Objections
to a Capital(ist) Strategy
"Workers
with a stake in a pension fund will be less likely to yearn for the day of
capitalist collapse than the class warriors of the early twentieth century."
-- Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death.
Lenin
(in a remark that is not nearly famous enough) once said that "when we
are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose
of building public lavatories...meanwhile, when you live among wolves, you
must howl like a wolf." The
same attitude is at the heart of many of the proposals for Market Socialism
(particularly those by self-identified Marxists) with regard to market transactions,
profit and loss, the accumulation of capital, and so on. Unless and until
we can develop a viable set of institutional alternatives that adequately
solve the design problems of economic planning without the use of market forces,
limited markets will have to be included in any honest socialist model.
It
is at this point that such proposals will almost certainly arouse passionate
resistance, both from the anti-capitalists of the new movements for global
justice and from the still-active remnants of older socialist traditions.
By suggesting that we get down and dirty with capitalist institutions, Market
Socialists are opening themselves to Mao-like charges that they are "capitalist
roaders," thereby running smack into the powerful traditions of utopian
rejectionism and fear of ideological and moral contamination that run deep
on the Left, a reluctance to risk the 'purity' of complete uncompromising
opposition to the historical violence of capitalism. These instincts are extremely
healthy, and perhaps find their most eloquent expression in Che Guevara's
reported remark to Eduardo Galeano (in Days and Nights of Love and War):
"He told me that when he was president of the central bank he had
signed the bills with the word 'Che' to poke fun, and he told me that money,
that shit-awful fetish, should be ugly."
There
is every reason to proceed with caution. Market Socialism has many design
features that point to potentially undesirable outcomes. Economists have argued
that worker-owned enterprises will lead to underinvestment. (Economists being
economists, they have also argued worker ownership will have a marked tendency
to overinvestment). Inequalities will persist. In the absence of preventative
legal structures, some past cooperatives have displayed the unfortunate habit
of pulling up the ladder after themselves, hiring new workers on a wage basis
rather than an ownership one, thus making the transition back to capitalism
in the space of less than a single generation. There is also the question
of free-riding: what is to stop worker-owners, any more than capitalists,
from maximizing profit by passing on pollution costs and other negative externalities
to the wider community? Not least, our new institutions run the risk of all
worker ownership models in that they can lead to 'enterprise egoism' and/or
ruthless self-exploitation.
There
are answers to these problems. "What does it mean," asks James Lawler,
"to say that workers will exploit themselves more efficiently in cooperatives?
Will a worker-owned enterprise decide to move to Mexico and work for one-tenth
previous wages in order to amass ever more capital?" Countervailing
incentives, where needed, can be built into the system. Retaining community
control over investment through a public bank, for example, or even community
control over the fixed capital in enterprises (in effect renting out the means
of production to self-managing groups of workers) can help ensure there are
no externalities, the local community being the ultimate universal owner.
In any case, none of these problems will be as severe as they currently are
under capitalism: workers, as Frances Fox Piven acknowledges, "are likely
to be better corporate decision-makers, simply because worker interests are
multifaceted, going beyond a singular preoccupation with the bottom line and
the short-term to include concerns with, for example, job security and community
well-being. This is the old promise in proposals for worker ownership..." Finally, a strong dose
of decommodification should be included in the model with regard to public
space, the environment, health care, education and all the other crucial ingredients
of a flourishing Commons: "only this can 'neutralise' the floating electric
charge of capital by tying it to the 'earth' of mutual or public property,
which can no longer be bought and sold."
But,
while we need not embrace every exotic innovation or new product from the
financial services industry, our Market Socialist economy should not be shy
about borrowing 'what works' from capitalism. Just as capitalism itself was
a sixteenth-century development of institutions that had grown up in the cracks
and interstices of the old feudal order, so it is that the economic institutions
and arrangements of the next economic system will, in all probability, come
from late capitalist innovations. To some degree there needs to be a return
to and reeducation in the categories of a more sophisticated Marxism. As Robin
Blackburn points out, "while [Marx and Engels] advocated state ownership
of the transport system and central bank they did not propose the suppression
of all market relations":
"Some
anti-capitalist activists may find [this approach] objectionable, since it
seeks to appropriate institutions and practices which they regard as inimical
to their project. Yet there has always been strong currents within the historic
anti-capitalist traditions--Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism and social democracy--which
have identified a progressive side to the complex organisation of capitalist
society. Indeed, Marx's idea that socialism could only be built on the basis
supplied by capitalism has yet to be faulted."
If
this fails to convince, then there are also some hard questions that need
to be put to antiglobalisation activists. For example, if their vision of
an alternative society is to include, say, intercontinental air travel, or
the benefits of medical science, or the options and amenities of metropolitan
city life as we have come to know and enjoy them, then by definition we are
already talking about some form of modern industrial civilisation, albeit
perhaps one that is built on genuinely democratic institutions in order to
more fully humanize the necessary economies of scale. From here one must tread
carefully so as not to tumble helter-skelter into the most tepid kind of reformism.
