We need to say what socialism will look like
"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.” 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.”
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.” Surprisingly, this attitude existed even within neoclassical economics, which had emerged in the shadow of the Paris Commune essentially as a counter to Marx. 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.”
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.” 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.”
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.” 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. 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.” 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. . ."
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