With the rise of the Occupy movement, opposition to the existing
political and economic order has gone mainstream. It’s hard to imagine
that the bandana-clad woman on the cover of Time magazine – representing “The Protestor,” Time‘s
“Person of the Year” – has many nice things to say about capitalism,
and the ubiquity of the Guy Fawkes mask – popularized by “V for
Vendetta” – further underscores how widespread the idea of revolution
has become.
However, this growing support for system change has not yet been
matched by a serious public dialogue about what an alternative might
look like. A new Pew poll published 12/28/2011 indicated that people who
are under 30 or black are more likely to favor socialism than
capitalism, but this does not correspond to clear ideas of what
socialism is or how a socialist economic and political system would
work. We offer up this FAQ as a contribution to the discussion.
How would a socialist economy work?
Under capitalism, institutions where immense wealth is concentrated
(corporations) run the economy, exploiting working people to increase
their own concentrated wealth. The essence of a socialist economy is to
flip this relationship upside-down, with working people running the
economy, utilizing the enormous wealth and productivity of society to
enrich their lives. To do this, we would have to take over all the
biggest banks and corporations and put their resources into public
ownership and democratic control.
Employing those out of work and reallocating investment and jobs
towards social priorities – healthcare, education, clean energy, etc. –
would give a huge boost to productivity and wealth in society.
Democratic planning of the economy would allow us to make sure everyone
had a good-paying job, high-quality health care, free education at all
levels, and, of course, basic physical necessities like food and
housing. It wouldn’t be limited to just the basics, though; we could
choose to invest in empowering people to make music, art, writing, film,
fashion, and all sorts of other forms of cultural development.
This type of economic system would require conscious planning, but
this is already true to a large extent under capitalism. Corporations
larger than entire countries are able to plan out their levels of
production, spread of distribution, pricing schemes and so on without
falling to pieces, so there’s no reason working people shouldn’t be able
to do the same.
The difference is that planning under capitalism is fractured,
incomplete and undemocratic, with the goal of maximizing profit for the
individual firm. Under socialism, we could structure investment of the
world’s wealth with a big picture, bird’s eye view of the whole economy,
with the goal of fulfilling human needs, sustaining the environment and
enabling a liberated human existence.
A socialist economic system would have to be globally integrated.
This is also the case already under capitalism, where we live in a
globally interdependent world. Right now globalization on a capitalist
basis means brutal exploitation of the weaker economies, and a race to
the bottom for workers everywhere. Under socialism, global economic
integration would be part of the plan to enrich people’s lives on a
global scale.
A socialist economy would handle the environment very differently.
Today, companies don’t care about environmental costs because they are
able to externalize them onto the public. The costs associated with
contaminated air and drinking water are real, but they don’t show up as a
red number on Monsanto’s balance sheet. That is why no corporation will
ever undertake the necessary steps to save the environment on the basis
of “free market” principles.
Democratic planning of the economy would eliminate the profit motive
behind externalizing the costs of pollution. Instead, efficiency,
environmental sustainability and meeting the basic needs of all would
form the core principles of economic decision-making. Instead of
inadequate measures like energy-efficient light bulbs and
recycling-awareness programs, a socialist economy could invest in
completely overhauling the way everything is produced, utilizing all the
latest green technologies for maximum sustainability and creating
millions of jobs in the process.
How would a socialist democracy work?
As most of us currently experience it, “democracy” boils down to
voting once every couple years for which wealthy career politician will
make all the decisions for us. Of course, there’s nothing democratic
about this at all, especially when the whole process is corrupted by
corporate money.
In contrast, socialist democracy would take place day to day, week to
week, in every workplace, school and community. Workers would rotate
management tasks, and elected managers would be subject to recall and
replacement whenever the workers saw fit. All decisions could be
overturned by majority vote.
School curriculum and policy would be jointly agreed upon by parents,
teachers and students, rather than imposed by distant administrators
and bureaucrats. Neighborhood assemblies would decide who is and is not
empowered with policing authority and instruct elected officers how to
prioritize their efforts.
All investment and economic decisions should be made democratically.
Workplace and neighborhood assemblies would elect representatives to
massively expanded local and regional councils, which in turn would
elect national representatives. Elected representatives should have no
special privileges or pay above their electorate, and they should be
subject to instant recall.
In order to facilitate this process of democratic decision-making,
there should be space roped off in regular work and school schedules for
decision-making meetings and discussions. With the increased wealth
created, the work-week could be shortened without loss of pay to allow
people time and energy to become engaged politically, and to pursue
their other life goals outside work and school.
