¹ An institutionally elaborated alternative is now elemental to encouraging social movements to press beyond protest, to sustaining socialists who are wavering, and to recruiting the newly discontented. Such an alternative has, in Ernst Bloch’s poetic capture of both despair and hope, become an indispensable spur “to make the defeated man try the world again.”¹²

Submerging Socialist Contradictions

On those occasions when Marxists have engaged the nature of a future socialist society, they too often shied away from problematizing future difficulties in favor of assuring the unconvinced that the difficulties involved in the construction of a socialist society had been vastly exaggerated. Yet working people well understand from their experience of capitalism that building a new society will be far from simple. To engage those that we expect to lead in the making of socialism by misleading them about the difficulties involved is patronizing and ultimately self-defeating. What is instead needed is an honest presentation of the risks, costs, and dilemmas the socialist project will face, alongside credible examples and promising indications of how the problems might be creatively addressed.

The primary quandary of socialism lies in how to concretely manifest social property in the means of production. Can workers run their workplaces? If social property is organized through the state, where does worker control fit in? If social property is divided among worker collectives, how do the particular interests of each collective mesh with the social interest? And can these fragmented collectives counteract the centralized power? That is, can the concentrated power that comes with comprehensive planning be democratized?

Such dilemmas — contradictions may be more apt — cannot be conjured away by appealing to the further development of the productive forces inherited from capitalism, whether that involves the “end of scarcity” or the explosion of computer power, artificial intelligence, and big data. Nor can they be resolved through expectations that the experience of “revolutionary praxis” in the course of ending capitalism will bring a level of socialist consciousness that similarly disposes of such questions. And neither can concern with the concentration of power in the central plan be escaped by asserting — on the basis of some combination of the end of scarcity, higher social consciousness, and a hoped-for democratization — the “withering away of the state.”

Scarcity — the need to make choices between alternative uses of labor time and resources — is unlikely to end outside of utopian fantasies because popular demands, even when transformed into collective/socialist demands, are remarkably elastic: they can continue to grow. Think especially of better health care, more and richer education, greater care for the aged, the expansion of art and of cultural spaces — all of which require labor time and generally also complementary material goods. That is, they demand choices.

Furthermore, the calculation of scarcity can in particular not ignore leisure, with leisure representing the “realm of freedom.” Even if we produced enough of what we wanted, as long as some of that labor isn’t completely voluntary but instrumental, then effective scarcity of either labor time or the good/service remains. Workers may even like their jobs and see them as a source of creative expression and satisfaction, but as long as they’d periodically prefer to not show up or leave early, some further inducement is needed to offset the sacrifice of providing those labor hours. That inducement is a measure of the persistence of effective scarcity. And once scarcity is acknowledged as an inherent and essentially permanent frame in the restructuring of society, the question of structured incentives becomes paramount. This is not just a matter of motivating adequate hours of work, but of affecting its intensity and quality, and influencing where that work is best applied (i.e., determining society’s overall division of labor).

As for the saving grace of computer power, its role in inventory control and the logistics of just-in-time delivery as well as the breathtaking potentials of big data and artificial intelligence would undoubtedly help solve specific planning problems.¹³ Perhaps even more significant are the exciting possibilities of reconfiguring computer power so it provides decentralized information to facilitate the decisions of worker collectives and links them to other workplaces.¹⁴ Nevertheless, computers cannot be depended on to solve the overall problems of socialist planning. This goes beyond contestation over whether future breakthroughs in computing power will be able to cope with the voluminous data involved in the simultaneous interactions and vicissitudes of a living society. It is also that the output computers give us depends entirely on the quality and completeness of the information going in (garbage in, garbage out), something more powerful computers alone cannot resolve. ¹⁵

This is not a secondary issue. A commonly noted dysfunction in Soviet-style planning was the systematic withholding of accurate information by both managers and workers.¹⁶ Since the annual production in any year influenced the target for the following year, and a lower base target allowed for more easily achieving the subsequent bonuses, workplaces conspired to hide actual productive potentials. Friedrich Hayek, the economist-philosopher and Thatcherite hero, pointed to such perverse incentives to reinforce his argument that socialism simply had no structures adequate to generating the existing and potential information and knowledge that is indispensable to the functioning of a complex society. And even if this were ameliorated and a coherent plan established, it still doesn’t follow that the plan will be implemented. In capitalism the competitive discipline to follow the rules is, for all its problems, integrated into that process of gathering, disseminating, and applying of information. Under socialism the center can, in the name of fulfilling the plan, instruct management or work councils to act according to certain directives — but what if they choose not to?

Higher levels of consciousness seem an obvious answer here. In this regard, the edifying impact of participating in the defeat of capitalism is unquestionably central to the construction of the new society. The escape from the debilitating resignation wrought by capitalism and the exhilarating discovery of new individual and collective capacities are clearly indispensable to advancing the building of socialism. But absent appropriate incentive structures and related mechanisms fully able to access accurate information, the heady moment of revolution cannot be sustained and extrapolated to consolidating a socialist society.

