The Left Needs More Socialism
For some reason I’ve not seen much discussion of this article in The Nation by Ronald Aronson, on why the left in America needs more socialism. Neither the socialist blogs
I frequent nor the more general leftie blogs (as listed on Prog Gold seem to have paid any attention to it. Which is a shame, as I think it makes some good points:
We would be further along on all of these fronts today had it not been for the immense success of the Anglo-American right in insisting, for nearly a generation now, that in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative,” that the onservative project of free markets, privatization and deregulation is simple obedience to necessity. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history” fourteen years ago, he ruled out picturing “to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.” Capitalism’s victory over Communism in the cold war silenced any and all alternatives, present and future, he said. And today, among apologists for global capitalism like Thomas Friedman, the ideological assault on alternatives has become even more insistent, the faith in the market almost total.
Successful ideological and political campaigns close up the space in which imagination might conceive of a world different from the status quo. Alternatives become “unthinkable.” In contrast, for two generations, between 1917 and 1989, the prospect of social change and political action worldwide were nurtured by the competition between two different world-embracing economic systems. Ugly as it was in so many ways, the Soviet Union not only spurred imitators but stimulated and sometimes supported resistance movements and, more relevant to us, along with the presence of vigorous socialist movements and ideas it encouraged thinking and acting toward alternatives that would be neither capitalist nor Communist. The 1930s through the ’70s saw important and still relevant efforts at social change led by anarchists (Spain), social democrats (Scandinavia), non-Stalinist Communists
(Yugoslavia, Italy), coalitions of socialists and Communists (Chile), and coalitions of leftists and less ideological forces of national liberation (Nicaragua, South Africa). Until the end of the cold war, alternatives to capitalism and Communism seemed both thinkable and possible.Today, when the bottom line is touted as the answer to every question, Americans are imprisoned in a mental world shaped by economic trends. Ironically, its ideologists have become pitchmen for a capitalist caricature of Marxism–promulgating a crude
economic determinism in which the market rules every social, mental and geographic space. Since the fall of Communism, market-oriented ways of thinking, feeling and seeing have permeated our lives and our culture to a degree that Marx never dreamed of.Yet the real Marxism, although no longer embodied in movements or governments, has never been truer or more relevant: Most of the world’s main problems today are inseparable from the dynamics of the capitalist system itself. With corporate capitalism everywhere in command, the outlook is for increased poverty, more environmental degradation, ever more uneven distribution of resources and
the undermining of traditional societies and ways of life, for a culture dominated by marketing, advertising and uneven global development.
The big question is, is the American left actually interested in building an alternative to capitalism? Certainly the Democrats aren’t, whether the old elite or the new, improved “netroots”. Most aren’t even leftwing liberals, let alone socialists. There no longer is a great Democratic Left like there still was even in the eighties: it has disappeared during the nineties, during that long period after
the fall of the Soviet Union when it did seem, as Aronson refers to, that there was no alternative to unbridled, neoliberal capitalism.
But America desperately needs a real, socialist left, if only to keep the Democrats honest. It cannot be a coincidence that the most progress: the New Deal in the thirties, civil rights legislation in the fifties and sixties, the creation of welfare systems in the sixties, happened at time when there were alternatives to the left of the Democrats. If it wasn’t for socialists and communists, would any of it have happened?
Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.
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