Wouldn’’t a bureaucratic elite just take over?
Undoubtedly, in the first stages of a socialist society, a struggle
against careerists and corruption within the system would be necessary.
The poisonous ideological baggage inherited from centuries of class rule
would not just fade away overnight. However, by establishing public
ownership of society’s productive resources, eliminating privileges, and
creating bottom-up structures of democratic management and control, the
obstacles to prevent aspiring bureaucrats seizing power would be
immense.
The main example driving fear of a bureaucratic takeover is Stalin
seizing power in the Soviet Union only a few years after Russia’s
working-class revolution in 1917. This tragic degeneration of the
Russian Revolution is something Marxists have grappled with in numerous
books. The basic conclusion supported by a serious historical analysis
is that this degeneration was neither natural nor inevitable, but the
result of particular circumstances.
Russia was among the poorest countries in the world at the time of
its revolution, and it was even further devastated when the deposed
capitalist rulers, backed by 21 foreign armies, tried to violently
retake power from the democratic workers’ movement, resulting in a
bloody civil war. Though revolutions took place elsewhere across Europe,
most notably Germany, they were all defeated, leaving Russia poor,
broken and alone.
This was not a healthy ground upon which socialism could be built.
The whole basis of socialism is having enough to go around, but Russia
didn’t have that. In this context, the democratic structures in the
Soviets (workers’ assemblies) ceased to function. Who wants to go to
political meetings when you’re worried about where your next meal is
going to come from?
It was this vacuum of workers’ power from below, fueled by the
isolation and economic starvation of the country, that spawned the
bureaucratization of Russian society and the rise of Stalin as this
bureaucracy’s dictatorial figurehead. Even then, it was not a natural
progression. Stalin had to jail, murder, exile, or otherwise force into
submission literally millions of people whose only crime was adherence
to the democratic principles of the 1917 revolution.
This experience shows the importance of building the fight for
socialism as a global movement. Because of imperialist plundering of
resources around the world, some countries may lack a stable economic
basis for socialism, and will need to trade with and get help from the
richer countries. If Russia had been joined by a successful revolution
in even one other country, such as Germany, history would have turned
out very differently.
Wouldn’’t it be easier to reform capitalism?
Unfortunately, contrary to official accounts, the history of
capitalism is not one of consistent progress towards ever loftier
heights of democracy and prosperity. Rather, every serious reform has
required mass struggle, often shaking the system to its core.
Reforms are not granted out of the kind hearts of well-meaning
politicians, but are concessions grudgingly granted to appease or
distract rising movements of working people hungry for real change.
Whether we’re talking about civil rights, the weekend off, or the right
to organize a union, every one of these required an all-out fight
against the profit-driven logic of capitalism, where countless innocents
were murdered by elites desperate to put down their struggles.
Under capitalism, even these partial reforms are not permanent, not a
foothold or new baseline to work from. As we have seen in the last few
decades, the capitalists and their politicians will roll back reforms as
soon as they think they can get away with it.
Social programs that people fought tooth and nail for in the past are
being dismantled or undermined via budget cuts. After almost destroying
unions in the private sector already – where less than 7% of workers
are in a union – corporate politicians in state after state are now
going after the public sector, where over a third of workers are still
unionized.
A stable basis for ongoing reforms will require working people to
take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and wield it
themselves – that is, overthrow capitalism and establish socialism.
There’s no way around it; the fight for reforms and the struggle for
socialist transformation are one and the same.
Socialism sounds great on paper, but is it realistic?
The only constant in history is uninterrupted change. From ancient
slave states to the feudal landowner lordships to the global capitalist
system of today, people have repeatedly overthrown old systems after
they became a brake on progressive development. The truly unrealistic
and utopian idea is that problems like war, poverty and environmental
devastation will be solved on the basis of capitalism.
Though socialism is realistic, it’s not inevitable. Again and again,
crisis-ridden capitalism has forced workers and the oppressed into
revolutionary uprisings. Several have happened in the last year, most
prominently in Egypt and Tunisia. But while many revolutions succeed in
toppling governments, few have achieved system change. Capitalism will
always find a way out on the backs of workers, youth and the poor if we
fail to replace it with something better.
That’s where socialists come in: We take seriously the study of
history, learning from both defeats and successes of revolutions and
mass movements. We aim to spread these lessons widely so that future
revolutions succeed in establishing socialism. That doesn’t just mean
reading a lot of books. It means actively building and engaging with the
movements that exist right now, boldly bringing in socialist ideas
while learning from others in struggle, working out the way forward
together.