To start, there is the generational problem. As time goes on fewer people will have experienced the revolution’s rousing élan. Then there is the reality that the skills and orientations developed in the course of political mobilization to defeat one kind of society don’t necessarily match the democratic sentiments and governance skills required for constructing a new society. Moreover, even among the revolution’s original participants, the heightened consciousness of that moment can’t simply be projected into the ensuing, more mundane world of meeting daily needs. As these workers become the new administrators of society, it can’t be assumed that questions of bureaucracy and self-interest will inevitably fade into yesterday’s problems.

Christian Rakovsky, a participant in the Russian Revolution and later a dissident internally exiled under Stalin, keenly noted this corrosion of the revolutionary spirit. “The psychology of those who are charged with the diverse tasks of direction in the administration and the economy of the state, has changed to such a point that not only objectively but subjectively, not only materially but also morally, they have ceased to be a part of this very same working class.” This, he argued, was true in spite of a factory director being “a communist, in spite of his proletarian origin, in spite of the fact that he was a factory worker a few years ago.” He concluded, with some despondency, that “I do not exaggerate when I say that the militant of 1917 would have difficulty in recognizing himself in the militant of 1928.”¹⁷ While this reflects the special circumstances of the Russian experience, it would be a mistake to ignore the vulnerability of all revolutions to such regressions.

Crucially, even with the heroic assumption that universal socialist consciousness has been achieved, the question remains of how individuals or workplace collectives limited by their own fragmented locations figure out what the right overall thing to do is. The highest levels of socialist consciousness cannot, in themselves, answer this dilemma. It is one thing to assert that workers will make the decisions but how, for example, would workers in an appliance plant weigh whether to increase their use of aluminum as opposed to leaving that aluminum for more valuable social purposes elsewhere? Or in deciding how to allocate their year-end “surplus,” how much should be reinvested in their own firm versus other firms? Or if a group of workers wanted to exchange some income for shorter hours, how could they measure and compare the benefits to themselves versus the loss of product or services to society?

Hayek argued that a good part of such knowledge is “tacit” or latent knowledge — informal knowledge about consumer preferences and production potentials that is often not explicitly appreciated even by the social agents directly involved. It only surfaces through reactions to particular institutional constraints, incentives, and opportunities such as, in Hayek’s telling, individual choices made via markets and pressures to maximize profits. This includes “discovered knowledge” — information only revealed post hoc through the process of competition among firms, e.g., which of a number of alternative goods, machines, services, or forms of work organization is superior. The power of capitalism, Hayek claimed, is that it brings such otherwise internalized, hidden knowledge to the surface while socialism, no matter how much it hopes to plan, cannot effectively access or develop the knowledge on which successful planning would rest.

For all its inherent ideological and class biases, this critique can’t be ignored. Hayek cannot be countered by arguing that capitalists themselves plan. Aside from the fact that the scale of organizing a total society in a nonmarket way is of a different order of magnitude than addressing a single, even vast, corporation, internal corporate calculations under capitalism have an advantage that centralized socialist planning would not have: they have external market prices and market-driven standards by which to measure themselves. More fundamentally, corporate planning is based on structures that give management the flexibility and authority to allocate and employ labor. To plan in a way that is instead based on worker control involves a completely new productive force — the capacity to democratically administer and coordinate workplaces.

The expectations of full or near-full abundance, added to perfect or near-perfect social consciousness, have a further consequence: they imply a dramatic waning, if not end, of substantive social conflicts and so do away with any need for an “external” state. This fading away of the state is, as well, rooted in how we understand the nature of states. If states are reduced to only being oppressive institutions, then the democratization of the state by definition brings the withering away of the state (a “fully democratic state” becomes an oxymoron).¹⁸ On the other hand, if the state is seen as a set of specialized institutions that not only mediate social differences and oversee judicial discipline but also superintend the replacement of the hegemony of class and competitive markets with the democratic planning of the economy, then the state will likely play an even greater role under socialism.

This is more than a semantic issue. An orientation to the disappearance of the state tends to pass over a whole range of issues: the state’s effectiveness; balancing state power with greater participation from below; how to initiate experiences and learning that would not rest so heavily on the original praxis of introducing socialism but constitute a constant praxis that fosters socialist education, consciousness, and culture.¹⁹ Accepting the persistence of the state turns the focus to the transformation of the inherited capitalist state into a specifically socialist, democratic state that is central to the creative rethinking of all institutions. Even where the process of democratization includes the decentralization of some state functions, advancing postrevolutionary socialism may also include (as we’ll see) a need for an increase in the state’s other roles.

It is, in short, one thing to build on the productive forces inherited from capitalism and the consciousness developed in the transition towards socialism, but quite another to place inflated socialist hopes on them — to see capitalism as socialism’s dialectical enabler. The extent to which capitalism’s productive and administrative achievements can be reproduced, adapted, and applied by nonspecialists in a democratic and socialized form is a question to be posed, not mechanically presumed.²⁰ It is to concretizing this challenge that we now turn.