The challenge rings out from Thomas de Zengotita's clarion call to progressives,
in his electrifying piece in January's Harper's magazine, to find our
way back to the Enlightenment:
"Have
you actually become (or were you always) just a liberal after all? Were your
pretensions to radicalism mostly a matter of style, of self-image? Have you
been working for the realization of something beyond bourgeois democracy--or
have you just been aiming for reform? If what your politics really envisions
is Global New Deal meets Respect for Diversity, that's one thing. That means
you are a liberal. That means you basically accept a world system of private
enterprise and technological innovation and consumer culture, and you want
to see it managed so that no one is excluded, the environment is protected,
free expression flourishes, and so on. And you can be very active in all sorts
of obvious ways, if this is what you are. If, on the other hand, you are a
radical, the ironic implication is this: there isn't much to do right now
to distinguish yourself from liberals. Toss a few rocks at Starbucks during
the next WTO meeting if you want, but don't mistake such gestures for genuinely
radical responses. What radicals should be doing right now is studying and
thinking. You need to put in your ten years in the library, the way Marx did.
You need to be figuring out what makes human beings tick and what, if any,
direction is to be found in history. And I don't mean some half-assed sci-fi
anarcho-Gaia nonsense...I mean serious study, working toward an alternative
to a global bourgeois democracy. What radicals need most right now isn't action
but theory."
From
a different perspective, our comrades on the "Revolutionary Left"
may be expected to reject out of hand the kind of model I have been tentatively
sketching, on the grounds that by preserving the market we have failed to
go "beyond capital" and are still colluding in the tyranny of dead
labour over living labour. This is an honourable position. But they, too,
need to answer some difficult questions. Not least of these is what role they
see for revolutionary politics in a nonrevolutionary situation (if they acknowledge
such a possibility). Historically, the Revolutionary Left in such situations
seems to occupy a position on the furthermost left of the "spectrum of
the possible," the range of immediate political issues of the day. In
practice, this puts them at the forefront of the fight to organize and extend
(or, more often, defend) welfare state protections, an extremely valuable
role given the abject failure of Social Democrats to rally to the defence
of their one signal achievement.
But
this strategy has a fundamental weakness: waiting around for the revolution
while practicing a purely defensive politics aimed at preserving what's left
of social protection means, in effect, watching while the welfare state bleeds
to death, infected with a particularly nasty condition known to economists
as 'Baumol's Disease.' William J. Baumol, an economist at NYU, has shown that
certain labour-intensive goods and services inevitably suffer from "cost
disease" since they do not and cannot participate in the ever-increasing
productivity gains of the wider economy. Unless the workers in these "stagnant
services" are to suffer a dramatic decline in their wages, these sectors
will consume an ever-growing share of GDP. Not coincidentally,
the services most afflicted (health care, education, etc.) are precisely those
that, over the course of the last century, migrated to the public sector--usually
as the centrepiece of Social Democratic programmes. If they are to be maintained
even at current levels of service provision, their defenders will have to
run faster and faster in order simply to stand still, necessitating an ever
greater tax burden on the income of the middle class that is difficult to
sustain politically over the long haul. Those on the Left whose basic commitment
is to funding the welfare state through taxation of income cannot but find
themselves firmly on the horns of this dilemma.
A
final objection, one that will probably come from social democrats, is that
the political momentum needed to establish Market Socialism--even if one were
to 'begin small' by merely giving workers and communities real control of
their pension assets, which could be directed into new economic institutions--far
exceeds that necessary to push through a traditional Keynesian programme of
'tax-and-spend,' since it is bound to precipitate a tremendous countermobilisation
by the current owners of capital. This is certainly true, in so far as it
goes. But unanticipated moments of conjunctural political energy are not unknown:
indeed, as Geoff Eley argues in his history of the Left in Europe, they are
the only occasions when great constitution-making epochal change occurs,
brought about through the inspiring spectacle of masses of people in political
motion:
"...things
fall apart. The given ways no longer persuade. The present loses its grip.
Horizons shift. History speeds up. It becomes possible to see the fragments
and outlines in a different way. People shake off their uncertainties and
hesitations; they throw aside their fears. Very occasionally, usually in the
midst of a wider societal crisis, the apparently unbudgeable structures of
normal political life become shaken. The expectations of a slow and unfolding
habitual future get unlocked. Still more occasionally, collective agency materializes,
sometimes explosively and with violent results. When this happens, the formal
institutional worlds of politics in a nation or city and the many mundane
worlds of the private, the personal, and the everyday move together. They
occupy the same time. The present begins to move. These are times of extraordinary
possibility and hope. New horizons shimmer. History's continuum shatters…"
What
is certainly clear is that, on several occasions in the past when these ruptures
have occurred, the Left, caught by surprise, has been entirely unprepared
to harness them, and they have broken and dissipated like cresting waves.
If such a moment were to occur at present, it would surely find socialists
less prepared than ever to rise to the occasion with a concrete programme
and a road map for getting there.
This
need not be the case. Where actual experiments with alternative economic institutions
have been attempted on the ground, they have been closely studied and a rich
academic and activist literature has built up. We know, for example, about
the successes and the difficulties faced by the Mondragon network of cooperatives
in the Basque region of Spain; we know what worked and what didn't in the
attempts at worker ownership in the former Yugoslavia. We know all about the
practice of community development financial institutions in India, and, soon,
we will have a fuller understanding of the implications of the participatory
budget now being practiced in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This is only a start.
We need the equivalent of Che Guevara's "two, three, many Vietnams,"
a rich proliferation of real-world experiments with new economic models and
institutions. We
need to reanimate the idea of an alternative socialist political economy for
the twenty-first century, based on values of justice, equality, democracy,
solidarity and sustainability. The capitalists and their usual pack of running
dogs and apologists will no doubt scorn and resist each and every one of our
attempts along the way. In return, we need only the simple determination that,
whatever else may happen, they shall not impoverish our imaginations too.
